Apparition, Sacking and Sirius’s Knickers
James and Sirius sat in the Three Broomsticks, sipping rather large goblets of cold pumpkin juice, chatting amiably with their fellow sixth years. After several Saturdays of practise sessions in the Great Hall, the time had come for anyone with a birthday before the end of June to take their Apparition exam. James and Sirius had already completed their test, as well as Lily Evans, Severus Snape, Jensen Patil, Mary Porter, and Abrac Zabini. Everyone else was either still taking the test or their birthday missed the cut off date. The test was fairly simple. One of the examiners would tell the student where the Apparate and they had to do it exactly on the mark and without Splinching themselves.
James had been instructed to Apparate from the Three Broomsticks down to Dervish and Banges, while Sirius had to Apparate to the post office. Both of them had passed and were reveling in their success, as were their fellow sixth years.
“There’ll never be another quiet moment in my house now the both of us can Apparate,” James told Sirius gleefully.
Lily Evans smirked into her goblet. “I imagine there never was a quiet moment in your house, especially with the two of you living there.”
James nodded slowly. “True… but now we can appear behind my parents and they’ll never hear us coming.”
“Except for the cracking sound,” Sirius added reasonably before draining the rest of his goblet.
“Yeah, but by the time they hear that, it’ll be too late.”
“You sound like you’re plotting you parents’ downfalls,” Jensen Patil said dubiously.
“I would never dream of doing that!” Sirius said, looking highly affronted. He was just being a tad melodramatic, but it was true. After everything Charles and Hannah Potter and done for him, he would do anything but help the two and would never dream of plotting anything relatively close to their downfalls.
“I passed!”
James, Sirius, Lily, Jensen and Mary turned to see Remus had just entered the pub, looking about as excited as he had when they finished the Marauder’s Map. He glanced around the pub, his eyes quickly moving away from the table that housed Snape and Zabini, and spotted the group of sixth years sitting by the window. Dropping into the empty seat in between James and Lily, he told them how they made him Apparate all the way to the Shrieking Shack and he would have been back sooner, but he had to walk.
“Congrats!” James said jovially, clapping a beaming Remus on the shoulder.
“It’s pretty mental when you think about it,” Lily began, taking a swig of ice cold pumpkin juice.
“What is?” James asked interestedly.
“That we’re old enough to Apparate and use magic outside of school now. Technically, we’re all adults.”
Her fellow sixth years couldn’t deny this. Lily was right. They were adults now in the eyes of their elders. They could do things like magic whenever they wanted or try to Apparate, without having the Ministry on their tails for every misstep. Exciting as this prospect was, it was also rather frightening. They all had only one more year of school before they were out on their own. They would have to find their own homes, get jobs, and start their new lives.
Once Joseph Smith and Allison Abbot returned from passing their tests, the group of sixth years made their way back to the castle, where classes had been dismissed only ten minutes ago. On the walk through Hogsmeade, James, Sirius and Remus hung behind the rest of the group. Sirius looked unsure about something and he wanted to discuss it with his two friends privately.
“You know, James, I reckon it’s time I started looking for my own place,” he proposed slowly, watching for James’s reaction.
James’s jaw dropped open. “What? Sirius, you can’t leave my place yet!” He didn’t want Sirius leaving his home yet. They were still at Hogwarts; there was no reason for him to move out yet. Sure, once they had both graduated it would make sense for Sirius to find a place of his own, but not now, not yet. Though they were both adults (blast Lily Evans for bringing that up), they were still students. Perhaps once they had graduated, but not now…
“I was just thinking, though, I have the money I inherited from Alphard,” Sirius began sheepishly. The money Alphard had left to him was enough to buy a decent flat and he would still have plenty to spare. Besides, he would be getting a job and that would cover any other expenses he would need. He didn’t need to impose on the Potters anymore.
“My mum’s going to hate it when you tell her you’re leaving,” James pointed out shrewdly. He knew Sirius looked to his mother like the one he never had. James wouldn’t have been surprised if Sirius started calling Hannah Potter ‘Mum’ soon. Sirius would hate doing something that would disappoint her. James smiled and nodded knowingly. “Got you thinking about that, didn’t I?” Sirius mumbled something under his breath that James took for a confirmation. “C’mon, Padfoot, you’re not causing any trouble living with my family!”
“We’re adults now, though, Prongs.”
“Yes, but we’re still in school, Padfoot.”
“Why don’t you just wait until you’ve graduated, Padfoot?” Remus suggested from behind the two. He could see where Sirius was coming from, as well as James. Ultimately, however, the decision belonged to Sirius. He was just making a suggestion.
Sirius and James wheeled around, almost causing Remus to walk straight into the both of them. “The boy says good things!” James said happily.
“I say realistic things,” Remus corrected. He quickened his step so he was now standing beside James. He looked across James at Sirius with an exasperated look. “Honestly, Sirius, I don’t think the Potters are ready to kick you out yet.”
Sirius bit his bottom lip. He knew Mr. and Mrs. Potter wouldn’t force him out of their home, they would never force anyone out, but he still felt that he should be able to fend for himself now. He would just explain the situation to James’s parents. He would just tell them that he appreciated everything they’ve ever done for him and that he’d be forever grateful, but it was time he learned to live on his own. Besides, he would be in the castle for the greater part of the year. He might not have even found a suitable apartment before summer’s end.
For the moment, the boys dropped the subject. Why waste an afternoon where they could be celebrating their Apparition tests by worrying about the summer? No, it was best to just leave it alone for now.
Professor Finely was in top form today, that much was obvious. He was going well out of his way to let every one of his students know this. The class was preparing for their exam at the end of the year and Professor Finely had officially announced that he was not telling them exactly what would be on the test. Every other professor was giving their students the general topics on the test, even going over parts in depth if their students were having trouble with the material, but not Professor Finely. He would much rather dance on a broomstick three thousand feet in the air about a pointy mountaintop than allow his students that information. Instead, he continued to teach them new topics.
During one Defence Against the Dark Arts class two weeks before they were due to sit for their exams, Professor Finely had broken into a vicious tirade about werewolves and the dangers they inflicted on society. No one was quite sure how he had managed to segue from silent spells to werewolves, but he had. The Gryffindors watched the man with a mixture of expressions on their faces. Lily, Alice and Frank simply looked revolted at the way in which the man described the animals. They didn’t believe one man could hold such hatred. Peter was shifting nervously in his seat, his eyes darting from Finely to Remus, who looked quite impassive about everything. Sirius and James looked furious, as if they were doing everything within their power to keep themselves from illegally hexing their professor.
“Professor?” Lily Evans said tentatively, her hand in the air. She either didn’t notice or promptly ignored the horrified looks her friends were sending her. Finely would eat her alive if she dared disrupt him in the middle of his rant.
Indeed, Professor Finely looked thoroughly irritated by the interruption. In a very restrained manner, he replied, “Yes, Miss Evans?”
“You’re just talking about the actual werewolf, aren’t you? Not the person who becomes one?”
Professor Finely scoffed. “Is there much of a difference?”
“Of course there is!” Lily said heatedly before whipping around as two more voices said the exact same thing. James and Sirius were leaning forward on their desks, their faces tinged red and their hands gripping the edges of the tabletops so tightly that their knuckles were ghostly white.
Professor Finely’s eyes were alight now; he looked to be enjoying himself now that he had infuriated some of his students. “Do explain, then, you three.”
James, Sirius and Lily were quiet for a moment, unsure if the professor was baiting them. It would be just like Professor Finely to ask for his students’ opinions, then to shoot them down, take points away from Gryffindor and then give them a week of detention. Still, they couldn’t let this man continue with this ridiculous lesson. Lily had no idea why James and Sirius were so enraged by it; she was angered because it was the exact same prejudice she had to face because she was a Muggle-born. But she had two people on her side, at least.
“The person probably had no choice when they were bitten,” Lily pointed out, doing her best to keep her voice even.
“They could fight away the beast,” Finely insisted indifferently, as if the thought of someone being ravaged by a werewolf didn’t disturb him in the slightest. The thought probably didn’t disturb him.
“What if it was a kid?” James persisted fiercely, leaning forward on his desk.
“Yeah,” Sirius quickly jumped in. “A kid wouldn’t be able to fight off a werewolf!”
“If the child had any intelligence at all, he or she would know better than to be wandering alone at night, especially when there’s a full moon in the sky.”
“I don’t think the first thing on a kid’s mind when he’s wandering around outside at night is, ‘Am I going to run into a werewolf?’” Remus hissed under his breath, just loud enough for his professor to hear.
Professor Finely smiled in delight. “I believe Mr. Lupin has something to tell us.” He stared challengingly at his student, daring him to speak his mind instead of letting his friends do it for him. Finely had been dying to hear Remus’s thoughts on this ever since he had first learned the Gryffindor was a Lycanthrope.
Remus returned the stare, trying to insert some confidence into his expression. He had been silent every time someone made a passing remark about what foul creatures werewolves were, not realising they were in the presence of one. Professor Finely knew his student was a werewolf and continued making the remarks. But this was getting ridiculous. Professor Finely was suggesting that a child should know what he was up against when he was faced with a werewolf. There was no way a child would know that. Remus had only been three when he was bitten; he thought the werewolf was a dog! That was the way children thought and this man had no right to suggest differently.
“There’s no way a kid will know what they’re up against,” Remus said quietly, glaring into the professor’s eyes.
Finely was clearly enjoying himself. “Louder, if you please, so the rest of the class can hear you.”
Remus was incensed and everyone in the room saw this. Luckily, though, only three of them knew the true reason behind this. The others could do no more than sit silently, watching him in slightly awestruck manners. Remus Lupin rarely lost his temper, especially with a professor. “What if the kid is so young that he doesn’t realise there’s such thing as a werewolf?”
“Anyone from a proper Wizarding family would know, Mr. Lupin.”
“That’s not true! What if the kid is only three years old and happens to like dogs and thinks the werewolf is a dog? He’s not going to know what’s happening until the wolf is biting down on him and he’s in pain! He’s not going to know what happens until he wakes up in a hospital and the Healers are telling him what he’s become!”
Sirius placed a hand on Remus’s shoulder and was forcing him back into his seat. Remus hadn’t even realised he was starting to get up. “Calm down, Remus,” Sirius said quietly. He’d never seen Remus get like this; it was only a matter of time before he announced that he was the werewolf he was talking about.
Finely was close to laughing, every single student saw this and it enraged them all. Finely had shown before that he had no respect for any of his students, but this was pushing it.
“Remus is right, Professor,” Frank Longbottom piped up, his tone filled with anger.
“Yeah,” Alice Gordon agreed intensely. “A little boy or girl isn’t going to know what’s happened, until it’s too late.”
“Then that is the child’s own fault,” Finely insisted in a tone that said this matter was closed.
Remus gritted his teeth and abruptly stood up, making his way towards the door without looking back. “Mr. Lupin, you do not have permission to leave this classroom!” Professor Finely yelled at his student’s retreating back. Remus said nothing to the man and left, slamming the door behind him. He had probably just lost Gryffindor fifteen points at the least, not that it mattered. Gryffindor had dominated the Quidditch Cup; they were too far ahead for a measly fifteen points to matter. He had enough of this. He was sick and tired of hearing it and he knew certain people in the castle wouldn’t stand for it.
He had no idea if Professor McGonagall had a class right now, if she did he would simply wait in the corridor until it completed. As it was, when Remus reached the Transfiguration classroom, it was to see Professor McGonagall sitting at her desk, poring over some sheets of parchment he presumed were students’ works. He knocked on the door and heard the professor tell him to come in. The professor looked surprised to see the Gryffindor sixth year enter. “Don’t you have a class right now, Lupin?”
“Yes, Professor,” Remus said, standing awkwardly in the doorway.
“Then what are you doing here?”
Remus bit his bottom lip and rocked back and forth on his feet. He wasn’t entirely sure how to begin. He had been so adamant against telling any authority figure about this for so long that he never had anything planned. “It’s… about Professor Finely.”
The Transfiguration professor’s nostrils flared - an instant sign of dislike. The woman loathed the man nearly as much as her students did, though she was not at liberty to discuss her opinion on him. “What he has done now?”
“Well… part of it is what he did now; the other part is what he’s been doing.”
“Sit down, Remus,” the professor ordered, nodding to one of the chairs closest to her desk. She looked apprehensive. Remus sat down, trying to keep his eyes from jumping around the room. He had rarely ever been alone in the Transfiguration room with the professor and was unsure of what to do. “What has our Defence Against the Dark Arts professor been up to?”
Remus was silent, considering his words. “Well… today he was just now giving us a lesson about how stupid werewolves were, trying to bait me into telling everyone in my house that I’m one.”
Professor McGonagall’s eyelids contracted - a sign of danger. “Was he? That’s very interesting to hear. Anything else you wish to tell me?”
“All year… he’s been trying to convince me to join Voldemort, like the other werewolves are going to.” Remus was surprised to see the woman flinch violently when he said Voldemort’s name. He didn’t know why she did this, but said nothing about it. He wondered what her reaction to that news would be.
Professor McGonagall checked her timepiece in a strangely calm manner, showing no signs of instant anger. She was going to let it stew inside her. “Dinner is about to start, you should go to the Great Hall.”
“Professor?” Remus said uncertainly. He knew there was more that she wasn’t saying.
“Please, Remus, go down now. I need to have a word with Professor Dumbledore.”
Within a matter of two days, there was no sign of Professor Finely at all in the castle. The boys knew this for a fact, as they combed the Marauder’s Map continuously in hopes of locating him. The strange part of it was that Professor Dumbledore had nothing to do with the man’s disappearance. Professor McGonagall had done as she said she would and went to speak with the Headmaster, but before Dumbledore could get around to sacking the man, he had vanished. Professor Finely’s office was bare, all his belongings gone and the students’ work that had not been graded was dispersed unceremoniously on the wooden floor. Of course, none of the students were terrible disappointed about the man’s sudden departure. In fact, they had to go painfully out of their way to pretend that they were shocked about it.
As a result of the disappearance of Professor Finely, the Defence Against the Dark Arts exams for every year except fifth and seventh were cancelled. The students did not trouble themselves with hiding their glee about this bit of information. They cheered loud and long when Dumbledore announced it at breakfast the morning the exams were due to begin. Nearly every student in the castle loathed Finely, some more than others, but it was a popular consensus that he was dreadful and they were glad he was gone. In fact, the only students who did not share in their classmates’ glee were the Slytherins, which was not a surprise, and, oddly enough, Peter Pettigrew.
When his friends questioned him about this, Peter simply said he didn’t think Finely was as bad as everyone was making him out to be.
The final exams were not nearly as terrible as the OWL examinations had been, but it was still an immense relief to be done with them. After the mishap in Transfiguration, which involved Alice Gordon and Frank Longbottom getting stuck together by the elbows, something no one could figure out the cause for, everyone just wanted the exams to be done with. The only consolation the sixth years could find about the tests was that they were not the Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Level exams, which they would be sitting for next year.
James, Sirius, Remus and Peter now found themselves sitting in their usual compartment on the Hogwarts Express, trading Chocolate Frog cards. The sky outside was the clearest blue they had ever seen and the green countryside swept by as the train progressed closer and closer to Platform Nine and Three Quarters.
“Bloody hell,” Sirius lamented, throwing the card he had down on the seat beside him. “I’ve got about fifteen Morgana cards!”
“Shame,” James said lightly, sorting through his own handful of cards. He had six Morgana cards of his own. “Perhaps she just loves seeing your hideous face and that’s why you keep getting her.”
“She’s got horrible taste, then,” Remus muttered before snapping off the leg of a Chocolate Frog and chewing thoughtfully on it.
Sirius drew himself up proudly and narrowed his eyes at Remus. “I don’t see any Chocolate Frog card ladies lining up to see your ugly mug, Moony.”
“How do you know they haven’t?” Remus challenged. “I could have just been keeping it all a secret.” He sat up straighter and zeroed in on Sirius. “You know, like you were going to try and keep snogging Emily Fort a secret?”
“Stuff it, Moony,” Sirius warned. There had been no mention of that incident in weeks. Sirius had been hoping they’d all forgotten about it.
“I’ve got some lovely pictures of you I could show her!” Remus suggested brightly. “How about I show her the one with your knickers out in the open for everyone to see?”
James and Peter burst into a fit of chuckles. “I forgot about that!” James said between laughs. He knew Remus had kept the picture, in case he ever needed some good blackmail, but he had momentarily forgotten about the photo’s existence.
Sirius couldn’t help but wonder if Remus would really show the Ravenclaw that photo. “I don’t think she needs to see my knickers out in the open!”
“What about Sirius’s knickers?” Lily Evans was standing in the doorway, pinning her Prefects badge onto the front of her shirt.
No one seemed to have heard her enter.
“Remus, I’m going to take that bloody camera of yours and-”
“You can’t do anything to it.”
“And why not?”
Remus smugly folded his arms across his chest. “It’s got an Anti-Theft Charm put on it. Now anyone who even resembles you goes near it, it wails so loudly your ears might start to bleed.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
“Fine, go find it and don’t come crying to me that you’ve gone deaf.”
Lily’s eyes moved confusedly between Sirius and Remus, wondering what in Merlin’s name had inspired this arguement. After knowing the two boys for almost seven years, she shouldn’t have been surprised that they could fight about anything. However, she needed her curiosity satiated and turned to one of the other occupants of the compartment. “What are they going on about, James?” she asked the untidy haired boy.
“Something about a picture of Sirius in his bloomers,” James told her vaguely as he ripped open another Chocolate Frog. He was having trouble comprehending the fact that this was one of the now several times that Lily hadn’t spoken to him without her usual loathing. He was quite pleased.
Lily nodded slowly, in a way that suggested she didn’t need to know any more than she already did. “Remus, do you think you could stop fighting with Sirius for a few minutes to patrol the corridors with me?”
Remus nodded and stood up to accompany Lily. Before he left, he rounded on Sirius, “One false move and that picture is posted in every common room in the castle.”
“I’ll believe it when it happens.” Once Lily and Remus had left the compartment and shut the door, Sirius turned worriedly to James and Peter. “You don’t think he would actually do it, do you?”
Peter shrugged. “He might.”
James agreed. “Yeah, Remus has been known to do some strange things when provoked.” For the next fifteen minutes, the three boys took advantage of the fact that Remus was not around to destroy them in Exploding Snap, and played a few rounds. By the end of the fourth match, James and Sirius were not sure their eyebrows would ever grow back completely. Peter, on the other hand, was completely ash free with both of his eyebrows fully intact and he was extremely proud of this. When the door to the compartment slid open again, they saw Remus and Lily reenter with their heads bent over a copy of the Daily Prophet, horrified expressions on their faces.
“What happened?” Peter asked concernedly, sitting up straighter.
“Professor Handlin,” Lily whispered in shock.
“Our old Defence professor?” Sirius asked, utterly nonplussed. Remus nodded slowly, resuming his seat beside Peter, Lily sitting next to him. “What happened to him?” Sirius persisted impatiently.
“He was murdered,” Remus informed them gravely, his face whiter than usual.
“What?” James, Sirius and Peter said, leaning forward and crossing to the other side of the compartment to get a better look at the article.
“He was found in his home in Blackpool, that skull in the air,” Sirius summarized once he’d finished reading the article, completely dazed. They had all liked the professor; they all knew he was a good man. He had once saved James, Sirius, Remus and Peter from the Forbidden Forest. Who would want to kill him? Why would anyone want to kill him?
“They have a name for the skull now,” Lily said softly. “They’re calling it the Dark Mark, the mark Death Eaters cast when they’ve killed someone.”
“Death Eaters?” Peter asked uncertainly. They had all heard the term before, yet not in a while.
“Voldemort’s followers,” James told his friend. “Does this mean they’re getting stronger?”
Remus shuffled the paper so he could read the end of the article. “They’re predicting what everyone knows is going to happen. There’s going to be a war soon. A lot of people have been trying to deny it, but they can’t do it anymore.”
War was inevitable.