Chapter 2
"Moony, buddy — you doing okay?" Sirius kept a steadying hand on my shoulder, while I did my best not to let the thoroughly bewildered, lost look on my face become too obvious.
"I'm fine. Just… a particularly rough night, hah," I said, managing a slightly strained smile. I didn't have the energy for a more convincing performance. The sight of James, Sirius, and Peter brought with it that strange doubling of feeling — one part of me seeing this crew of unhinged teenagers for the very first time, while another part insisted they were my best friends in the world, the only ones I had.
*Oh, this is so difficult,* I thought with an inward grimace, fighting the urge to press my fingers against my throbbing temples.
"It shows." James studied me with open concern — unlike the proud scion of the House of Black, he made no effort to hide it behind humor or bluster. "You look terrible, honestly. Maybe you should go see Madam Pomfrey? She'd give you some of her favorite potions."
"What, you want to finish me off, James?" I snorted, tilting my chin up. "After that woman's potions, you might as well climb straight into the coffin. Less suffering that way."
"Fair point," James admitted, cracking a smile at the simple joke, while Sirius finally let me drop onto my own bed. Grateful for that — getting back to our room had taken genuine effort on my part. "So you'll just rest today?"
"Are we supposed to be doing something?" I asked, keeping my voice light, while internally I went still. With the mess currently occupying the space where my brain should have been, I could easily have forgotten some minor promise I'd made to this Gryffindor lot.
"What plans, Remus? Just a little mischief, as Dumbledore likes to say," Sirius laughed — a sharp, barking sound that left me with absolutely no doubts about what his Animagus form would be. A dog through and through, even in Britain. Though he hadn't mastered the transformation yet, even if all of us had been deep in studying the subject for a while now.
"Going to go bother Snape again?" I asked, without smiling. I already knew perfectly well what my companions meant by "a little mischief."
"Niunius has been completely out of control lately! Get this — while you were gone, that little worm slipped something into Peter's food. Some new concoction of his, and God only knows how he managed it, the sneaky little—" James bared his teeth, hatred for the dark-haired boy from Slytherin sharper in him than in any of the rest of us.
Not without reason, I had to admit. Snape was a genuine thorn in everyone's side, managing to irritate two entire houses simultaneously. The Slytherins were annoyed by his half-blood status and by the fact that their faculty's unwritten code forced them to publicly support someone they privately disdained. The Gryffindors were irritated by his closeness to Lily Evans — the unofficial leader among the girls of our year.
Beyond all that, the sullen, dark-haired, sharp-nosed boy was simply not a pleasant person. Prickly, proud, vindictive, and completely indifferent to the unspoken rules of Hogwarts. That was young Snape, and it was why someone was always giving him grief — if not us, then the Slytherins themselves, who hadn't put him in the ground only because of his outstanding academic performance.
"Well then. I entrust the honor of avenging the heroically fallen Peter to the two of you," I said, letting a grin spread across my face as I watched James and Sirius's battle-ready energy. "I'm confident two proud lions can trample one overly presumptuous snake into the dirt."
"Excuse me, I'm still alive! And I already got back from the hospital wing!" Peter Pettigrew protested with mock indignation. He was the shortest member of our group, carrying a bit of extra weight, and in most other respects a perfectly ordinary boy — if somewhat on the cowardly side. It was genuinely hard to believe that this was the person who, in the future, would defect to the Dark Lord.
The Dark Lord, incidentally, had already announced himself to Magical Britain several years ago. And while his influence currently amounted to little more than aggressive maneuvering for control of the Ministry of Magic — certain unsettling movements from the so-called Lord of Fate's agents were already making every Muggle-born and even half-blood in the country uneasy.
*Damn. I'll need to factor those people in as well,* I thought grimly, watching the three teenagers head off to carry out their revenge. *And I'll need to come up with a good reason for why I'm going to stop taking part in tormenting Snape. Whatever a miserable wretch he might be, bullying a child is beneath me. Even if he does occasionally seem to be asking for it.*
I filed that away as another item on a mental list that was already growing longer by the day.
What I decided to start with, however, was a long, restorative sleep. The night in the Shrieking Shack, followed by the entire ordeal of the memories crashing over me, had drained even this impressively resilient and healthy body to its limits. The exhaustion was overwhelming. So I gave in to it without argument — though not before spending another half hour turning various thoughts over in my head, until the fatigue finally won out entirely.
The next morning came for me in the dead of night, around three in the morning. Not surprising, really — I'd fallen asleep at midday, and even the nervous exhaustion I'd reluctantly had to acknowledge in myself hadn't been enough to hold me down for longer than that. A werewolf's body recovered quickly from shocks. It was hungry afterward, though — ravenously, almost absurdly hungry.
I resisted the temptation to wander the castle in the dark, knowing there'd be no food to find at this hour. Instead I raided my personal stash of milk chocolate biscuits and picked away at my hunger as best I could.
*Is an appetite like this a benefit or a drawback of my physiology?* I rolled the thought around lazily in my head. On one hand, eating enormous quantities without putting on weight — that was genuinely useful. On the other, you had to actually get your hands on enormous quantities of food, which wasn't currently a problem but could become one under less favorable circumstances. *Though,* I added to myself, giving my head a slight shake, *that's just my predecessor's pessimism talking.* And I was no longer in any doubt that Lupin and I were entirely different people.
Over the course of that sleep, the foreign memories had settled firmly into place in my mind — though they'd lost some of their original vividness, the emotional weight that had hit so hard in the beginning now smoothed and muted. The same, I realized, had happened to Andrei Ryabov's memories. Which left me with genuinely mixed feelings as I spent the following week adjusting to my new reality.
Naturally, the change in me was noticed — by my housemates and by Hogwarts's teachers alike, on whose lessons I'd become less focused and less prepared. It took far more than a single day to recall and internalize the curriculum I was supposed to already know. And that was before even attempting the practical work, which sometimes locked up entirely.
Relearning Lupin's knowledge was essentially starting from scratch, and with time in desperately short supply, my grades suffered. On top of that, I wanted to start physical training as soon as possible, and to find something — anything — in the library that might protect me from having another wizard read my mind.
By the fourth day in this body, it had suddenly hit me just how much of my safety was currently dependent on sheer luck and the relative rarity of Legilimency — the magic that allowed someone to read thoughts. But luck wasn't a strategy. Sooner or later, someone would make the attempt, possibly just out of curiosity, and then…
What would happen then, I had no idea. But nothing good. That much was certain.
"Hey — James, Sirius — do either of you know anything about magic that works with the human mind?" I asked, after thinking it over for some time. I'd decided to bring my companions into the problem. Not friends, quite — but not strangers either.
"Magic that works with the mind? Are you talking about Occlumency? Legilimency?" Sirius perked up immediately, throwing a suspicious glance in my direction. He was the one who'd felt the change in me most keenly, more than the others. And he didn't exactly like what he'd sensed.
"Probably, yes." I paused, then began what I privately thought of as my confession. "I've just been thinking. It occurred to me that I've never actually considered whether there might be some way to fight my… ahem, furry little problem. Even in theory." I let that settle, giving the others an explanation for my distraction and withdrawal over the past few days. "So now I'm thinking. Looking for ways to help, if not cure it, then at least make it easier to live with."
"Ohh, so *that's* why you've been wandering around like you're lost," James said, realization crossing his face, and he exchanged a quick nod with Sirius. "We were starting to think Niunius had cursed you or slipped you something."
"I just can't shake the thought that there might be a way somewhere in the world to deal with my lycanthropy," I said, keeping it simple, "and I'm not even trying to find it — when I'm sitting right next to the largest magical library in all of Britain." I shrugged. "That seems like a waste."
"Heh. You could've just said so from the start. I could ask my father about it. He trained with the Aurors once, so he's bound to know a fair bit about werewolves," James said, already warming to the idea.
I grimaced, just slightly.
"I don't think that's a good idea. I doubt you'd be able to hide the reason for your interest from your parents — a topic that specific isn't exactly subtle." I shook my head, deflating the young heir's enthusiasm. "Besides, what I'm most concerned about right now is — what did you say? Occlumency and Legilimency? That's where I want to start. And it'll be worth knowing regardless, whatever else happens."
"Fair enough. My parents have been making me study Occlumency since I was small…" Sirius drawled the words with an air of great philosophical weight, casting an amused look in my direction. "I'm not very good at it, to be honest. And I've never liked any of that mental magic business. It's barely different from the Dark Arts, really." He paused, then grinned. "But for you, Moony, I might just write to my father. Tell him I've finally decided to apply myself. Ha!"
"If you do that, I'd be genuinely grateful, Sirius," I said, matching his sincerity with my own — though I didn't bother hiding the smile pulling at my lips. It kept his mood up, and it was also a truthful expression of how I actually felt.
I was a little worried his parents might take exception to learning their son had been seeking knowledge on someone else's behalf. But I'd figure out how to navigate that when the time came. In the worst case, I'd simply sit Sirius down and make him actually learn mental magic himself. I already had a sense of how to get that particular nuisance to buckle down and put effort into something tedious. He was practicing Animagus transformation despite everything, after all — and that was hardly easy on a teenage attention span.
It was all a matter of finding the right words and the right argument. After that, Sirius would handle the rest himself — giving us all cover with the House of Black, and giving me a fighting chance of protecting what was in my head. Something I'd be deeply grateful for, and which I silently promised myself I'd find a way to repay.
Because I genuinely doubted the library carried books on something as demanding as Occlumency or Legilimency. Even the Restricted Section wasn't guaranteed to have them — let alone the general shelves, which dealt primarily with the standard curriculum subjects. Anything more specialized, according to the memories of this body's father, had been quietly removed from Hogwarts long ago.
The Ministry of Magic — or possibly Dumbledore himself — had pulled all "questionable" knowledge from general access. And the faction of pureblood families was perfectly pleased with that arrangement, cementing their information advantage over Muggle-borns and ordinary members of the wizarding world alike.
Still, the library was worth searching regardless. Placing full trust in the words of a wizard who harbored strong biases against the current power structure was its own kind of risk. And it wasn't as though Hogwarts's library had earned its reputation as one of the largest on the British Isles for nothing. The only collection that could rival it was the Ministry's own archives — and even that was far from certain.