The Marauders: Year Seven Part One

The Note of Excuse

October was crawling toward an end and the castle was being trussed up with pumpkins and reminders that Halloween was just about the corner, inciting a good deal of excitement in Sirius Black. "My favorite day of the year, this is," he announced happily, pouring over a parchment at his desk, drawing ideas for costumes to magic together for the occasion. He grinned about at the others as they sat in the boys' dormitories one evening. "I've had an idea." 

"Never were more terrifying words ever spoken," Remus murmured from his bed.

The nearer to the end of October they came, the nearer the full moon got, and the more awful Remus Lupin felt. It's a particularly terrible moon, he kept saying, but it seemed to the others that every moon recently had been a particularly terrible one, and that they kept getting worse and worse. This one had Remus's bones cracking in the days leading up to the full moon so that he couldn't walk anywhere without his knees and ankles snapping and popping as he moved and James had taken to carrying him nearly everywhere piggy-backed style. Every moment not spent in class, the four boys - and most usually Lily as well - spent gathered about in the boys' dormitory room, Remus with his legs up on a pillow, or on Snuffles's back. Today, it was pillows he was propped upon.

Lily asked, "Do I, as Headgirl, even want to know your idea, Sirius?"

Sirius's eyes twinkled, "It's nothing awful. Just imagine if we were to all dress up and we go Trick or Treating about the castle to all of the professors?"

Peter spoke up, "But how would they know that they were to keep treats on hand?"

"Oh we'll post about it, get everyone in the school in on it, it'll be marvelous fun." Sirius looked at Lily, grinning, "Just think, a wholesome activity for even the youngest of wee scholars to partake in."

Lily gave him a suspicious eye, but didn't see where the argument could lie with what he'd suggested, and she said, "I mean, if you wanted to talk to Dumbledore and arrange it..."

Sirius grinned. "Of course I meant to include Dumbledore." He hadn't even thought of it, really.

Remus groaned suddenly, clutching his side, and wincing. Outside, a near-to-full moon was rising and they all stared at the window a long moment. "Tea," Lily announced, "You need tea." And she waved her wand and on the desk behind Sirius there spun her little pink flowered tea pot, steaming and a tea cup with a saucer.

Two days before, Sirius had snuck into the dungeons in the middle of the night and into Slughorn's storeroom for some aconite from the little box on the shelves there. There was loads and loads of it, more aconite than Sirius had ever seen, in great stacks and bundles, piled high. He'd happily stolen whole fistfuls of the leaves, filling his pockets before running back up to the Gryffindor common room with his loot, turning out his pockets at the foot of Remus's bed with a grin on his face. "It must be for the Wolfsbane," Lily had pointed out the next day when she found out about what Sirius had done. Sirius had been afraid that she would chastise him and make him return the leaves, but on the contrary she was actually quite supportive of the idea of helping Remus out - even if it resorted to thievery. 

Now, Sirius put several of the aconite leaves into the tea pot and used his wand to make them swivel about, releasing an almost minty scent into the room. The smell alone seemed to have soothing properties on Remus, and he heartily drank down several cups of the tea, restoring some of the usual sparkle in his greenish-brown eyes, though there were deep, dark bags beneath them that seemed to grow each day. He leaned back into his pillows happily, having finished off the entire pot of the leaves, and sighed, his eyes droopy as the pain subsided and the sleepiness he'd been denied for several days taking over.

"C'mon you lot," whispered James, waving for the others to follow him, "I think Remus can skip over one Defense class in the name of catching up on some sleep."