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flowrs4opheliaI wrote this, my first-ever HP fanfic, while I was reading Order of the Phoenix and you'll be able to tell. Characters like Bellatrix Black appear, but at the same time the characterization of the five main characters slightly contradicts how we saw them in the "Snape's Worst Memory" chapter. For example, Lily is pretty wise and sometimes dissaproving of her friends' behavior in a motherly way, but she's not the bossy kind of Lily we see in the books. My Lily is very much the way Remus described her in the PoA movie (which kind of creeped me out because I had already written this). James is also much less cocky and childish than he's supposed to be, but maybe he changed a lot in one year. Heh.
At the time I wrote this I never intended to continue it; the title refers to the fact that this entire fic tells what happened prior to events you already know happened. But ideas for what I could write about the boys and Lily during their last year just kept coming, so I'm now in the middle of writing a sequel to this called "Requiems" which is actually much longer and which I like more.
Title: Preludes
Author: me, CatsOnMars
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: James/Lily, Sirius, Remus, Peter, Snape
Summary: Lily and the Marauders are all friends in their sixth year. Lily starts wondering why Remus is missing from school so often, which leads to her getting herself in danger
prelude: (1) an introductory action, event, or performance preparing for and preceding a more important matter: a musical movement introducing the chief subject (2) to lead up to: foreshadow (3) to play a musical introduction
Preludes
Chapter 1
All students at Hogwarts find permanent friends by the time they enter their third or fourth year of school there, but the four Marauders had practically been eternally connected since the individual moments they all first met eachother. Now, nearly finished with their sixth year, the boys couldn`t be pried apart by any force seemingly imaginable. They had also acquired popularity that undoubtably could never have been gained by any solo act.
James and Sirius were the faces that popped into mind when one thought about widely-liked troublemakers from the Gryffindor house. They had been best friends since their first year at Hogwarts, complete opposites and completely inseparable. James was everything that a well-liked young wizard should be: an amazing Quidditch player, a good student with neatly concealed intelligence, and always up for partying or a good joke. Not to mention that girls couldn`t help but find him strangely attractive. He was always wild in a calm way, lying with his lean figure sprawled across the strangest place to be relaxing like on the back of one of the castle gargoyles, or simply smiling to himself almost unnoticeably while Sirius was cracking up loudly at the reaction of one of their practical jokes. And with his almost unbefitting glasses modestly hiding his crystal blue eyes, he was cute in a very quiet and comfortable way. On the contrary, Sirius was outrageous and loud about everything, his daring eyes and shoulder-length black hair just begging for girls to look at him. The fact that this year he had arrived at the train station to catch the Hogwarts Express riding a motorcycle made no false statement about his personality. Sirius was the kind of person who was horrible at consoling or even taking anything seriously, but as was reflected by his close friendship with James more than anything, he had good intentions, a good heart, and was worthy of his place in the Gryffindor house.
Their second year at the school was when they had started being seen often with Remus. This surprised many, for Remus had never before had any apparent friends. He was always keeping to himself as if he thought it was the way to be the most considerate to others, and his fox-like face was always looking down as if avoiding eye contact. People couldn`t help but like Remus and always talk about him; there was a certain warmness about him, and the way he always looked tired and completely harmless like a gentle young boy was oddly calming. His unique kind of popularity that was absent of him actually having numerous friends was also helped, of course, by the mystery surrounding his absense once a month. Nobody knew that this was the cause, but when his friends had later found out his secret Sirius had conveniently turned into somewhat of a bullying figure, tacetly daring anyone to try to get past him if they wished to question Remus about his unexplained monthly illness.
Peter, by far the most unlikely member of their group, had always talked to the boys regularly. It wasn`t until he showed his devotion to Remus by wanting to become an Animagus with Sirius and James that they really saw they had a true friend in him. So soon he was seen as part of the group as well, and they called eachother their own nicknames and were very secretive, and therefore were always talked about.
But there was also Lily.
Lily had dark red hair and eyes of a deep, velvety green, and one look with those eyes could give anyone comfort in the strangest way, like something warm was filling them up inside. She had the kind smile of an angel and usually seemed willing to flash it at anybody, as if she didn't know how to hate anyone, and was often especially kind to those who weren't used to that kind of attention. Even Snape, who commonly shared a mutual loathing with the four boys, could get a wave and a casual "Hello, Severus" from her if he passed her on the way into the library. Though Lily could be light-hearted and fun, she carried an aura of wisdom beyond her years, and she had a way of always having something sensible to say in any situation.
No one was really sure whether it was accurate to associate Lily with the four boys or not. She talked to all of them a lot, but she was always nice to everyone in the school. Peter sat with her in Potions and they were used to always working together. She adored Remus, who was able to talk to her about some things his friends were a little too immature to care about. Sirius, who had truly befriended her first but was not so much the type to open up to others, was usually either sneaking up behind her and tickling her (often breaking the silence in a room where a lot of students were quietly studying) or giving her a ride on his back through the halls. James had met her only through Sirius and was possibly the least close to her, but Lily seemed to have the kind of effect on people so that they felt like they were friends with her just by talking to her once.
Perhaps in a way the boys, though they cared for her, unconsciously pushed Lily away. She was popular in the complete opposite way than they were, because she was well-liked by the teachers and one of the friendliest students in school while they just got attention because they made trouble. They didn`t want her to be associated with them and change that. But mostly it was because they had developed an instinct to keep other people out for their own protection. For Lily did not know that Remus was a werewolf, or indeed that the other three were Animagi. She did know that James had an Invisibility Cloak and that the boys used it to sneak around the school a lot. She had even seen the map they`d made and knew about how they called themselves the Marauders, but when she`d asked about why they had such odd nicknames they had quickly changed the subject as casually as possible and never mentioned anything of the sort in front of her again.
One night Remus was minding himself quietly in the common room, playing the piano that sat in the corner as he was often doing. The piano was his own which Dumbledore had allowed to be apparated into the school so that he could have it to play. Remus was a very good piano player for his age, and though they considered it a bit odd, the students in Gryffindor liked that he played. Whether his friends were with him lounging on the sofas with nothing to talk about, or some other students he didn`t talk to were there doing homework, or he was alone in the common room, the majority of the time he could be found there playing and off in his own world. Students could hear his music from almost anywhere in the Gryffindor dormitories. Sometimes they heard his music even when Remus wasn`t there, for he knew how to bewitch the piano to make it keep playing on its own. Sometimes they heard it very faintly late at night in their beds, and were unable to tell whether the music was real or in their heads.
Remus was the only one in the common room. Then Lily came in and went over to the corner right away, leaning her hip against the grand piano`s side. It was like when she had first talked to Remus after only seeing him in hallways with Sirius and James before. Usually people avoided bothering him while he was playing piano, as if some other side of him would come out if he was disturbed, but Lily had kindly come over to him one night and told him he was very good. Then she`d ended up sitting next to him on the bench and asking about the songs he could play and how long he`d been learning, and then their conversation had comfortably drifted to other topics, Lily all the while amazed at how Remus could play perfectly and carry on a casual conversation at the same time. Sirius had then come in and Lily had teasingly asked him why he`d never properly introduced her and Remus before ("He`s so sweet!" she`d whispered to him afterwards, and then, half-jokingly, "I never would have expected it, seeing as he hangs out with the lot of you and James").
Remus smiled at her in greeting, thinking to himself what an ugly grimace his smile was in comparison to the one she glimmered back at him. They said nothing to eachother because Lily was listening to his song, and she did until it slowly died and was over.
"What`s that song?" she asked him. "I hear you play it a lot."
He looked down so that his eyes were hidden under his sandy hair even more than usual. "It`s called 'Stella,'" he explained quietly. "My mum wrote it a long time ago."
"It`s very pretty."
"Thank you," he said in an awkward tone, as if he wasn`t sure if that was the right response, and started playing the next song that jumped out from his memory.
James came into the room. Only Lily was facing the portrait hole and saw him come in.
"Hi, James," she said.
Seeing that she was there, he smiled at her briefly and then looked away almost immediately. James was usually very confident, but he always felt weird around Lily, like he could easily look at her for a long time and had to be really careful not to stare.
"What`s going on, Moony," he said to Remus.
"Not much," he replied without looking up.
They sat with little circulating conversation between them for a while, and then Remus finished his last song and dropped his hands to his lap. He yawned and turned around to sit in the other direction on the piano bench.
"Looks like the party`s dead in here," James observed, looking around the common room.
"Yeah, it`s getting pretty late," Lily agreed, looking at the grandfather clock. "I`m going to get to bed. I`ll see you guys tomorrow."
"Goodnight," Remus and James said, waving with tired effort as she got up and left the room.
"Well." James turned to his friend. "Guys are going to start thinking they`re competing with you for the prettiest girl in school."
"I think they know Lily isn`t my girlfriend," Remus assured him. "And I`m sure they`re more worried about Sirius."
James laughed, and then looked around to make sure no one had come into the room unnoticed. He said a little more quietly, "How much time do you have?"
"Not much," Remus answered.
"You know, I was thinking this time we should sneak into the-"
He stopped talking when someone came in, but relaxed when he saw it was only Sirius.
"What are we going to say you have now, Moony?" Sirius asked right away. "A cold again? Maybe we can dump ice water over your head tomorrow and make it look like Snape did it as a joke; that way it`ll be believable when you`re supposedly sick."
Remus didn`t laugh, but smiled quietly.
"You don`t have to say I have anything," he said. "I never asked you to blatantly lie to anybody. Everyone just figures when I`m gone that I get sick."
"We need a better story," Sirius said. "When people start reporting that they were sent to the hospital wing when you were absent but you weren`t there, and we start making up stuff like them having a separate room for you or that you use floo powder to go home when you`re sick...well, it`s kind of unbelievable."
"Does it matter?" James said. "It`s not like they`re automatically going to figure out that because his story`s unbelievable he must be turning into a wolf."
"Don`t tell them anything," Remus said stressingly. "Don`t make up any stories. You`re right; they won`t be able to figure it out anyway. And I don`t like lying."
"Yeah," Sirius agreed. "Especially to some certain people."
It was unspokenly understood that a picture of the same girl came into all of their heads then. Remus had thought about telling Lily the truth about him as often as she had asked him about it. The thought never occured to him that her motive for such curiousity was concern for him, but Lily had tried to get him to tell her why he was often absent from school nearly every time he`d "fallen ill" that year. She had stopped the last couple times, though, much to his relief. Telling Lily his secret would take a great weight off of his shoulders, but it was only a fleeting dream and not at all a possibility. If he did that, it could put her in danger in ways that they couldn`t even fathom. Or, even worse...she might react just like the rest of the world. She might not understand.
Another student came into the common room, breaking their privacy, and they said nothing more.
Right beside the greenhouse at Hogwarts that was used for Herbology, there stood a tall wall which blocked the greenhouse from view of anyone approaching the castle from afar. Vines had grown up the wall from the greenhouse side and all the way to the bottom of the other side in the time it had been there, so that it was more green than it was the color of the rest of the castle by now.
In front of this wall was where the four friends were enjoying themselves after classes the next day and entertaining themselves by seeing who could throw a stone all the way into the lake from where they stood. They weren`t alone; a group of Ravenclaw students that nearly doubled their amount were also lounging near the bank on this side of the school, and there was also Snape, accompanied by four friends of his. His and the other group ignored eachother, with the exception of an occasional glance behind a shoulder at the enemy connected with some kind of dialogue that was intended to be overheard by the others.
"The Quidditch match next week is going to be a steal," Clopin Avery, one of Snape`s crowd, was commenting.
"You never know when it`s us against Gryffindor," said Rabastan Lestrange. "They do have a good Seeker. They say Potter`s like a god. The best Seeker their house has ever had." There was such obvious deviousness and unseriousness in his tone that it was as bad as if he had suggested that James couldn`t even fly.
"They shouldn`t say such things," said Snape in a low tone. "It doesn`t make much of a statement about their house."
Sirius, who along with his friends could hear this conversation perfectly, had just picked up his next stone to throw toward the lake. He pulled his arm back to throw it, but as he brought it forward he turned on his heel almost in a complete half-circle.
"Oops," he said as the stone flew in the direction of the gathering of Slytherins. It went into the trail of Avery`s cloak behind him, and he flashed Sirius a dangerous look.
"Don`t look so sad that it missed your head and failed to put you out of your misery," James said, standing casually with his hands in his pockets.
Peter and Remus were both sitting in the grass with open books on the ground in front of them and facing away from the other two. James was the only one who saw Lily sneaking up behind Sirius, and he noticed James smirking but not saying anything.
"Ah!" Sirius said as she put her hands over his eyes, but he immediately relaxed in a state of humorous contentment about being currently blinded. "Now honestly, woman, how am I supposed to aim like this?"
"It`s a lake, not a target," Lily said as she walked around to face him, not bothering to ask how he`d known it was her. "What is there to aim for? Just throw it as far as you can." She said this as she bent over to pick up a rock and tossed it in her hand once. Then she cast it away with a fast throw and it landed just a few feet from the end of the bank.
"I`ll bet I could throw you far enough to go in," Sirius said, grabbing her around the waist from behind and lifting her up off the ground. She laughed, kicking her feet in the air, and nudged him with her elbow until he put her back down.
Remus was distracted from studying, bent over a strange-looking insect on the ground that had a large amount of forked legs. He let it crawl onto his finger from a blade of grass and stared at it curiously.
At this time Snape had attracted a lot of attention by climbing up onto the wall. He was now walking across it like a rope with his arms out at his sides to keep balance as he kept talking casually to his friends below.
"Prat," James muttered with his arms crossed, shaking his head.
Remus walked over to them to get a closer look, not wanting to miss it if Snape happened to fall down.
"What have you got there?" Lily asked him, noticing the insect that was happily crawling over Remus`s knuckles.
"Ooooh," Sirius said as soon as his attention was called to it, getting an idea right away. "Let me see it."
Remus confusedly let him brush the bug into the palm of his hand, and then Sirius dropped it gently into his breast pocket and turned to go straight to the bottom of the wall. Peter was now watching, and nobody bothered asking what he was doing because from the look everyone had on their faces it was obvious nobody knew. The puzzled Slytherin students on the ground watched as he climbed up the wall by taking hold of the vines. Snape couldn`t see Sirius now walking along the wall behind him once he had climbed up onto the top. Lucy Carpath yelled a warning to him as Sirius advanced behind him, but it couldn`t be helped when he pulled back the neck of Snape`s shirt.
Lily gasped, seeing what he was about to do, and just as soon Sirius had taken the unpleasant insect from his pocket and dropped it down the back of his shirt. Snape immediately yelled and squirmed, and a lot of girls screamed as he fell to the left but just barely caught hold of the wall so that he hung from the top instead of falling.
James and Peter were laughing and Remus was covering his mouth with his hand and trying not to. Some of the Ravenclaw students started to laugh, too, but Lily was shaking her head.
"You guys are going to put his life in danger some day," she said dissaprovingly, but she had started to smile like Remus and couldn`t help but find it funny.
Chapter 2
One afternoon a few days later, Lily went into her Defense Against the Dark Arts class in a good mood, ready to get a big test back that the class had taken the day before. When the whole class was seated Professor Marlew picked up a stack of papers and started leafing through them. He called off names one by one for students to come up and get their tests. Lily got hers and was happily looking over her good marks, and then a moment later the teacher called, "Lupin."
Half the class turned to look for him. Then, as if he was being stupid and should have expected it, Professor Marlew said, "Oh, Mr. Lupin is absent again today."
Lily turned and looked at the empty desk where Remus should have sat. She couldn`t believe it. She sighed and bent over to dig through her bookbag while the rest of the tests were being passed out and found her datebook.
She had stopped questioning Remus about why he was gone so much because she had felt the truth must be something he was embarassed about, and for the past few months she had started collecting assignments for him to make up on those days he was absent. He had never asked her to do this, but she knew that none of the boys were organized enough to do it for him. So once again she wrote a reminder to herself on the page of that day`s date: "Record assignments for Remus."
As the teacher gave out the rest of the tests Lily flipped all of the pages of her datebook back and forth in boredom. She stopped randomly at an old page to doodle on, but then something caught her eye. This page was for the sixteenth of last month, and it had written at the top, "Record assignments for Remus." Today was also the sixteenth.
As the lesson started Lily flipped through the datebook, reading all of her scribbles and notes from past days. After she had combed the last five months she sat back in her chair holding her quill under her chin, and could only stare at her writing in complete bewilderment.
Lily found the three boys gathered in the hall and easy to corner. As soon as they saw her approaching with a determined look they shot their eyes at eachother uneasily as if they knew exactly what was coming.
Despite the serious expression on her face, Lily asked very casually, "Where`s Remus?"
"He`s sick," James said, stopping himself from adding "again" so that it would sound like no big deal.
Lily looked at all of their faces searchingly. "Where is he really?"
"Sick, Lily," Sirius said with a trace of urgency to change the subject that came out as annoyance. "Sleeping. What is this about?"
"Did you know that Remus is gone exactly once every month? How does that happen? Don`t tell me he`s sick."
"He has a kind of bad condition, okay? Maybe he doesn`t want the whole school to know about it."
"No, I don`t think I can believe that. How does someone get sick around the same day every month? Maybe you haven`t noticed, but it`s always a day shortly before the twentieth."
"How do you know that?"
"I kept track! Look-" She started to get her datebook out of her bag.
She was so close to figuring it out that it was almost impossible not to show any sign of panic. Sirius was the only one who appeared to keep his cool, but "appeared" was most likely a key word in describing his state at the moment.
"Lily, cut it out," he said. There was a seriousness and roughness in his voice now that made everyone suddenly very uncomfortable, and which made Lily stop going through her bag. "You`re being really nosy, you know."
"And how come you can know what`s wrong with him and I can`t?" she demanded, obviously getting upset now. Then her expression changed. "Or maybe there`s nothing wrong with him at all, and I`m worrying for no reason. It`s something bad that he`s up to, isn`t it? That`s the only reason you`d keep it away from me. Does anyone else know about it?"
"There`s nothing to know!" Sirius said. "It`s none of your business anyway, all right? So just shove off."
The look in Lily`s eyes changed, and she stared him down in disbelief. "You`re a jerk."
"Hey, I`m not the one who brought up the subject."
"Sirius!" James had to cut in, startled by his friend`s resort to utter meanness, but he didn`t know exactly what to say himself.
"Fine," Lily said angrily, turning away from Sirius as if she`d decided to just pretend he wasn`t there. "One of you. I want to know what`s going on. Remus is my friend, too, and I think I have a right to know."
The other two said nothing. Lily stood and waited with her arms crossed. "James?"
James looked at her with a sincerely regretful expression and then stared down at the floor. "I`m sorry, Lily."
"...Peter?"
But she already knew how much she would get out of him; he remained completely silent, standing with hunched shoulders and his eyes avoiding hers.
Lily had approached them with confidence, but now just looked hurt. The others could tell that Sirius felt sorry, but Lily wouldn`t look at him. Not giving any of them a glance, she turned away and said with the smallest voice, "I`ll see you later," as if nothing out of the ordinary had just been said.
As she walked away they watched her with their moods sinking.
"Why don`t we just tell her?" asked Peter. "She`ll never give it up."
"Are you crazy?" Sirius said. "It`s Remus`s secret to tell. And he`s too scared of what she`ll think, whether or not he admits it."
"But...it`s Lily," he said meltingly.
"It doesn`t matter who it is. We can`t loosen up on our secrecy because of a pair of pretty eyes." After saying that he shot a look at James as if to say, "That goes for you, too."
"He`s right, you know," James told Peter, seeing how Sirius had aimed the comment at him and wanting to assure him that he wasn`t going to let anything slip either. "If she`s going to find out about it, Remus should be the one to tell her. And besides," he added, lowering his voice, "we agreed when we became Animagi that it would just be us. We agreed never to let anyone else in. We`re the only Marauders, we`ll always be the only Marauders. So there`s no reason to tell anyone anything. It`s risking too much."
"But it was all right when we showed her the map," Peter said a little challengingly; it was uncharacteristic of him.
"What is this, Wormtail?" Sirius asked dangerously. He suddenly looked a lot taller than Peter and very threatening. The halls were clearing out now as the next class time got closer, but he was talking very quietly. "Are you going to betray us? I wonder, should we have trusted you long ago when you wanted to do the unthinkable and become one of us? We broke the law. We did something very few grown wizards have ever dared to do. But what mattered was that we did it together, so that we wouldn`t be alone, just like Remus is alone. That makes us brothers. That bonds us to eachother and makes us a group no matter what should happen to us. Now are you in it, or aren`t you?"
Before Peter could answer, James was gripping Sirius`s arm. "Come off it, Padfoot," he said. "That`s enough."
The halls were completely empty now, and James was soon pulling his arm toward the class they had next with eachother. "Catch up with you later, Wormtail," he called back at Peter as they went different ways. Sirius was still casting him a warning look as James pulled him along.
"What`s wrong with you?" James hissed into Sirius`s ear. "You know how Peter is. How could you talk to him like that?"
"I was just scaring him," Sirius said with a sly smile. "Making sure he was in line."
"You mean making sure he`s still going to go along with whatever we say and do like some inferior person who`s just there to carry your books?" James asked darkly. "I thought Peter was our friend. But apparently you have different ideas about him, after all."
"Oh, don`t lay that crap on me, Prongs," Sirius said, getting irritable. "I`m sorry if I`m the only one who thinks protecting Remus is more important than someone getting their feelings hurt a couple times, whether it`s Lily or one of us. And you know that Peter`s a pushover. He`s innocent and easy to manipulate. His intentions are good, but I think he could sign a promise in blood and break it the next day if somebody who looks trustworthy could get it out of him."
"Oh yeah? Well, I happen to trust Peter. I`d trust him with my life. And to think, you talking about all this trust and loyalty stuff. I`m amazed by you."
Sirius just snickered uncompassionately as they walked in the classroom and snuck into their desks before the teacher noticed they were late.
Chapter 3
Dusk was coming fast, and the sky was streaked with red and gold like the feathers of a phoenix. Most students were in the library studying or outside enjoying the last of the daylight. But Lily was up in her dormitory with her cat, Galadriel, curled on her lap and some books that she was neglecting lying astray across the bed around her. She was unable to keep her mind on any schoolwork, and could only pet Galadriel`s head and look out her window at the sunset, enjoying the quiet.
Before long the color left the sky and it was darkening to a deep blue that would eventually be a thick black sprinkled with stars. In less than half an hour dinner would be served downstairs. Lily decided to go outside and find some of her friends before it was time to go into the Great Hall. When she was going down the small staircase to the entrance of the common room, she was surprised by how little talking she heard, for there seemed to be very few people in there at the moment. But just before she appeared through the entrance she heard familiar voices whispering right by it. It was James, Sirius, and Peter. She shrinked against the wall at the bottom of the staircase and listened intently.
"He`ll be back to normal really soon," James was whispering. "The sun`s almost down."
"We won`t have time to do anything, but the least we can do is go down there to meet him," she heard Sirius say.
"We have to wait until it`s completely dark before we go," Peter whispered. "Otherwise..."
"We`ll just go now," Sirius said. "We can always change when we get down there, just in case."
As Lily heard them walk across the room, she peeked out to get a look at them. James was holding a garment folded in a neat square that she recognized as his invisibility cloak. He hid it in his robes before he and the others went throught the opening in the wall and left the common room.
Lily knew, somehow, that this had something to do with Remus. They had been talking about meeting some. There were other things they had been saying that she didn`t understand at all, but she was determined to find out. After she went through the portrait hole she looked down at Sirius, Peter, and James going down the stairs toward the bottom floor, and she started to make her way down the circling stairs after them.
When they got downstairs Lily followed them around a couple corners and realized they must have been going outside. When they finally led her down the steps of the castle onto the grounds, it was especially difficult to keep from being seen. They started to look behind them quite a lot, making her suspect that they sensed someone following them and know for sure that they had to be up to something. She had to keep darting from bush to bush to stay in hiding, and after a while the three were a lot farther ahead of her than they had been. Luckily it was getting very dark as they walked, and there weren`t any more students out on the grounds to see her looking like she was up to something even more so than the people she was following.
Eventually the three were so far ahead of her that they became only small figures in the dark, and then they turned around a corner of the school. Now out of their sight, Lily ran quickly forward until she reached the corner and slowly peeked behind it.
They were nowhere to be seen. Lily looked over the landscape in front of her two and then three times, but nothing was moving. She walked out and started to look around, all the while getting a bad feeling. She knew she wasn`t supposed to be on this side of the castle. None of the students ever came over here because it wasn`t a very attractive place to relax, being the end opposite of the lake. This was where the Whomping Willow was, which the students were warned never to go near.
Lily stopped dead in her tracks, her head turning to the left where the willow was. Something was wrong. The tree wasn`t moving at all. She sat in a classroom every day where she could see it through the window while at her desk, and never when she`d watched it before had it behaved like a normal tree.
She cautiously approached the Whomping Willow, looking around the whole time for places that the boys could be. When she was standing right under the tree, a very surreal feeling now coming over her, she stared up at its massive branches and limbs reaching up towards the sky. Through them she could see the moon, which was almost fully round.
As her eyes traveled down to the bottom of the tree, she saw something that she had never been close enough to the tree to notice before. Two of its monstrous tree roots grew high above the ground and were stretched open to form a wide gap. As she peered through the opening it looked almost completely dark, but enough moonlight went in to show that it went far back.
Lily`s mind stirred. Had they gone through here? She remembered their map of secret passageways and tunnels all over the school which they had discovered on their own. Remembering this, she was almost sure they had gone through here and gone underground. Where else could they have dissapeared to?
Feeling uneasy but comforted by the fact that her friends had probably just gone this way, she put her feet through the opening and almost immediately slid through and landed about eight feet deeper on a hard floor. She got up and looked around. There was a wall in front of her and long passageways going left and right. She looked up at the opening she`d come through, and knew there nothing else to do but start walking down one side of the tunnel.
She couldn`t hear anyone else there as she advanced down the right passageway, but still didn`t want to light her wand in case she was still following someone. She started wondering what she would say if they discovered she had come here, and what she`d thought she would find by following them out here. She kept walking, feeling as if the tunnel could go on forever, and went farther and farther away from the moonlight in the opening, farther into the swallowing dark.
After a few minutes Lily started to feel uncomfortable. It was so dark now that she couldn`t see her hand in front of her face. A little dissettled, she called out down the tunnel.
"Sirius?"
She said it so unsurely and quietly that it barely made an echo. No kind of response came. Louder than before, she yelled, "James!" Then, without knowing why, she tried, "...Remus?"
There were a few seconds of silence before Lily jumped at something she heard right in front of her. It was the sound of heavy breathing, like panting. Suddenly calling one of her friends` names didn`t seem like a good idea. She had a feeling this couldn`t be one of them.
Slowly she reached inside her robes and found her wand in the dark. She held it in front of her and her voice was slightly shaky as she said, "Lumos."
Her wand lit up at the tip, and what she saw made her gasp and drop it to the floor. It was a huge dog nearly half as tall as her with a sleek black coat. Its fur was standing up on its back as it bared its teeth and growled at her, its every muscle seeming to twitch impatiently in preparation for attack. She had backed against the wall on her left when she saw the dog and was now standing pressed against it, paralyzed. When her heart had skipped a beat in surprise it seemed to have sent an electric shock jolting through her whole body, and now her legs were so numb she couldn`t move them. The dog moved a step towards her, its claws tapping on the floor, and let out two sharp, terrifying barks that made her jump. She pulled back, still feeling the wall behind her, but she couldn`t bring herself to run.
"Come on, Lily," she whispered to herself, closing her eyes. But then a sound attracted her attention to the other end of the tunnel, and the dog seemed to be distracted, too. It was the galloping of hooves; something was coming this way from her right.
The sound of the hooves got closer and closer and then the animal appeared and halted before her in the wandlight, a great muscular stag with its antlers nearly touching the top of the tunnel. It bowed its head to the ground as if to show Lily it wasn`t going to hurt her, and as it did this she saw that the dog was backing away on her other side. She watched the dog until it almost completely dissapeared from the light still coming from her wand on the floor. And then when she looked back at the stag, she saw the most peculiar sight yet.
Its shape was changing completely. Its antlers came into its head and were gone, its legs shortened, and then it changed into a dark, circular shape lying on the floor that was hard to make out in the dim light. Then some feet squirmed out into view, and she saw that it was a boy curled up under a black cloak. And then a very familiar face raised to look at her with glasses sliding down his nose and untidy hair in his eyes.
Lily stared with her eyes wide in disbelief. It didn`t even seem real to say it. "...James?!"
He was on his feet in a second and he immediately grabbed her hand. "You have to get out of here!"
He started to pull her back down the tunnel in the direction she had come. Then with a realization Lily looked back and said, "My wand!"
"Forget it!" James said, pulling her into a fast run. But before Lily looked away again she noticed that there was now something else there with the dog. The dog was growling at it threateningly, and all she saw of it was a dull metallic gleam of gray fur and a pair of haunting yellow eyes far off in the darkness.
When they were standing under the willow tree with the opening pouring moonlight into the tunnel from above them, James wasted no time before grabbing Lily`s waist and lifting her up so she could climb out. She reached a hand down to help him out. As soon as they were outside again the questions that had been plaguing her mind were begging to get out.
"What`s going on?"
"Not now," James said. He was running around to the other side of the tree trunk, and he came back with the invisibility cloak, which he`d hid there. He let it fall out from its neatly folded state and quickly pulled Lily close to him to drape it around both of them.
Just as soon as they were under it, a face appeared in the window of a classroom where a teacher was working late. Professor Hawkins, the Potions teacher, was looking around as if he`d heard something. He examined the scene only briefly before turning around and vanishing from the window.
"That was close. Can you hold that side?" James asked her, and she took hold of the side of the cloak she was under. They started to walk around the grounds toward an entrance to get back in. Lily looked up and saw through the cloak that it was completely dark now, and clusters of stars were shining brightly everywhere in the sky. She looked at James and saw that he was staring upward, too.
"He`ll be back now," he said so quietly that she knew he was only muttering to himself.
There was so much Lily wanted to know, but she kept quiet beside James as they went inside. When they walked past the doors to the Great Hall she saw that everyone was eating dinner now. This was to their advantage, because the common room was empty when they finally got inside of it.
Lily`s legs were still feeling detached and achy from the shock of what had just happened, and she sank into a couch as soon as she could reach it. James remained standing above her.
"James," Lily said after a long pause. "What-?"
"Calm down, and I`ll explain everything," he told her.
She felt kind of silly that the experience had scared her so much; she knew it wouldn`t have affected her that badly if she hadn`t come from a Muggle family and had grown up seeing strange things like that every day. Yet somehow almost getting ripped apart by a dog seemed like something that any kind of person had a right to get a little frightened by.
"What happened back there?" she asked. "I was just looking for you and the others, because I thought you had gone down there. And all the sudden there was that big black dog..."
"Yes. That was Sirius," James said.
"Sirius? No," she said, shaking her head. "How? That dog growled at me. I was sure it was going attack me."
"He hoped you would run away and get out of the tunnel," James explained. "He was trying to protect you."
"From what?"
He looked down at the carpet and tried to find an answer, but couldn`t before Lily remembered something.
"I saw something else when we were running away. It looked like another dog. Was that one of you, too?"
James nodded, but didn`t say who.
She shook her head. "How can all this be? You were that stag...But that isn`t possible if you`re not an Animagus. And the others..."
"Lily..." He sat down on the coffee table in front of her to face her. "It...It`s Remus."
She looked at his distressed face, not understanding. "Yes? What about him?"
James looked her straight in the eye as if to make her stay calm, and then came right out with it. "He`s a werewolf."
She was so alarmed that she pulled back from him, her back leaning closer to the couch. "No! Remus? But he`s the most harmless person I know!"
James gave a small smile. "It is kind of ironic, isn`t it?"
Lily was taking this in, and understanding was starting to settle in. "That`s why he`s been gone every month. During the full moon. Of course." She thought about it, and now everything she`d overheard before following them made sense. They had been going to meet Remus because he was about to change back as soon as night came with a moon that was no longer full.
James explained how the Whomping Willow had been acquired to guard the entrance to Remus`s escape path, and how the tunnel lead to the abandoned house in Hogmeade said to be haunted. When he started explaining how he and the others had figured out what Remus was on their own and how they had wanted to find a way to be safe from him during his transformations, Lily`s eyes widened.
"You didn`t become Animagi, did you?" she asked.
"Yes. Sirius, Peter, and I all did."
"But that takes a long time to do. And it`s dangerous, and extremely difficult."
"We managed it. We were younger then and really determined. But it really paid off, in ways we never imagined. As animals we`ve discovered places no one knows about. Everything you`ve seen on our map."
Lily exhaled heavily, looking down at her knees. "And no one knows about this?"
"No one but you." He smiled at her. "He wanted to tell you. It`s not that the four of us don`t trust you. But he was scared."
"Why?"
"Because he`s the kind of person to hide from everybody. It`s almost befitting that Remus has this kind of secret, in a sad way. He never knows if someone will accept him for what he is or not. He almost gave up on getting into a school, but Dumbledore allowed him to come here."
They both stood up alertly when they heard the painting slide to the side, opening up the common room entrance. Sirius ran inside, followed slowly by Remus. In an instant Sirius came to Lily and grabbed her arms, holding them tightly.
"Please don`t say anything," he said in a panic. "If any of the staff finds out that you were put in danger, Remus could get kicked out of the school. You aren`t going to tell anybody about this, are you?"
Lily slowly shook her head. "No," she said. "Of course I won`t tell anybody."
He looked almost surprised. "Nobody?"
She shook her head more surely. "No. Don`t worry. Your secret is safe with me."
He smiled, and then found that he still had her arms siezed tightly and clumsily let go of her. Lily looked over his shoulder at Remus, who was still standing in front of the portrait hole entrance. He looked very worn-out and sad as he always did just after a transformation, and was avoiding looking up at her.
Lily walked past Sirius and came over to him. His mouth quivered into a shy smile for a second, but then he looked away from her again. She said nothing to him, but suddenly stepped into him and hugged him as Remus had never been embraced before by anyone but his family members. It surprised him so much that the thought never occured to him to hug her back, so he stood there awkwardly with his arms hanging at his sides as she was tightly clutching him around his middle.
"I`m so sorry," she said.
Remus looked down at her crown of firey red hair and said softly, "What are you talking about?"
"All this time I was trying to get you to tell me," she said. "Now I understand why you didn`t want to, and it`s okay." She let go of him and he was finally able to look into her eyes. "But Remus, I would never...I....It could never matter to me that you-"
"No, Lily, it`s all right," he said, waving his hand in front of her and brushing the subject away. For it didn`t need to be said aloud. "I know."
Everyone`s attention then turned to Sirius, who was vigorously shaking out his robes. "Come on, Wormtail, out with you," he said. "You miserable coward."
Something round and furry with a long ringed tail sticking out of it fell from the depths of Sirius`s robes and landed on the floor. Lily`s brow raised in astonishment as it uncurled to reveal itself as a plump rat. Then in a flash it had shot up faster than anyone could see and recall in great detail, and had turned into the boy Lily knew as Peter.
He looked at her in embarassment. "...Hi, Lily."
"Oh," Sirius said, suddenly remembering something and digging through his robes. He took out Lily`s wand. "Here, this is yours," he said, handing it to her. Then, as a timid second thought, he added, "...I`m sorry I scared you."
Lily smiled her mother-like, forgiving smile. She pocketed her wand, saying to everyone, "I was so stupid to follow you...That really wasn`t subtle of me, I`m sorry. And I could have gotten you all in trouble."
"We could have gotten in trouble?" James repeated in amazement. "Do you have any idea what could have happened to you? You gave us all a huge scare."
"It wouldn`t have been that bad," Sirius said, pretending not to see the seriousness of a situation as usual. "If you`d gotten bitten, you know, then you and Remus could have kept eachother company when the rest of us can`t be down at the shack."
"Or it could have been worse than that," Remus said quietly. He looked up from under his dirty blond hair at Lily. "...I could have killed you."
She smiled warmly. "But you didn`t," she said. "Nothing happened to me. I`m perfectly fine because of James."
She regarded James at last and now everyone was looking at him. Lily came over to him, stood up on her toes, and kissed his cheek while he stood inanimately. "Thank you."
He scratched the back of his head and all that came out of his mouth was, "Er." Behind Lily he saw Sirius supressing a laugh, which was enough to make him force himself together. "Don`t worry about it."
"Well," Lily said, turning and addressing the whole room. "I`m going to go get some food in me, gentlemen. I encourage you to do the same." She pointed at Remus, who looked terrible. "Especially you."
They all laughed half-heartedly, in more of a relieved sighing way than an amused way, as she left the room through the portrait hole and left the four boys to look at eachother awkwardly. Remus`s posture was that of a starved dog that had just been drenched in rain. Peter looked like he wanted to hide under something. Sirius was grinning unstoppably at James.
"You shut up," he said to Sirius before he could speak, which only made him smile more.
Continue to next chapter...
At the time I wrote this I never intended to continue it; the title refers to the fact that this entire fic tells what happened prior to events you already know happened. But ideas for what I could write about the boys and Lily during their last year just kept coming, so I'm now in the middle of writing a sequel to this called "Requiems" which is actually much longer and which I like more.
Title: Preludes
Author: me, CatsOnMars
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: James/Lily, Sirius, Remus, Peter, Snape
Summary: Lily and the Marauders are all friends in their sixth year. Lily starts wondering why Remus is missing from school so often, which leads to her getting herself in danger
prelude: (1) an introductory action, event, or performance preparing for and preceding a more important matter: a musical movement introducing the chief subject (2) to lead up to: foreshadow (3) to play a musical introduction
Chapter 1
All students at Hogwarts find permanent friends by the time they enter their third or fourth year of school there, but the four Marauders had practically been eternally connected since the individual moments they all first met eachother. Now, nearly finished with their sixth year, the boys couldn`t be pried apart by any force seemingly imaginable. They had also acquired popularity that undoubtably could never have been gained by any solo act.
James and Sirius were the faces that popped into mind when one thought about widely-liked troublemakers from the Gryffindor house. They had been best friends since their first year at Hogwarts, complete opposites and completely inseparable. James was everything that a well-liked young wizard should be: an amazing Quidditch player, a good student with neatly concealed intelligence, and always up for partying or a good joke. Not to mention that girls couldn`t help but find him strangely attractive. He was always wild in a calm way, lying with his lean figure sprawled across the strangest place to be relaxing like on the back of one of the castle gargoyles, or simply smiling to himself almost unnoticeably while Sirius was cracking up loudly at the reaction of one of their practical jokes. And with his almost unbefitting glasses modestly hiding his crystal blue eyes, he was cute in a very quiet and comfortable way. On the contrary, Sirius was outrageous and loud about everything, his daring eyes and shoulder-length black hair just begging for girls to look at him. The fact that this year he had arrived at the train station to catch the Hogwarts Express riding a motorcycle made no false statement about his personality. Sirius was the kind of person who was horrible at consoling or even taking anything seriously, but as was reflected by his close friendship with James more than anything, he had good intentions, a good heart, and was worthy of his place in the Gryffindor house.
Their second year at the school was when they had started being seen often with Remus. This surprised many, for Remus had never before had any apparent friends. He was always keeping to himself as if he thought it was the way to be the most considerate to others, and his fox-like face was always looking down as if avoiding eye contact. People couldn`t help but like Remus and always talk about him; there was a certain warmness about him, and the way he always looked tired and completely harmless like a gentle young boy was oddly calming. His unique kind of popularity that was absent of him actually having numerous friends was also helped, of course, by the mystery surrounding his absense once a month. Nobody knew that this was the cause, but when his friends had later found out his secret Sirius had conveniently turned into somewhat of a bullying figure, tacetly daring anyone to try to get past him if they wished to question Remus about his unexplained monthly illness.
Peter, by far the most unlikely member of their group, had always talked to the boys regularly. It wasn`t until he showed his devotion to Remus by wanting to become an Animagus with Sirius and James that they really saw they had a true friend in him. So soon he was seen as part of the group as well, and they called eachother their own nicknames and were very secretive, and therefore were always talked about.
But there was also Lily.
Lily had dark red hair and eyes of a deep, velvety green, and one look with those eyes could give anyone comfort in the strangest way, like something warm was filling them up inside. She had the kind smile of an angel and usually seemed willing to flash it at anybody, as if she didn't know how to hate anyone, and was often especially kind to those who weren't used to that kind of attention. Even Snape, who commonly shared a mutual loathing with the four boys, could get a wave and a casual "Hello, Severus" from her if he passed her on the way into the library. Though Lily could be light-hearted and fun, she carried an aura of wisdom beyond her years, and she had a way of always having something sensible to say in any situation.
No one was really sure whether it was accurate to associate Lily with the four boys or not. She talked to all of them a lot, but she was always nice to everyone in the school. Peter sat with her in Potions and they were used to always working together. She adored Remus, who was able to talk to her about some things his friends were a little too immature to care about. Sirius, who had truly befriended her first but was not so much the type to open up to others, was usually either sneaking up behind her and tickling her (often breaking the silence in a room where a lot of students were quietly studying) or giving her a ride on his back through the halls. James had met her only through Sirius and was possibly the least close to her, but Lily seemed to have the kind of effect on people so that they felt like they were friends with her just by talking to her once.
Perhaps in a way the boys, though they cared for her, unconsciously pushed Lily away. She was popular in the complete opposite way than they were, because she was well-liked by the teachers and one of the friendliest students in school while they just got attention because they made trouble. They didn`t want her to be associated with them and change that. But mostly it was because they had developed an instinct to keep other people out for their own protection. For Lily did not know that Remus was a werewolf, or indeed that the other three were Animagi. She did know that James had an Invisibility Cloak and that the boys used it to sneak around the school a lot. She had even seen the map they`d made and knew about how they called themselves the Marauders, but when she`d asked about why they had such odd nicknames they had quickly changed the subject as casually as possible and never mentioned anything of the sort in front of her again.
One night Remus was minding himself quietly in the common room, playing the piano that sat in the corner as he was often doing. The piano was his own which Dumbledore had allowed to be apparated into the school so that he could have it to play. Remus was a very good piano player for his age, and though they considered it a bit odd, the students in Gryffindor liked that he played. Whether his friends were with him lounging on the sofas with nothing to talk about, or some other students he didn`t talk to were there doing homework, or he was alone in the common room, the majority of the time he could be found there playing and off in his own world. Students could hear his music from almost anywhere in the Gryffindor dormitories. Sometimes they heard his music even when Remus wasn`t there, for he knew how to bewitch the piano to make it keep playing on its own. Sometimes they heard it very faintly late at night in their beds, and were unable to tell whether the music was real or in their heads.
Remus was the only one in the common room. Then Lily came in and went over to the corner right away, leaning her hip against the grand piano`s side. It was like when she had first talked to Remus after only seeing him in hallways with Sirius and James before. Usually people avoided bothering him while he was playing piano, as if some other side of him would come out if he was disturbed, but Lily had kindly come over to him one night and told him he was very good. Then she`d ended up sitting next to him on the bench and asking about the songs he could play and how long he`d been learning, and then their conversation had comfortably drifted to other topics, Lily all the while amazed at how Remus could play perfectly and carry on a casual conversation at the same time. Sirius had then come in and Lily had teasingly asked him why he`d never properly introduced her and Remus before ("He`s so sweet!" she`d whispered to him afterwards, and then, half-jokingly, "I never would have expected it, seeing as he hangs out with the lot of you and James").
Remus smiled at her in greeting, thinking to himself what an ugly grimace his smile was in comparison to the one she glimmered back at him. They said nothing to eachother because Lily was listening to his song, and she did until it slowly died and was over.
"What`s that song?" she asked him. "I hear you play it a lot."
He looked down so that his eyes were hidden under his sandy hair even more than usual. "It`s called 'Stella,'" he explained quietly. "My mum wrote it a long time ago."
"It`s very pretty."
"Thank you," he said in an awkward tone, as if he wasn`t sure if that was the right response, and started playing the next song that jumped out from his memory.
James came into the room. Only Lily was facing the portrait hole and saw him come in.
"Hi, James," she said.
Seeing that she was there, he smiled at her briefly and then looked away almost immediately. James was usually very confident, but he always felt weird around Lily, like he could easily look at her for a long time and had to be really careful not to stare.
"What`s going on, Moony," he said to Remus.
"Not much," he replied without looking up.
They sat with little circulating conversation between them for a while, and then Remus finished his last song and dropped his hands to his lap. He yawned and turned around to sit in the other direction on the piano bench.
"Looks like the party`s dead in here," James observed, looking around the common room.
"Yeah, it`s getting pretty late," Lily agreed, looking at the grandfather clock. "I`m going to get to bed. I`ll see you guys tomorrow."
"Goodnight," Remus and James said, waving with tired effort as she got up and left the room.
"Well." James turned to his friend. "Guys are going to start thinking they`re competing with you for the prettiest girl in school."
"I think they know Lily isn`t my girlfriend," Remus assured him. "And I`m sure they`re more worried about Sirius."
James laughed, and then looked around to make sure no one had come into the room unnoticed. He said a little more quietly, "How much time do you have?"
"Not much," Remus answered.
"You know, I was thinking this time we should sneak into the-"
He stopped talking when someone came in, but relaxed when he saw it was only Sirius.
"What are we going to say you have now, Moony?" Sirius asked right away. "A cold again? Maybe we can dump ice water over your head tomorrow and make it look like Snape did it as a joke; that way it`ll be believable when you`re supposedly sick."
Remus didn`t laugh, but smiled quietly.
"You don`t have to say I have anything," he said. "I never asked you to blatantly lie to anybody. Everyone just figures when I`m gone that I get sick."
"We need a better story," Sirius said. "When people start reporting that they were sent to the hospital wing when you were absent but you weren`t there, and we start making up stuff like them having a separate room for you or that you use floo powder to go home when you`re sick...well, it`s kind of unbelievable."
"Does it matter?" James said. "It`s not like they`re automatically going to figure out that because his story`s unbelievable he must be turning into a wolf."
"Don`t tell them anything," Remus said stressingly. "Don`t make up any stories. You`re right; they won`t be able to figure it out anyway. And I don`t like lying."
"Yeah," Sirius agreed. "Especially to some certain people."
It was unspokenly understood that a picture of the same girl came into all of their heads then. Remus had thought about telling Lily the truth about him as often as she had asked him about it. The thought never occured to him that her motive for such curiousity was concern for him, but Lily had tried to get him to tell her why he was often absent from school nearly every time he`d "fallen ill" that year. She had stopped the last couple times, though, much to his relief. Telling Lily his secret would take a great weight off of his shoulders, but it was only a fleeting dream and not at all a possibility. If he did that, it could put her in danger in ways that they couldn`t even fathom. Or, even worse...she might react just like the rest of the world. She might not understand.
Another student came into the common room, breaking their privacy, and they said nothing more.
Right beside the greenhouse at Hogwarts that was used for Herbology, there stood a tall wall which blocked the greenhouse from view of anyone approaching the castle from afar. Vines had grown up the wall from the greenhouse side and all the way to the bottom of the other side in the time it had been there, so that it was more green than it was the color of the rest of the castle by now.
In front of this wall was where the four friends were enjoying themselves after classes the next day and entertaining themselves by seeing who could throw a stone all the way into the lake from where they stood. They weren`t alone; a group of Ravenclaw students that nearly doubled their amount were also lounging near the bank on this side of the school, and there was also Snape, accompanied by four friends of his. His and the other group ignored eachother, with the exception of an occasional glance behind a shoulder at the enemy connected with some kind of dialogue that was intended to be overheard by the others.
"The Quidditch match next week is going to be a steal," Clopin Avery, one of Snape`s crowd, was commenting.
"You never know when it`s us against Gryffindor," said Rabastan Lestrange. "They do have a good Seeker. They say Potter`s like a god. The best Seeker their house has ever had." There was such obvious deviousness and unseriousness in his tone that it was as bad as if he had suggested that James couldn`t even fly.
"They shouldn`t say such things," said Snape in a low tone. "It doesn`t make much of a statement about their house."
Sirius, who along with his friends could hear this conversation perfectly, had just picked up his next stone to throw toward the lake. He pulled his arm back to throw it, but as he brought it forward he turned on his heel almost in a complete half-circle.
"Oops," he said as the stone flew in the direction of the gathering of Slytherins. It went into the trail of Avery`s cloak behind him, and he flashed Sirius a dangerous look.
"Don`t look so sad that it missed your head and failed to put you out of your misery," James said, standing casually with his hands in his pockets.
Peter and Remus were both sitting in the grass with open books on the ground in front of them and facing away from the other two. James was the only one who saw Lily sneaking up behind Sirius, and he noticed James smirking but not saying anything.
"Ah!" Sirius said as she put her hands over his eyes, but he immediately relaxed in a state of humorous contentment about being currently blinded. "Now honestly, woman, how am I supposed to aim like this?"
"It`s a lake, not a target," Lily said as she walked around to face him, not bothering to ask how he`d known it was her. "What is there to aim for? Just throw it as far as you can." She said this as she bent over to pick up a rock and tossed it in her hand once. Then she cast it away with a fast throw and it landed just a few feet from the end of the bank.
"I`ll bet I could throw you far enough to go in," Sirius said, grabbing her around the waist from behind and lifting her up off the ground. She laughed, kicking her feet in the air, and nudged him with her elbow until he put her back down.
Remus was distracted from studying, bent over a strange-looking insect on the ground that had a large amount of forked legs. He let it crawl onto his finger from a blade of grass and stared at it curiously.
At this time Snape had attracted a lot of attention by climbing up onto the wall. He was now walking across it like a rope with his arms out at his sides to keep balance as he kept talking casually to his friends below.
"Prat," James muttered with his arms crossed, shaking his head.
Remus walked over to them to get a closer look, not wanting to miss it if Snape happened to fall down.
"What have you got there?" Lily asked him, noticing the insect that was happily crawling over Remus`s knuckles.
"Ooooh," Sirius said as soon as his attention was called to it, getting an idea right away. "Let me see it."
Remus confusedly let him brush the bug into the palm of his hand, and then Sirius dropped it gently into his breast pocket and turned to go straight to the bottom of the wall. Peter was now watching, and nobody bothered asking what he was doing because from the look everyone had on their faces it was obvious nobody knew. The puzzled Slytherin students on the ground watched as he climbed up the wall by taking hold of the vines. Snape couldn`t see Sirius now walking along the wall behind him once he had climbed up onto the top. Lucy Carpath yelled a warning to him as Sirius advanced behind him, but it couldn`t be helped when he pulled back the neck of Snape`s shirt.
Lily gasped, seeing what he was about to do, and just as soon Sirius had taken the unpleasant insect from his pocket and dropped it down the back of his shirt. Snape immediately yelled and squirmed, and a lot of girls screamed as he fell to the left but just barely caught hold of the wall so that he hung from the top instead of falling.
James and Peter were laughing and Remus was covering his mouth with his hand and trying not to. Some of the Ravenclaw students started to laugh, too, but Lily was shaking her head.
"You guys are going to put his life in danger some day," she said dissaprovingly, but she had started to smile like Remus and couldn`t help but find it funny.
One afternoon a few days later, Lily went into her Defense Against the Dark Arts class in a good mood, ready to get a big test back that the class had taken the day before. When the whole class was seated Professor Marlew picked up a stack of papers and started leafing through them. He called off names one by one for students to come up and get their tests. Lily got hers and was happily looking over her good marks, and then a moment later the teacher called, "Lupin."
Half the class turned to look for him. Then, as if he was being stupid and should have expected it, Professor Marlew said, "Oh, Mr. Lupin is absent again today."
Lily turned and looked at the empty desk where Remus should have sat. She couldn`t believe it. She sighed and bent over to dig through her bookbag while the rest of the tests were being passed out and found her datebook.
She had stopped questioning Remus about why he was gone so much because she had felt the truth must be something he was embarassed about, and for the past few months she had started collecting assignments for him to make up on those days he was absent. He had never asked her to do this, but she knew that none of the boys were organized enough to do it for him. So once again she wrote a reminder to herself on the page of that day`s date: "Record assignments for Remus."
As the teacher gave out the rest of the tests Lily flipped all of the pages of her datebook back and forth in boredom. She stopped randomly at an old page to doodle on, but then something caught her eye. This page was for the sixteenth of last month, and it had written at the top, "Record assignments for Remus." Today was also the sixteenth.
As the lesson started Lily flipped through the datebook, reading all of her scribbles and notes from past days. After she had combed the last five months she sat back in her chair holding her quill under her chin, and could only stare at her writing in complete bewilderment.
Lily found the three boys gathered in the hall and easy to corner. As soon as they saw her approaching with a determined look they shot their eyes at eachother uneasily as if they knew exactly what was coming.
Despite the serious expression on her face, Lily asked very casually, "Where`s Remus?"
"He`s sick," James said, stopping himself from adding "again" so that it would sound like no big deal.
Lily looked at all of their faces searchingly. "Where is he really?"
"Sick, Lily," Sirius said with a trace of urgency to change the subject that came out as annoyance. "Sleeping. What is this about?"
"Did you know that Remus is gone exactly once every month? How does that happen? Don`t tell me he`s sick."
"He has a kind of bad condition, okay? Maybe he doesn`t want the whole school to know about it."
"No, I don`t think I can believe that. How does someone get sick around the same day every month? Maybe you haven`t noticed, but it`s always a day shortly before the twentieth."
"How do you know that?"
"I kept track! Look-" She started to get her datebook out of her bag.
She was so close to figuring it out that it was almost impossible not to show any sign of panic. Sirius was the only one who appeared to keep his cool, but "appeared" was most likely a key word in describing his state at the moment.
"Lily, cut it out," he said. There was a seriousness and roughness in his voice now that made everyone suddenly very uncomfortable, and which made Lily stop going through her bag. "You`re being really nosy, you know."
"And how come you can know what`s wrong with him and I can`t?" she demanded, obviously getting upset now. Then her expression changed. "Or maybe there`s nothing wrong with him at all, and I`m worrying for no reason. It`s something bad that he`s up to, isn`t it? That`s the only reason you`d keep it away from me. Does anyone else know about it?"
"There`s nothing to know!" Sirius said. "It`s none of your business anyway, all right? So just shove off."
The look in Lily`s eyes changed, and she stared him down in disbelief. "You`re a jerk."
"Hey, I`m not the one who brought up the subject."
"Sirius!" James had to cut in, startled by his friend`s resort to utter meanness, but he didn`t know exactly what to say himself.
"Fine," Lily said angrily, turning away from Sirius as if she`d decided to just pretend he wasn`t there. "One of you. I want to know what`s going on. Remus is my friend, too, and I think I have a right to know."
The other two said nothing. Lily stood and waited with her arms crossed. "James?"
James looked at her with a sincerely regretful expression and then stared down at the floor. "I`m sorry, Lily."
"...Peter?"
But she already knew how much she would get out of him; he remained completely silent, standing with hunched shoulders and his eyes avoiding hers.
Lily had approached them with confidence, but now just looked hurt. The others could tell that Sirius felt sorry, but Lily wouldn`t look at him. Not giving any of them a glance, she turned away and said with the smallest voice, "I`ll see you later," as if nothing out of the ordinary had just been said.
As she walked away they watched her with their moods sinking.
"Why don`t we just tell her?" asked Peter. "She`ll never give it up."
"Are you crazy?" Sirius said. "It`s Remus`s secret to tell. And he`s too scared of what she`ll think, whether or not he admits it."
"But...it`s Lily," he said meltingly.
"It doesn`t matter who it is. We can`t loosen up on our secrecy because of a pair of pretty eyes." After saying that he shot a look at James as if to say, "That goes for you, too."
"He`s right, you know," James told Peter, seeing how Sirius had aimed the comment at him and wanting to assure him that he wasn`t going to let anything slip either. "If she`s going to find out about it, Remus should be the one to tell her. And besides," he added, lowering his voice, "we agreed when we became Animagi that it would just be us. We agreed never to let anyone else in. We`re the only Marauders, we`ll always be the only Marauders. So there`s no reason to tell anyone anything. It`s risking too much."
"But it was all right when we showed her the map," Peter said a little challengingly; it was uncharacteristic of him.
"What is this, Wormtail?" Sirius asked dangerously. He suddenly looked a lot taller than Peter and very threatening. The halls were clearing out now as the next class time got closer, but he was talking very quietly. "Are you going to betray us? I wonder, should we have trusted you long ago when you wanted to do the unthinkable and become one of us? We broke the law. We did something very few grown wizards have ever dared to do. But what mattered was that we did it together, so that we wouldn`t be alone, just like Remus is alone. That makes us brothers. That bonds us to eachother and makes us a group no matter what should happen to us. Now are you in it, or aren`t you?"
Before Peter could answer, James was gripping Sirius`s arm. "Come off it, Padfoot," he said. "That`s enough."
The halls were completely empty now, and James was soon pulling his arm toward the class they had next with eachother. "Catch up with you later, Wormtail," he called back at Peter as they went different ways. Sirius was still casting him a warning look as James pulled him along.
"What`s wrong with you?" James hissed into Sirius`s ear. "You know how Peter is. How could you talk to him like that?"
"I was just scaring him," Sirius said with a sly smile. "Making sure he was in line."
"You mean making sure he`s still going to go along with whatever we say and do like some inferior person who`s just there to carry your books?" James asked darkly. "I thought Peter was our friend. But apparently you have different ideas about him, after all."
"Oh, don`t lay that crap on me, Prongs," Sirius said, getting irritable. "I`m sorry if I`m the only one who thinks protecting Remus is more important than someone getting their feelings hurt a couple times, whether it`s Lily or one of us. And you know that Peter`s a pushover. He`s innocent and easy to manipulate. His intentions are good, but I think he could sign a promise in blood and break it the next day if somebody who looks trustworthy could get it out of him."
"Oh yeah? Well, I happen to trust Peter. I`d trust him with my life. And to think, you talking about all this trust and loyalty stuff. I`m amazed by you."
Sirius just snickered uncompassionately as they walked in the classroom and snuck into their desks before the teacher noticed they were late.
Dusk was coming fast, and the sky was streaked with red and gold like the feathers of a phoenix. Most students were in the library studying or outside enjoying the last of the daylight. But Lily was up in her dormitory with her cat, Galadriel, curled on her lap and some books that she was neglecting lying astray across the bed around her. She was unable to keep her mind on any schoolwork, and could only pet Galadriel`s head and look out her window at the sunset, enjoying the quiet.
Before long the color left the sky and it was darkening to a deep blue that would eventually be a thick black sprinkled with stars. In less than half an hour dinner would be served downstairs. Lily decided to go outside and find some of her friends before it was time to go into the Great Hall. When she was going down the small staircase to the entrance of the common room, she was surprised by how little talking she heard, for there seemed to be very few people in there at the moment. But just before she appeared through the entrance she heard familiar voices whispering right by it. It was James, Sirius, and Peter. She shrinked against the wall at the bottom of the staircase and listened intently.
"He`ll be back to normal really soon," James was whispering. "The sun`s almost down."
"We won`t have time to do anything, but the least we can do is go down there to meet him," she heard Sirius say.
"We have to wait until it`s completely dark before we go," Peter whispered. "Otherwise..."
"We`ll just go now," Sirius said. "We can always change when we get down there, just in case."
As Lily heard them walk across the room, she peeked out to get a look at them. James was holding a garment folded in a neat square that she recognized as his invisibility cloak. He hid it in his robes before he and the others went throught the opening in the wall and left the common room.
Lily knew, somehow, that this had something to do with Remus. They had been talking about meeting some. There were other things they had been saying that she didn`t understand at all, but she was determined to find out. After she went through the portrait hole she looked down at Sirius, Peter, and James going down the stairs toward the bottom floor, and she started to make her way down the circling stairs after them.
When they got downstairs Lily followed them around a couple corners and realized they must have been going outside. When they finally led her down the steps of the castle onto the grounds, it was especially difficult to keep from being seen. They started to look behind them quite a lot, making her suspect that they sensed someone following them and know for sure that they had to be up to something. She had to keep darting from bush to bush to stay in hiding, and after a while the three were a lot farther ahead of her than they had been. Luckily it was getting very dark as they walked, and there weren`t any more students out on the grounds to see her looking like she was up to something even more so than the people she was following.
Eventually the three were so far ahead of her that they became only small figures in the dark, and then they turned around a corner of the school. Now out of their sight, Lily ran quickly forward until she reached the corner and slowly peeked behind it.
They were nowhere to be seen. Lily looked over the landscape in front of her two and then three times, but nothing was moving. She walked out and started to look around, all the while getting a bad feeling. She knew she wasn`t supposed to be on this side of the castle. None of the students ever came over here because it wasn`t a very attractive place to relax, being the end opposite of the lake. This was where the Whomping Willow was, which the students were warned never to go near.
Lily stopped dead in her tracks, her head turning to the left where the willow was. Something was wrong. The tree wasn`t moving at all. She sat in a classroom every day where she could see it through the window while at her desk, and never when she`d watched it before had it behaved like a normal tree.
She cautiously approached the Whomping Willow, looking around the whole time for places that the boys could be. When she was standing right under the tree, a very surreal feeling now coming over her, she stared up at its massive branches and limbs reaching up towards the sky. Through them she could see the moon, which was almost fully round.
As her eyes traveled down to the bottom of the tree, she saw something that she had never been close enough to the tree to notice before. Two of its monstrous tree roots grew high above the ground and were stretched open to form a wide gap. As she peered through the opening it looked almost completely dark, but enough moonlight went in to show that it went far back.
Lily`s mind stirred. Had they gone through here? She remembered their map of secret passageways and tunnels all over the school which they had discovered on their own. Remembering this, she was almost sure they had gone through here and gone underground. Where else could they have dissapeared to?
Feeling uneasy but comforted by the fact that her friends had probably just gone this way, she put her feet through the opening and almost immediately slid through and landed about eight feet deeper on a hard floor. She got up and looked around. There was a wall in front of her and long passageways going left and right. She looked up at the opening she`d come through, and knew there nothing else to do but start walking down one side of the tunnel.
She couldn`t hear anyone else there as she advanced down the right passageway, but still didn`t want to light her wand in case she was still following someone. She started wondering what she would say if they discovered she had come here, and what she`d thought she would find by following them out here. She kept walking, feeling as if the tunnel could go on forever, and went farther and farther away from the moonlight in the opening, farther into the swallowing dark.
After a few minutes Lily started to feel uncomfortable. It was so dark now that she couldn`t see her hand in front of her face. A little dissettled, she called out down the tunnel.
"Sirius?"
She said it so unsurely and quietly that it barely made an echo. No kind of response came. Louder than before, she yelled, "James!" Then, without knowing why, she tried, "...Remus?"
There were a few seconds of silence before Lily jumped at something she heard right in front of her. It was the sound of heavy breathing, like panting. Suddenly calling one of her friends` names didn`t seem like a good idea. She had a feeling this couldn`t be one of them.
Slowly she reached inside her robes and found her wand in the dark. She held it in front of her and her voice was slightly shaky as she said, "Lumos."
Her wand lit up at the tip, and what she saw made her gasp and drop it to the floor. It was a huge dog nearly half as tall as her with a sleek black coat. Its fur was standing up on its back as it bared its teeth and growled at her, its every muscle seeming to twitch impatiently in preparation for attack. She had backed against the wall on her left when she saw the dog and was now standing pressed against it, paralyzed. When her heart had skipped a beat in surprise it seemed to have sent an electric shock jolting through her whole body, and now her legs were so numb she couldn`t move them. The dog moved a step towards her, its claws tapping on the floor, and let out two sharp, terrifying barks that made her jump. She pulled back, still feeling the wall behind her, but she couldn`t bring herself to run.
"Come on, Lily," she whispered to herself, closing her eyes. But then a sound attracted her attention to the other end of the tunnel, and the dog seemed to be distracted, too. It was the galloping of hooves; something was coming this way from her right.
The sound of the hooves got closer and closer and then the animal appeared and halted before her in the wandlight, a great muscular stag with its antlers nearly touching the top of the tunnel. It bowed its head to the ground as if to show Lily it wasn`t going to hurt her, and as it did this she saw that the dog was backing away on her other side. She watched the dog until it almost completely dissapeared from the light still coming from her wand on the floor. And then when she looked back at the stag, she saw the most peculiar sight yet.
Its shape was changing completely. Its antlers came into its head and were gone, its legs shortened, and then it changed into a dark, circular shape lying on the floor that was hard to make out in the dim light. Then some feet squirmed out into view, and she saw that it was a boy curled up under a black cloak. And then a very familiar face raised to look at her with glasses sliding down his nose and untidy hair in his eyes.
Lily stared with her eyes wide in disbelief. It didn`t even seem real to say it. "...James?!"
He was on his feet in a second and he immediately grabbed her hand. "You have to get out of here!"
He started to pull her back down the tunnel in the direction she had come. Then with a realization Lily looked back and said, "My wand!"
"Forget it!" James said, pulling her into a fast run. But before Lily looked away again she noticed that there was now something else there with the dog. The dog was growling at it threateningly, and all she saw of it was a dull metallic gleam of gray fur and a pair of haunting yellow eyes far off in the darkness.
When they were standing under the willow tree with the opening pouring moonlight into the tunnel from above them, James wasted no time before grabbing Lily`s waist and lifting her up so she could climb out. She reached a hand down to help him out. As soon as they were outside again the questions that had been plaguing her mind were begging to get out.
"What`s going on?"
"Not now," James said. He was running around to the other side of the tree trunk, and he came back with the invisibility cloak, which he`d hid there. He let it fall out from its neatly folded state and quickly pulled Lily close to him to drape it around both of them.
Just as soon as they were under it, a face appeared in the window of a classroom where a teacher was working late. Professor Hawkins, the Potions teacher, was looking around as if he`d heard something. He examined the scene only briefly before turning around and vanishing from the window.
"That was close. Can you hold that side?" James asked her, and she took hold of the side of the cloak she was under. They started to walk around the grounds toward an entrance to get back in. Lily looked up and saw through the cloak that it was completely dark now, and clusters of stars were shining brightly everywhere in the sky. She looked at James and saw that he was staring upward, too.
"He`ll be back now," he said so quietly that she knew he was only muttering to himself.
There was so much Lily wanted to know, but she kept quiet beside James as they went inside. When they walked past the doors to the Great Hall she saw that everyone was eating dinner now. This was to their advantage, because the common room was empty when they finally got inside of it.
Lily`s legs were still feeling detached and achy from the shock of what had just happened, and she sank into a couch as soon as she could reach it. James remained standing above her.
"James," Lily said after a long pause. "What-?"
"Calm down, and I`ll explain everything," he told her.
She felt kind of silly that the experience had scared her so much; she knew it wouldn`t have affected her that badly if she hadn`t come from a Muggle family and had grown up seeing strange things like that every day. Yet somehow almost getting ripped apart by a dog seemed like something that any kind of person had a right to get a little frightened by.
"What happened back there?" she asked. "I was just looking for you and the others, because I thought you had gone down there. And all the sudden there was that big black dog..."
"Yes. That was Sirius," James said.
"Sirius? No," she said, shaking her head. "How? That dog growled at me. I was sure it was going attack me."
"He hoped you would run away and get out of the tunnel," James explained. "He was trying to protect you."
"From what?"
He looked down at the carpet and tried to find an answer, but couldn`t before Lily remembered something.
"I saw something else when we were running away. It looked like another dog. Was that one of you, too?"
James nodded, but didn`t say who.
She shook her head. "How can all this be? You were that stag...But that isn`t possible if you`re not an Animagus. And the others..."
"Lily..." He sat down on the coffee table in front of her to face her. "It...It`s Remus."
She looked at his distressed face, not understanding. "Yes? What about him?"
James looked her straight in the eye as if to make her stay calm, and then came right out with it. "He`s a werewolf."
She was so alarmed that she pulled back from him, her back leaning closer to the couch. "No! Remus? But he`s the most harmless person I know!"
James gave a small smile. "It is kind of ironic, isn`t it?"
Lily was taking this in, and understanding was starting to settle in. "That`s why he`s been gone every month. During the full moon. Of course." She thought about it, and now everything she`d overheard before following them made sense. They had been going to meet Remus because he was about to change back as soon as night came with a moon that was no longer full.
James explained how the Whomping Willow had been acquired to guard the entrance to Remus`s escape path, and how the tunnel lead to the abandoned house in Hogmeade said to be haunted. When he started explaining how he and the others had figured out what Remus was on their own and how they had wanted to find a way to be safe from him during his transformations, Lily`s eyes widened.
"You didn`t become Animagi, did you?" she asked.
"Yes. Sirius, Peter, and I all did."
"But that takes a long time to do. And it`s dangerous, and extremely difficult."
"We managed it. We were younger then and really determined. But it really paid off, in ways we never imagined. As animals we`ve discovered places no one knows about. Everything you`ve seen on our map."
Lily exhaled heavily, looking down at her knees. "And no one knows about this?"
"No one but you." He smiled at her. "He wanted to tell you. It`s not that the four of us don`t trust you. But he was scared."
"Why?"
"Because he`s the kind of person to hide from everybody. It`s almost befitting that Remus has this kind of secret, in a sad way. He never knows if someone will accept him for what he is or not. He almost gave up on getting into a school, but Dumbledore allowed him to come here."
They both stood up alertly when they heard the painting slide to the side, opening up the common room entrance. Sirius ran inside, followed slowly by Remus. In an instant Sirius came to Lily and grabbed her arms, holding them tightly.
"Please don`t say anything," he said in a panic. "If any of the staff finds out that you were put in danger, Remus could get kicked out of the school. You aren`t going to tell anybody about this, are you?"
Lily slowly shook her head. "No," she said. "Of course I won`t tell anybody."
He looked almost surprised. "Nobody?"
She shook her head more surely. "No. Don`t worry. Your secret is safe with me."
He smiled, and then found that he still had her arms siezed tightly and clumsily let go of her. Lily looked over his shoulder at Remus, who was still standing in front of the portrait hole entrance. He looked very worn-out and sad as he always did just after a transformation, and was avoiding looking up at her.
Lily walked past Sirius and came over to him. His mouth quivered into a shy smile for a second, but then he looked away from her again. She said nothing to him, but suddenly stepped into him and hugged him as Remus had never been embraced before by anyone but his family members. It surprised him so much that the thought never occured to him to hug her back, so he stood there awkwardly with his arms hanging at his sides as she was tightly clutching him around his middle.
"I`m so sorry," she said.
Remus looked down at her crown of firey red hair and said softly, "What are you talking about?"
"All this time I was trying to get you to tell me," she said. "Now I understand why you didn`t want to, and it`s okay." She let go of him and he was finally able to look into her eyes. "But Remus, I would never...I....It could never matter to me that you-"
"No, Lily, it`s all right," he said, waving his hand in front of her and brushing the subject away. For it didn`t need to be said aloud. "I know."
Everyone`s attention then turned to Sirius, who was vigorously shaking out his robes. "Come on, Wormtail, out with you," he said. "You miserable coward."
Something round and furry with a long ringed tail sticking out of it fell from the depths of Sirius`s robes and landed on the floor. Lily`s brow raised in astonishment as it uncurled to reveal itself as a plump rat. Then in a flash it had shot up faster than anyone could see and recall in great detail, and had turned into the boy Lily knew as Peter.
He looked at her in embarassment. "...Hi, Lily."
"Oh," Sirius said, suddenly remembering something and digging through his robes. He took out Lily`s wand. "Here, this is yours," he said, handing it to her. Then, as a timid second thought, he added, "...I`m sorry I scared you."
Lily smiled her mother-like, forgiving smile. She pocketed her wand, saying to everyone, "I was so stupid to follow you...That really wasn`t subtle of me, I`m sorry. And I could have gotten you all in trouble."
"We could have gotten in trouble?" James repeated in amazement. "Do you have any idea what could have happened to you? You gave us all a huge scare."
"It wouldn`t have been that bad," Sirius said, pretending not to see the seriousness of a situation as usual. "If you`d gotten bitten, you know, then you and Remus could have kept eachother company when the rest of us can`t be down at the shack."
"Or it could have been worse than that," Remus said quietly. He looked up from under his dirty blond hair at Lily. "...I could have killed you."
She smiled warmly. "But you didn`t," she said. "Nothing happened to me. I`m perfectly fine because of James."
She regarded James at last and now everyone was looking at him. Lily came over to him, stood up on her toes, and kissed his cheek while he stood inanimately. "Thank you."
He scratched the back of his head and all that came out of his mouth was, "Er." Behind Lily he saw Sirius supressing a laugh, which was enough to make him force himself together. "Don`t worry about it."
"Well," Lily said, turning and addressing the whole room. "I`m going to go get some food in me, gentlemen. I encourage you to do the same." She pointed at Remus, who looked terrible. "Especially you."
They all laughed half-heartedly, in more of a relieved sighing way than an amused way, as she left the room through the portrait hole and left the four boys to look at eachother awkwardly. Remus`s posture was that of a starved dog that had just been drenched in rain. Peter looked like he wanted to hide under something. Sirius was grinning unstoppably at James.
"You shut up," he said to Sirius before he could speak, which only made him smile more.
