Years in the Making
“I hate the OWLs.”
“We haven’t even taken them yet.”
“I don’t care, I still hate them.” Sirius flung himself dejectedly onto the bench at the Gryffindor table. It was lunchtime on the first day of class and the Gryffindor fifth years had spent the past half hour listening to Professor McGonagall lecture them about the OWL Exams, which would take place that June. Honestly, the way she went on in her forbidding tone, it was as if the exams were a matter of life and death. Sirius and James stared at each other in horror the entire time, while Peter anxiously tried to write down everything the Transfiguration professor said, and Remus gaped at her in shock with his mouth hanging open. They had heard the horror stories about fifth year, but had never taken them seriously. Until now.
“Hell!” Sirius shouted, pounding a fist loudly on the table. He promptly ignored every face that turned to look at him. “That’s what it is! Hell! It’s all a conspiracy to terrify every fifteen year old that comes through Hogwarts.”
“Calm down, Sirius,” Remus advised, lowering himself onto the bench across from his friend. People were shamelessly staring at the commotion Sirius was making.
“You’re telling me to calm down? I saw you looking at McGonagall like you were about to wet yourself.”
Remus’s face reddened. “I never said I wasn’t nervous; you’re just making a spectacle of yourself and I’d rather people stop looking over here.” He took the ladle of stew and poured some into his bowl. “Besides, you think you have it bad? Try having to concentrate on the massive amounts of homework they’re giving us and Prefect duties at the same time.”
“You haven’t had to do that yet,” James reminded him as he searched for something to eat before Sirius took it all in his melancholy state.
“True,” Remus agreed fairly. “I’ll get back to you after tomorrow night.”
The next night he and Lily would be condemned to patrolling the Astronomy Tower until the late hours of the night. They hoped that, since it was the beginning of the school year, they would not run into too much trouble there. Remus had to say, he was glad the Head Girl was smart enough to pair Gryffindor with Gryffindor, Slytherin with Slytherin and so on. Obnoxious as Cooper might be, she at least knew who got along with whom. Remus didn’t think he would be able to survive patrolling if he had been placed with Snape.
“So,” James continued, dropping a roll onto his plate and picking off a piece. “Did you see the new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor?”
“Professor Kern?” Sirius asked, spooning around the stew in his dish with unnecessary anger. “What about him?”
“Dunno. He just didn’t look very thrilled to be here.”
“I think that might have been because you had bewitched all the professors’ silverware to dance at the feast,” Remus pointed out, pulling out the schedule Cooper had given him that day on the train.
“Dumbledore thought it was funny.”
“Dumbledore thinks everything is funny.”
The Gryffindors were scheduled to have Defence Against the Dark Arts right after lunch, so they would learn in a short while if their new professor truly did want to be there or was just teaching for the sake of getting money. If the latter was the case, why bother becoming a professor? The boys were fairly certain they did not make magnificent amounts of gold. If anything, he should have gotten a job at the Ministry, that way he would not have to force his presence on children. Once lunch ended, the four boys trooped up to their next class, falling into step with their fellow Gryffindor fifth year, Frank Longbottom. They discussed their summers as they made their way to class. Frank was quite interested when the boys told him about what happened at the Lovegoods’ over the holidays.
James, Remus and Peter had tried repeatedly to ask their fathers about that night, even though they knew it was nothing more than a misunderstanding of uncalled for explosions. The boys wanted to know why they reacted in such a way; they wanted to know why they had to call in people named Moody, Gideon and Fabian. Who were they? How did their fathers know them? They had so many questions swimming through their heads, but their fathers simply refused to answer them. Their reasoning “ the boys were too young to know. The boys strongly disagreed with this; they were two years away from adulthood.
Professor Kern was exactly how James had predicted. He did not want to be there. He was listless and dull, reading off the class roster of Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs as though it was a recipe to a terribly drab dish. Then he went on to explain, in his monotonous voice, the seriousness of the OWL Exams. Every single student took this as their cue to promptly stare off into space. This man was Professor Binns in solid form. Besides, they had already heard this information reiterated by several professors in their voices. At least the other teachers made it sound more interesting “ frightening, but interesting.
“Sweet Merlin, I thought that would never end,” James moaned as they emerged from the classroom.
“I honestly think I was legitimately brain dead,” Frank Longbottom groaned, rubbing his forehead as if to make sure there was still something behind his skull.
“Oh, come on,” Lily Evans said from behind the mutinous boys. “It wasn’t that bad.”
James’s mouth dropped open in horror. He spun around, causing Lily to walk straight into him. He took a step back. “Evans, were you sitting in the same room as us just then?”
“Yes, and I don’t think he was as boring as you’re making him out to be.”
“Lily, may we all be able to have your patience,” Remus chimed in, turning to look at her.
“It’s not patience, it’s-”
“Evans, allow me to demonstrate.” Sirius stood perfectly straight and dulled the expression on his face. Then, dropping the pitch of his voice several octaves, he pretended to read off a scroll. “Black? Black? Has anyone seen Sirius Black?”
Lily rolled her eyes. “Well, you didn’t answer him the first two times.”
“That’s because I was in a stupor of boredom.”
Alice Gordon added, “Lily, you know they’re right.”
Lily frowned and, with great effort, confirmed this. “I just hate admitting it.” Lily and Alice quickened their pace. Alice glanced over her shoulder. “See you guys later.”
“They’ll see us later,” James hissed under his breath. “If we don’t have to listen to Kern again. How long do you think he’ll last?”
“I give him two months,” Peter wagered.
“Ha!” Sirius laughed. “I give him two weeks.”
“Three months and he gets pushed out his classroom window,” James insisted.
“I say three months, as well,” Frank agreed. “Only every student fifth year and up drive him insane and he never wants to come back.”
“No,” Remus disagreed. “I give him a year.” James, Sirius, Peter and Frank stared at him with their gaping mouths open. “That’s how long everyone else has lasted, remember?”
James, Sirius and Peter were bored. Simply and utterly bored. They had homework, naturally, but were putting it off until it became inevitable that they would have to do it. They had long ago exhausted playing Exploding Snap and chess. They’d eaten all their sweets, and some from Remus’s stash hidden under his socks. They were bored. The three boys were sprawled on Sirius’s bed, staring at the ceiling with unfocused eyes. Occasionally one of the boys would comment on how ridiculously bored he was, but other than that, they talked about nothing.
“This is pathetic,” James finally announced. “We’re fifteen years old; we’re supposed to make excitement when none is given to us.”
“And what do you suggest we make excitement out of? Pocket lint?” Sirius questioned sardonically, playing with a thread he had plucked out of his blanket.
“That would probably be more exciting than just sitting here.”
“I don’t think so,” Peter said absently, following a piece of floating dust with his eyes.
Sirius sat up, leaning back on his elbows. “He was joking, Pete.”
Peter blinked quickly and turned to Sirius. “I know he was.”
Sirius fell back against his mattress again. “Just checking.” Sirius ripped the thread in half and then jumped to his feet. “Wait a moment.”
“What?” James and Peter chorused eagerly, hoping Sirius had had a brainwave that would solve their problem.
“The potion!” Sirius shouted, a little too loudly. Lowering his voice, he went on, “Remember we checked it when we first came back? We drank it and everything, but we didn’t have time to test it out.”
James leapt to his feet to join Sirius. “Brilliant! Let’s go!”
“It’s almost curfew,” Peter reminded them.
“Not a problem.” James dived under his bed and slid out his trunk embossed with his initials. He pulled out from it the familiar silver, liquid-like cloak he had been given by his father - his Invisibility Cloak. Let the Prefects try catching them now. James tucked the cloak in his pocket and led Sirius and Peter out of the dormitory, through the common room and out into the corridor of Gryffindor Tower. He tossed the cloak over their heads and they set off at once for the Room of Requirement.
The day after their return to school the boys had made sure the potion simmered correctly over the summer. It looked exactly as the book described it “ the consistency of water, the perfect shade of grey, the taste of bat droppings. Now that the potion had successfully entered their systems, they had to be able to concentrate long enough to go into their animal state and return as a human with all the correct parts. They did not want to have to roam around the castle with tails they needed to conceal. They had waited years for this, they couldn’t fail now. Not when they were so close to achieving their goal.
The cauldron was standing in the centre of the room, waiting to be emptied of the no longer needed contents. The book said one goblet would be enough to ensure that they would be able to make the transformation. Since they did not know what to do with the remainder of the potion, they left it there. Perhaps they should dump it into one of the toilets in Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom and flush it away. They would save that for later. Now they had to finish this task.
“Who wants to go first?” James asked, whipping the Invisibility Cloak off and stuffing it in his pocket. Neither Sirius nor Peter said anything. James didn’t want to go first either, so he had another option. “How about we all have a go and see who gets it?” His friends agreed more enthusiastically to this idea.
The room was silent as the three boys concentrated every fiber of their thoughts onto their soon-to-be Animagus forms. They each roamed absentmindedly to different corners of the room, occasionally breaking the silence with a mutter under their breath. They had been working on this since third year. It was their chance to be there for their friend on the nights when he was alone and hurt himself because of it. They could not wait any longer to get this. If they did, they were likely to be graduated and who knew where they would be then? They could make the last few years of Remus’s schooling career as pain free as possible. If they could only get this right.
The silence of the room was ruptured by a shout of surprise from James. Broken out of their concentration, Sirius and Peter spun around to see what had happened to their friends. But James was no longer there. Instead they were faced with a greyish stag with long, crooked antlers. Around the stag’s eyes they could see a pattern of markings which were undoubtedly James’s glasses. They had read they would be able to identify an Animagus by his markings. The stag was wearing a look of utter shock, its head moving as quickly as it could with the antlers weighing it down as if it was trying to get a good look at itself. James had done it!
“Sweet Merlin,” Sirius gasped, staring at his friend in amazement. “You’ve done it!”
The stag reared its head proudly. Sirius and Peter were sure that, if it could, it would look incredibly smug.
“How do you get out of it, though?” Peter asked, joining Sirius by the stag’s side.
“Maybe he can’t,” Sirius offered conspiratorially, his face breaking into a mischievous smile. “Maybe he’ll stay that way forever and it’ll go down in the history of the school. Whatever happened to James Potter?” The stag kicked its hind legs into Sirius. “Ouch!” Sirius shouted, jumping away from James. “I was only joking.”
“Seriously, how does he become human again?” Peter asked concernedly. He knew that when he finally achieved this, he did not want to walk around with a tail for the rest of his life. James would have a difficult time concealing antlers that large.
“Think human thoughts?” Sirius suggested playfully.
The stag became suddenly still and Sirius and Peter knew James was trying to become human again, focusing on his human form. After ten minutes, the two boys were considering performing drastic measures that they were not even sure existed to get James back into his body. Fortunately, just as Sirius was whipping out his wand, a scrawny boy with untidy black hair was sitting on the floor. James saw Sirius with his wand out and immediately backed away, scrambling across the floor. “I did it, I don’t need help,” he begged.
“Nice work, mate,” Sirius congratulated, holding out a hand and going to help his friend up. “What’s the time?”
“Almost eleven,” James replied, checking his watch. “Reckon we call it a night?”
“Peter and I haven’t gotten it yet!”
“We’ll come back tomorrow,” James promised. “Don’t want the Prefects to catch us, do we?” He winked at his friends. They would only run into Remus and Lily. In James’s opinion, an angry Lily Evans was a lot scarier than an angry Remus Lupin. Besides, they had the Invisibility Cloak with them. He threw the cloak over their heads and led the way out of the room. The door dissolved behind them and they set off down the seventh floor corridor.
“I hate being a Prefect.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“You mean you enjoyed telling those two seventh years to stop snogging and get back to bed?”
“Well, no. That wasn’t one of the highlights of my night, but it’s nice to try and enforce some order around the school.”
Remus mumbled an incoherent response to Lily’s sentiment. Had he not had friends who enjoyed causing the chaos Lily was trying to desperately to thwart, he might have agreed with her. Actually, he would rather to just keep out of everyone else’s business. If someone wanted to cause trouble, as long as it didn’t become lethal in any way, Remus did not want to waste his time and energy trying to stop this person. He just wanted to go to bed, the full moon was the following week and he was already beginning to feel more tired than usual. He stifled a yawn that was threatening to come out.
“Oh, about patrolling next week, I won’t be able to “ whoa!” Remus had walked headlong into what appeared to be nothing at all. But he knew better than this.
“Remus, are you alright?” Lily asked anxiously, gaping at the area where Remus had stumbled. There was nothing there; he couldn’t have walked into thin air. Maybe he just tripped over his own feet. They were both very tired; it wouldn’t be very strange if he had.
“Yeah, I’m fine, Lily,” Remus said hastily, waving a hand dismissively. “You go on ahead, my shoelace came out. I’ll catch up in a bit.”
Lily still looked unsure, but left with another insistent nod from her fellow Prefect. Remus waited until Lily was out of sight before grabbing at the thin air, his hand catching on something solid, and he pulled his arm back quickly. “What are you doing?” he snapped at the three figures that were now visible.
James, Sirius and Peter were still giddy from James’s accomplishment and could not keep the laughter out of their voices nor the silly grins off their faces.
“It seemed like a nice night for a walk,” James replied airily, chortling.
Remus rolled his eyes. He knew better than this; they were up to something. “What are you guys doing?” he repeated more forcefully.
“Going for a walk,” James repeated firmly, not chortling any longer.
“You’re not going to write us up, are you?” Peter asked apprehensively.
Remus looked at his friends and bit his lip. The right thing to do would be to write them up and assign them detention for being out of bed after curfew, precisely what Peter feared. But a nagging voice in the back of his mind told him to just let them off with a warning. Remus hated this. He felt as though there was an angel sitting on one shoulder and a devil on the other, both shouting loudly for him to do what he wanted. “Don’t let me catch you out here again,” he ordered. “Get back to the common room.”
“Thanks mate!” Sirius whispered happily, as he, James and Peter hurried past.
Remus waited until they had pulled the Invisibility Cloak over their heads before he returned to Lily. He caught up with her halfway up the corridor, where she was redoing her own shoelace. She looked up when she heard his footsteps.
“Did I mention how much I hate being a Prefect?”
With the success of James’s transformation, Sirius and Peter were as determined as ever to achieve the same. Their goal was to be able to accompany Remus to the Shrieking Shack during September’s full moon, a mere week away. Every night they disappeared to the Room of Requirement, leaving a bewildered Remus behind at the common room. They wanted to surprise him. He was still in the dark about why he had caught them sneaking around the castle the other night. They wanted to see the look on the werewolf’s face when he was confronted with three strange animals with him in the Shrieking Shack. It was their chance to finally erase the monthly pain their friend had to endure.
Remus didn’t mind them disappearing every night, as it gave him the chance to study without their loud voices penetrating his concentration. But he did wonder what they were up to. Part of his mind knew it must have something to do with their Animagus training, but if that was so, why were they keeping him out of it? He had been helping them with this ever since the beginning. It was because of him that they were doing this in the first place. It only made sense that he should help them. He shrugged it off; he would find out what they were doing soon enough. As long as he didn’t catch them while he was doing one of his patrols, he didn’t care what they were doing.
Speaking of patrols, Remus looked up to see Lily sitting across the common room with Frank and Alice. He still had not told Lily that he would not be able to join her on their patrol next week, as he was distracted by an invisible barrier that caused him numerous headaches every day of his life - James, Sirius and Peter. He abandoned his Arithmancy homework and crossed the room. As he approached the three, he couldn’t help but notice Alice and Frank were sitting closer than was natural. It was only a matter of time…
“Lily?” he said, breaking the three out of their conversation about Professor Kern and his inability to cast a sufficient Stunner. Or so they heard from certain Slytherin sources. “Could I have a word?”
“Sure,” Lily said, casting a wondering glance at her friends, and getting up to follow Remus to the window. “What’s up?”
“I can’t patrol with you next week, on the twentieth.”
“Why not?” Lily asked with dread. The twentieth was a Saturday night and Saturday nights were the worst nights for patrolling. Whether it was troublemakers causing more mischief than usual or the Astronomy Tower filled with more snogging couples than they would like to find, Saturday nights were notorious for being the worst night to perform Prefect duties. “Don’t abandon me,” she added, a smile flitting across her face.
“I have to go visit my mum,” Remus explained, trying to remember the last time he had used that excuse. It had been his last tutoring session with Lily the previous year, when she had unfortunately wanted to schedule it on the night of a full moon. “She’s been feeling ill and my dad says she wants me home.” One day his lies were going to come back to get him, he knew they would.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Lily said sympathetically. “I didn’t realise your mum was still ill.”
“It comes and goes.”
“Well, I’ll just ask Severus if he would like to do an extra shift with me.”
“I’m sure he would.” The entrance to the common room then burst open and they saw James, Sirius and Peter had returned from whatever they were doing. Remus turned back to Lily. “Thanks for understanding,” and he hurried to, once again, ask what they were up to.
September twentieth dawned with the usual air of the first full moon of the year. Remus was more irritable than usual, and Sirius was louder than usual, which meant that James and Peter were also louder than usual in their efforts to shut Sirius up before Remus went and hexed him. Luckily, it was a Saturday and they did not have classes to slug through. Yet James, Sirius and Peter had vanished once more, leaving Remus to laze around the dormitory, trying to dull the pain in his head. To do this, he spent most of the day falling in and out of sleep.
It was only around seven in the evening that he was broken out of his doze by Sirius’s voice, laughing from somewhere above him. “Wake up, sleeping beauty.” Remus’s eyes snapped open to see James, Sirius and Peter peering over him. He jumped up and climbed up his pillow. This was a frightening thing to wake up to “ those three with ridiculously gleeful looks on their faces. They were up to something. “Madam Pomfrey’s waiting for you,” Sirius informed him, grabbing Remus’s blanket and yanking it back.
“You know, some people get a nice tap on the arm when they need to wake up. I get you three,” Remus commented, reluctantly sitting up and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
“You know you love us,” James reminded him airily, going over to pull something out from under his bed. “You’d better hurry, though. Madam Pomfrey was looking furious.”
“Why? I’m not late.”
“We might’ve accidentally incapacitated a poor Slytherin fourth year with a rhinoceros horn growing out of his forehead and for some reason that put her in a bad mood.”
“Brilliant,” Remus muttered, pulling on his shoes and hurrying as fast as his legs could carry him out of the dormitory and down to the infirmary.
Madam Pomfrey was furious, just as James claimed. If it was possible, she would have had ten shades of steam coming out of various holes in her head. The nurse harped on him for not arriving before seven and Remus thought it best to point out that there was no exact time he was supposed to materialize, as long as it was a decent time before the moon rose. The nurse grabbed his arm and dragged him down seven flights and out onto the grounds, towards the Whomping Willow. The monthly custom lives again. She prodded the knot at the trunk and wished Remus luck as he descended into the dark tunnel leading to Hogsmeade.
The trip through the tunnel took no time at all, though Remus could not deny he was reminded of one of the last times he had entered this building. It was to find the very beast that had turned him into a werewolf. He was waiting on the top floor, waiting for Remus’s blood. But Dumbledore had increased the security measures to such a length that Remus occasionally wondered if even Dumbledore himself could break them. Fenrir Greyback would never again step foot into the Shrieking Shack. When he arrived at the decrepit building, it was too find no one else there with him.
The moon rose as it always did and Remus felt the familiar pain course through his body, causing him to shout loudly, begging it to stop. It was only when he was a fully grown werewolf that he realised he was not alone. There was a stag, a large black dog, and a small rat in the room with him. They were standing fearfully in the corner, clearly having heard the entire transformation. The werewolf’s first instinct was to attack these unfamiliar creatures, but a small, human voice said that they were friends. They were not here to hurt him, they were not enemies. They were here to help him and to have a good time. The werewolf cautiously approached the newcomers and sniffed the floor where they stood. The three animals backed away cautiously, in case their plan failed. Once the werewolf decided they were, indeed, friends, he growled in what was supposed to be a happy tone.
And what had been years in the making, was finally a reality. The boys were at last able to help their friend on the nights of the full moon.