Remus dragged himself down to the Great Hall the next morning. Maybe it wasn’t the brightest idea he had ever had, looking out the window in the Three Broomsticks yesterday afternoon. Maybe if he had never seen Cesi, none of this would’ve happened. And if none of this had ever happened, then Lily Evans wouldn’t have repeatedly hit him with James’s overstuffed pillow.
Remus pushed his light brown hair out of pale blue eyes and sat down. His friends were already there, drowning their pancakes in maple syrup and massacring their sausages.
He poured himself a bowl of Owl-Os, whihc hooted at him indignantly as he liberally poured milk over them. His friends had long since declared Owl-Os to be disgusting, but Remus wasn’t terribly fond of meat. This was mostly because it reminded him that he might do the same thing “shovel meat into his mouth ravenously- someday, and the victim could be anyone. Anyone at all. Werewolves did not know good from bad, right from wrong. They were all claws and crazed hunger.
And as for the pancakes… well, it was very easy to lose one’s appetite for pancakes when one spent nearly every morning watching three people down stacks of them, each cake brittle from the amount of sugar that was crystallizing them into solid disks.
He shook his head. Diabetics in the making.
Sirius waved a sausage by way of greeting, his cheeks stuffed with pancake.
“You okay, Moony?” Peter asked. “You look a bit pale.”
Remus suddenly pushed away the bowl and dropped his head onto the table, groaning loudly.
“Forget an assignment?” James asked.
“No,” Remus mumbled into his arms. “It’s that stupid Cesi.” He scrambled to his feet. “I’m going out for a walk.”
He turned around and stumbled towards the door angrily. Why him? Why him? Why did he always have to get himself into messes like this? Why was he the loser who was woken up on the stupid middle of the night to deal with a stupid psychotic loser of a Muggle?
Because he was a stupid psychotic loser of a wizard. Duh. Perhaps if he, the stupid psychotic loser, got away for a bit and spent some time alone, he wouldn’t have to zone out through his morning classes in a desperate attempt to recharge. He had to get to the doors. Had to get to the doors. Just thought the doors was a nice, quiet castle surrounded by nice, quiet grounds. Nice and quiet. Quiet. He just had to make it though those doors and then he would be free, free to think, free to focus his thoughts and decide on the next course of action concerning-
“Remus, could you come here for a minute?”
Remus grimaced at the ceiling. There. That proved it. He was cursed. The sky hated him. So much for the quick escape.
Wearily, he turned around and walked over to where Lily Evans was sitting. She was surrounded by her friends, who were chattering animatedly and were obviously oblivious to how much Remus hated the clamor that they were producing.
Lily hopped out of her seat, oblivious to his irritation, and walked over to him. “Remus, I want to know why You-Know-Who is after Cesi.”
“So do I, but I don’t think that’s likely,” Remus nodded. “I know this sounds really clichéd, but you saw how she acted last night. She’s scared, she thinks that Death Eaters are everywhere. How are we going to get her to say anything?”
“I know what you mean. And then she wouldn’t talk about any of it. And now she’s disappeared.”
“What?” he yelled, causing several bystanders to jump.
“She’s gone, and she wasn’t in Hagrid’s hut, either.”
Remus thought for a minute and finally said, “I’ll find out if she’s on the grounds, and then we can talk to her together in the library, where there are lots of witnesses. It’ll be safer that way.”
“Here,” Lily said. She withdrew the Muggle pen that she had stuck in her ponytail and grabbed Remus’s slight, bony hand. “I’m writing down the times that I have free today,” she explained, scribbling on his palm, “and the classes that I’d be more than happy to skip.” She retracted the tip on the pen and stabbed it back into her hair. “Get to me when you can, okay?” She flashed a smile and went back to the table.
Remus nodded and looked at his palm. Lily was, apparently, not terribly fond of a lot of her classes. He noticed that Divination had been underlined, with the letters ‘pls’ in parenthesis.
***
Remus wandered around the lake lazily, wishing that he had the Map. Sirius had stolen it to evade detention the other night and had promptly forgotten where he had set it down.
Typical Padfoot. He would just set an important tool down and not remember where it was. What was next? The Cloak? Remus fervently hoped not.
And Cesi. What was he going to do about her, anyway? He didn’t even know what she was. A wizard? A Muggle? Something from a sort of Limbo between magical and nonmagical, a place where people got weird, vague talents that slowly killed them if they used them?
He would just have to ask her, he decided miserably. It wasn’t something that he was looking forward to. He already had a headache. Any explanations from Cesi in the future were likely to make his head explode.
Maybe part of possessing the seventh sense was the ability to grasp huge, twisted concepts. That could explain it.
Or, on the other hand, maybe she couldn’t understand any of it, and had gone crazy a long time ago. She probably had post-traumatic stress disorder. That might have also driven her over the edge.
Remus shivered against the bitter January wind. The more that he thought about it, the more he worried. What if she had other tricks up her sleeve? No one could come close to the various tortures and weapons that Muggles had come up with over the centuries. Wizards weren’t that original. They had their three Unforgivable Curses and hundreds of minor spells, but those had been invented a long time ago. Muggles were always thinking up new things, new ways to hurt and kill.
The other scary thing about Muggles was that there was no way to stop their weapons. You could block a hex with a Shield Charm, but even the strongest Shield Charm couldn’t save you from a “what was it again? Oh, right- a bullet. Bullets were fast- so fast that you died before your brain realized it. And all you could do was pray that your attacker had lousy aim.
A thought sparked in the back of Remus’s brain. Maybe, the annoying little voice said, that’s how Muggles feel when they’re attacked by wizards. Like there’s nothing that they can do except hope for a good conscience and bad aim.
Remus settled down on the shore. He didn’t feel like going to History of Magic. No one would mind if he skipped class just this once. Well, James might mind, since that meant that he would have to take notes for himself, instead of copying Remus’s.
But Remus didn’t consider that to be particularly consequential at the moment. His brain was already filled with questions that he had to sort out. He needed quiet. He needed solitude. And furthermore, he could not possibly care less about troll wars. Not when he had more pressing issues on his mind. Why did You-Know-Who want this Muggle? What had she done? What could she do? Why not just kill her right away?
Remus groaned and threw himself back onto the frozen earth. He had such a headache.