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On a lovely late afternoon in early June, Remus Lupin settled into his quarters to engage in his nightly ritual.
Over the few months since he had reclaimed the Marauder’s Map from Harry Potter, Remus had developed the (surely not unhealthy) habit of using it every evening, sometimes to check up on the goings-on around the castle, but mostly to converse with his younger self and his dead friends. Or rather, two of them – Prongs and Wormtail. Padfoot, as if sensing he was not welcome among the people whose lives he had destroyed, had yet to make an appearance. This was a great relief to Remus, or so he had convinced himself. He wasn’t sure what he would do if his lover-turned-enemy tried to contact him, even in this echoed form. Had Sirius been plotting against them already when they infused the map with their voices? He couldn’t bear to consider it, and while Mr. Padfoot stayed silent, he didn’t have to.
On this particular afternoon, the impending full moon, a scant few hours from its ascendance, was tugging unpleasantly at Remus’s bones. Pouring himself a couple fingers of firewhiskey, smoothing his mustache, and easing into his desk chair with a heavy sigh, Remus tapped the map to begin his nightly conversation. His own spindly writing was the first to swim into view tonight.
Mr. Moony welcomes Mr. Moony to his nightly moping session and would like to humbly suggest he get a life.
Mr. Wormtail thinks Mr. Moony is being a little hard on himself, but that perhaps it wouldn’t hurt if he went out and experienced the touch of a woman once in a while.
Mr. Prongs would like Messrs. Moony and Wormtail to piss off so he can hear how the Weasley twins’ latest dungbomb endeavor panned out.
Remus smiled wanly. “It went okay, but they did get caught before they were able to get past the staff toilets on the fourth floor. Don’t worry, Prongs, your sixth-year adventure is still the most pungent prank Hogwarts has ever seen. Er, smelled, rather.”
Mr. Wormtail thinks he deserves some credit for that one, thanks. He would very much like to see a stag try to be an effective lookout.
Mr. Prongs offers his most humble apologies and would like to state for the record that Mr. Wormtail was an indispensable agent in all of his most successful endeavors.
Remus chuckled at that. Poor Peter had so rarely gotten his due. He was preparing to add his own gracious response when another line began to scrawl across the page. A line written in a precise, aristocratic hand. The glass of whiskey, halfway to his lips, dropped to the floor and shattered.
Mr. Padfoot is somewhat concerned about the creature that has taken residence upon Mr. Moony’s upper lip and notes that, while Mr. Moony likely thinks it makes him look dignified and professorial, it mostly makes him look like the old man he is at heart.
Remus threw the map across the desk as if it had burned him. Maybe burning him would have been preferable. He was horrified and, it must be said, a bit nonplussed. For the first time in months, Sirius had written to him through the map, and it was…to mock his facial hair? Were the voices of the map not actually as intuitive as he had given them credit for? Perhaps this would be what finally stopped him from spending all of his nights talking to an inanimate piece of parchment – if Mr. Padfoot were to start making regular appearances, his fragile mental stability might well collapse. Or maybe it already had.
Remus vanished the glass shards, poured himself a much larger glass of whiskey (curse this werewolf metabolism), and sat in his armchair, across the room from his desk. He pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to clear his mind, to think of something – anything – else, but Mr. Padfoot’s words wouldn’t leave him alone. Finally, he decided there was nothing else for it. Remus stood and headed briskly for the bathroom. He supposed that the mustache may have outlived its usefulness.
(Remus told himself that it was just time for a change, but if he were being a little more honest with himself, he hoped that without a mustache to make fun of, Sirius wouldn’t have anything else to say, and he could go back to chatting with the map every night. If he were being entirely honest with himself, which he wasn’t, he would also have been able to admit that, even after all this time and everything Sirius had done, he still wanted Sirius to find him attractive. Remus had always been very good at not being entirely honest with himself.)
Upon opening the bathroom door, Remus was hit with a noxious odor. It took him a panicked moment to remember that its source was the goblet of wolfsbane waiting by the sink. Of course – after the stress of his conversation with the map, it had almost slipped his mind that tonight was the full moon. (Imagine forgetting something like that!) He downed the potion, grimacing at the taste – he often wondered whether Snape purposely added something to make it extra bitter just for him – then lathered up and shaved off the mustache.
Remus hated to admit it, but he did look better without it. A bit younger, sure, but he had enough grey in his hair and wrinkles at the corners of his eyes that the students would surely still see him as an authority figure. Padfoot had always been obnoxiously correct about these things, hadn’t he? Remus took a moment, hunched over the sink, to try reconciling his lingering affectionate feelings toward Sirius with the knowledge of the monster he truly was. In the end, as usual, he was unsuccessful, and had to push the thoughts to the back of his mind before he lost it completely.
Okay, Remus thought desperately, what would be a good, normal thing to do right now? What would he usually be doing in the early evening before a wolf night? Maybe he would check the map, see whether anyone was waiting in his office to talk to him, and if not, he would call it a night early. Everything would seem clearer without the full moon confounding his emotions, he was sure of it.
Remus went back out to his desk and gingerly picked up the map. He made sure to get the passphrase exactly right so as not to accidentally resummon any ghosts of his past, then did a quick scan of the parchment. Ah – Harry, Ron, and Hermione were visiting Hagrid. He vaguely remembered that Hagrid’s hippogriff had an appeal today. It was kind of them to keep him company, he thought. How very like James and Molly they were, in that regard. But wait…there was someone else leaving with them. Who was it? He squinted at the parchment, and for the second time that evening, a line on the map stole the breath from his throat.
Peter Pettigrew.
And again, not far from Hagrid’s hut, another name…
Sirius Black.
It only took a moment for everything to click into place after that. Remus grabbed his wand and bolted out the door.