"Five Times a Conversation Between Professors Lupin and McGonagall Ended in ..." (Remus, Minerva)
Author: Anonymous
Prompt/Prompt Author: Anything set during the year Lupin teaches Defense Against the Dark Arts. McGonagall reminisces about the boy Lupin, Lupin reflects on his memories of his former teacher, Lupin seeks out advice, the two of them share memories of James/Lily/Peter/Sirius, one of them shares a funny student story or plays a prank on the other ... anything, really. May be happy, sad, funny, angsty, dramatic ... give us a snapshot of the staffs' lives at Hogwarts.) / kissaweasley
Title: Five Times a Conversation Between Professors Lupin and McGonagall Ended in Thanks, and One Time It Didn't Have To
Characters: Remus Lupin, Minerva McGonagall, Fred and George Weasley, Severus Snape
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Word Count: ~9000
Summary: A series of conversations between Professor Lupin and Professor McGonagall about friendship, betrayal, love, loss, teaching, learning, and Weasley twins.
Author's Notes: I had a lot of fun writing this! Lupin and McGonagall have long been two of my favorite characters, and I so enjoyed the chance to write some behind-the-scenes exchanges between them. I tried to include as much of the prompt as possible, giving voice to Remus’s anguish and conflict while still hinting at the witty prankster we all know and love. Also, I hope you will forgive (and enjoy!) the sudden appearances of the wild Weasley Twins - you have my beta M to thank for that!
I.
There was something about Hogwarts, Remus mused as he stood at the edge of the long drive to the front doors, that made him feel like a student again, despite being 33 years of age. And there was something about walking up that long drive toward the waiting figure of his old Head of House that made him feel like a student caught in a misdeed again, despite the fact that he was here on Professor Dumbledore's invitation.
There was also something about visiting the school in the middle of the summer that made him feel decidedly out of place, especially given that he wasn't entirely sure what he was doing here.
"We would have sent a carriage for you, if you'd told us you had arrived," was Minerva McGonagall's first greeting to him as he came into earshot. Remus shrugged.
"It's a lovely day," he said simply. "The walk was no hardship."
Professor McGonagall sniffed. "Be that as it may, you are here on the Headmaster's express wishes. I would hate for it to get around that you were denied any hospitality."
"Well, I won't say anything if you won't," Remus said with a smile, and he won the tiniest one from his old teacher in response.
"It's good to see you again, Remus," she said, holding out her hand. Remus shook it.
"Likewise."
“I’m glad to have you coming aboard,” she said then, and Remus grimaced. He remembered the Headmaster’s unannounced visit to his ramshackle and run down dwelling the week before; though the place had been tidy and as clean as Remus could make it, it still bespoke an utter and embarrassing poverty. Professor Dumbledore had said nothing, of course, but Remus knew he had noticed, and his pride was still recovering, even a week later. Even more shocking than the Headmaster’s sudden appearance was what he had come to say.
I would like to offer you the post of Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts this year . . . take a week, think it over, then come to the castle with your final answer, yes?
After a beat, he shook himself from his reverie. “I haven’t officially accepted yet,” was his quiet response, and Professor McGonagall surveyed him shrewdly over her spectacles.
“No,” was all she said, her tone unreadable. “You haven’t.” After another moment of silence, she sniffed again and straightened. “Well, come with me.” And as she turned and entered the castle, Remus had no choice but to follow.
She spoke as they walked, slowly enough for Remus to soak in the familiar atmosphere of the place that had been his home for so long. “Professor Dumbledore’s plan was, of course, to hear your answer himself,” Professor McGonagall said as they walked, “but he had to answer an urgent owl from the Minister this morning, and given the climate . . .” she trailed off darkly, and Remus could only guess what she was referring to. “He’s asked me to speak with you instead. I hope that is satisfactory.”
“Completely.”
“Here we are,” she said as they reached the door to a room Remus remembered very well. “This would be your classroom, and your office and quarters would branch off of it, there.” She ushered him inside. If the rooms had changed since Remus had last been there, he couldn’t discern it. Inside the small office, Remus smiled a bit at the memories of the many iterations this room had taken on in the years when he had been a student here.
“Remus,” Professor McGonagall said softly but with her usual no-nonsense tone, “I won’t insult your intelligence by beating around the bush. We need you.”
He made sure he was composed before he answered. “Because of Sirius Black?” he asked, his voice calm and even. Professor McGonagall didn’t answer, but she didn’t need to. “As I said to Professor Dumbledore, I don’t know how much help I will be. I think the past makes it pretty clear that I didn’t and don’t know him nearly as well as I once thought.”
The words did not come out as cool and even as Remus would have liked. Something crept in, and Professor McGonagall frowned and made an involuntary movement that he would have been tempted to think the start of a comforting gesture if he hadn’t known that that was impossible. He took a deep breath, endeavoring to regain control.
“There is more to it than that,” Professor McGonagall said. “What we have successfully managed to keep from the public in an effort to avoid a panic is that we have excellent reason to believe that Black’s intentions are to track down and attack Harry Potter.”
Remus paled. “Harry?” he asked in a very soft voice. “He’s after Harry?” Professor McGonagall nodded, watching him closely.
“When was the last time you saw Harry?” she asked gently, but she might have shouted it for all the more it fazed him. He was disoriented, stunned, by what she’d told him. Against his will, an image of a grinning Sirius lifting an infant Harry high into the air while James and Harry and Sirius laughed and Lily refrained from looking nervous swam into his head.
“Um,” he said belatedly, grasping at the focus necessary to answer the question. “They went into hiding, before he was born . . . I only saw him a handful of times. He was - young, very. Very, um . . . we decided it was too dangerous after that. We sent gifts and letters, but - eight months? Ten? I think?”
“He’s thirteen now. Just about to start his third year. You should know, since you’re going to be teaching him, so it doesn’t catch you off guard, he’s the spitting image of James.” Remus swallowed hard and tried not to picture James at thirteen.
“Professor, I still haven’t said yes,” he said quietly.
“This has not escaped my notice. What are your reservations?”
“I outlined them for Professor Dumbledore.”
“Outline them for me.”
Remus stood, facing off in a quiet battle of wills with his old teacher, knowing all the while which of them would end up giving in. After a moment, he sighed.
“I’m not qualified,” Remus said quietly.
“Nonsense,” Professor McGongall said briskly. “You are the sole reason Reggie Fullerton passed Defense Against the Dark Arts each year with anything resembling distinction. If you can teach him, you can teach anyone. You know the spells, you’re patient and charismatic, you have a comforting presence, and you can teach. And even if all of those things were not true, you would still be a better choice than the imbecile we had to put up with last year.”
Remus blinked at the outpouring of praise, so unexpected, and he couldn’t help but feel that she was prepared to counter any objection he voiced.
“The Ministry will never approve of it,” he said, alluding to the real issue at hand.
“The Ministry has no control over the filling of posts at Hogwarts,” Professor McGonagall countered immediately, so Remus stopped being delicate and addressed the elephant - or wolf - in the room.
“Parents will not want a werewolf teaching their children,” he said simply.
“I don’t plan on telling them,” was her only response. “Do you?”
“I’m a danger to them.”
“Remus,” Professor McGonagall said in her best no-nonsense voice, “There will be soon be hundreds of underage wizards gathered in this school, all with varying degrees of control over the magic they possess, trying to cast jinxes, brew potions, handle poisonous plants, and care for vicious magical creatures. Last year alone, Madame Pomfrey treated over 200 potion-related incidents, over 400 Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures injuries, over 300 Quidditch accidents, and the aftermaths of more than 950 miscast curses, wand malfunctions, and poorly aimed spells. This is to say nothing of fisticuffs, pranks, and physical altercations that took place between students in the halls of this school. I assure you, with great authority, that the students of Hogwarts are more a danger to themselves than you are to any one of them.”
Remus tried to argue that, but he didn’t get very far. “Dumbledore would never have offered you the post if he didn’t feel that you and he and Hogwarts were up to the challenge,” Professor McGonagall said briskly, interrupting his words before he’d a chance to find them. “Severus Snape is more than capable of brewing a first rate Wolfsbane Potion for a year’s time, and Hogwarts is more than able to bear the expense. The potion works, Remus. Professor Dumbledore has seen it in action.”
“Have you?” he asked quietly.
“I trust what the Headmaster has told me, and the other accounts I’ve been given. You will not be a danger to these students. And as an added precaution, should you feel you need it, I have Transfigured the doorways of this office to close into solid stone walls. There are no windows, the reversal can only be triggered by wand and incantation, and no werewolf is strong enough to tear through a foot and a half of stone and mortar. You will not be a danger to these students, Remus. Dumbledore and I will not let you be.”
With those words, Remus had to turn away, his eyes stinging unexpectedly. While he was composing himself, Professor McGonagall said, gently but firmly, “Now, will you officially accept the post, or will I have to tell Professor Dumbledore that he needs to take more time out of his busy schedule to continue convincing you?”
Remus knew when he was beat. Regaining his control, he turned back to his old teacher and asked, “Is it true this job is cursed?” Professor McGonagall sniffed.
“Stuff and nonsense,” she said. Remus smiled, then sighed.
“All right,” he said, extending his hand across the desk.
Professor McGonagall took his hand and shook it. “Welcome aboard, Professor Lupin. And thank you.”
“My pleasure, I’m sure,” he said, though he was, in truth, wondering how soon he would come to regret this.
II.
The Great Hall at the end of the Welcome Feast was the same hustle and bustle and jubilant, frantic chaos that Remus remembered from his own school days. He stood from his place at the head table as the other teachers did the same, and pulled his focus away from the melee of students to place it in a more pertinent location - his colleagues.
Anticipating that the Dementors might cause some disturbances on the train, Remus had volunteered to ride in with the students to at least help take that situation in hand, but his reason for volunteering had been twofold. He’d also wanted to give Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall the chance to announce his appointment to the staff and deal with the fallout without his presence. He knew that his fellow teachers would be a lot more honest with their opinions if he personally wasn’t there.
And now, as he greeted the rest of the staff and shook hands and accepted introductions, he was able to guess just which staff members had voice unease about his appointments. No one but Professor Trelawny - rambling some excuse about the juncture of Mars and Neptune - refused to shake his hand, but from some, it was a decidedly wary gesture.
The professors he had studied under as a student all greeted him warmly - Professors Flitwick, Sprout, and Babbling, as well as Madame Pomfrey and Hagrid - and a bubbly, enthusiastic young woman who introduced herself as Charity Burbage, professor of Muggle Studies, welcomed him with a wide, genuine smile. But Professor Sinastra was more hesitant, and Professor Vector looked downright suspicious. And then, of course, there was Snape.
Snape had sneered for a moment at Remus’s offered hand, but had eventually not so much shaken it as grasped it in an iron grip, as if trying to root Remus to the spot. “How the power has shifted,” he said in greeting, a smug sneer on his face.
“A pleasure as always, Severus,” Remus said with cordiality. Snape’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, but before he could say anything else, Professor McGonagall was at Remus’s elbow.
“Forgive me for interrupting,” she said sternly, surveying Snape over the top of her spectacles, “but I need to fill you in on last night’s staff meeting, Remus.”
“Of course, Professor McGonagall,” Remus said, then with a smile and a nod to Snape, said, “Severus,” and turned and followed Professor McGonagall out of the Great Hall.
“There’s not going to be any trouble between the two of you this year, is there?” Professor McGonagall asked in an undertone, then raised her voice, but not at Remus. “Miss Boone! Mr. Pullman! Miss Cartwright! Less clogging the hallways, more hurrying along to your Common Rooms! And you two! The Misters Weasley; don’t think I don’t see you behind that corner. Out here, if you please.”
Remus watched as two identical and very red-headed boys walked out from around a nearby corner, the very picture of innocence. Professor McGonagall surveyed them both with a look that Remus knew very well - it was the one she had usually reserved for James, and - Black.
“I believe the Gryffindor Common Room is in the opposite direction, boys. Don’t think I won’t give you each a month of detentions your first night back.”
One of the boys grinned and said, “‘Course not, Minerva,” and Professor McGonagall’s eyes blazed.
“Gryffindor Tower. Now.”
The other boy winked cheekily, and laughing, they both ran down the corridor in the direction Professor McGonagall had pointed. Once they were out of sight, she sighed and closed her eyes as if asking a higher power for patience.
“And who were those two gentlemen?” Remus asked with a bit of a smile.
“Misters Fred and George Weasley,” she said, in a tone of voice she had once reserved for another pair of Gryffindor boys. “And you’ll experience them soon enough, I have no doubt.”
“So,” Remus said once they had reached her office, “what else do I need to know from the staff meeting? Your letter was fairly detailed -”
She cut him off with a dismissive wave of her hand. “You don’t need to know anything else about the staff meeting, I just needed to keep you and Professor Snape from coming to blows in front of any lingering students.”
“There was nothing to come to blows over, so that was an unnecessary concern.” Professor McGonagall looked unconvinced. “I have no issue with Severus Snape,” Remus insisted.
“No,” Professor McGonagall said with a sigh. “But there is every likelihood that he has one with you. He was not terribly pleased to hear that you had been assigned the post.”
“No, I don’t imagine he was.”
“So I just want to make sure,” - and now some of that stern Professor tone was directed at him - “that the peace will be kept within these walls.”
“Would I willingly antagonize the man who is going to be brewing Wolfsbane Potion for me all year?”
“I like to think not,” Professor McGonagall said. “But humor an old woman, would you?” Remus shook his head.
“You’re not old,” he protested, and Professor McGonagall gave a wry smile. “But you have my word. I am not going to start trouble with Severus. I cannot speak for him, but on my end, there is no grudge.”
Professor McGonagall beheld him for one moment longer, then nodded briskly. “You’ll have to forgive me,” she said then, “but it is more difficult than I anticipated to see you sitting across from me and not see the young man from sixteen years ago.”
Remus gave a small laugh. “And I’ll admit that being here again is bringing him out more than I expected. These halls are very full of memories, and seeing Harry tonight on top of that . . .” Remus sobered, as he always did when James invaded his thoughts.
“I did warn you how much he looks like his father.”
“Yes,” Remus said with a sad smile. “And I had prepared myself for that. But I was not prepared to see Lily’s eyes looking out at me again. That was rather more startling.”
A look of sympathy passed over Professor McGonagall’s face, and the two shared a moment of shadowed remembrance.
“He is more like her than like his father,” she said then, and Remus gave the ghost of a smile.
“At thirteen? That’s all for the best,” he said. “If there’s nothing else, Professor?” Remus asked then, standing.
“You are prepared for your classes tomorrow?” she asked, standing as well.
“We’ll find out tomorrow, won’t we?” The comment won a smile.
“Then have a good night. I won’t reiterate the need to keep the peace; I will merely say that I am putting my full trust in you.”
“You have my word,” he said again, and she looked relieved.
“Thank you,” she said.
III.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Remus said as a frowning Professor McGonagall loomed in his office doorway. He’d been expecting her.
He couldn’t say he didn’t understand why she was there; the day’s events did have the feel of running counter to the promise he had so recently made. But the day’s events were also not entirely his doing. And he stood by what had happened and what he’d done, and was more than ready to make his defense.
“Four days,” she said, stern as ever.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Four days ago, Remus.”
“Yes.”
“Four days ago, you gave me your word that you were going to keep the peace.”
“I wasn’t the one who lost track of the peace,” Remus said, completely serious. Professor McGonagall did not look impressed.
“Isn’t the‘he started it’ excuse a bit beneath you?” she asked in a frosty tone, looking down at him over the top of her spectacles. Remus crossed his arms over his chest and held her gaze.
“First of all -”
“An image of Professor Snape stumbling around the staff room in a dress, vulture-topped hat, fox-fur stole, and handbag?” she interrupted forcefully. “Professor Snape dressed up, in other words, to the exact specifications of Augusta Longbottom? It’s all anyone can talk about, Remus! Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
“On the contrary,” Remus said evenly, “I’ve been expecting you since I released my third years thirty minutes ago.”
“Remus-”
“Neville Longbottom’s greatest fear was going to be the same regardless of any actions of mine, and personally, I think the greater share of the blame here lies in the fact that one of his professors is a thirteen-year-old boy’s-”
“The ‘he brought it on himself’ defense is also beneath you,” Professor McGonagall interrupted again, and Remus set his jaw.
“Not entirely untrue, though,” he said with conviction.
“Remus-”
“Professor McGonagall, with all due respect,” he said, standing, “what would you have had me do? I can’t change the nature of the spell, I can’t, in an hour-long class period, change a thirteen-year-old’s greatest fear. That boggart was always going to turn into Professor Snape when Neville Longbottom stood before it, and if the spell was going to work correctly, the boggart’s image was going to be made to look ridiculous. So what would you have had me do? Deny Neville the chance to face the boggart? Refuse to give him the guidance he needed to perform the spell? I stand by what happened in class today, Professor, and I’d do it again if it meant achieving the same results. I am sorry that there are people currently laughing at Professor Snape, but my first duty is to my students, not my colleagues, and I will not be party to setting them up for failure. I advised Neville on his boggart the same way I would have advised any student chosen to go first. And I chose Neville to go first because he was clearly the most nervous, and that was the surest way to give him a little extra help without calling attention to the fact. Now, if I can help my students succeed and help a colleague save face, I will, but if it comes down to a choice between the two, I will always side with the student. I will assume that the colleague is well able to stand up for himself.”
“Did you speak to Professor, then?” she asked immediately, and she didn’t sound as if she entirely believed him. “After this incident occurred? Did you find him and give him some warning of what he might face? Apologize for the circumstances that were, apparently, outside of your control?”
“No,” Remus said evenly. “I did not.”
“And could you have?”
Remus recognized her tone, and he recognized what she was attempting to do. He’d seen it in action countless times over his own school years. But her mistake was in thinking that he’d overlooked this particular course of action. He had not.
“Oh, I could have,” he said with a nod. “I even might have, had Professor Snape chosen to act a little differently when he encountered my class entering the staff room.”
From the almost imperceptible narrowing of her eyes and tilt of her head, Professor McGonagall had not heard this part of the story. Remus wasn’t terribly surprised. He was more than happy to fill her in.
“Had Professor Snape not ridiculed Neville in front of his entire class, I might have found the chance to tell him what transpired with Neville’s boggart. Had Professor Snape not tried to discredit a student to a new professor before that student even had a chance to leave his own impression, I might have tried to alert him to Neville’s achievement. But seeing for myself exactly what makes Professor Snape Neville Longbottom’s greatest fear, I confess that extending him the courtesy of a heads’ up slipped my mind.”
Professor McGonagall closed her eyes and sighed. “Ah,” she said, resigned. “Yes, now that I think of it, the incident does have the ring of Remus Lupin justice to it.” Remus quirked an eyebrow.
“Remus Lupin justice?”
“I could always tell, you know, when James Potter’s treatment of another student crossed a line in your book. You never called him out on it, precisely, but you would ignore him for a period of days. His work in my class suffered whenever it happened, because you weren’t reading over it.”
Remus was too stunned that she’d noticed this to do anything more than say, slightly irrelevantly, “James never needed my help with his Transfiguration.”
“Transfiguration, no,” she agreed. “Spelling and grammar, yes.”
Remus couldn’t help but smile at that. “Yeah, James always did have a tendency toward linguistic creativity.”
“He once spelt ‘giant’ with a j,” she remarked dryly. “Granted, he was eleven, but at sixteen he spent a full ten minutes trying to convince me that vampirically was a word.”
Remus grinned. “I remember,” he said with a laugh. “I also remember how S-”
He broke off abruptly, because the end of that sentence was, how Sirius was the one suggesting an etymological link between vampirical and empirical. His grin gone, replaced by a look lined with pain, Remus looked away, taking a deep breath. For one shining moment, he’d been allowed to forget. But it hadn’t lasted, as they never did.
Professor McGonagall spoke then, back on topic. “Neville Longbottom successfully performed the Riddikulus charm on his first attempt?” she asked. Remus nodded. “And he was the first in the class to do so?” Remus nodded again.
“He was also the last,” he said, “and he was the one to finish off the boggart with his confidence and the strength of his charm.”
“After Professor Snape ridiculed him in front of the entire class?”
“He said that I needed to be warned that Neville should not be entrusted with anything difficult unless another student was hissing instructions in his ear.” Even just repeating the words made Remus’s blood boil anew at Snape’s petty immaturity, and cemented his complete lack of desire to go make an apology, but - he could tell from the strain on Professor McGonagall’s face that this year was proving very stressful and difficult, and that his actions, much as he would defend them, were making things worse. He respected her and Professor Dumbledore too much for that. So someone had to be the better man, and it wasn’t going to be Snape.
He sighed heavily, running a hand through his hair. “I’ll talk to Severus,” he said, but Professor McGonagall shook his head.
“No,” she said firmly. “I will talk to Severus. You were merely teaching a spell, and doing so admirably, as evidenced by an unprecedented first attempt success from Neville Longbottom, and I am, after all, of the opinion that you should not apologize if you have done nothing wrong.”
Remus stared, surprised, then he smiled. “Thank you, Professor,” he said softly. She surveyed him over her spectacles.
“We are colleagues now, Remus,” she said briskly. “I think it would be permissible for you to call me Minerva.” Remus smiled.
“Again, Professor, I thank you,” was all he said.
IV.
When Remus went to visit Professor McGonagall in her office shortly before the winter holidays, he found the Weasley twins conjuring canaries outside the professor’s closed door.
He managed to come up behind them without drawing notice, and had been standing patiently, observing, for about a minute before George realized he was there. Slowly, George turned and held eye contact with Remus for a long moment, then nudged his twin in the side. When Fred just waved him off, George hissed, “Fred!”
“What?” Fred demanded in an aggravated whisper, and that’s when he, too, caught sight of Remus, who raised a single eyebrow.
Fred and George exchanged a look with each other, then turned to him and abruptly broke into identical winning smiles, a move that might have worked better if Remus hadn’t seen the slightly panicked looks that had preceded it.
“‘Lo, Professor!” Fred said cheerfully.
“Hello, boys,” Remus said with a cordial nod. “Practicing your spellwork?”
The boys put on looks of confusion, and Remus merely glanced significantly upward. The boys followed his gaze.
“Oh,” Fred said in a tone of dawning comprehension. “You mean the birds?” Remus nodded. “Well, the birds are -”
“They’re for Professor McGonagall,” George chimed in.
“Yes, they’re for Professor McGonagall,” Fred echoed immediately.
“What a thoughtful gift,” Remus commented, and the twins took to nodding with enthusiasm.
“That’s us,” Fred said with an easy grin. “Thoughtful, always thoughtful. And she made it clear to us that she has an important letter to write and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“So we thought we would assist her by creating a flock of, you know, guard canaries,” George continued effortlessly. And Remus had to hand it to them - they were good. It was just too bad he’d seen this ploy a countless dozen times.
“Guard canaries?” he repeated with a quirked eyebrow, not bothering to hide his look of amusement.
“You may be surprised to learn this, Professor, but canaries really are the best guard birds,” George informed him, and Remus had to applaud him on his improv skills. “I mean, you see a flock of canaries around a door, and if you have any sense, you’ll turn the other way and fast. Isn’t that right, Fred?”..
“Yes, indeed, George. So. Is there any chance you’re buying any of this?” Fred asked conversationally, and Remus smiled.
“Not even a little bit.”
“You know what? That’s fair,” Fred said with a nod. “Don’t you think, George?”
“Perfectly fair,” George said. “So we’ll just go then, shall we, Professor?”
“I think that might be best,” Remus told them, and both boys nodded, moving quickly away down the corridor. “Boys?” Remus called after them, and when they turned, he looked again significantly toward the birds still flocking around the door.
“Oh, the birds,” George said with a faked laugh. “Right. Must’ve slipped our minds.” And he and Fred waved their wands and the birds disappeared. “See ya, Professor!”
Shaking his head, smiling, as the mischievous twins ran off to presumably cause trouble elsewhere, Remus knocked softly on Professor McGonagall’s closed door.
“Come in, Remus,” he heard through the door, so he opened it and stepped inside. Professor McGonagall glanced up from the letter she was composing. “Do I want to know what those two were doing outside my door?” she asked.
“Pretty advanced magic for their age, actually.”
Professor McGonagall sighed. “Yes,” she muttered. “It always seems to be.”
“They also mentioned that you didn’t want to be disturbed, so I can come back another time.”
She cut off the end of his statement with a sharp wave of her hand, setting aside her quill. “What’s another twenty minutes’ delay on a letter to Molly Weasley?” she asked rhetorically. “In twenty minutes, I’ll probably have four new misdeeds to add anyway. What can I do for you?”
Confident that he wasn’t interrupting anything urgent, Remus slid into a chair. “After the events of the most recent Quidditch match, Harry has asked me to give him some private Defense lessons. Specifically, he wants to learn to fight dementors.”
Professor McGonagall’s eyebrows shot up. “He wants to learn the Patronus Charm?” she clarified.
“He doesn’t know it by that name, but yes. That’s what he’s asking. I warned him it would be difficult work, but he’s adamant. So, as his Head of House, I wanted to run it by you.”
“I mean no disrespect to Harry’s abilities, but I know many adult wizards who have trouble conjuring a Patronus. Do you really think he’s capable of it?”
“I think,” Remus said carefully, “that he’s talented enough and, perhaps more importantly, determined enough to produce, at the very least, some form of incorporeal Patronus which, Merlin willing, will be more than he needs to be capable of the rest of the year.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” Professor McGonagall said. “But tell me, Remus. How do you plan on going about these lessons?”
“Well, when we had our boggart lesson, I wouldn’t let Harry face it because I wanted to avoid having Voldemort materialize in the staff room.”
“Probably wise.”
Remus smiled. “I thought so. But he confessed to me later that he didn’t think of Voldemort. He thought of the dementors. Given that fact, and adding in what happened at the Quidditch match, I think it likely that if confronted with a boggart, it would take a dementor’s form and, naturally, imbue itself with a dementor’s qualities.”
“So you’d like to scour the castle to find another boggart to use in teaching the Patronus charm. That’s . . . quite ingenious, Remus.” She considered for a moment. “There are some unused classrooms on the fifth floor that you might search. And the southeast tower is currently being used mainly for storage. Finding another boggart shouldn’t be too difficult in a castle this size. But tread carefully, Remus. Make sure you’re prepared for emotional upheaval. We don’t know what Harry experiences in the presence of a dementor-”
“Yes, I do, actually,” Remus interrupted softly. “He told me. He hears his mother being murdered.”
He said it simply, looking her in the eye as he did, because it was the only way he knew how to say it. He watched her eyes close against the words, and he knew what she was feeling. They let the silence speak for itself for a moment, before Professor McGonagall gently broke it.
“Then you should tread all the more carefully. For your own sake. Can you handle this, Remus? No one would think less of you if the answer is no.”
Remus was silent for another long moment. He could feel Professor McGonagall’s eyes on him, patient and waiting, but he wanted to make sure he had the words before he spoke.
“When I heard what had happened,” he said very quietly, his focus turned inward, “when I was told that Lily and James, that they were dead, and that Peter and Sirius - and Harry off to his aunt and uncle’s . . . When I heard all that, I started running. I started running because I couldn’t imagine staying still. I couldn’t imagine staying in a world that was celebrating the destruction of all I cared about. So I left. I ran away, and that’s all I’d been doing for years. And then Professor Dumbledore sent me that letter.”
She listened quietly, which Remus appreciated. She didn’t try to interrupt, which was good, because he wasn’t sure he could get through everything he wanted to say if she did.
“When I sat in this office so many months ago, I didn’t tell you the real reason I was hesitant to take the post. I knew doing so would mean I couldn’t run anymore, a desire I was ashamed to communicate to my old Head of House, given that wanting to run away is not particularly Gryffindor-like. And I was right. I haven’t been able to run. Since coming here, I have been bombarded with memories, at every moment. It has been - inescapable.
“But you know, I think it’s actually been for the best. I never let myself think about them before. Any memory at all was just too painful, and I ran so I wouldn’t have to confront them. Here I’ve been forced to, and the result is that I can think of them now, James and Lily, the good times, and it doesn’t hurt as much. It aches a bit, but it also makes me smile, James’s antics, and Lily’s passion.” He allowed himself a smile, a small one, and yes, the ache was there even as he spoke.
He pulled himself back to the moment, forcing himself to meet Professor McGonagall’s eyes. “The point is, having gotten to know Harry, having been forced to see how his parents live on in him, I am ready and willing and eager to do anything in my power to help him. I can deal with the emotions on my end. I can handle hearing the account of how Lily died if doing so means I can help her son never have to hear it again.”
He meant it, he did, but there were parts he wasn’t saying still - how he still didn’t let himself speak or think of Sirius, how remembering anything about Peter sent a pang of pain and guilt through his core, how keeping the secret of the Animagus transformations was eating away at him, constantly - but what he’d said was enough for Professor McGonagall. After a brief moment, she nodded in acquiescence.
“Well then, if Harry’s asked for them, and you feel up to it and are certain you can teach the skill safely, I see no reason why I can’t grant my permission. I’ll clear it with the Headmaster, but I think you can start your preparations whenever you’re ready.”
And she picked up her wand to summon a new sheaf of parchment, but as soon as it was settled in her hand, she frowned, turned the wand over carefully, and examined with great precision. Cautiously, she pointed it away from Remus and made a simple spell gesture.
With a bang, the wand let out a puff of smoke, and when it cleared, the professor was holding not a wand, but a bouquet of flowers. “Those two!” she exclaimed in exasperated outrage, throwing the flowers down onto her desk as she stood in one fluid, angry movement. “They are without a doubt the most troublesome, aggravating pair of students I have ever had the misfortune to teach!”
Remus lifted an eyebrow. “Really?” he asked, hiding a smile. Professor McGonagall looked at him, then sighed in irritation.
“No,” she admitted, “but they could have given you lot a run for your money!”
“Professor,” Remus said with a bit of a laugh, standing as well. “I hate to be the one to break this to you, but if the Weasley twins had shared a school with the Marauders, I don’t think we’d have been in competition with one another.”
“A thought that will now haunt my nightmares, thank you, Remus.”
Remus chuckled. “Any time.”
“And I thought we agreed that you were going to call me Minerva,” she said then, one eyebrow lifted in his direction.
“You agreed,” he said cheerfully, and was rewarded with an over-the-spectacles stare.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You were all quick enough to use my Christian name when you were students.”
“Ah ah,” Remus said with a raised hand. “That was never me.” She sniffed.
“Well,” she said, “you have a boggart to find and I have twins to throttle, so if that’s all?”
“For the time being.”
“Do let me know how the lessons go, would you?”
“Of course.” With a nod to her, he headed for the door; her voice called him back.
“Remus?” He turned. “If there’s ever anything you need to talk about, please don’t hesitate. No one should have to sort through memories like that alone.”
He gave her a brief and grateful smile. “Thank you,” he said sincerely, and slipped out the door.
V.
When Sirius Black first gained entrance to the castle on Halloween, it wasn’t difficult for Remus to justify not telling Professor Dumbledore about Sirius’s unique abilities. After all, he told himself, it wasn’t terribly likely that Sirius was using his Animagus form to gain access to the grounds. Sirius’s dog form, while not connected with his identity to anyone but Remus, was not exactly inconspicuous. Someone would have noticed an unfamiliar giant black dog if one had been skulking around the grounds, and Remus was certain he would have heard of it. So there was no reason, he argued, to break Professor Dumbledore’s trust with this little bit of truth.
But when Sirius Black gained entrance to the castle a second time, got so far as Gryffindor Tower, Harry’s dorm room, and Ron Weasley’s bed, well. There were things Remus could no longer ignore. And those things made it impossible for him to tell the full truth to Professor Dumbledore when he was summoned after the incident and asked if he’d thought of any way Sirius Black might have gotten into the castle.
He knew Snape didn’t believe him, knew that Snape was probably whispering into Professor Dumbledore’s ear the minute Remus left the Headmaster’s office, but Remus had bigger issues to think about, issues he’d thought about constantly as he’d searched the castle til dawn, looking in all their old hiding spots, peering out every window, hoping for some hint that he’d been there, some sign someone else would overlook - a pawprint or a tuft of black fur - but there was nothing.
By the time Professor Dumbledore released him to his bed, he was exhausted, but he couldn’t sleep. Not yet. He was too charged, too desperate to speak his mind. So he headed for Professor McGonagall’s office, to await her return. And when she came up the corridor, she looked as exhausted as he felt, and also stunned to see him.
“Remus,” she said in some surprise. “I’d have thought you’d have sought your bed by now.”
“No, I -” He took a deep breath. “You said I could come, if I ever needed to talk?” Understanding lit in her eyes, and he watched her push her exhaustion down, and he felt a bit guilty.
But she said, “Of course,” in a gentler tone, and ushered him into her office. She offered him a chair, but he didn’t take it, choosing instead to pace the length of the room in some agitation. “What is it, Remus?” she asked, sounding as if she already knew the answer.
“Why didn’t he kill Ron?”
The question surprised her. She blinked, frozen in some astonishment. “I - don’t . . .?” She looked at him, a question in her eyes, and Remus shook his head.
“Sirius Black is a madman, yes? That’s what they’ve been telling us? A lunatic, crazed and illogical, no scrap of humanity left in him?” He was speaking very quickly, knowing that if he didn’t get it all out now, he never would. “A hardened killer who thinks nothing of taking innocent lives if they stand between him and his goal?”
“Yes,” Professor McGonagall said carefully, watching him with wary eyes.
“So why didn’t he kill Ron?” Remus asked again, some of his struggle creeping into his voice. “Ron’s asleep, he’s unarmed, he’s thirteen. When Ron wakes up, why not silence him and move on?”
“The other boys, they woke when Mr. Weasley screamed-” But Remus was already shaking his head.
“So kill them, too!” he said immediately. “He killed thirteen Muggles with one curse, he betrayed his best friends, what’s four thirteen-year-olds?”
“He had only a knife,” Professor McGonagall tried to argue.
“There were five wands in that room,” Remus said with conviction, “and I know a third year’s dormitory; those wands weren’t stored carefully away. They were out on bedside tables, the ends of trunks, sticking out of school bags. It would have been child’s play for him to get a wand. So why didn’t he? Why didn’t he grab one, silence the room, kill Harry, and leave? It’s first and second years between Harry’s dorm and the Common Room; they’re no threat. He’d have been ahead of the students who might actually have challenged him. You wouldn’t have gotten to the Common Room in enough time to stop him, and you wouldn’t have raised an alarm - you thought it was Quidditch celebrations! It would have been easy. It took him five and a half months to arrange his second break-in; he knows he’s probably not going to get a chance at a third - why wouldn’t he complete his mission at any cost? A few dead students? He’s already proven he doesn’t care, hasn’t he? Why didn’t he kill Ron?”
There was a long silence. Then she simply said, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t either,” he echoed. “I don’t know, but it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t fit, and I -”
“Remus,” she said gently when he’d been silent too long, the words spoken with a great and patient understanding. “What is it?”
He closed his eyes, still gathering courage, but he’d kept the words in too long, and he’d said too much already to keep them in any longer.
“I knew him,” he whispered.
“We all did.”
Remus shook his head emphatically. “No,” he said, stronger, with more conviction because he had to make her understand. “I knew him. He was my best friend. He was more than that; he was my brother. He was the one person who really understood what it was to be set apart by your family, to be all but abandoned by them, and it made us family, and he and James were even closer! They made themselves blood brothers when Sirius ran away from home, did you know that?”
“I didn’t,” she said gently. “But things change -”
“Not that!” he cried, and now they were at the heart of it. “Sirius Black, betray James Potter? Never! Not in a million years! If I was sure of anything, I was sure of that! We knew there was a spy, we knew there was a mole, but I never even entertained the thought that it might be Sirius because that would never happen!”
He was agitated, he was frantic, he was desperate to make her understand. And she seemed to at least understand his need to speak. She let his words spill out, no longer trying to interrupt.
“I saw him, two weeks before they died, he sat in my sitting room with a bottle of whisky, and we talked for four hours - about how hard everything was, how much we missed seeing James and Lily and Harry, how much we wanted it all to be over. He sat in my armchair and told me how much he hated having to be suspicious of everyone, but that he had to because James wouldn’t, James insisted on trusting everyone because he’d run mad if he didn’t, and we knew that, but someone had to be his protector, Sirius said, and distrust the people James wouldn’t, and that that fell to him. Two weeks before they died, he told me that! Was that all dissembling? Was he planning to betray them even then? Did he sit in my flat, drunk on half a bottle of whisky, and put on an act? It had to be, right? It had to be pretense?”
He didn’t expect an answer, but he had to keep asking the questions.
“When did we lose him? Can you pinpoint it, Professor? Because I can’t! We sat in a dorm with him and listened to him talk about how much he hated his family, and I stayed up til three in the morning with him in the Common Room while he confessed how terrified he was of turning out like them, and Peter and James and I all rallied around him to make sure he knew that the choice was his and he could follow a different path! When did we lose him? He didn’t begin deceiving us at the age of eleven, so when? When did our conversations shift from genuine to duplicitous? When did he turn against us? Because I am wracking my brain, and I can’t see it! What did I miss? And when did I start missing it?”
His throat raw and his breath ragged from the emotion he hadn’t bothered to try and stop, Remus ran his hands through his hair, swallowing hard, desperate for release, to not feel this way anymore.
“Remus,” Professor McGonagall said into the silence, softly and gently, without any sort of judgment or reproof, “what is it you really want to say?”
He knew what she was asking, and he also knew that he didn’t have an answer, not really. There was too much evidence against him for anyone to assert Sirius’s innocence, and that wasn’t what Remus wanted to do anyway, not really. He just wanted to understand He wanted all the pieces to fit together and make sense, and right now, they didn’t.
“I don’t know,” he said to answer her question, because it really was the only answer he had to give. “I don’t know what I want to say. I know all the evidence points to him, all of it - except my memory of him. The person I knew him to be and the character reference I would have given him in a heartbeat.” He sank into a chair, his elbows braced on his knees and his face buried momentarily in his hands. “I want to know what I missed,” he said bitterly when he’d raised his head once more. “I want to know how I didn’t see this coming. And I know what Professor Snape is saying about me, but I’m not helping him into the castle. I have no idea where he is - believe me, if I did -” He broke off to push down a swell of anger. He took a deep breath. “I want to track him down and find him just as much as anyone else, maybe more. Because I want him to look me in the eyes and tell me how this happened.” The words were hard and fierce and far more unyielding than was his normal wont. “I want him to account for himself, to me. To the last one of us left. I need that.”
There was nothing to say to that, and Professor McGonagall didn’t try. She just let the silence surround them, and Remus kept his focus down and inward, and after a long moment, he spoke again, sharing a truth he had never voiced aloud.
“I miss them,” he whispered, his voice anguished and raw. “I miss them every day. I miss James and Lily, I miss Peter, I miss the Harry who was my nephew and not just my student. And yes, I miss Sirius. I do. I miss them all, these friends who made themselves my family. I never thought - I knew the war was dangerous, I knew people would die. But I never imagined that one night would rip everyone from me. I knew we can’t dwell, and I knew we can’t go back, but - I want my friends back. I want the life we said we would live together when the war was past. I want the life I was promised. Not the lonely existence I’ve been living. I miss them so much. I miss what we were so much, it’s like a physical ache. It’s constant and unyielding, and it’s not fair. Not for any of us, and I just . . . I want to know how it happened.”
He was so lost is his traitorous thoughts and anguished memories that he didn’t realize Professor McGonagall had stood and crossed to him until he felt her hand on his shoulder. Blinking, he raised his head to look at her, this woman he respected and cared about so much. And he was startled to see tears in her eyes.
“This comes about twelve years too late, but Remus - words cannot express - how sorry I am for your loss.”
The words were not what he expected, and they undid him. He closed his eyes and no longer tried to stop the tears. She kept her hand on his shoulder, solid and reassuring, as he mourned for his loss in a way he’d never let himself before. Somehow, his hand found hers, and it was like an anchor. And when he was spent, he squeezed her hand and whispered his thanks.
I.
There was nothing to do as he began the process of packing up his office but try and sort through his churning thoughts and emotions. There were plenty of them, more than enough to keep him occupied. Last night had been a whirlwind, a maelstrom, and so much had happened, not all of it good.
The first thing he’d done after finding himself human in the forest at dawn was run as well as he could for the castle and the Headmaster’s office to demand, panicked, “Did I hurt anyone?” Though blessed relief had flooded through him at Professor Dumbledore’s negative reply, the next thing he’d done was resign. Then he’d asked after Sirius.
As Professor Dumbledore had recounted all that had happened after moonrise the previous night, Remus had been overwhelmed with dismay. So much had gone wrong because of his carelessness and thoughtlessness. Peter had escaped. Sirius and Harry had almost been Kissed. Sirius had had to run again, his name still sullied. And all of that was nothing compared to the knowledge of what could have happened. Remus had reiterated his resignation. Snape needn’t have lashed out; Remus would have been gone without the other man’s actions, but Severus had always been petty and driven by a need for revenge. And now he had that.
He felt Professor McGonagall’s presence in the office doorway before she spoke. Slowly, he turned and met her eye, seeing there all the sorrow and regret and apology that, before this year, he would never have expected her to show so openly. She said nothing, because what was there to say?
To spare her from having to find the words, he spoke instead, saying lightly, “I think I might have to disagree with you about this job being cursed.”
As if his words had broken some barrier, she came into the room, almost reaching for him as she said, “Remus, we can weather this.” Remus just smiled and shook his head.
“Don’t you dare,” he said, his tone still light. What Professor McGonagall didn’t know was that this step was routine. He had done this countless times, and while this job and this place were harder to leave than others had been, the routine was still there. “I didn’t resign because they found out I’m a werewolf,” he informed her. “I resigned because I acted in a manner unbefitting a Hogwarts professor last night.”
“You’re one of the best professors we’ve had walk these halls,” she countered passionately. Remus gave her a wry look.
“You have afforded me more praise in this past year than during my entire tenure as a student here. It’s starting to get disconcerting.”
“Remus-”
“What is left to be said?” he asked quietly. He held her gaze for a long moment. She did not reply. “You’ll have storms enough to weather, I imagine. There’s no need to add mine to the mix. So don’t you dare.”
“Where will you go?” she asked then, and Remus knew she’d accepted his decision, even if she wasn’t happy about it.
“I’ve had some success in the Muggle world in the past,” he said, his tone light again as he turned back to his trunk. “They don’t immediately think ‘werewolf’ when you ask for every full moon off. They’re just pleased to have a worker who only asks to have one evening a month free.”
He could read in her face what she thought of his teaching potential being wasted as he toiled in a Muggle shop somewhere, but she gave the thoughts no voice, for which he was grateful.
“I shall, of course,” he continued, “be available if Professor Dumbledore should require me again.”
He watched her sort through what to say next, watched as she considered and discarded several possible comments, and he could only imagine what they had been.
Aren’t you glad Sirius’s innocence has been proved?
Will you keep in contact with Harry?
How could you not have told your Transfiguration Professor that those three achieved Animagus status in just three years?
But regardless of the things she might have said, when she spoke, it was simply to ask, “Do you need anything?”
“Look after Harry for me?” he asked. “I have a feeling his struggles are far from over. I wish I could do more for him, but . . .” He trailed off, not having the words he needed to finish the thought, but she understood.
“Of course,” she said softly. “And Remus? If there is ever anything you need, please don’t hesitate to ask.” He knew the offer was genuine, and it touched him more than he could have expressed. “You will always have a place here,” she said then, and he smiled indulgently.
“I appreciate the sentiment,” was his soft reply, “even if I doubt its veracity.”
They shared one last long look, an understanding reached between them, and then she nodded and moved for the door. But there was one last thing left to be said.
“Minerva,” he called softly, using her name for the first time. She turned and met his eyes, and the words he had been about to say died on his lips, because they were inadequate. There was no way to express all he wanted and needed to convey. But somehow, he knew, she understood.
“It’s been a privilege, Remus,” she said simply. He smiled, and she left. And that was enough.
Prompt/Prompt Author: Anything set during the year Lupin teaches Defense Against the Dark Arts. McGonagall reminisces about the boy Lupin, Lupin reflects on his memories of his former teacher, Lupin seeks out advice, the two of them share memories of James/Lily/Peter/Sirius, one of them shares a funny student story or plays a prank on the other ... anything, really. May be happy, sad, funny, angsty, dramatic ... give us a snapshot of the staffs' lives at Hogwarts.) / kissaweasley
Title: Five Times a Conversation Between Professors Lupin and McGonagall Ended in Thanks, and One Time It Didn't Have To
Characters: Remus Lupin, Minerva McGonagall, Fred and George Weasley, Severus Snape
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Word Count: ~9000
Summary: A series of conversations between Professor Lupin and Professor McGonagall about friendship, betrayal, love, loss, teaching, learning, and Weasley twins.
Author's Notes: I had a lot of fun writing this! Lupin and McGonagall have long been two of my favorite characters, and I so enjoyed the chance to write some behind-the-scenes exchanges between them. I tried to include as much of the prompt as possible, giving voice to Remus’s anguish and conflict while still hinting at the witty prankster we all know and love. Also, I hope you will forgive (and enjoy!) the sudden appearances of the wild Weasley Twins - you have my beta M to thank for that!
I.
There was something about Hogwarts, Remus mused as he stood at the edge of the long drive to the front doors, that made him feel like a student again, despite being 33 years of age. And there was something about walking up that long drive toward the waiting figure of his old Head of House that made him feel like a student caught in a misdeed again, despite the fact that he was here on Professor Dumbledore's invitation.
There was also something about visiting the school in the middle of the summer that made him feel decidedly out of place, especially given that he wasn't entirely sure what he was doing here.
"We would have sent a carriage for you, if you'd told us you had arrived," was Minerva McGonagall's first greeting to him as he came into earshot. Remus shrugged.
"It's a lovely day," he said simply. "The walk was no hardship."
Professor McGonagall sniffed. "Be that as it may, you are here on the Headmaster's express wishes. I would hate for it to get around that you were denied any hospitality."
"Well, I won't say anything if you won't," Remus said with a smile, and he won the tiniest one from his old teacher in response.
"It's good to see you again, Remus," she said, holding out her hand. Remus shook it.
"Likewise."
“I’m glad to have you coming aboard,” she said then, and Remus grimaced. He remembered the Headmaster’s unannounced visit to his ramshackle and run down dwelling the week before; though the place had been tidy and as clean as Remus could make it, it still bespoke an utter and embarrassing poverty. Professor Dumbledore had said nothing, of course, but Remus knew he had noticed, and his pride was still recovering, even a week later. Even more shocking than the Headmaster’s sudden appearance was what he had come to say.
I would like to offer you the post of Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts this year . . . take a week, think it over, then come to the castle with your final answer, yes?
After a beat, he shook himself from his reverie. “I haven’t officially accepted yet,” was his quiet response, and Professor McGonagall surveyed him shrewdly over her spectacles.
“No,” was all she said, her tone unreadable. “You haven’t.” After another moment of silence, she sniffed again and straightened. “Well, come with me.” And as she turned and entered the castle, Remus had no choice but to follow.
She spoke as they walked, slowly enough for Remus to soak in the familiar atmosphere of the place that had been his home for so long. “Professor Dumbledore’s plan was, of course, to hear your answer himself,” Professor McGonagall said as they walked, “but he had to answer an urgent owl from the Minister this morning, and given the climate . . .” she trailed off darkly, and Remus could only guess what she was referring to. “He’s asked me to speak with you instead. I hope that is satisfactory.”
“Completely.”
“Here we are,” she said as they reached the door to a room Remus remembered very well. “This would be your classroom, and your office and quarters would branch off of it, there.” She ushered him inside. If the rooms had changed since Remus had last been there, he couldn’t discern it. Inside the small office, Remus smiled a bit at the memories of the many iterations this room had taken on in the years when he had been a student here.
“Remus,” Professor McGonagall said softly but with her usual no-nonsense tone, “I won’t insult your intelligence by beating around the bush. We need you.”
He made sure he was composed before he answered. “Because of Sirius Black?” he asked, his voice calm and even. Professor McGonagall didn’t answer, but she didn’t need to. “As I said to Professor Dumbledore, I don’t know how much help I will be. I think the past makes it pretty clear that I didn’t and don’t know him nearly as well as I once thought.”
The words did not come out as cool and even as Remus would have liked. Something crept in, and Professor McGonagall frowned and made an involuntary movement that he would have been tempted to think the start of a comforting gesture if he hadn’t known that that was impossible. He took a deep breath, endeavoring to regain control.
“There is more to it than that,” Professor McGonagall said. “What we have successfully managed to keep from the public in an effort to avoid a panic is that we have excellent reason to believe that Black’s intentions are to track down and attack Harry Potter.”
Remus paled. “Harry?” he asked in a very soft voice. “He’s after Harry?” Professor McGonagall nodded, watching him closely.
“When was the last time you saw Harry?” she asked gently, but she might have shouted it for all the more it fazed him. He was disoriented, stunned, by what she’d told him. Against his will, an image of a grinning Sirius lifting an infant Harry high into the air while James and Harry and Sirius laughed and Lily refrained from looking nervous swam into his head.
“Um,” he said belatedly, grasping at the focus necessary to answer the question. “They went into hiding, before he was born . . . I only saw him a handful of times. He was - young, very. Very, um . . . we decided it was too dangerous after that. We sent gifts and letters, but - eight months? Ten? I think?”
“He’s thirteen now. Just about to start his third year. You should know, since you’re going to be teaching him, so it doesn’t catch you off guard, he’s the spitting image of James.” Remus swallowed hard and tried not to picture James at thirteen.
“Professor, I still haven’t said yes,” he said quietly.
“This has not escaped my notice. What are your reservations?”
“I outlined them for Professor Dumbledore.”
“Outline them for me.”
Remus stood, facing off in a quiet battle of wills with his old teacher, knowing all the while which of them would end up giving in. After a moment, he sighed.
“I’m not qualified,” Remus said quietly.
“Nonsense,” Professor McGongall said briskly. “You are the sole reason Reggie Fullerton passed Defense Against the Dark Arts each year with anything resembling distinction. If you can teach him, you can teach anyone. You know the spells, you’re patient and charismatic, you have a comforting presence, and you can teach. And even if all of those things were not true, you would still be a better choice than the imbecile we had to put up with last year.”
Remus blinked at the outpouring of praise, so unexpected, and he couldn’t help but feel that she was prepared to counter any objection he voiced.
“The Ministry will never approve of it,” he said, alluding to the real issue at hand.
“The Ministry has no control over the filling of posts at Hogwarts,” Professor McGonagall countered immediately, so Remus stopped being delicate and addressed the elephant - or wolf - in the room.
“Parents will not want a werewolf teaching their children,” he said simply.
“I don’t plan on telling them,” was her only response. “Do you?”
“I’m a danger to them.”
“Remus,” Professor McGonagall said in her best no-nonsense voice, “There will be soon be hundreds of underage wizards gathered in this school, all with varying degrees of control over the magic they possess, trying to cast jinxes, brew potions, handle poisonous plants, and care for vicious magical creatures. Last year alone, Madame Pomfrey treated over 200 potion-related incidents, over 400 Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures injuries, over 300 Quidditch accidents, and the aftermaths of more than 950 miscast curses, wand malfunctions, and poorly aimed spells. This is to say nothing of fisticuffs, pranks, and physical altercations that took place between students in the halls of this school. I assure you, with great authority, that the students of Hogwarts are more a danger to themselves than you are to any one of them.”
Remus tried to argue that, but he didn’t get very far. “Dumbledore would never have offered you the post if he didn’t feel that you and he and Hogwarts were up to the challenge,” Professor McGonagall said briskly, interrupting his words before he’d a chance to find them. “Severus Snape is more than capable of brewing a first rate Wolfsbane Potion for a year’s time, and Hogwarts is more than able to bear the expense. The potion works, Remus. Professor Dumbledore has seen it in action.”
“Have you?” he asked quietly.
“I trust what the Headmaster has told me, and the other accounts I’ve been given. You will not be a danger to these students. And as an added precaution, should you feel you need it, I have Transfigured the doorways of this office to close into solid stone walls. There are no windows, the reversal can only be triggered by wand and incantation, and no werewolf is strong enough to tear through a foot and a half of stone and mortar. You will not be a danger to these students, Remus. Dumbledore and I will not let you be.”
With those words, Remus had to turn away, his eyes stinging unexpectedly. While he was composing himself, Professor McGonagall said, gently but firmly, “Now, will you officially accept the post, or will I have to tell Professor Dumbledore that he needs to take more time out of his busy schedule to continue convincing you?”
Remus knew when he was beat. Regaining his control, he turned back to his old teacher and asked, “Is it true this job is cursed?” Professor McGonagall sniffed.
“Stuff and nonsense,” she said. Remus smiled, then sighed.
“All right,” he said, extending his hand across the desk.
Professor McGonagall took his hand and shook it. “Welcome aboard, Professor Lupin. And thank you.”
“My pleasure, I’m sure,” he said, though he was, in truth, wondering how soon he would come to regret this.
II.
The Great Hall at the end of the Welcome Feast was the same hustle and bustle and jubilant, frantic chaos that Remus remembered from his own school days. He stood from his place at the head table as the other teachers did the same, and pulled his focus away from the melee of students to place it in a more pertinent location - his colleagues.
Anticipating that the Dementors might cause some disturbances on the train, Remus had volunteered to ride in with the students to at least help take that situation in hand, but his reason for volunteering had been twofold. He’d also wanted to give Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall the chance to announce his appointment to the staff and deal with the fallout without his presence. He knew that his fellow teachers would be a lot more honest with their opinions if he personally wasn’t there.
And now, as he greeted the rest of the staff and shook hands and accepted introductions, he was able to guess just which staff members had voice unease about his appointments. No one but Professor Trelawny - rambling some excuse about the juncture of Mars and Neptune - refused to shake his hand, but from some, it was a decidedly wary gesture.
The professors he had studied under as a student all greeted him warmly - Professors Flitwick, Sprout, and Babbling, as well as Madame Pomfrey and Hagrid - and a bubbly, enthusiastic young woman who introduced herself as Charity Burbage, professor of Muggle Studies, welcomed him with a wide, genuine smile. But Professor Sinastra was more hesitant, and Professor Vector looked downright suspicious. And then, of course, there was Snape.
Snape had sneered for a moment at Remus’s offered hand, but had eventually not so much shaken it as grasped it in an iron grip, as if trying to root Remus to the spot. “How the power has shifted,” he said in greeting, a smug sneer on his face.
“A pleasure as always, Severus,” Remus said with cordiality. Snape’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, but before he could say anything else, Professor McGonagall was at Remus’s elbow.
“Forgive me for interrupting,” she said sternly, surveying Snape over the top of her spectacles, “but I need to fill you in on last night’s staff meeting, Remus.”
“Of course, Professor McGonagall,” Remus said, then with a smile and a nod to Snape, said, “Severus,” and turned and followed Professor McGonagall out of the Great Hall.
“There’s not going to be any trouble between the two of you this year, is there?” Professor McGonagall asked in an undertone, then raised her voice, but not at Remus. “Miss Boone! Mr. Pullman! Miss Cartwright! Less clogging the hallways, more hurrying along to your Common Rooms! And you two! The Misters Weasley; don’t think I don’t see you behind that corner. Out here, if you please.”
Remus watched as two identical and very red-headed boys walked out from around a nearby corner, the very picture of innocence. Professor McGonagall surveyed them both with a look that Remus knew very well - it was the one she had usually reserved for James, and - Black.
“I believe the Gryffindor Common Room is in the opposite direction, boys. Don’t think I won’t give you each a month of detentions your first night back.”
One of the boys grinned and said, “‘Course not, Minerva,” and Professor McGonagall’s eyes blazed.
“Gryffindor Tower. Now.”
The other boy winked cheekily, and laughing, they both ran down the corridor in the direction Professor McGonagall had pointed. Once they were out of sight, she sighed and closed her eyes as if asking a higher power for patience.
“And who were those two gentlemen?” Remus asked with a bit of a smile.
“Misters Fred and George Weasley,” she said, in a tone of voice she had once reserved for another pair of Gryffindor boys. “And you’ll experience them soon enough, I have no doubt.”
“So,” Remus said once they had reached her office, “what else do I need to know from the staff meeting? Your letter was fairly detailed -”
She cut him off with a dismissive wave of her hand. “You don’t need to know anything else about the staff meeting, I just needed to keep you and Professor Snape from coming to blows in front of any lingering students.”
“There was nothing to come to blows over, so that was an unnecessary concern.” Professor McGonagall looked unconvinced. “I have no issue with Severus Snape,” Remus insisted.
“No,” Professor McGonagall said with a sigh. “But there is every likelihood that he has one with you. He was not terribly pleased to hear that you had been assigned the post.”
“No, I don’t imagine he was.”
“So I just want to make sure,” - and now some of that stern Professor tone was directed at him - “that the peace will be kept within these walls.”
“Would I willingly antagonize the man who is going to be brewing Wolfsbane Potion for me all year?”
“I like to think not,” Professor McGonagall said. “But humor an old woman, would you?” Remus shook his head.
“You’re not old,” he protested, and Professor McGonagall gave a wry smile. “But you have my word. I am not going to start trouble with Severus. I cannot speak for him, but on my end, there is no grudge.”
Professor McGonagall beheld him for one moment longer, then nodded briskly. “You’ll have to forgive me,” she said then, “but it is more difficult than I anticipated to see you sitting across from me and not see the young man from sixteen years ago.”
Remus gave a small laugh. “And I’ll admit that being here again is bringing him out more than I expected. These halls are very full of memories, and seeing Harry tonight on top of that . . .” Remus sobered, as he always did when James invaded his thoughts.
“I did warn you how much he looks like his father.”
“Yes,” Remus said with a sad smile. “And I had prepared myself for that. But I was not prepared to see Lily’s eyes looking out at me again. That was rather more startling.”
A look of sympathy passed over Professor McGonagall’s face, and the two shared a moment of shadowed remembrance.
“He is more like her than like his father,” she said then, and Remus gave the ghost of a smile.
“At thirteen? That’s all for the best,” he said. “If there’s nothing else, Professor?” Remus asked then, standing.
“You are prepared for your classes tomorrow?” she asked, standing as well.
“We’ll find out tomorrow, won’t we?” The comment won a smile.
“Then have a good night. I won’t reiterate the need to keep the peace; I will merely say that I am putting my full trust in you.”
“You have my word,” he said again, and she looked relieved.
“Thank you,” she said.
III.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Remus said as a frowning Professor McGonagall loomed in his office doorway. He’d been expecting her.
He couldn’t say he didn’t understand why she was there; the day’s events did have the feel of running counter to the promise he had so recently made. But the day’s events were also not entirely his doing. And he stood by what had happened and what he’d done, and was more than ready to make his defense.
“Four days,” she said, stern as ever.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Four days ago, Remus.”
“Yes.”
“Four days ago, you gave me your word that you were going to keep the peace.”
“I wasn’t the one who lost track of the peace,” Remus said, completely serious. Professor McGonagall did not look impressed.
“Isn’t the‘he started it’ excuse a bit beneath you?” she asked in a frosty tone, looking down at him over the top of her spectacles. Remus crossed his arms over his chest and held her gaze.
“First of all -”
“An image of Professor Snape stumbling around the staff room in a dress, vulture-topped hat, fox-fur stole, and handbag?” she interrupted forcefully. “Professor Snape dressed up, in other words, to the exact specifications of Augusta Longbottom? It’s all anyone can talk about, Remus! Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
“On the contrary,” Remus said evenly, “I’ve been expecting you since I released my third years thirty minutes ago.”
“Remus-”
“Neville Longbottom’s greatest fear was going to be the same regardless of any actions of mine, and personally, I think the greater share of the blame here lies in the fact that one of his professors is a thirteen-year-old boy’s-”
“The ‘he brought it on himself’ defense is also beneath you,” Professor McGonagall interrupted again, and Remus set his jaw.
“Not entirely untrue, though,” he said with conviction.
“Remus-”
“Professor McGonagall, with all due respect,” he said, standing, “what would you have had me do? I can’t change the nature of the spell, I can’t, in an hour-long class period, change a thirteen-year-old’s greatest fear. That boggart was always going to turn into Professor Snape when Neville Longbottom stood before it, and if the spell was going to work correctly, the boggart’s image was going to be made to look ridiculous. So what would you have had me do? Deny Neville the chance to face the boggart? Refuse to give him the guidance he needed to perform the spell? I stand by what happened in class today, Professor, and I’d do it again if it meant achieving the same results. I am sorry that there are people currently laughing at Professor Snape, but my first duty is to my students, not my colleagues, and I will not be party to setting them up for failure. I advised Neville on his boggart the same way I would have advised any student chosen to go first. And I chose Neville to go first because he was clearly the most nervous, and that was the surest way to give him a little extra help without calling attention to the fact. Now, if I can help my students succeed and help a colleague save face, I will, but if it comes down to a choice between the two, I will always side with the student. I will assume that the colleague is well able to stand up for himself.”
“Did you speak to Professor, then?” she asked immediately, and she didn’t sound as if she entirely believed him. “After this incident occurred? Did you find him and give him some warning of what he might face? Apologize for the circumstances that were, apparently, outside of your control?”
“No,” Remus said evenly. “I did not.”
“And could you have?”
Remus recognized her tone, and he recognized what she was attempting to do. He’d seen it in action countless times over his own school years. But her mistake was in thinking that he’d overlooked this particular course of action. He had not.
“Oh, I could have,” he said with a nod. “I even might have, had Professor Snape chosen to act a little differently when he encountered my class entering the staff room.”
From the almost imperceptible narrowing of her eyes and tilt of her head, Professor McGonagall had not heard this part of the story. Remus wasn’t terribly surprised. He was more than happy to fill her in.
“Had Professor Snape not ridiculed Neville in front of his entire class, I might have found the chance to tell him what transpired with Neville’s boggart. Had Professor Snape not tried to discredit a student to a new professor before that student even had a chance to leave his own impression, I might have tried to alert him to Neville’s achievement. But seeing for myself exactly what makes Professor Snape Neville Longbottom’s greatest fear, I confess that extending him the courtesy of a heads’ up slipped my mind.”
Professor McGonagall closed her eyes and sighed. “Ah,” she said, resigned. “Yes, now that I think of it, the incident does have the ring of Remus Lupin justice to it.” Remus quirked an eyebrow.
“Remus Lupin justice?”
“I could always tell, you know, when James Potter’s treatment of another student crossed a line in your book. You never called him out on it, precisely, but you would ignore him for a period of days. His work in my class suffered whenever it happened, because you weren’t reading over it.”
Remus was too stunned that she’d noticed this to do anything more than say, slightly irrelevantly, “James never needed my help with his Transfiguration.”
“Transfiguration, no,” she agreed. “Spelling and grammar, yes.”
Remus couldn’t help but smile at that. “Yeah, James always did have a tendency toward linguistic creativity.”
“He once spelt ‘giant’ with a j,” she remarked dryly. “Granted, he was eleven, but at sixteen he spent a full ten minutes trying to convince me that vampirically was a word.”
Remus grinned. “I remember,” he said with a laugh. “I also remember how S-”
He broke off abruptly, because the end of that sentence was, how Sirius was the one suggesting an etymological link between vampirical and empirical. His grin gone, replaced by a look lined with pain, Remus looked away, taking a deep breath. For one shining moment, he’d been allowed to forget. But it hadn’t lasted, as they never did.
Professor McGonagall spoke then, back on topic. “Neville Longbottom successfully performed the Riddikulus charm on his first attempt?” she asked. Remus nodded. “And he was the first in the class to do so?” Remus nodded again.
“He was also the last,” he said, “and he was the one to finish off the boggart with his confidence and the strength of his charm.”
“After Professor Snape ridiculed him in front of the entire class?”
“He said that I needed to be warned that Neville should not be entrusted with anything difficult unless another student was hissing instructions in his ear.” Even just repeating the words made Remus’s blood boil anew at Snape’s petty immaturity, and cemented his complete lack of desire to go make an apology, but - he could tell from the strain on Professor McGonagall’s face that this year was proving very stressful and difficult, and that his actions, much as he would defend them, were making things worse. He respected her and Professor Dumbledore too much for that. So someone had to be the better man, and it wasn’t going to be Snape.
He sighed heavily, running a hand through his hair. “I’ll talk to Severus,” he said, but Professor McGonagall shook his head.
“No,” she said firmly. “I will talk to Severus. You were merely teaching a spell, and doing so admirably, as evidenced by an unprecedented first attempt success from Neville Longbottom, and I am, after all, of the opinion that you should not apologize if you have done nothing wrong.”
Remus stared, surprised, then he smiled. “Thank you, Professor,” he said softly. She surveyed him over her spectacles.
“We are colleagues now, Remus,” she said briskly. “I think it would be permissible for you to call me Minerva.” Remus smiled.
“Again, Professor, I thank you,” was all he said.
IV.
When Remus went to visit Professor McGonagall in her office shortly before the winter holidays, he found the Weasley twins conjuring canaries outside the professor’s closed door.
He managed to come up behind them without drawing notice, and had been standing patiently, observing, for about a minute before George realized he was there. Slowly, George turned and held eye contact with Remus for a long moment, then nudged his twin in the side. When Fred just waved him off, George hissed, “Fred!”
“What?” Fred demanded in an aggravated whisper, and that’s when he, too, caught sight of Remus, who raised a single eyebrow.
Fred and George exchanged a look with each other, then turned to him and abruptly broke into identical winning smiles, a move that might have worked better if Remus hadn’t seen the slightly panicked looks that had preceded it.
“‘Lo, Professor!” Fred said cheerfully.
“Hello, boys,” Remus said with a cordial nod. “Practicing your spellwork?”
The boys put on looks of confusion, and Remus merely glanced significantly upward. The boys followed his gaze.
“Oh,” Fred said in a tone of dawning comprehension. “You mean the birds?” Remus nodded. “Well, the birds are -”
“They’re for Professor McGonagall,” George chimed in.
“Yes, they’re for Professor McGonagall,” Fred echoed immediately.
“What a thoughtful gift,” Remus commented, and the twins took to nodding with enthusiasm.
“That’s us,” Fred said with an easy grin. “Thoughtful, always thoughtful. And she made it clear to us that she has an important letter to write and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“So we thought we would assist her by creating a flock of, you know, guard canaries,” George continued effortlessly. And Remus had to hand it to them - they were good. It was just too bad he’d seen this ploy a countless dozen times.
“Guard canaries?” he repeated with a quirked eyebrow, not bothering to hide his look of amusement.
“You may be surprised to learn this, Professor, but canaries really are the best guard birds,” George informed him, and Remus had to applaud him on his improv skills. “I mean, you see a flock of canaries around a door, and if you have any sense, you’ll turn the other way and fast. Isn’t that right, Fred?”..
“Yes, indeed, George. So. Is there any chance you’re buying any of this?” Fred asked conversationally, and Remus smiled.
“Not even a little bit.”
“You know what? That’s fair,” Fred said with a nod. “Don’t you think, George?”
“Perfectly fair,” George said. “So we’ll just go then, shall we, Professor?”
“I think that might be best,” Remus told them, and both boys nodded, moving quickly away down the corridor. “Boys?” Remus called after them, and when they turned, he looked again significantly toward the birds still flocking around the door.
“Oh, the birds,” George said with a faked laugh. “Right. Must’ve slipped our minds.” And he and Fred waved their wands and the birds disappeared. “See ya, Professor!”
Shaking his head, smiling, as the mischievous twins ran off to presumably cause trouble elsewhere, Remus knocked softly on Professor McGonagall’s closed door.
“Come in, Remus,” he heard through the door, so he opened it and stepped inside. Professor McGonagall glanced up from the letter she was composing. “Do I want to know what those two were doing outside my door?” she asked.
“Pretty advanced magic for their age, actually.”
Professor McGonagall sighed. “Yes,” she muttered. “It always seems to be.”
“They also mentioned that you didn’t want to be disturbed, so I can come back another time.”
She cut off the end of his statement with a sharp wave of her hand, setting aside her quill. “What’s another twenty minutes’ delay on a letter to Molly Weasley?” she asked rhetorically. “In twenty minutes, I’ll probably have four new misdeeds to add anyway. What can I do for you?”
Confident that he wasn’t interrupting anything urgent, Remus slid into a chair. “After the events of the most recent Quidditch match, Harry has asked me to give him some private Defense lessons. Specifically, he wants to learn to fight dementors.”
Professor McGonagall’s eyebrows shot up. “He wants to learn the Patronus Charm?” she clarified.
“He doesn’t know it by that name, but yes. That’s what he’s asking. I warned him it would be difficult work, but he’s adamant. So, as his Head of House, I wanted to run it by you.”
“I mean no disrespect to Harry’s abilities, but I know many adult wizards who have trouble conjuring a Patronus. Do you really think he’s capable of it?”
“I think,” Remus said carefully, “that he’s talented enough and, perhaps more importantly, determined enough to produce, at the very least, some form of incorporeal Patronus which, Merlin willing, will be more than he needs to be capable of the rest of the year.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” Professor McGonagall said. “But tell me, Remus. How do you plan on going about these lessons?”
“Well, when we had our boggart lesson, I wouldn’t let Harry face it because I wanted to avoid having Voldemort materialize in the staff room.”
“Probably wise.”
Remus smiled. “I thought so. But he confessed to me later that he didn’t think of Voldemort. He thought of the dementors. Given that fact, and adding in what happened at the Quidditch match, I think it likely that if confronted with a boggart, it would take a dementor’s form and, naturally, imbue itself with a dementor’s qualities.”
“So you’d like to scour the castle to find another boggart to use in teaching the Patronus charm. That’s . . . quite ingenious, Remus.” She considered for a moment. “There are some unused classrooms on the fifth floor that you might search. And the southeast tower is currently being used mainly for storage. Finding another boggart shouldn’t be too difficult in a castle this size. But tread carefully, Remus. Make sure you’re prepared for emotional upheaval. We don’t know what Harry experiences in the presence of a dementor-”
“Yes, I do, actually,” Remus interrupted softly. “He told me. He hears his mother being murdered.”
He said it simply, looking her in the eye as he did, because it was the only way he knew how to say it. He watched her eyes close against the words, and he knew what she was feeling. They let the silence speak for itself for a moment, before Professor McGonagall gently broke it.
“Then you should tread all the more carefully. For your own sake. Can you handle this, Remus? No one would think less of you if the answer is no.”
Remus was silent for another long moment. He could feel Professor McGonagall’s eyes on him, patient and waiting, but he wanted to make sure he had the words before he spoke.
“When I heard what had happened,” he said very quietly, his focus turned inward, “when I was told that Lily and James, that they were dead, and that Peter and Sirius - and Harry off to his aunt and uncle’s . . . When I heard all that, I started running. I started running because I couldn’t imagine staying still. I couldn’t imagine staying in a world that was celebrating the destruction of all I cared about. So I left. I ran away, and that’s all I’d been doing for years. And then Professor Dumbledore sent me that letter.”
She listened quietly, which Remus appreciated. She didn’t try to interrupt, which was good, because he wasn’t sure he could get through everything he wanted to say if she did.
“When I sat in this office so many months ago, I didn’t tell you the real reason I was hesitant to take the post. I knew doing so would mean I couldn’t run anymore, a desire I was ashamed to communicate to my old Head of House, given that wanting to run away is not particularly Gryffindor-like. And I was right. I haven’t been able to run. Since coming here, I have been bombarded with memories, at every moment. It has been - inescapable.
“But you know, I think it’s actually been for the best. I never let myself think about them before. Any memory at all was just too painful, and I ran so I wouldn’t have to confront them. Here I’ve been forced to, and the result is that I can think of them now, James and Lily, the good times, and it doesn’t hurt as much. It aches a bit, but it also makes me smile, James’s antics, and Lily’s passion.” He allowed himself a smile, a small one, and yes, the ache was there even as he spoke.
He pulled himself back to the moment, forcing himself to meet Professor McGonagall’s eyes. “The point is, having gotten to know Harry, having been forced to see how his parents live on in him, I am ready and willing and eager to do anything in my power to help him. I can deal with the emotions on my end. I can handle hearing the account of how Lily died if doing so means I can help her son never have to hear it again.”
He meant it, he did, but there were parts he wasn’t saying still - how he still didn’t let himself speak or think of Sirius, how remembering anything about Peter sent a pang of pain and guilt through his core, how keeping the secret of the Animagus transformations was eating away at him, constantly - but what he’d said was enough for Professor McGonagall. After a brief moment, she nodded in acquiescence.
“Well then, if Harry’s asked for them, and you feel up to it and are certain you can teach the skill safely, I see no reason why I can’t grant my permission. I’ll clear it with the Headmaster, but I think you can start your preparations whenever you’re ready.”
And she picked up her wand to summon a new sheaf of parchment, but as soon as it was settled in her hand, she frowned, turned the wand over carefully, and examined with great precision. Cautiously, she pointed it away from Remus and made a simple spell gesture.
With a bang, the wand let out a puff of smoke, and when it cleared, the professor was holding not a wand, but a bouquet of flowers. “Those two!” she exclaimed in exasperated outrage, throwing the flowers down onto her desk as she stood in one fluid, angry movement. “They are without a doubt the most troublesome, aggravating pair of students I have ever had the misfortune to teach!”
Remus lifted an eyebrow. “Really?” he asked, hiding a smile. Professor McGonagall looked at him, then sighed in irritation.
“No,” she admitted, “but they could have given you lot a run for your money!”
“Professor,” Remus said with a bit of a laugh, standing as well. “I hate to be the one to break this to you, but if the Weasley twins had shared a school with the Marauders, I don’t think we’d have been in competition with one another.”
“A thought that will now haunt my nightmares, thank you, Remus.”
Remus chuckled. “Any time.”
“And I thought we agreed that you were going to call me Minerva,” she said then, one eyebrow lifted in his direction.
“You agreed,” he said cheerfully, and was rewarded with an over-the-spectacles stare.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You were all quick enough to use my Christian name when you were students.”
“Ah ah,” Remus said with a raised hand. “That was never me.” She sniffed.
“Well,” she said, “you have a boggart to find and I have twins to throttle, so if that’s all?”
“For the time being.”
“Do let me know how the lessons go, would you?”
“Of course.” With a nod to her, he headed for the door; her voice called him back.
“Remus?” He turned. “If there’s ever anything you need to talk about, please don’t hesitate. No one should have to sort through memories like that alone.”
He gave her a brief and grateful smile. “Thank you,” he said sincerely, and slipped out the door.
V.
When Sirius Black first gained entrance to the castle on Halloween, it wasn’t difficult for Remus to justify not telling Professor Dumbledore about Sirius’s unique abilities. After all, he told himself, it wasn’t terribly likely that Sirius was using his Animagus form to gain access to the grounds. Sirius’s dog form, while not connected with his identity to anyone but Remus, was not exactly inconspicuous. Someone would have noticed an unfamiliar giant black dog if one had been skulking around the grounds, and Remus was certain he would have heard of it. So there was no reason, he argued, to break Professor Dumbledore’s trust with this little bit of truth.
But when Sirius Black gained entrance to the castle a second time, got so far as Gryffindor Tower, Harry’s dorm room, and Ron Weasley’s bed, well. There were things Remus could no longer ignore. And those things made it impossible for him to tell the full truth to Professor Dumbledore when he was summoned after the incident and asked if he’d thought of any way Sirius Black might have gotten into the castle.
He knew Snape didn’t believe him, knew that Snape was probably whispering into Professor Dumbledore’s ear the minute Remus left the Headmaster’s office, but Remus had bigger issues to think about, issues he’d thought about constantly as he’d searched the castle til dawn, looking in all their old hiding spots, peering out every window, hoping for some hint that he’d been there, some sign someone else would overlook - a pawprint or a tuft of black fur - but there was nothing.
By the time Professor Dumbledore released him to his bed, he was exhausted, but he couldn’t sleep. Not yet. He was too charged, too desperate to speak his mind. So he headed for Professor McGonagall’s office, to await her return. And when she came up the corridor, she looked as exhausted as he felt, and also stunned to see him.
“Remus,” she said in some surprise. “I’d have thought you’d have sought your bed by now.”
“No, I -” He took a deep breath. “You said I could come, if I ever needed to talk?” Understanding lit in her eyes, and he watched her push her exhaustion down, and he felt a bit guilty.
But she said, “Of course,” in a gentler tone, and ushered him into her office. She offered him a chair, but he didn’t take it, choosing instead to pace the length of the room in some agitation. “What is it, Remus?” she asked, sounding as if she already knew the answer.
“Why didn’t he kill Ron?”
The question surprised her. She blinked, frozen in some astonishment. “I - don’t . . .?” She looked at him, a question in her eyes, and Remus shook his head.
“Sirius Black is a madman, yes? That’s what they’ve been telling us? A lunatic, crazed and illogical, no scrap of humanity left in him?” He was speaking very quickly, knowing that if he didn’t get it all out now, he never would. “A hardened killer who thinks nothing of taking innocent lives if they stand between him and his goal?”
“Yes,” Professor McGonagall said carefully, watching him with wary eyes.
“So why didn’t he kill Ron?” Remus asked again, some of his struggle creeping into his voice. “Ron’s asleep, he’s unarmed, he’s thirteen. When Ron wakes up, why not silence him and move on?”
“The other boys, they woke when Mr. Weasley screamed-” But Remus was already shaking his head.
“So kill them, too!” he said immediately. “He killed thirteen Muggles with one curse, he betrayed his best friends, what’s four thirteen-year-olds?”
“He had only a knife,” Professor McGonagall tried to argue.
“There were five wands in that room,” Remus said with conviction, “and I know a third year’s dormitory; those wands weren’t stored carefully away. They were out on bedside tables, the ends of trunks, sticking out of school bags. It would have been child’s play for him to get a wand. So why didn’t he? Why didn’t he grab one, silence the room, kill Harry, and leave? It’s first and second years between Harry’s dorm and the Common Room; they’re no threat. He’d have been ahead of the students who might actually have challenged him. You wouldn’t have gotten to the Common Room in enough time to stop him, and you wouldn’t have raised an alarm - you thought it was Quidditch celebrations! It would have been easy. It took him five and a half months to arrange his second break-in; he knows he’s probably not going to get a chance at a third - why wouldn’t he complete his mission at any cost? A few dead students? He’s already proven he doesn’t care, hasn’t he? Why didn’t he kill Ron?”
There was a long silence. Then she simply said, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t either,” he echoed. “I don’t know, but it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t fit, and I -”
“Remus,” she said gently when he’d been silent too long, the words spoken with a great and patient understanding. “What is it?”
He closed his eyes, still gathering courage, but he’d kept the words in too long, and he’d said too much already to keep them in any longer.
“I knew him,” he whispered.
“We all did.”
Remus shook his head emphatically. “No,” he said, stronger, with more conviction because he had to make her understand. “I knew him. He was my best friend. He was more than that; he was my brother. He was the one person who really understood what it was to be set apart by your family, to be all but abandoned by them, and it made us family, and he and James were even closer! They made themselves blood brothers when Sirius ran away from home, did you know that?”
“I didn’t,” she said gently. “But things change -”
“Not that!” he cried, and now they were at the heart of it. “Sirius Black, betray James Potter? Never! Not in a million years! If I was sure of anything, I was sure of that! We knew there was a spy, we knew there was a mole, but I never even entertained the thought that it might be Sirius because that would never happen!”
He was agitated, he was frantic, he was desperate to make her understand. And she seemed to at least understand his need to speak. She let his words spill out, no longer trying to interrupt.
“I saw him, two weeks before they died, he sat in my sitting room with a bottle of whisky, and we talked for four hours - about how hard everything was, how much we missed seeing James and Lily and Harry, how much we wanted it all to be over. He sat in my armchair and told me how much he hated having to be suspicious of everyone, but that he had to because James wouldn’t, James insisted on trusting everyone because he’d run mad if he didn’t, and we knew that, but someone had to be his protector, Sirius said, and distrust the people James wouldn’t, and that that fell to him. Two weeks before they died, he told me that! Was that all dissembling? Was he planning to betray them even then? Did he sit in my flat, drunk on half a bottle of whisky, and put on an act? It had to be, right? It had to be pretense?”
He didn’t expect an answer, but he had to keep asking the questions.
“When did we lose him? Can you pinpoint it, Professor? Because I can’t! We sat in a dorm with him and listened to him talk about how much he hated his family, and I stayed up til three in the morning with him in the Common Room while he confessed how terrified he was of turning out like them, and Peter and James and I all rallied around him to make sure he knew that the choice was his and he could follow a different path! When did we lose him? He didn’t begin deceiving us at the age of eleven, so when? When did our conversations shift from genuine to duplicitous? When did he turn against us? Because I am wracking my brain, and I can’t see it! What did I miss? And when did I start missing it?”
His throat raw and his breath ragged from the emotion he hadn’t bothered to try and stop, Remus ran his hands through his hair, swallowing hard, desperate for release, to not feel this way anymore.
“Remus,” Professor McGonagall said into the silence, softly and gently, without any sort of judgment or reproof, “what is it you really want to say?”
He knew what she was asking, and he also knew that he didn’t have an answer, not really. There was too much evidence against him for anyone to assert Sirius’s innocence, and that wasn’t what Remus wanted to do anyway, not really. He just wanted to understand He wanted all the pieces to fit together and make sense, and right now, they didn’t.
“I don’t know,” he said to answer her question, because it really was the only answer he had to give. “I don’t know what I want to say. I know all the evidence points to him, all of it - except my memory of him. The person I knew him to be and the character reference I would have given him in a heartbeat.” He sank into a chair, his elbows braced on his knees and his face buried momentarily in his hands. “I want to know what I missed,” he said bitterly when he’d raised his head once more. “I want to know how I didn’t see this coming. And I know what Professor Snape is saying about me, but I’m not helping him into the castle. I have no idea where he is - believe me, if I did -” He broke off to push down a swell of anger. He took a deep breath. “I want to track him down and find him just as much as anyone else, maybe more. Because I want him to look me in the eyes and tell me how this happened.” The words were hard and fierce and far more unyielding than was his normal wont. “I want him to account for himself, to me. To the last one of us left. I need that.”
There was nothing to say to that, and Professor McGonagall didn’t try. She just let the silence surround them, and Remus kept his focus down and inward, and after a long moment, he spoke again, sharing a truth he had never voiced aloud.
“I miss them,” he whispered, his voice anguished and raw. “I miss them every day. I miss James and Lily, I miss Peter, I miss the Harry who was my nephew and not just my student. And yes, I miss Sirius. I do. I miss them all, these friends who made themselves my family. I never thought - I knew the war was dangerous, I knew people would die. But I never imagined that one night would rip everyone from me. I knew we can’t dwell, and I knew we can’t go back, but - I want my friends back. I want the life we said we would live together when the war was past. I want the life I was promised. Not the lonely existence I’ve been living. I miss them so much. I miss what we were so much, it’s like a physical ache. It’s constant and unyielding, and it’s not fair. Not for any of us, and I just . . . I want to know how it happened.”
He was so lost is his traitorous thoughts and anguished memories that he didn’t realize Professor McGonagall had stood and crossed to him until he felt her hand on his shoulder. Blinking, he raised his head to look at her, this woman he respected and cared about so much. And he was startled to see tears in her eyes.
“This comes about twelve years too late, but Remus - words cannot express - how sorry I am for your loss.”
The words were not what he expected, and they undid him. He closed his eyes and no longer tried to stop the tears. She kept her hand on his shoulder, solid and reassuring, as he mourned for his loss in a way he’d never let himself before. Somehow, his hand found hers, and it was like an anchor. And when he was spent, he squeezed her hand and whispered his thanks.
I.
There was nothing to do as he began the process of packing up his office but try and sort through his churning thoughts and emotions. There were plenty of them, more than enough to keep him occupied. Last night had been a whirlwind, a maelstrom, and so much had happened, not all of it good.
The first thing he’d done after finding himself human in the forest at dawn was run as well as he could for the castle and the Headmaster’s office to demand, panicked, “Did I hurt anyone?” Though blessed relief had flooded through him at Professor Dumbledore’s negative reply, the next thing he’d done was resign. Then he’d asked after Sirius.
As Professor Dumbledore had recounted all that had happened after moonrise the previous night, Remus had been overwhelmed with dismay. So much had gone wrong because of his carelessness and thoughtlessness. Peter had escaped. Sirius and Harry had almost been Kissed. Sirius had had to run again, his name still sullied. And all of that was nothing compared to the knowledge of what could have happened. Remus had reiterated his resignation. Snape needn’t have lashed out; Remus would have been gone without the other man’s actions, but Severus had always been petty and driven by a need for revenge. And now he had that.
He felt Professor McGonagall’s presence in the office doorway before she spoke. Slowly, he turned and met her eye, seeing there all the sorrow and regret and apology that, before this year, he would never have expected her to show so openly. She said nothing, because what was there to say?
To spare her from having to find the words, he spoke instead, saying lightly, “I think I might have to disagree with you about this job being cursed.”
As if his words had broken some barrier, she came into the room, almost reaching for him as she said, “Remus, we can weather this.” Remus just smiled and shook his head.
“Don’t you dare,” he said, his tone still light. What Professor McGonagall didn’t know was that this step was routine. He had done this countless times, and while this job and this place were harder to leave than others had been, the routine was still there. “I didn’t resign because they found out I’m a werewolf,” he informed her. “I resigned because I acted in a manner unbefitting a Hogwarts professor last night.”
“You’re one of the best professors we’ve had walk these halls,” she countered passionately. Remus gave her a wry look.
“You have afforded me more praise in this past year than during my entire tenure as a student here. It’s starting to get disconcerting.”
“Remus-”
“What is left to be said?” he asked quietly. He held her gaze for a long moment. She did not reply. “You’ll have storms enough to weather, I imagine. There’s no need to add mine to the mix. So don’t you dare.”
“Where will you go?” she asked then, and Remus knew she’d accepted his decision, even if she wasn’t happy about it.
“I’ve had some success in the Muggle world in the past,” he said, his tone light again as he turned back to his trunk. “They don’t immediately think ‘werewolf’ when you ask for every full moon off. They’re just pleased to have a worker who only asks to have one evening a month free.”
He could read in her face what she thought of his teaching potential being wasted as he toiled in a Muggle shop somewhere, but she gave the thoughts no voice, for which he was grateful.
“I shall, of course,” he continued, “be available if Professor Dumbledore should require me again.”
He watched her sort through what to say next, watched as she considered and discarded several possible comments, and he could only imagine what they had been.
Aren’t you glad Sirius’s innocence has been proved?
Will you keep in contact with Harry?
How could you not have told your Transfiguration Professor that those three achieved Animagus status in just three years?
But regardless of the things she might have said, when she spoke, it was simply to ask, “Do you need anything?”
“Look after Harry for me?” he asked. “I have a feeling his struggles are far from over. I wish I could do more for him, but . . .” He trailed off, not having the words he needed to finish the thought, but she understood.
“Of course,” she said softly. “And Remus? If there is ever anything you need, please don’t hesitate to ask.” He knew the offer was genuine, and it touched him more than he could have expressed. “You will always have a place here,” she said then, and he smiled indulgently.
“I appreciate the sentiment,” was his soft reply, “even if I doubt its veracity.”
They shared one last long look, an understanding reached between them, and then she nodded and moved for the door. But there was one last thing left to be said.
“Minerva,” he called softly, using her name for the first time. She turned and met his eyes, and the words he had been about to say died on his lips, because they were inadequate. There was no way to express all he wanted and needed to convey. But somehow, he knew, she understood.
“It’s been a privilege, Remus,” she said simply. He smiled, and she left. And that was enough.