Fic: We, The Wicked
Title: We, The Wicked
Fandom: Harry Potter
Author: carmentakoshi
Beta: phiso_kun
Rating: G
Pairing(s): Remus/Sirius
Summary:The tales of faery and wolf from Remus’ childhood are what tie and bind them.
Warnings: none
Word Count: 2 933
Prompt: "Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others." --Oscar Wilde
Author's Notes: This is the second time I write for the R/S Games but it didn't get any easier XD Anyway, this fic was well-received during the Games so I am very grateful to all of you! This corner of fandom will always have a special place in my heart :) <3
As always, thanks and kisses for the wonderful phiso_kun, whose beta work is invaluable to me <3 <3 <3
We, The Wicked
There are people in this world who are inherently wicked.
Not evil, mind you. Sometimes, not even bad. But wicked, oh, yes.
Sirius Black is quite wicked.
You’re a curse, Remus would say, not really meaning it.
And Sirius would smile.
=====
Wicked boys, Remus’ mother used to say, of the other village boys of around his age. Brutish, nasty, boorish, wicked boys.
Don’t ever become like them, Remus’ mother used to say. And Remus would always nod and say Yes, yes, of course not.
She stopped saying it after he was bitten.
=====
When Remus first met James and Sirius and Peter on the Hogwarts Express, his first thought had been brutish, nasty, boorish, wicked before he had managed to tamp it down.
As these things go, they soon all became friends.
Yet, the myth of the wicked boy persisted in Remus’ mind. It dogged his vague, early morning nightmares and his noontime daydreams. It tainted his fellows’ friendly ribbing and soured their earnest, boyish smiles. It was a unpleasant aftertaste lingering on the back of his tongue, faint but omnipresent and flavouring everything he ate with his mother’s particular brand of country snobbery.
Remus’ friends, against all sense and logic, rather loved his mother’s many tall tales and sordid stories. Throughout all of first and second year, when came time to hunker down to sleep, they would plead with him to tell them one or two or five, just for fun. So Remus would lie on his back in his vast, covered bed, and would stare up at the velvet hangings, and would tell, in his solemn boy’s voice, of faeries that danced in circles at night, and beasts that prowled and preyed in the countryside, and dark, lonely creatures that took offerings of food from doorsteps and coaxed wandering children into their hollows and clearings to play until the children dropped with exhaustion.
It came as no surprise to Remus that his friends were most fond of the sinister stories, the ones involving disobedience and disappearances and murder and blood. Sirius in particular had a disturbing sort of bloodthirsty streak, which Remus first took to be a result of his close, dark (and Dark) upbringing.
“Can’t I tell a faeries one tonight?” second-year Remus asked, a little dejectedly, after getting the order for yet another werewolf tale.
“Faeries are no fun,” Peter claimed.
“Faeries are dull,” James intoned.
“And besides, werewolves are wicked,” Sirius affirmed, in the very solemn voice he normally reserved for grand excuses and princely requests to leave class in favour of the washroom.
And every time, Remus would sigh, and would twiddle his thumbs a bit to delay, and would attempt to strike up a conversation with Caradoc instead (who was rather afraid of the stories at the time, and so would endeavour to be fast asleep before they began), but it was, as usual, all to no avail.
So he would begin - in a slight monotone at first, but with increasing excitement and breathlessness as the words streamed by - to tell the stories of werewolf bites and werewolf crimes and werewolves crying out to the moon in useless agony: the story of his own second birth, periodically retold in gruesome, indulgent, exquisite detail.
=====
Remus told his mother about his friends, of course. Every neatly penned and folded letter related some mishap or adventure from which he was careful to downplay his own participation, but Mother must have seen right through him because she frequently replied along the lines of, Don’t let those boys lead you astray, now, my love. It’s good that you’ve found some good friends to fall in with but don’t let them distract you from what matters.
This, in particular, perplexed Remus all throughout his years at Hogwarts: this “distraction” that his mother so feared, like it was a disease that could be caught from close and prolonged proximity to teenage boys. Like their company was a shining, glittering thing like faerie lights in the distance, luring him away from the path.
He did not question her, of course. His mother had taught him to question all things of men but one did not question stories, which were born of the land and of the creatures not limited by fragile human psyches and fragile human limbs.
He dared not question her, Mother, what are they, then?
He dared not question her, Mother, what am I?
=====
We know, they said, in the dead of the night.
And Remus trembled, and choked, and tried not to cry out, What do you know?
And Sirius, his face lit silver by the light of the new moon, broke the sacred circle of boys and wrapped one arm tight around Remus’ shoulders, and told him in a voice as soft as faerie song, We know what you are.
And James said, It’s all right.
And Peter said, We’ll never tell.
And Remus shook, and wept, and knew who his friends were, his faithful three.
=====
In third year, the others seemed to lose interest in the werewolf stories for a time. It was a relief, a little. Their demands had gotten grave and insistent, like the telling and listening of tales was some sort of serious research project.
In fact, the three seemed to have outgrown the bedtime stories altogether, which was fine. Caradoc was beginning to scorn them a little anyway, which was a shame because Remus quite liked Caradoc even though he had fallen in with the older Gryffindor Quidditch players and had become rather swelled with teenage bravado as a result.
Brutish, nasty, boorish, wicked, his mother whispered in his ear, only to be promptly disregarded, like a voice out of a dream.
Thus, third year and fourth year passed, in a brightly lit haze of magic and mischief. These were as uneventful as life at Hogwarts could possibly be, which, after the stress of learning to undergo his transformations without his mother’s comforting presence nearby, was a vast relief.
In fifth year, the spell was shattered.
A note fluttered - literally - onto Remus’ desk, held aloft by twin folded paper wings. Peter’s work: he had always been the best at Charms.
It said, in Sirius’ pompously curling script: see us during lunch? -S
Furtively, Remus wrote back: I always see you at lunch -R
Sirius made elaborate faces in Remus’ peripheral vision for a time, then, after being sharply asked by Professor McGonagall about whether he would like to step outside to spell himself normal again, sent the note back with more of his elegant scrawl: DON’T BE OBTUSE, MOONY, YOU KNOW I MEAN OUT IN THE FOREST - S
Moony? was all he could think, slightly hurt, before he sent his affirmative answer back.
He was only slightly surprised when Sirius, Peter, and James all leapt up and manhandled him out of the classroom the moment the bell had rung. He had only enough time to catch Lily’s alert, suspicious look before he was bustled out into the hall, down the stairs, out the door, and down the path to the Forbidden Forest, which they had discovered actually was terribly and seriously Forbidden, thus making it the ideal place to have secret meetings such as this.
They dived into the woods and walked for a time, soon alighting in a small clearing fringed with gnarled half-buried roots and ferns that swished and swatted at them as they stepped through.
“All right, lads, what’s this all abou-”
“Once upon a time,” interrupted Sirius in his solemn voice, “there was a boy named Remus, and he was a werewolf.
“But Remus was a good werewolf, not nasty or violent or horrible like the ones in the stories, and as such he had many friends. Three in particular were his very best friends, and accompanied him everywhere on his everyday adventures.
“However, there was one adventure they that couldn’t accompany him on, and that was rather unlucky because it was the most important of all. It was his adventure of the full moon. It was unlucky because Remus would get very lonely on these awful, moonlit nights, and would shriek and howl, and scratch and tear, and be very unhappy.
“Remus’ three friends couldn’t be with him on these nights, because they didn’t transform at the full moon and didn’t stand a chance against an unhappy werewolf, and this made them very unhappy themselves. So, because they were very faithful, and very brilliant, they devised a plan…”
“And what plan is this, pray tell?” said Remus into the following, spellbound silence.
They all just stood in the clearing for a moment, quiet, reverent, charged with the energy of the story, then Sirius grinned and lunged forward. Remus startled back, thinking himself in danger of being tackled, but there was no impact, and no sign of Sirius at all.
The massive black dog that took his place blinked up at Remus beseechingly, a remarkably human expression for a creature so large and furred and powerful. Almost, Remus didn’t believe it was him, but when the dog trotted the few steps forward and nudged his belly with his nose and gazed up at him with steady, hopeful eyes (a familiar vision; in fact Remus had seen it just the night before, though not from the dog form of Sirius), Remus couldn’t help but see it, and when the realization hit him it was so heartrending he nearly cried.
He looked up at a swish of movement across the clearing, where an enormous stag was leaping around in the grass, still rather ungainly on its four slim legs and very top-heavy from the huge antlers rising up like a crown from its head. When it caught Remus staring, it stopped and tossed its regal head, as though inviting praise and admiration.
“Looking for faeries, James?” was all Remus said, to an amused snort of the dog. “Where’s Peter?”
Peter made himself known by scuttling up Remus’ left trouser leg and up, up the side of his robes to his shoulder. Once there, he twitched his ratty pink nose against Remus’ cheek and tapped his ratty pink paws against the side of his head, to which Remus laughed and replied, “Good show, you can easily hide from the wolf this way! Why couldn’t you lot be so smart?”
Sirius barked, a frighteningly loud sound in the stillness of the forest, and began to chase James ecstatically around the clearing. Peter perched on the top of Remus’ head and made a chittering sort of noise that sounded so incredibly like his usual “Dear me, they’re at it again, let’s go, Remus” that Remus laughed again until he wheezed.
Sirius as a dog bounded atop James as a stag, and the two of them hit the ground with a heavy thud and a burst of human laughter.
“I’m Padfoot!” Sirius cried from the tangle of adolescent limbs. “And this here is Prongs, because of his great poncy headdress. And Pete is Wormtail, because of his tail, obviously. So you see, you’re not the only one with a nickname now, Moony!”
“How creative,” Remus said.
“Gerroff my nads,” James said.
“Chitter chitter chirp,” Peter said.
And for the rest of the lunch hour, the forest clearing rang with exclamations and joyous cries, dog barks and rat shrieks, and the relieved, open laughter of a werewolf who was no longer alone.
=====
When Remus was only little and Father was still alive, Remus found himself in possession of a terrible and fascinating secret.
It was late and Remus was restless from the approach of the full moon. As a child, the sensation of the moon drawing ever closer was worse, much worse than it would be as the years passed. For days before the moon reached its fullness, Remus would feel its deep niggling yanking tug in the not-quite centre of his chest, perhaps anchored in one lung, or behind his heart. Sometimes it hurt, but often it just made him feel sick and unwilling to eat, no matter how Mother coaxed and cajoled.
So it was late, and the moon was due to rise the next night, but Remus suddenly found himself hungry, ravenously hungry, so hungry he could think of nothing else, so he crept out of bed in the stillness of midnight and tiptoed downstairs to the pantry, where he knew Mother kept the biscuits. He unwrapped the half-packaged box slowly, slowly, and pulled out three sandy biscuits just as slowly, and replaced the wrapping and the box with equal slowness until he was able to triumphantly - and slowly - shut the pantry and creep back up the stairs to his room.
A sudden muffled laugh stopped him in his tracks halfway down the hall, a shrill, happy cry of “John!” that Remus couldn’t place, until he realized it must be his mother.
“John!” Mother said.
“Hahah,” Father said, in his low, friendly chuckle.
“Oh, you wicked man,” Mother said, in an altered voice Remus had never quite heard before this very moment.
Remus stood captivated in the hall, the three crumbling biscuits clutched tight in his small hands, but his parents did not say anything more, so he sidled all the way back into his room and shut the door with a sigh.
Wicked, wicked, my daddy is wicked.
Then, “wicked” must mean something else.
Remus sat on his bed and ate his biscuits, then after dutifully wiping his hands on his pyjama trousers and brushing the crumbs off the duvet and onto the floor, he crawled back into bed. He determined, just before drifting off to sleep, that if his mother asked about the missing biscuits in the morning, he would tell her that it was the work of faeries.
=====
They ended up missing the period after lunch, the intrepid four, but as it was only History of Magic and Remus was too preoccupied with his newfound happiness to care about missing class, nobody much minded. They ran and romped like children or puppies, chasing and tackling and wrestling good-naturedly, in human and animal forms, until finally they collapsed together in the middle of the clearing, chuckling and panting and feeling rather hungry.
“They’ll have cleared the tables by now,” James said, after a long peaceful moment.
“We can always nip down to the kitchens before next period,” Peter said helpfully.
“That’s our Wormy, always with a plan.”
“M’not sure I like ‘Wormy’ so much…”
“It’s up to you to think of a better one, then. Oi, Sirius, you lazy mutt, up you get.”
“I’ll stay a bit,” said Sirius from the ground, where he was unselfconsciously sprawled on the grass with his head resting on Remus’ stomach. “Got another thing to tell Moony.”
This was news to everyone, but James and Peter only brushed themselves off before hurrying back towards the castle. Sirius waited until the sound of their conversation had faded completely away, then he turned his head to gaze up across Remus’ chest to his face, without making a move to sit up or otherwise.
Without preamble, he said, “I meant it last night, you know. I really do fancy you.”
Remus sighed. He spread his arms in the grass, palms up, and sighed again.
“Fancy a werewolf?” he said finally, all traces of joy dissipated.
Sirius made a frustrated sound, not unlike the growl of his black dog form. “You’re not some dark, mystical creature from a storybook, Remus. We know you. I know you. And I know you’re a better person than most even with the monthly transformations.”
“Werewolves are Dark creatures,” Remus reminded him.
“Yes, but you aren’t!”
“Werewolves are wicked-”
Sirius sat up abruptly. There was a sprig of grass in his hair but he was so deadly serious that Remus didn’t dare laugh.
“Have you considered that that might not be such a bad thing?” Sirius argued. “Besides, you wouldn’t fit in at all with James and Peter and me if you weren’t at least a little. And I’m not even talking about the werewolf bit of you, I mean the other bits of you.”
This was a bit of a shock to Remus, who had believed himself quite immune to the brutish, nasty, boorish wickedness of mythic creatures and shady entities and other boys, so he was quiet for some time, with his head laid in the grass and his legs stretched out in the moss and with Sirius looking down at him with uncustomary patience.
Finally, Remus said, “Is it really not bad, then? Being wicked?”
Sirius said, “No.”
“I suppose you’d know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well…” Remus looked away, to the saplings and ferns ringing the clearing like sentinels, to the mushrooms and toadstools sitting in rows like faery seats, waiting and ready for their nighttime hosts to claim them.
“Well,” Remus started again, as Sirius leaned down and crept forward, his knees in the moss, “you’d know best, being so wicked yourself.”
And Remus met Sirius’ eyes then, just as Sirius leaned forward, and smiled his wicked smile, and kissed him with lips of sweetest poison.
=====
You’re a curse, Remus would say, until the day they graduated.
And Sirius would smile and say, Cursed with handsomeness?
No.
Cursed with unwanted but bountiful gifts?
Oh, no.
With what, then? Sirius would ask, as though he did not know the answer.
And Remus would cast a quick charm to check for passersby, and would lean forward and say, very softly and very close, You are a curse of wickedness, my Padfoot.
Yours and mine.
The End
Fandom: Harry Potter
Author: carmentakoshi
Beta: phiso_kun
Rating: G
Pairing(s): Remus/Sirius
Summary:The tales of faery and wolf from Remus’ childhood are what tie and bind them.
Warnings: none
Word Count: 2 933
Prompt: "Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others." --Oscar Wilde
Author's Notes: This is the second time I write for the R/S Games but it didn't get any easier XD Anyway, this fic was well-received during the Games so I am very grateful to all of you! This corner of fandom will always have a special place in my heart :) <3
As always, thanks and kisses for the wonderful phiso_kun, whose beta work is invaluable to me <3 <3 <3
We, The Wicked
There are people in this world who are inherently wicked.
Not evil, mind you. Sometimes, not even bad. But wicked, oh, yes.
Sirius Black is quite wicked.
You’re a curse, Remus would say, not really meaning it.
And Sirius would smile.
=====
Wicked boys, Remus’ mother used to say, of the other village boys of around his age. Brutish, nasty, boorish, wicked boys.
Don’t ever become like them, Remus’ mother used to say. And Remus would always nod and say Yes, yes, of course not.
She stopped saying it after he was bitten.
=====
When Remus first met James and Sirius and Peter on the Hogwarts Express, his first thought had been brutish, nasty, boorish, wicked before he had managed to tamp it down.
As these things go, they soon all became friends.
Yet, the myth of the wicked boy persisted in Remus’ mind. It dogged his vague, early morning nightmares and his noontime daydreams. It tainted his fellows’ friendly ribbing and soured their earnest, boyish smiles. It was a unpleasant aftertaste lingering on the back of his tongue, faint but omnipresent and flavouring everything he ate with his mother’s particular brand of country snobbery.
Remus’ friends, against all sense and logic, rather loved his mother’s many tall tales and sordid stories. Throughout all of first and second year, when came time to hunker down to sleep, they would plead with him to tell them one or two or five, just for fun. So Remus would lie on his back in his vast, covered bed, and would stare up at the velvet hangings, and would tell, in his solemn boy’s voice, of faeries that danced in circles at night, and beasts that prowled and preyed in the countryside, and dark, lonely creatures that took offerings of food from doorsteps and coaxed wandering children into their hollows and clearings to play until the children dropped with exhaustion.
It came as no surprise to Remus that his friends were most fond of the sinister stories, the ones involving disobedience and disappearances and murder and blood. Sirius in particular had a disturbing sort of bloodthirsty streak, which Remus first took to be a result of his close, dark (and Dark) upbringing.
“Can’t I tell a faeries one tonight?” second-year Remus asked, a little dejectedly, after getting the order for yet another werewolf tale.
“Faeries are no fun,” Peter claimed.
“Faeries are dull,” James intoned.
“And besides, werewolves are wicked,” Sirius affirmed, in the very solemn voice he normally reserved for grand excuses and princely requests to leave class in favour of the washroom.
And every time, Remus would sigh, and would twiddle his thumbs a bit to delay, and would attempt to strike up a conversation with Caradoc instead (who was rather afraid of the stories at the time, and so would endeavour to be fast asleep before they began), but it was, as usual, all to no avail.
So he would begin - in a slight monotone at first, but with increasing excitement and breathlessness as the words streamed by - to tell the stories of werewolf bites and werewolf crimes and werewolves crying out to the moon in useless agony: the story of his own second birth, periodically retold in gruesome, indulgent, exquisite detail.
=====
Remus told his mother about his friends, of course. Every neatly penned and folded letter related some mishap or adventure from which he was careful to downplay his own participation, but Mother must have seen right through him because she frequently replied along the lines of, Don’t let those boys lead you astray, now, my love. It’s good that you’ve found some good friends to fall in with but don’t let them distract you from what matters.
This, in particular, perplexed Remus all throughout his years at Hogwarts: this “distraction” that his mother so feared, like it was a disease that could be caught from close and prolonged proximity to teenage boys. Like their company was a shining, glittering thing like faerie lights in the distance, luring him away from the path.
He did not question her, of course. His mother had taught him to question all things of men but one did not question stories, which were born of the land and of the creatures not limited by fragile human psyches and fragile human limbs.
He dared not question her, Mother, what are they, then?
He dared not question her, Mother, what am I?
=====
We know, they said, in the dead of the night.
And Remus trembled, and choked, and tried not to cry out, What do you know?
And Sirius, his face lit silver by the light of the new moon, broke the sacred circle of boys and wrapped one arm tight around Remus’ shoulders, and told him in a voice as soft as faerie song, We know what you are.
And James said, It’s all right.
And Peter said, We’ll never tell.
And Remus shook, and wept, and knew who his friends were, his faithful three.
=====
In third year, the others seemed to lose interest in the werewolf stories for a time. It was a relief, a little. Their demands had gotten grave and insistent, like the telling and listening of tales was some sort of serious research project.
In fact, the three seemed to have outgrown the bedtime stories altogether, which was fine. Caradoc was beginning to scorn them a little anyway, which was a shame because Remus quite liked Caradoc even though he had fallen in with the older Gryffindor Quidditch players and had become rather swelled with teenage bravado as a result.
Brutish, nasty, boorish, wicked, his mother whispered in his ear, only to be promptly disregarded, like a voice out of a dream.
Thus, third year and fourth year passed, in a brightly lit haze of magic and mischief. These were as uneventful as life at Hogwarts could possibly be, which, after the stress of learning to undergo his transformations without his mother’s comforting presence nearby, was a vast relief.
In fifth year, the spell was shattered.
A note fluttered - literally - onto Remus’ desk, held aloft by twin folded paper wings. Peter’s work: he had always been the best at Charms.
It said, in Sirius’ pompously curling script: see us during lunch? -S
Furtively, Remus wrote back: I always see you at lunch -R
Sirius made elaborate faces in Remus’ peripheral vision for a time, then, after being sharply asked by Professor McGonagall about whether he would like to step outside to spell himself normal again, sent the note back with more of his elegant scrawl: DON’T BE OBTUSE, MOONY, YOU KNOW I MEAN OUT IN THE FOREST - S
Moony? was all he could think, slightly hurt, before he sent his affirmative answer back.
He was only slightly surprised when Sirius, Peter, and James all leapt up and manhandled him out of the classroom the moment the bell had rung. He had only enough time to catch Lily’s alert, suspicious look before he was bustled out into the hall, down the stairs, out the door, and down the path to the Forbidden Forest, which they had discovered actually was terribly and seriously Forbidden, thus making it the ideal place to have secret meetings such as this.
They dived into the woods and walked for a time, soon alighting in a small clearing fringed with gnarled half-buried roots and ferns that swished and swatted at them as they stepped through.
“All right, lads, what’s this all abou-”
“Once upon a time,” interrupted Sirius in his solemn voice, “there was a boy named Remus, and he was a werewolf.
“But Remus was a good werewolf, not nasty or violent or horrible like the ones in the stories, and as such he had many friends. Three in particular were his very best friends, and accompanied him everywhere on his everyday adventures.
“However, there was one adventure they that couldn’t accompany him on, and that was rather unlucky because it was the most important of all. It was his adventure of the full moon. It was unlucky because Remus would get very lonely on these awful, moonlit nights, and would shriek and howl, and scratch and tear, and be very unhappy.
“Remus’ three friends couldn’t be with him on these nights, because they didn’t transform at the full moon and didn’t stand a chance against an unhappy werewolf, and this made them very unhappy themselves. So, because they were very faithful, and very brilliant, they devised a plan…”
“And what plan is this, pray tell?” said Remus into the following, spellbound silence.
They all just stood in the clearing for a moment, quiet, reverent, charged with the energy of the story, then Sirius grinned and lunged forward. Remus startled back, thinking himself in danger of being tackled, but there was no impact, and no sign of Sirius at all.
The massive black dog that took his place blinked up at Remus beseechingly, a remarkably human expression for a creature so large and furred and powerful. Almost, Remus didn’t believe it was him, but when the dog trotted the few steps forward and nudged his belly with his nose and gazed up at him with steady, hopeful eyes (a familiar vision; in fact Remus had seen it just the night before, though not from the dog form of Sirius), Remus couldn’t help but see it, and when the realization hit him it was so heartrending he nearly cried.
He looked up at a swish of movement across the clearing, where an enormous stag was leaping around in the grass, still rather ungainly on its four slim legs and very top-heavy from the huge antlers rising up like a crown from its head. When it caught Remus staring, it stopped and tossed its regal head, as though inviting praise and admiration.
“Looking for faeries, James?” was all Remus said, to an amused snort of the dog. “Where’s Peter?”
Peter made himself known by scuttling up Remus’ left trouser leg and up, up the side of his robes to his shoulder. Once there, he twitched his ratty pink nose against Remus’ cheek and tapped his ratty pink paws against the side of his head, to which Remus laughed and replied, “Good show, you can easily hide from the wolf this way! Why couldn’t you lot be so smart?”
Sirius barked, a frighteningly loud sound in the stillness of the forest, and began to chase James ecstatically around the clearing. Peter perched on the top of Remus’ head and made a chittering sort of noise that sounded so incredibly like his usual “Dear me, they’re at it again, let’s go, Remus” that Remus laughed again until he wheezed.
Sirius as a dog bounded atop James as a stag, and the two of them hit the ground with a heavy thud and a burst of human laughter.
“I’m Padfoot!” Sirius cried from the tangle of adolescent limbs. “And this here is Prongs, because of his great poncy headdress. And Pete is Wormtail, because of his tail, obviously. So you see, you’re not the only one with a nickname now, Moony!”
“How creative,” Remus said.
“Gerroff my nads,” James said.
“Chitter chitter chirp,” Peter said.
And for the rest of the lunch hour, the forest clearing rang with exclamations and joyous cries, dog barks and rat shrieks, and the relieved, open laughter of a werewolf who was no longer alone.
=====
When Remus was only little and Father was still alive, Remus found himself in possession of a terrible and fascinating secret.
It was late and Remus was restless from the approach of the full moon. As a child, the sensation of the moon drawing ever closer was worse, much worse than it would be as the years passed. For days before the moon reached its fullness, Remus would feel its deep niggling yanking tug in the not-quite centre of his chest, perhaps anchored in one lung, or behind his heart. Sometimes it hurt, but often it just made him feel sick and unwilling to eat, no matter how Mother coaxed and cajoled.
So it was late, and the moon was due to rise the next night, but Remus suddenly found himself hungry, ravenously hungry, so hungry he could think of nothing else, so he crept out of bed in the stillness of midnight and tiptoed downstairs to the pantry, where he knew Mother kept the biscuits. He unwrapped the half-packaged box slowly, slowly, and pulled out three sandy biscuits just as slowly, and replaced the wrapping and the box with equal slowness until he was able to triumphantly - and slowly - shut the pantry and creep back up the stairs to his room.
A sudden muffled laugh stopped him in his tracks halfway down the hall, a shrill, happy cry of “John!” that Remus couldn’t place, until he realized it must be his mother.
“John!” Mother said.
“Hahah,” Father said, in his low, friendly chuckle.
“Oh, you wicked man,” Mother said, in an altered voice Remus had never quite heard before this very moment.
Remus stood captivated in the hall, the three crumbling biscuits clutched tight in his small hands, but his parents did not say anything more, so he sidled all the way back into his room and shut the door with a sigh.
Wicked, wicked, my daddy is wicked.
Then, “wicked” must mean something else.
Remus sat on his bed and ate his biscuits, then after dutifully wiping his hands on his pyjama trousers and brushing the crumbs off the duvet and onto the floor, he crawled back into bed. He determined, just before drifting off to sleep, that if his mother asked about the missing biscuits in the morning, he would tell her that it was the work of faeries.
=====
They ended up missing the period after lunch, the intrepid four, but as it was only History of Magic and Remus was too preoccupied with his newfound happiness to care about missing class, nobody much minded. They ran and romped like children or puppies, chasing and tackling and wrestling good-naturedly, in human and animal forms, until finally they collapsed together in the middle of the clearing, chuckling and panting and feeling rather hungry.
“They’ll have cleared the tables by now,” James said, after a long peaceful moment.
“We can always nip down to the kitchens before next period,” Peter said helpfully.
“That’s our Wormy, always with a plan.”
“M’not sure I like ‘Wormy’ so much…”
“It’s up to you to think of a better one, then. Oi, Sirius, you lazy mutt, up you get.”
“I’ll stay a bit,” said Sirius from the ground, where he was unselfconsciously sprawled on the grass with his head resting on Remus’ stomach. “Got another thing to tell Moony.”
This was news to everyone, but James and Peter only brushed themselves off before hurrying back towards the castle. Sirius waited until the sound of their conversation had faded completely away, then he turned his head to gaze up across Remus’ chest to his face, without making a move to sit up or otherwise.
Without preamble, he said, “I meant it last night, you know. I really do fancy you.”
Remus sighed. He spread his arms in the grass, palms up, and sighed again.
“Fancy a werewolf?” he said finally, all traces of joy dissipated.
Sirius made a frustrated sound, not unlike the growl of his black dog form. “You’re not some dark, mystical creature from a storybook, Remus. We know you. I know you. And I know you’re a better person than most even with the monthly transformations.”
“Werewolves are Dark creatures,” Remus reminded him.
“Yes, but you aren’t!”
“Werewolves are wicked-”
Sirius sat up abruptly. There was a sprig of grass in his hair but he was so deadly serious that Remus didn’t dare laugh.
“Have you considered that that might not be such a bad thing?” Sirius argued. “Besides, you wouldn’t fit in at all with James and Peter and me if you weren’t at least a little. And I’m not even talking about the werewolf bit of you, I mean the other bits of you.”
This was a bit of a shock to Remus, who had believed himself quite immune to the brutish, nasty, boorish wickedness of mythic creatures and shady entities and other boys, so he was quiet for some time, with his head laid in the grass and his legs stretched out in the moss and with Sirius looking down at him with uncustomary patience.
Finally, Remus said, “Is it really not bad, then? Being wicked?”
Sirius said, “No.”
“I suppose you’d know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well…” Remus looked away, to the saplings and ferns ringing the clearing like sentinels, to the mushrooms and toadstools sitting in rows like faery seats, waiting and ready for their nighttime hosts to claim them.
“Well,” Remus started again, as Sirius leaned down and crept forward, his knees in the moss, “you’d know best, being so wicked yourself.”
And Remus met Sirius’ eyes then, just as Sirius leaned forward, and smiled his wicked smile, and kissed him with lips of sweetest poison.
=====
You’re a curse, Remus would say, until the day they graduated.
And Sirius would smile and say, Cursed with handsomeness?
No.
Cursed with unwanted but bountiful gifts?
Oh, no.
With what, then? Sirius would ask, as though he did not know the answer.
And Remus would cast a quick charm to check for passersby, and would lean forward and say, very softly and very close, You are a curse of wickedness, my Padfoot.
Yours and mine.
The End