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Sirius was very careful to keep his nose clean over the next week, leaving early to classes and working extra hard on his assignments so that none of the teachers had anything to complain about him for. He did not want to be expelled. Even in Potions, Slughorn was amazed by the changes in how hard Sirius was working and praised him eagerly for the improvements - which spilled over onto James, who was working side-by-side with Sirius at their table. Severus Snape glowered from across the room at them as Slughorn blustered on and on about how grand a job they’d done. Snape’s disapproval was possibly an even larger highlight than the praise of Slughorn!

It was going on the second week of Sirius’s carefulness - and the beginning of February - before James was able to talk him into their next adventure. They needed to get a book on becoming animagi from the restricted section of the library if they planned to see Remus out to the Shrieking Shack anytime this century. “The way McGonagall talked, we’ll be muddling through this for eons,” he reminded Sirius, “So it’s best if we can get started as soon as possible, isn’t it?”

They waited until late in the evening and took out the invisibility cloak from James’s trunk. Peter watched on anxiously as Sirius and James ducked under the cloak. He had agreed to stay behind to make sure Remus didn’t become suspicious - and also to open the portrait hole door for the boys to sneak through without attracting the attention of the other Gryffindors milling about in the common room. The idea was to collect the book from the library and make it back to the dormitory without anybody noticing they’d gone at all.

Remus was sitting in the common room with Lily Evans, working on some homework assignments together and smiling shyly. James rolled his eyes under the cloak as they snuck down the stairs behind Peter, headed for the door of the common room. “Bloody hell, they need to get on with it if they’re going to,” he whispered.

“You want them to be laying about the common room snogging instead?” Sirius jibed.

“No,” James replied too quickly, “I do not.”

“Me thinks we are quick to reply,” Sirius teased, “Look, James, just because you’re jealous of Remus and Lily and all of the snogging he’ll eventually be doing with her --”

“I’m not jealous of Remus and Lily, I’m --”

“Shhh,” Peter hissed. Alex Tinnamin had looked ‘round from the chair he’d commandeered by the fireplace, as though certain he had heard them. Sirius and James both promptly shut up and Peter scurried quickly to the portrait hole door. “Going for a walk,” he announced, a little too loudly and too practiced.

“Good on you, mate,” said Bilius distractedly from the table where he was hard at work, biting his tongue, writing on a bit of parchment. He turned about in his seat, “Oi - Alex - the cost of my Weasley’s Guide to Dating Attractive Muggle Girls has just gone up a sickle as I’ve come up with yet another brilliant strategy!”

Alex’s face soured, “You’ve got to stop raising the price, mate.”

“Trust me, it’s priceless information you’re receiving, for the mere cost of two galleons and three sickles.”

Alex grumbled, “It can’t both be priceless and have a price, you git.”

Peter quickly opened up the portrait hole and scrambled out, keeping the door open long enough for James and Sirius to follow along before letting it close. He stood awkwardly in the corridor, unsure where his friends were. “Well, good luck,” he told the empty space about him.

“You too. Keep him out of the dorms,” said Sirius, “And if he finds we’ve gone, then you don’t know where we went and we’ll think of something when we get back.”

“He’s too busy not snogging Evans to notice us missing anyway,” said James.

Sirius snickered and they made their way off down the hallway.

Peter was unsure what to do, so he hovered about in the corridor there for a couple of moments, studying the pattern in the carpet, and then climbed back through the portrait hole.

“That was a short walk,” commented Bilius, who, in the time Peter had been in the hall, had gone from the table with his parchment to wrestling Alex Tinnamin on the floor. Alex, however, was clearly the stronger of the two, and had Bilius pegged to the carpet.

Peter only barely noticed them, though, because Remus was on his way toward the dormitory steps. He hastened past the prefect and seeker and ran over to cut off Remus, leaping onto the third step of the case before Remus could reach them. “Where you headed, Rey?” Peter asked quickly.

“Just getting my Defense book,” Remus replied, trying to dodge around Peter.

“What do you need your Defense book for?” laughed Peter manically, as though it were the craziest idea in the known world that one would possibly want their textbooks.

Remus gave Peter a funny look. “We’re studying, Peter,” he replied, “Perhaps you should give it a go sometime?”

“Ha ha ha! Because I don’t study near enough!” Peter chortled nervously. Then, inspiration struck him. “Actually - you know what - you’re quite right, I don’t study near enough. Let me go get my textbooks, too, and I’ll join you and Evans and I’ll get your book while I’m at it, so you can go back over there to Lily and I’ll be right back with your book!”

Remus frowned. The last thing in the entire world he wanted was for Peter to join him and Evans, but he did think that Peter needed to study more… He sighed and relented. “Fine, but hurry up, will you?” He turned back to the table as Peter scrambled up the stairs breathlessly.

Lily looked up as Remus returned. “Where’s your book?” she asked.

“Peter’s getting it for me,” Remus replied, “He’s decided to join us.”

“That’s lovely,” Lily replied politely, though it was clear on her face that she would have rathered Peter not join them as well. She shifted in her seat and adjusted the placement of her parchment and quills. She stared at Remus for a moment. She’d been waiting for a particular topic to come up all evening and it still hadn’t and she was afraid if it hadn’t before Peter returned that it never would. “Do you know what next Wednesday is, Rey?” she asked as innocuously as she could.

The day before the full moon, Remus thought. “No?” he said aloud.

“It’s Valentines,” Lily answered sweetly.

A lump rose up in Remus’s throat. The implications laid down by the fact that Lily Evans was bringing up Valentine’s Day to him like this was even scarier than the werewolf. His palms went from rather dry to pools of sweat within a nanosecond. He swallowed back the great lump, and tried to tell himself that it was all right, but he felt a little sick. This was it then. They were about to actually make their hand-holding a bit more official, then. He took a deep breath, about to ask how she wanted to spend it together, when Peter returned, slamming the large pile of books onto the table.

“Figured I’d bring every subject, in case we decided to change again once we finish Defense Against the Dark Arts,” Peter said, separating Remus’s books from his own. He sprawled them across the table top when he knocked the pile over by accident and Remus’s books went sliding everywhere.

Remus jumped to keep them scratching or falling from the table. He kept meticulous care of his books, which was why, compared to Peter’s, his still looked brand new while Peter’s books were a mess of dings and bent covers and dog eared pages. One of the books - his Potions book - was actually missing a cover, which would have upset Remus very much. When he’d pointed it out to Peter, he hadn’t even given a damn about it, though, and Remus found that sort of careless attitude about the well being of books to be insane.

Lily lifted one of the volumes that had slid across to her with a smile. It was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which Remus had ordered through owl post after she’d told him about it. “You got the book,” she said excitedly.

Remus nodded. “The summary you gave… it, uh, it spoke to me,” he said.

Lily looked up, realizing the connection that Dr. Jekyll had with Mr. Hyde was very much the same as Remus and his wolfish self. Of course, having not known about Remus being a werewolf, she hadn’t thought of it before, when she’d recommended the book, and now her cheeks pinkened. “Did you enjoy it?” she asked.

“I cringed when Mr. Hyde killed people, but… it was a very good book indeed,” he answered.

Lily smiled.

“Muggle books are boring,” Peter injected, feeling left out of the conversation.

“Not all muggle books are boring,” Lily argued. “There’s some that are quite exciting!”

Peter shook his head. “Even the ones they say are supposedly exciting are boring! I read one once about a man who was shipwrecked and you would think that would be a very exciting book but it really wasn’t very exciting at all.”

“Perhaps you should look at a muggle children’s book, I hear those have pictures,” Remus said sourly.

Peter didn’t pick up on the annoyance in Remus’s voice, “But they don’t have moving pictures,” he argued. “My copy of Beedle the Bard has the most brilliant pictures!”

Remus looked at Lily with an apology in his eyes and she smirked back in reply.




Meanwhile, Sirius and James had made it to the library without much incident, their closest call having been nearly running into a Ravenclaw boy who had come running down the corridor shouting to his mates who they’d just passed. It had been a close call as the boy tripped over James’s feet before they could get out of the way and gone sprawling onto the carpet. Luckily, it was Xenophlilius Lovegood and he was rather known for bizarre things happening to him and wild stories, so that when he claimed there had definitely been something there - “Nargles,” he said solemnly - the other Ravenclaws he’d been following only giggled amongst themselves before moving on.

The library itself was no worry for being caught. Pince had closed up hours ago and the shelves were left unguarded. A simple alohamora charm and they’d sprung the door and snuck their way past the desk where Pince usually roosted, past the long tables that the students would crowd around, and through the shelves of regular books until they reached the very dark, blocked off area marked Restricted Section. To borrow books from this section, one needed a note from a Professor granting permission. One look about at the titles and it wasn’t very hard to see why they were restricted - and, some of them, James felt very relieved, too, as several of the Slytherins surely would’ve used the spells contained within on somebody by now if they had been allowed free access to the books.

“Alright, let’s see what we find,” Sirius said, looking at the dusty book spines that surrounded them.

They spent a good deal of time looking for something on becoming an animagus, passing over books like Moste Potente Potions and Curses To Rid You of Your Enemies. Some of the books didn’t even have titles on their spines, but just looked like they contained evil within. Jame made the mistake of pulling one of these out and it tried to bite him before he managed to shove it back onto the shelf, bits of parchment fluttering from the book’s pages. Finally, Sirius pulled out a book entitled Releasing the Animagus Within and waved for James to join him kneeling upon the floor.

They opened the cover and flipped through the pages quickly to see there were step-by-step instructions, complete with illustrations, and a long section on the theory of the animagi. “McGonagall would be pleased to see that,” whispered James.

Sirius said, “These instructions are murder.” He was flipping slowly through the illustrated pages. “I mean, they’re so tedious. Look at this. Holding a mandrake leaf in your mouth for a full month?! Who’s got time for that?”

“It’s quite important,” James intoned, “Unless you wanna end up like Deborah the Duck-billed.”

Sirius looked up at him funnily, “Who?”

“The witch with the Platypus bill,” James said, as though Sirius ought to know who it was, and he himself hadn’t only just learned it the week before during his chat with Professor McGonagall.

Sirius looked back at the book and flipped the pages, going backwards, the theory passing by them. He paused on a page headlined The Form of the Animagus. He asked, “If McGonagall’s right and it’s got something to do with your spirit animal and all that… what animal do you think you’ll take?” he asked James.

James shook his head, “Bugger if I know. You?”

“I should think a lion,” Sirius replied, “Like Gryffindor house. I brave and I kind of lead you lot around and --”

“And to think they say you’re the modest one of the two of us,” smirked James, interrupting.

Sirius said, “You’ll probably be some sort of bird, with how well you fly.”

James grinned, “Then I could fly without a broomstick! But that wouldn’t be very helpful for Remus if I was a bird,” he remembered, “He could chomp me up like nothing. At least being a lion you’ll be right helpful.”

“Yeah, true,” Sirius said.

“What about Peter?” James asked, “What do you think Peter will be?”

Sirius thought for a moment, “Dunno,” he answered, “Maybe a pig.”

James laughed. “Well that’s no good either. I’m sure Remus is just as fond of bacon in his wolf form as he is in his human one.”

They gathered up the book, though, realizing they’d been gone long enough and didn’t know how well Peter was doing at distracting Remus. They pulled the invisibility cloak over their heads and made their way back through the corridors toward Gryffindor Tower.