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Wild Young Things


Next day, the fight was completely forgotten - which was good because they had much bigger things to worry about how, with Regulus’s threat to tell Orion and Walburga about the letters hanging over their heads.

Besides that, too, it was the first full moon of term and Remus wasn’t feeling well and would be leaving before breakfast to go out to the Shrieking Shack. He had dark circles under his eyes that worried Sirius and his skin was paler than usual. “It’s just a bad one,” he said with a shrug, trying to downplay how terrible he felt. “It happens now and then, the moon just affects me more than usual.” Sirius helped him pack his things for the Shack, keeping a careful watch over him until it was time that he left the dormitories.

“I wish Operation Snuffles had worked out better than it did,” Sirius lamented as he crunched his way through a stack of jam-covered toast, his mind still on Remus. “I hate that he’s gotta go out there and be all alone through it.”

James looked about, “Alright, I gotta tell you --” he leaned closer and whispered to Sirius and Peter everything that Professor McGonagall had said about being James’s mentor in the Animagus process and the cryptic way she’d bade him goodbye. “Do you suppose she knows?”

Peter shivered, “It sounds like she at least suspects it.”

“She didn’t mention me and Peter at all?” Sirius hissed.

James shook his head, “Not a word.”

“Maybe she only suspects you?” Peter suggested.

“Do you think we should take her help?” James whispered. “She might be able to explain where we went wrong.”

“You don’t want to get in trouble, though, by telling her!” Peter squeaked.

Sirius rubbed his chin, “What if you ask her to give you sort of an overview of the process? You know, like you’re thinking about it, but you haven’t decided yet, and you just want to know sort of what it takes. You know? Then maybe there’ll be at least some idea of if we missed something… and she’s none the wiser about it because as far as she knows you’ve just changed your mind about becoming an animagus at all.”

“Brilliant!” James said, nodding, “You’re a genius.”

Sirius smirked, “No, I’m a ruddy idiot, remember?”

“You’re the best ruddy idiot there is,” James said, smirking back.

Peter still wasn’t sure he understood exactly how it was that Sirius and James had made up from their row so fast - whatever Remus had said about it being a nature of their friendship. Peter felt as though his friendship with them was nothing like that at all, though he wished immensely that it was.

The boys finished their breakfast and headed off to their classes, followed by Lily Evans. They went first to the Charms corridor, where Flitwick had them bewitching books to fly about the room and then off to Transfiguration and McGonagall’s latest assignment of transfiguring a pineapple into a quaffle. When the class was over, James gave Sirius and Peter a meaningful look and nodded for them to go on without him and he hung back until they’d left. Lily was talking to McGonagall at the front of the classroom about ways to get the quaffle to turn the reddish shade that it ought to be, instead of retaining the brown of the pineapple’s skin.

When Evans had gotten the answer she needed, she collected her things. “Aren’t you coming to lunch, Potter?”

“Why? Will you miss me, love?” he asked, grinning at her.

Lily rolled her eyes. “No,” she replied, shoving the last of her things into her bookbag.

“I gotta talk to McGonagall,” James answered more seriously. “I’ll catch you up, Evans, go on.”

Lily didn’t answer before leaving.

McGonagall was collecting her papers together. “Mr. Potter,” she said once Lily had left, “I take it that you have considered my offer?”

James nodded slowly, trying to decide how best to say what he had to. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking on it… You said that it’s a lot of work to become an animagus… What exactly goes into it?” he asked, “For example, exactly what are the steps?”

McGonagall eyed him over her spectacles.

“Just curious.”

She considered him a moment, then took a deep breath. “First you would study the theory.”

James nodded, “Okay, right. And then?”

“And then you would take the necessary steps to make your body susceptible to the to the change from man to beast and back again.” McGonagall said, “It takes quite a lot out of you - more than you may perhaps be considering. It’s not exactly the most comfortable experience, for one.”

James hesitated. “I reckon not…” He contemplated his options for furthering the conversation, and finally went with, “So… how does one prepare for it?”

McGonagall put the last of her papers into a little box, contemplating her options for answering him as well. Finally, she chose to go with a point blank sort of response. “With a potion. The Draught of Change,” she said. James felt like nodding to encourage her on, but knew he needed to keep his face perfectly straight or else he’d be caught for sure. “It’s a very complicated potion with a great many steps involved in its preparation and a very long stewing process.”

James nodded slowly, “So you just drink that potion and poof, you’re an animagus?” he asked, raising an eyebrow, “I thought you said it was a load of hard work?”

“It is,” McGonagall said. “The Draught of Change doesn’t make you into an animagus. Nothing makes you into an animagus.”

James asked, “Well then how do you get to be one?”

“You become an animagus,” McGonagall said. “Once you’ve taken the Draught, you’ve only just begun the process. Your muscles and skin and bone are ready to change, but it’s your mind - the theory - that makes you be an animagus. You have to practice at it and learn how to bring that part of yourself out of you.”

James thought on it a moment, “So… so the animal part of me, of anyone really, is always inside of them?”

“Yes,” McGonagall said, nodding. “It’s a part of you, the same as a patronus.” She waved her wand and a wispy white cat seemed to fall forth from her wand tip, landing on its four paws on her desk. “It’s a part of who you are. You have to discover who you are before you can summons that part of yourself. That’s why the theory of it is so important.”

James nodded, staring at the cat.

“Does that sound like something you can do, Potter?” she asked.

James looked up at her. “I’ll have to think on it some more,” he answered. “Thanks Professor.”

McGonagall watched him leave, shaking her head as she finished collecting her things, and then she started off down the corridor toward her office, mumbling to herself about wild young things that didn’t ever want to listen…




“So what did McGonagall say?” Sirius asked when James joined him and Peter at the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall.

James looked about to be sure that the others at the table were thoroughly engrossed in their own conversations and wouldn’t be listening in on theirs before turning to face Sirius and Peter. “She said that the Draught is only one of the steps. Basically, it’s like it prepares you for it, but you have to know the theory and like psychoanalyze yourself in order to actually do the change correctly.”

“I didn’t psychoanalyze myself to become Snuffles!” Sirius said.

“But you did it in your sleep didn’t you?” James asked, “So you did it subconsciously.”

“I s’pose,” Sirius murmured.

James explained, “Apparently, the animal we become is like a part of us, the way our patronus is, like it somehow represents us.”

“Are you calling me a dog?” Sirius grinned.

James grinned back, “If the shoe fits…”

“Chew it!” Sirius laughed.

Peter asked, “What animal am I like?”

James and Sirius both looked at him for a long moment. “I reckon you could be a squirrel with how twitchy you are,” said Sirius.

“And in how you store away food, too!” James said excitedly.

“I don’t want to be a squirrel,” whined Peter.

James looked about between them, “What do you reckon me being a buck means?”

A grin spread across Sirius’s face, “Perhaps you’re horny.”

James shoved him as Peter’s eyes went wide. “That is very rude!” he squeaked, turning red at the very words, even as James and Sirius cackled and guffawed and smacked at each other in delight at the dirtiness of Sirius’s mouth, the way most young boys do when they first try on a dirty word for size.

“Good one, Sirius,” James wheezed happily.




As the light failed across the land outside, Remus sat, peeking through one of the cracks of the boarded up windows, hugging his knees to his chest, his stomach sick and his muscles literally heavy with the aches that throbbed through them. He felt close to tears, as though the pain in his limbs were squeezing them out of him, like a sopping sponge. He rocked himself gently, watching the sunlight disappearing.

Every now and then there was a moon which had a much stronger effect on Remus’s body, the way a particularly strong virus might do to the immune system. The ordinary full moon always felt a bit as though the blood of his veins had been replaced by boiling water, but every now and then an extraordinary moon would make it feel like molten metal. This was one of those moons. A bad moon rising, his mum had always called it.

These were the moons he feared most. They were the ones where he was the hungriest, the ones that he lost himself the deepest within the werewolf’s skin.

The first rays of the pale blue streaked across the sky, reaching out like long fingers and he gulped, watching them come towards him, as though watching his own death sentence approach. He closed his eyes at the very last second and as the beams creeped between the slats of the window, the lycanthropy took over.

Shuddering, Remus fell to the floor, his back aching, skin splitting open to allow for the fur to sprout across him, rippling like water struck by stones. His bones cracked and a scream vibrated from his lungs, slowly losing it’s pitiful boyish sound to deepen and elongate into a long and haunting howl. Teeth burst forth from his strong jaw and he lashed out, his claws scraping across the wood in his fit of anger, his teeth sinking into the first flesh it could find - his hind legs, tearing and ripping and snarling and shrieking.

The moon flooded the floor of the shack, illuminating the thick pool of blood left behind as Remus’s cries rang through the night.