Chapter 3
It took me a full month and a half after arriving at Hogwarts to truly settle into my studies and get a grip on myself. Winter had long since taken hold outside the castle windows, and I had only just finished making sense of the knowledge Remus had left me. It had taken me just over forty days to work through the curriculum of two and a half years of magical education.
And there was something to be proud of in that, I'll say. The school actually taught its students quite well, strange as it was to admit. Simple spells came in abundance. Transfiguration was practiced regularly. Potions, on the other hand, had given me the most trouble on the theoretical side, while Defense Against the Dark Arts had presented the opposite problem — the theory was manageable, but the practical work sometimes locked up completely.
Defense didn't require mastering a particularly large number of spells. But almost every one of them, barring the simplest ones useful only against minor magical nuisances, was genuinely difficult to execute. I pushed myself to drill each one properly, knowing from experience that in a closed boarding school where every teenager walked around with a wand they could use almost freely, the ability to defend yourself magically wasn't optional.
Most of those skills had been hammered into Remus before he ever arrived at Hogwarts — his father had made no distinctions about what his son should or shouldn't learn early, apparently eager to push the boy out of the house as quickly as possible. But Defense lessons had their own gems. It wasn't by accident that this year's class was taught by a retired Auror named Ernest Aberwein, who handled the subject with real competence, even if he was somewhat sharp-tongued with students who disappointed him.
Sharp-tongued, more often than not, in my direction and the others'. Ernest knew about my nature, as every teacher in the school did, and he made no particular effort to hide his bias. Sirius and James he simply disliked, on account of the regular sabotage our group inflicted on his lessons. Only Peter seemed exempt from his irritation — the man had apparently decided that we were dragging a frightened boy into all of it, rather than it being his own choice.
"What are you thinking about this time, Remus?" Sirius snapped me back to the present, waving a hand directly in front of my face with his usual lack of subtlety.
"Nothing. Just sleeping with my eyes open," I said, brushing him off, which drew a genuine laugh from him. "By the way — remind me tonight to give back those books on mental magic. I'm done with them."
"Forget it. Return them before the Christmas holidays. I wasn't planning to give them back to my parents before then anyway." He spread his parchment across the desk as he spoke — Charms was about to start. "Just keep them."
"Just make sure you actually read them yourself before you do. I promise you, they're fascinating. I even came up with a few ideas for using some of the spells on Niunius." I smiled, knowing precisely which lever to pull with Black. Besides, I'd recently found something suspicious in my breakfast — something that couldn't be ignored.
"Oh, it's been a while since I've heard something that delightful from you, my fanged friend. Spill — what did you sniff out?" The teenager leaned closer immediately, interest ignited.
"Mental illusions are a remarkable thing, I'll tell you that," I said, dropping my voice conspiratorially, and began walking him through the details of my idea.
It wasn't that I particularly wanted to make the hook-nosed Slytherin's life difficult — if anything, the opposite. I was honestly indifferent to the boy. But drifting too far from the group wasn't wise either. And the prank I had in mind, while certainly embarrassing for Snape, couldn't cause him any real harm. He also wouldn't be able to identify mental magic as the culprit. Illusions could be produced through charms or potions, both of which a nose-deep fanatic of the subject like Snape was bound to know. Let him dig in that direction. I'd even leave a few empty vials at the scene to make sure he didn't think toward mental magic.
Because as I recalled from my previous life, the greasy-haired future Potions master was, in fact, a master of mental magic. Which meant some natural talent for that discipline likely existed in him already, and in my situation, that could complicate things considerably.
It would be very inconvenient if Snape, during whatever retaliation he planned against our group, decided to poke around inside my head. My own abilities in that area were barely nascent — I had only just begun training in the methods of shielding and controlling my own mind. So I needed to be genuinely careful here, to avoid manufacturing problems for myself out of nothing.
Especially now that I'd confirmed — somewhat recently — that Hogwarts's library did in fact carry books on Legilimency and Occlumency. Nothing like the volumes Black had obtained for me, of course. The reading list sent by his father had never heard of censorship, overflowing with various schemes, spells, and techniques for working with the mind, some of them quite advanced.
What the library held was, so far, rather… questionable in its usefulness. Too much water, too many tangential musings, too much outright philosophizing. But even those books had things worth learning, if you were willing to work for them. And Snape was a Slytherin — who was to say some housemate of his wouldn't be willing to share knowledge with a promising young talent? Not for free, obviously, but these were things worth considering well in advance.
"Mister Black! Mister Lupin! I'll ask you to maintain quiet in the classroom. The fact that I was a few minutes late is no excuse for disrupting your fellow students!" Flitwick's sharp voice cut through our conversation at some point — he'd noticed Sirius and I whispering rather actively about our planned operation against Snape.
"Sorry, Professor," Sirius and I said in near-perfect unison. Neither of us had any desire to annoy the miniature professor without good cause. Flitwick may have been half-goblin, which led many wizards — especially the pureblood variety — to look down on him.
But as a teacher, our Charms professor was a genuine virtuoso and an enthusiast of the subject in the truest sense. A teacher by calling, not merely profession. No one else could direct the minds of young witches and wizards toward the mysteries of magic with quite such sincere and wholehearted dedication.
In short, Flitwick was beloved by the school, and no one was foolish enough to antagonize him without cause. Because sooner or later you'd need help with something difficult, and there'd be no one better to turn to. Not everyone had spare pocket money to bribe older students for tutoring.
In my case, things were particularly lean in that department. Remus's father hadn't been generous with money — he'd left me the bare minimum needed to buy myself something sweet a couple of times a week. Anything more substantial was out of reach.
And there was nothing I could do about it for now. Hogwarts offered very few ways to earn money, and those that existed had long since been claimed by older students. But I wasn't in desperate need at the moment. My goal for the near future was already set, and achieving it required almost no money at all.
What it required was the library, a wand, and an enormous amount of determination — because I saw no other path to becoming a skilled and powerful wizard. And that was precisely the goal I had set myself, having developed a keen sensitivity to how the wizarding world treated those who were genuinely formidable. They were either feared or revered. But the core principle was the same either way: as long as I was strong, as long as my abilities were something unique and valuable, no one would dare say a word about my nature.
And if I could somehow find a way to stop unleashing my inner beast every full moon…
On that front, no miracles had occurred. The very first full moon after my arrival in this body had been more than sufficient to illustrate why my predecessor had reacted so sharply to his "furry little problem."
The sensation of your own mind being pushed to the back while something else — something that was genuinely a monster — moved into your body and took the controls. I had hundreds of those moments in Remus's memories, but experiencing it myself gave me something no amount of inherited recollection ever could. I hadn't liked it. Not in the slightest. Not even close to slightly, if I'm being completely honest about it.
*It's not for nothing that lycanthropy is considered a curse,* I thought, with an inward shudder, absorbing what was obvious truth for anyone who lived here. *A werewolf is truly a dark and terrible creature — one that, come the full moon, could drain an entire Muggle village dry simply by being nearby.*
I had quietly harbored a hope, even hidden from myself, that maybe things wouldn't be quite so extreme in my case. That because of the rather specific anomaly in my consciousness — and likely not only my consciousness — the beast wouldn't manifest as fully. Or that it would manifest in some less… revolting way.
But no. My secret hope had gone unfulfilled. Lupin's furry little problem remained entirely unchanged.
Though — that wasn't quite accurate either. There had been some difference. It might have been a simple trick of perception, but I seemed to feel the beast's frenzy far more acutely than the original Remus ever had.
The boy, at least, had remembered almost nothing of those hours when the beast controlled his body. I remembered — hazily, yes, and what I did remember was difficult to process through the sheer difference in perception. But even so, that animal fury, that terrible hunger, that wild and insane craving for blood — those things I would never forget.
They were too alien to everything I was. And the next full moon was already approaching.
"Hey, Sirius, Remus — what were you two whispering about all through Charms?" James appeared the moment class ended, swooping over to us. He and Peter had been sitting in the front row and had missed every word of our planning session.
"Oh, Moony came up with an absolutely brilliant idea, listen to this…" Sirius grinned and immediately began filling the others in.
"Mm. Not bad at all. We'd just need to learn the spells first," James said quickly, acknowledging the merit of my idea with a gleam of something mean in his eyes. "Niunius is going to absolutely lose it this time."
"Right, but don't get ahead of yourself. The spell isn't simple — I don't even fully know how to approach it yet." I moved to slow him down before he sprinted off to start immediately. "Mental magic has always been considered one of the most demanding disciplines."
"But you've already worked it out, haven't you, Moony?" James looked at me hopefully, adjusting the enchanted glasses on his nose.
"I've only just started," I said, shaking my head. "So either way, you'll all have to at least attempt to learn the mental illusion spells alongside me. On my own, I'll be working on this for a long time yet."
"Ah, damn… Well, all right. Peter, you in?" James said, not quite losing his enthusiasm.
"Of course," came the inevitable reply from the boy who didn't dare consider disagreeing with two slightly-overconfident heirs of noble families.
I mentally shook my head at the whole spectacle. Sirius and James could be decent enough companions. Sirius especially — the boy had already promised to petition his parents for books on whatever topics I needed, and he'd meant it. He understood the seriousness of my situation and genuinely wanted to help.
Which was why I felt a real warmth toward him, and genuine gratitude for the help and support he'd shown. But if I was being honest with myself, as excellent as Black and Potter could be to the people inside their circle, they could be equally terrible to everyone outside it.
In that sense, Peter and I were actually somewhat alike. The difference was that Pettigrew had attached himself to this group most likely out of instinctive self-preservation — fear of becoming a target rather than a bystander. Whereas I had rather more calculating thoughts about the two teenagers behind whose family names stood influential and serious magical bloodlines.
Which didn't exactly reflect well on me. But truly, I knew how to be a grateful person. If Sirius or James ever needed something from me, I would help them. Within reason, with basic common sense applied — but whenever what they needed didn't cross certain lines, the ones drawn mainly by the laws of Magical Britain, I would not abandon them.
That was a promise I'd made to myself. And I intended to keep it.