Admissions At Dawn
Admissions at Dawn
From a chair by my dormitory window, I watched the moon go down and realized it was about to release Remus for another month. As the sky darkened I imagined him sleeping off his first exhaustion in the safe-house Professor Dumbledore had created so he could come to Hogwarts, the so-called Shrieking Shack. Or maybe he lay curled in the tunnel that connected it with the school grounds. I saw the stars fade in the grey dawn and knew Madame Pomfrey would be getting a bed ready for him til he was well enough to come back to class. At sunrise, I watched her crossing the grounds with him from the Whomping Willow that guarded the tunnel’s entrance.
Should I go talk to him now or wait til later? I hadn’t thought to hurt him. Problem was, I hadn’t thought at all. Now I had to. Confessing later would be easier. For me, anyway. The world might end first, or, less likely, I’d figure out a reason that made some kind of sense for what I’d done.
But what would be best for Remus? I wasn’t sure any amount of resting up could make hearing what I had to say easier. Waiting could increase the risk that old Snivvelus might decide to confront Remus before I could warn him that his secret was out. Oh, how Snape would love a chance to gloat. I could almost hear him. He’d spout the same sort of Slytherin snobbery as my family would if they learned something like this!
How disgusting! Disgraceful! A werewolf at Hogwarts trying to pass himself off as a Wizard! No wonder they have such unsavory reputations! Allowing it must be more of Dumbledore’s lunacy! See how that idiot’s lowered the standards of the school! Not to mention that there could be danger!
Remus would be hurt and, maybe worse, ashamed.
I couldn’t wait! Things were bad enough, without him getting a surprise like that!
The room was still. There was an hour til it was time to get up for breakfast. The curtains were drawn around the four-posters belonging to James and Peter. Remus’s, like mine, was open and unslept in. Rising, I tiptoed to my bed, tossed the blanket I’d wrapped around me on top of it, then started for the door. I was almost there when I heard something behind me. I turned. James, fully dressed, slipped out from behind his curtains. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“Where d’you think?” There was no defiance in the words. “To see Remus.”
“I’m coming with you,” said James.
“Why?” He was furious at me last night with good reason. Did he want to tell Remus before I made excuses for myself? Like I would, or could when there were none.
He shrugged one shoulder, quirked half a grin at me. “Why not? He’s my friend too.”
We slipped out of Gryffindor Tower without speaking. The deserted hallways echoed every footfall. Madame Pomfrey must’ve heard us, because she was leaning through the half open doorway leading into the Hospital Wing when we arrived. She had a finger raised to her lips. “What can I help you with?”
I’d only come here twice before. Not to see Remus. We’d always waited for him to come back to our dormitory after the moon. So we wouldn’t draw attention to him, so it looked like we believed his story that an ill Mum was the reason for his absences. Once I was here to see James when he took a bludger to the knee playing Quidditch and once when I was bitten by an over-enthusiastic snap dragon during Herbology. Neither time was it so early or quiet as this. It was kind of creepy.
“We’re here,” I whispered through the stillness. “To see Remus.”
“Remus Lupin?” She raised an eyebrow and stayed firm in the doorway. “Why on Earth would you think…”
“Please,” I cut in. “We know he’s here-.”
She frowned. “If you want to talk to your friend, you can do it in your dormitory…”
I tried to peer past her into the dimness. Was he waiting just beyond the door or had he been whisked into bed already? “Madame Pomfrey, we live with him! We know why-”
James’s shoulder brushed mine as he stepped forward. “It’s important or we wouldn’t disturb him,” he said. “We know it was full moon last night and that he’s a werewolf.”
“And he knows we know.” I added, on a rush of gratitude that James had come.
She studied us both and after a long moment, moved aside. Beckoning us to follow, she led us to a curtained bed at the far end of the room. “Five minutes,” she said.
James let me push aside the curtain and step through first. Remus lay with his back to me, burrowed deep within a nest of covers. Was he asleep already? He must be, to lie here so motionless like this. How could this still form have anything to do with what I’d seen a few hours ago beneath the Whomping Willow? I stepped closer.
I’d never seen him so soon after the change before. Last night my final glimpse of him had been as he walked to the Willow with Madame Pomfrey. The figure was small and distant, but I had no doubt it was the same Remus Lupin I’d known for almost five years. Later, in the tunnel with Snape, there had been no sign of him. Instead there had been a swift and snarling creature leaping through the dimness toward us. A werewolf. A real werewolf with madness glinting in his eyes and sharp fangs gleaming huge in the dimness. Not a kid I knew at all…
What would he be like this morning?
“Remus?” I whispered.
Blankets rustled as he shifted toward the sound of my voice. His head moved on the pillow. “Sirius! James! What are you doing here?” he exclaimed pushing himself up on his elbows. He stared at us with wide eyes.
No glints of madness now. They were Remus’s eyes. Sane and familiar again, but shadowed more deeply than any eyes I’d ever seen before.
How exhausting must it be to undergo such a fearsome change as what I’d seen? Even after learning most of the steps in the animagus charm that would let me take on animal form, I knew now that I’d never come close to understanding how painful it must be for him.
My transformation was voluntary. I had some discomfort as my bones shifted and reshaped themselves, but I knew I could control how fast it would happen, or decide to stop it altogether. He could do neither. The moonlight made all the choices.
Right now, he looked as pale and thin as good parchment and so light that the weight of the blankets was all that’d keep him from blowing away in a strong breeze.
This was going to be bad. Hard. Awful.
Would it be kinder to let him rest? I looked at James. He nodded at me, but then stepped back. This was, after all, my show, my Quidditch match. But his steady presence was there behind me.
Gryffindor, I told myself. You’re a Gryffindor! The Sorting Hat said so. It said they have courage. You don’t want to make a liar out of it, do you? Get on with it, man.
“Remus, I have to talk to you.” Oh, yeah, real good. State the obvious, Sirius.
He nodded and gestured for me to sit on the end of the bed.
I shook my head. Stayed standing. Squared my shoulders. No way to make it easier. Not for him. Not for me. No way to start except by starting. “I’m a stupid git.” I said.
He said nothing. Just tipped his head a little and waited.
“Last night-” I began, then faltered.
I didn’t think a face could get paler than his had been. I was wrong. I saw his fingers curl tight and his eyelids squeeze shut like he was waiting for a blow. “Did…?” He swallowed hard. “Did I…? Are you here to tell me I bit somebody?”
“No, Remus, not that!” I perched on the edge of the bed. Made myself look at him. Twisted the hem of my robes so my hands wouldn’t shake. I could feel the aching loss of our easy comradeship, the laughter, the sharing of hopes and dreams as we lay in our four posters late at night, staring at the ceiling.
“What?” Remus pushed himself from his elbows to his hands. His bones looked like sticks propped together to hold each other up as he leaned forward. “Sirius, tell me.”
Whether or not he was my friend after this was almost beside the point compared to the burden I was laying on him. “It’s Snape. If he hasn’t already put all the pieces together, he’s going to quite soon now.”
“Pieces?” Remus squinted, either at the morning brightness or in concentration.
I jerked my chin at the window. “You, the moon, the tunnel to the Shrieking Shack.”
“What?” A hand grabbed the sleeve of my robes.
I eased from his grip as gently as I could and got back to my feet. His gaze rose with me. I pushed my hands into my pockets. “I’ll say this right out. He knew about the Whomping Willow. He watched you and Madame Pomfrey go out there! I hated seeing him trailing you like that, knowing he’s spied on us for all these years! And how he was holding you back on the stairs last night…”
“Wait!” James cut in. “What do you mean?”
I glanced at him. “Snape kept blocking the steps to the tower last night, wouldn’t let Remus go up to drop off his books. I think he wanted to test his theory and see what happened once the moon came up.”
“Stinking, stupid git,” said James. I could hear an echo of my own fury in his voice.
Remus’s face was still, waiting. I looked from him to James. “I kept thinking Snape won’t stop digging til he comes up with something! He won’t think twice what it’ll mean for Remus here! Or care! It’ll be like winning some kind of banner to wave all over school! Man, I’ve never been so angry…”
I began walking back and forth along the side of the bed. “I thought if I scared him, he wouldn’t be so bleeding proud of himself! So I- I dared him to look in the tunnel!”
“Sirius, no!” I saw the fear that filled my guts fill Remus’s tired eyes
“James came and chased us out,” I said before his horror could get bigger. “Nobody got hurt. But any of us could’ve been. I risked us all last night, but mostly you. What I did’s going to have you at risk every day now, ‘cause Snape’ll know about you!”
I paused by the window, stroked the curtain, looked out at the trees. From here, I could see the Whomping Willow. It looked calm and innocent, swaying in the morning breeze. I began pacing again. I couldn’t stand still and speak at the same time. Truth was, looking at Remus’s strained face made words all but meaningless. “I didn’t know it’d go so far. Sorry doesn’t half say it, Remus.”
There, I’d said all of it that had words. All that was left was to stop pacing and wait for whatever came next.
I looked at James. What did it mean, this waiting? Nobody reacted to things I did with silence. My Father lectured, my Mother shrieked. I knew what to do with shouts or sermons. From Remus there was only stillness.
“I guess,” he said at last, lowering himself to his elbows again, one careful bone at a time. “That you really didn’t get what it means to be a... Well, to be someone like me. That you understood-”
Had I ever heard anyone sound so tired before? So resigned?
It was worse than having him shouting and angry.
Now he’d tell me how he’d trusted me. How I’d let him down. And he’d be right.
I’d never realized til this moment how separate the lives we lived in our minds were from those we shared in our classes each day and dormitory each night. I’d had a glimmer of it once before. The night we met, I thought Remus had come a hard road to get to Hogwarts. But I’d guessed then it was to do with his bloodline. Being from my kind of family, that was the one burden I could understand something about. Even when I learned what his condition was, I hadn’t realized how lonely his journey had been. And still was.
“I’m sorry.” I said, looking straight at him through the heavy silence of the room.
“Why should you be sorry about that?” Real surprise rounded his eyes. A grin quirked the corner of his mouth. “How much do I get what it’s like to be almost Wizard royalty?”
Wizard royalty. I made a face, remembering my first year in Gryffindor. Heard some of the kids say how great it must be, having wealth and power to get anything I wanted. So different than the confining realities. How often I wanted to shout “You don’t know what it’s like!” I’d never felt rich til I found friendship with James, Remus and Peter. They treated my name and my family like they were no big deal, til I mostly forgot they didn’t know what my life was like away from school.
I nodded at Remus. Maybe he forgot sometimes that we didn’t know what it was like for him either. Forgetting was a lot less lonely. Before I could say anything, he went on. “How could you get how dangerous it is? I’m not talking about for me! But for you! I don’t ever want to risk hurting anybody! Especially not my friends!”
What was he saying to me? That we were still friends, maybe?
I heard weariness in his tone, but was there anger in it too? Not in any form I recognized.
I looked at James. Maybe there was something in his face I could understand. He was still angry with me, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he?
There was no answer there. His eyes weren’t glaring, his jaw wasn’t clenched. “You know,” he split a look between Remus and me. “I was thinking after I went to bed last night that maybe Sirius did us all a favor.”
“What?” Remus and I exclaimed in unison. We exchanged confused looks.
“I’m not saying what you did wasn’t stupid, Sirius,” he cautioned.
“Oh, well, thanks, James,” I said. “You know, I almost forgot that.”
He flashed me a brief grin. “And I won’t say it wouldn’t come down hardest on Remus if anything went wrong,” James moved closer to the bed, talking fast as, beyond the curtain, Madame Pomfrey’s footsteps echoed on the stone floor. “But here’s the thing. It could’ve been worse if Sirius hadn’t gone out after Snape. If he stayed in the common room, I wouldn’t have gone looking for him after I got off detention and…”
Remus groaned.
“What?” I looked from one to the other.
“Snape would’ve found a way into the tunnel,” said Remus.
James nodded. “Yeah. And he’d have gone in there alone. If he didn’t manage it last night, he’d’ve worked out a way to do it next month. Or the one after that. What you did, Sirius, maybe satisfied his snooping for now. And we know it put a scare into him. That might keep him off our backs a while. And who knows? He could even honour his word to Dumbledore!”
“Yeah right,” I said, thinking how crazy I must’ve sounded when I said that same thing earlier. “How likely do you think that really is?”
“I don’t know.” James shook his head. “But it may’ve bought us time-”
“Dumbledore knows?” Remus interrupted.
“Yeah,” James nodded. “I don’t know how she knew we were there, but when we came out of the tunnel, Madame Pomphrey was waiting with her wand in her hand.”
“She never let us say so much as word one,” I added. “Just marched all of us straight up to the Headmaster’s office.”
“After she left, Professor Dumbledore asked us a lot of questions…” said James.
“Mostly Snape, though.” I put in. “Like what made him go outside after supper.”
“And what he thought he saw in the tunnel,” continued James. “Snape said there’d been a werewolf in there, and-”
Remus winced.
James looked full at him. “When Snape mentioned the werewolf, Dumbledore never said if he was right or wrong. Just that there were good reasons students weren’t to go near the forest. Whatever Snape believed he had or hadn’t seen, it was best for everyone that no tales got floating round school about werewolves or anything else that would lure us out for a look. He swore him not to talk about any of it...."
Remus let out a long sigh. It seemed that whatever energy he had rode out on it as he lay back on the pillow. His eyes looked more tired than ever as he stared at the ceiling. “It’s not like I didn’t think this kind of thing might happen sooner or later,” he said.
“Well, now it has,” said James in a brisk, no-nonsense kind of voice, glancing over his shoulder at the curtain as Madame Pomfrey’s footsteps sounded louder. “And Professor Dumbledore’s going to be taking care of it. Along with the rest of us.”
Remus turned his head to look at James. “What do you mean, the rest of us?”
“Me, Sirius, Peter, who else? You know, we’ve played this whole thing down way too much. Trying to look like we hardly notice you’re gone every month, as if that might keep anyone else from noticing. Well, now we know that doesn’t work, don’t we? So, what we do instead is stick together. Keep a better watch. Right?”
James looked at me. I saw no anger in his face. That flat, disappointed sound wasn’t in his voice, either. Where had they gone? I didn’t get it. Maybe he was so caught up in finding a way to make things better there was no room for those feelings to show now.
Whatever came later, it was great, having him trust me to help with that much. To at least say we’d need to stick together. “Yeah, right,” I said.
“Okay. Just you, Sirius and Peter,” said Remus. There was no mistaking the relief in his voice. At least for now his secret was something close to safe. “Okay, all right.”
Behind us, the curtain rustled. “Five minutes!” called Madame Pomfrey. “Time to get to breakfast, Mr. Black, Mr. Potter. Mr. Lupin here needs his rest.”
“We’ll talk more later,” James said as she parted the curtain and stepped through with a large golden goblet in her hand.
“I have your potion for you, dear,” she said, moving to the head of the bed. “To help you sleep and regain your strength more quickly.” Her free arm slipped under Remus’s shoulders and lifted him to a sitting position. She made it look as if he were weightless. Tendrils of steam rose from the cup as she steadied it for him.
Remus’s hands closed around it. He raised it to his lips, then paused. “One thing, first.” he said.
I thought he would turn to James again, but it was me he looked at. “Sirius, did you take those notes for me in Charms like you said?”
“Yeah…” I nodded. Could even a student like him really be thinking about homework right now? “Yeah, I did. I took them. Why?”
“Good.” His gaze held mine through the drifting steam. “I want to go over them later. Together, okay?” His smile was tired but deliberate.
The dread in my gut became a lump in my throat.
Us. Together. After what I had done, he still wanted to be my friend!
“Yeah, okay.” I managed to say as I returned his smile and turned to walk out of the Hospital Wing with James.