Muskrat Ears
“Are you sure you have everything? Your books are in your trunk? You have soap? Toothpaste?” Hope released her tight hug and held Remus at arms length, gripping his shoulders.
Exasperated, Remus resisted the urge to shrug off her thin hands. “Of course. And if for some reason I’m wrong, I’ll owl you and you can save the day.”
His father stood beside her, smiling tiredly at Remus. “She always does,” he said, giving his son a weak hug and a pat. “And I’ve no doubt you have everything you need. You always do. Just be careful.”
His father was right on both fronts. His mother always did save the day, whether it was bandaging skinned knees, mending torn playclothes, or dabbing Remus’s post-moon wounds with dittany and iodine, she had a solution for everything. He was right about being careful, though Remus resented that bit a little. He was also right about Remus: punctual, organized Remus, who did his best to always be prepared. “You’d have been a wonderful Boy Scout,” his mother told him ruefully, fixing the collar of his shirt and kissing his cheek. “Now get out of here before I burst into tears.”
Remus grinned. His mother was not a crier. Then again, he didn’t want to find out if this would be what set her off for the first time since he’d been bitten, so he gave his parents a little wave and hauled his trunk toward the enormous scarlet steam engine. It was easy to disappear into the crowd, squeezing between a loud family arguing about who should be apologizing to whom for some slight of honor and a pair of deeply entwined seventh years who likely hadn’t seen one another all summer.
Remus had never seen so many people or heard so many voices. Hurrying through the crowd, he made his way to the train and began to search for a quiet compartment. Empty was unlikely, but quiet would be nice. On a hunch, Remus started near the middle of the train and began working his way to the back.
The first compartment was full, a group of animated near-adults laughing and chatting, crammed together closely. The next two were similar, and the following contained a group of Slytherins, already in their robes and glaring as he peered in meekly. Finally, he settled on a compartment with just one occupant: a small boy with flat brown hair and big, watery blue eyes.
“Mind if I join you?” Remus asked, yanking his trunk behind him.
The boy shrugged. “I’m waiting for a friend, but there’s plenty of room. I’m Peter.”
The name rang a bell in Remus’s head, and he reached out a hand to shake. “Remus.” He sat opposite Peter and dug in his shoulder bag for his diary, opening it and flipping through the pages. Full of the cryptic scrawlings of a traumatized and barely literate five year old, the diary had yet to serve him much helpful advice beyond “help mum when you can” and “da doesn’t hate you he’s just scared and sad.” Those had served him well, of course, but he liked to think he’d have at least helped his mum out on his own. Remus occasionally wondered if the things he’d written were the results of a child’s vivid imagination, but the fact was that he remembered waking up in someone else’s skin that night, and he remembered other things too. He remembered a tiny baby, a boy smoking a cigarette out a leaded window, a child casting white fog from his wandtip… brief flashes came and went, but he knew they were real. He skimmed his own writing, occasionally looking up to see what Peter was doing. He was pretending not to pay Remus any mind, staring out the window but glancing curiously at him every few moments.
And there it was. peter is the spy. save him if you can. Well. That meant nothing at all to him, but it sent a shiver up his spine nonetheless. The boy, Peter, waved an excited hand out the window and grinned.“James!” He called jovially. “Jamie, over here!” Whoever he was waving at didn’t seem to see him, and he sighed. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he’s deaf.” Peter turned his attention back to Remus. “What are you reading?”
Remus shrugged noncommittally. “Just some notes I took. Have you read any of the assigned texts yet?”
Already fair Peter went pale and the train began to move, slowly, from the station. “Should I have, d’you think?” he asked anxiously.
“I don’t think we were expected to,” Remus told him. “But I was bored. I went to a muggle primary school and my mum tutored me, so -”
“Neither brainy nor brawny, honestly what an – oh! There you are Petey!” A boy with tousled black hair and warm brown skin grinned at Peter and threw himself into the seat beside him. “Couldn’t find you on the way in, had to sit with this tosser.” He gestured toward the door where another boy was entering, a soft-featured boy with glossy black hair and sharp grey eyes. He grinned at Remus.
“Sirius Black,” he said, settling into the seat beside him.
“Remus Lupin,” Remus said. There was another ping in his brain – an important name, an important face.
“Oh! Hello there,” said the other boy. “Sorry, didn’t see you there. James Potter.” Ah. Another important name. Fate appeared to be intervening. He knew that diary was mostly useless. He’d check to see what it said about these boys later. “Sorry, did you say your name was Black? Bad enough that your whole family’s Slytherins, but you’re a Black too? Poor thing.” He clucked his tongue like a sad, disapproving mother and Sirius Black laughed heartily.
“You don’t know the half of it,” he told them cheerfully. “Is this Peter, the one you were talking about?”
Peter flushed with pleasure. “Sure is!” said James with a slap to Peter’s back. “My partner in crime.”
“Peter Pettigrew,” he said, reaching out to shake Sirius’s hand the way Remus had done. Sirius grinned and shook it.
“Excellent to meet you sir,” he said in an overly-cordial, mocking tone that Peter seemed to miss entirely.
“You too!” he said brightly.
Remus pulled the journal from his bag and began skimming it idly. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be friends with people who made fun of someone as over-eager and open as Peter.
“Petey and I grew up together,” James was telling them. “We’re in Godric’s Hollow. Where are you from?”
“London,” Sirius said. “What’s Godric’s Hollow like? I’ve never been to one of the larger wizard villages, just Diagon Alley.”
“It’s fine,” James said. “Just a neighborhood really. It’s nice to be able to play Quidditch at home, though. We can usually get a good pickup game going if we send an owl around or run door to door.”
“Really?” Sirius was incredulous. “My little brother and I play all the time, and when my cousins are over we can usually convince them, but whenever you want?”
James nodded. “My dad only just told me that not everyone could do that. He didn’t want me to be too culture shocked at Hogwarts, can you believe it?”
Remus snorted involuntarily. Everyone stared at him, and he felt his cheeks flush. “Sorry,” he muttered. “It’s just, I went to a Welsh muggle primary school and all my da said about Hogwarts was that it’s ‘a bit big and rambling, don’t get lost.”
Sirius thought this was hilarious. “A bit big and rambling? Merlin, that’s an understatement. My cousin Andi told me that some of the staircases change about and there are over a thousand rooms! Mum insisted that I learn where all the important ones are before I left.”
“Oh dear,” Peter fretted. “I do wish they’d give us a map or something.”
“Don’t worry Pete, we’ll stick together,” James encouraged.
“Definitely,” Sirius agreed, and Remus was surprised to find that he sounded sincere. Maybe the arrogance was something he could shed, or unlearn. “The four musketeers!”
“What’s a musketeer?” Peter asked.
“I have no idea, it’s the title of a muggle book someone tipped in the bin at the park,” Sirius said. “I only got to read the cover before mum called it dirty and smacked it out of my hand.”
“Whatever they are, there are only three of them,” Remus said, “so I don’t think that works.”
“We might not be sorted together anyway,” Peter said.
“Don’t jinx it!” James told him fiercely. “The four muskrat ears will prevail.”
Remus wrestled back another laugh for the sake of James’s ego. “All for one and one for all,” he deadpanned, which for some reason made Sirius laugh, and then they were all laughing. All at once, he remembered what his diary said. you can make friends. it’s safe.
Remus knew very little about Hogwarts, but as the train grew dim and began to slow it was if he could feel something buzzing in his bones, some magic he couldn’t quite name. That feeling only increased as they exited the train into the cool, clammy night air. He looked up at the stars, the only familiar thing around, and took a deep breath of cool, fresh air. It was good to be away from London. The air there had been heavy in his lungs. Beside him, James and Sirius were shoving each other’s shoulders, laughing, so loud that they almost couldn’t hear the booming voice of the towering man holding a lantern and calling out for the first years. Remus threw an elbow in the mix, and he and Peter made their way through the crowd.
“Evenin’ all!” the man said, beaming down at them. “I’m Hagrid, I’m the Hogwarts groundskeeper, and one of my duties is makin’ sure the firs’ years all arrive safely at the start o’ year feast.” He looked around, counting the cluster around him and scanning the crowd. A pretty ginger girl was clinging to a sallow, frowning boy on Hagrid’s other side. The boy caught Remus’s gaze and glared. Remus glared right back, then stuck out his tongue childishly, causing the girl to laugh. “Looks like we’re all accounted for. Let’s get goin’!” Hagrid led them off into the deeper, richer darkness of the forest with only the bobbing, golden light of his lantern to guide them.
“D’you think we’re about to get murdered?” a girl’s voice whispered from behind him.
“Nah,” another girl said. “They would have taken our wands first.” Remus considered privately whether twenty-odd untrained eleven year olds could take a man mountain in the dark, but ultimately decided it didn’t matter. This man’s voice was too gentle and gaze was too kind to be a danger to anyone, especially children. They trooped along quietly through the darkness, eventually arriving at a cluster of little boats sitting along a lakeshore.
“No more ‘n four to a boat!” Hagrid told them, helping students board the boats before settling into his own. The boats seemed to take off on their own.
“The squid is going to eat us,” Peter squeaked, and Sirius shushed him.
“You’ll scare them!” he chided, nodding to the boat beside theirs where the red-haired girl, the angry boy, and the two girls from behind Remus were bobbing along, looking wary. “That boy looks like he’s pissed his pants already,” he murmured to James, and they both laughed. Remus rolled his eyes.
“You shut up,” he told them, glowering. “If you’ve such a problem with Slytherins, stop bullying people before you end up one.”
Peter nodded sagely. “Musket Tears tell the truth, even when it’s hard to hear.” Remus turned to him, bewildered. Apparently they were all giving him the same look, because Peter flushed a brilliant red. “It’s what my mum says about families.”
Remus tightened his lips, fighting back a laugh, and thankfully the boats beached beneath them, giving him a good reason to look away. The rest of the way to the castle he couldn’t look at any of them, still fighting off the urge to start laughing at Peter’s comment. If he made eye contact, and thought about Musket Tears, he’d lose it for sure.