Chapter 25: Conspiratorial
It was too early for anyone to be in the library, especially on a Saturday, but Sirius still strolled there, hands in pockets and a smile on his face as he looked around the stacks. Every table he came across was empty. Normally, he would have turned around and returned to the Great Hall, but he already knew the person he sought wasn't at breakfast. Around the final table and into the dark corner, straight to the discouraging bars of the Restricted Section, he swaggered confidently.
Even the Restricted Section looked empty, but after a moment he heard the noise of someone walking around among the sequestered books. Then the curses started, softly muttered and in a very familiar voice. Harry James Granger. Just where he thought the boy would be.
"Harry James Granger!" Sirius called loudly, completely unperturbed by the eagle-eyed librarian looking his way. "Oi! Gorgeous Granger!"
Blushing a deep and amusing red, Harry ran from the back to keep him from shouting that name again. Sirius couldn't imagine why, it was a perfectly respectable nickname and one he would have been proud to wear, although, he answered to 'Sexy Sirius' quite often. "What do you want?" Harry asked through the bars, his voice a low murmur.
"It's Hogsmeade this weekend," he replied, his tone implying that what he wanted was obvious.
"And I told you I have stuff to do," the boy reminded him. "I have a lot more to look through than I thought. Without Hermione, this is going to take me all day. I think I'll be here pretty late tonight. Don't be surprised if I just camp out down here if Madam Pince will let me."
Sirius frowned. "Right."
"Maybe tomorrow, too," he added causally as he shifted the heavy book in his arms.
"Do you need help? I'm quite smart, you know. Don't let the pretty face fool you." Sirius grinned.
Harry's casualness faltered and he offered no smile in return. "No, that's okay. You promised Tildy you'd go with her. 'Sirius Black always keeps his word' and all that."
Sirius frown deepened; he was being told to piss off again. He didn't like that.
"I'll be out for food and Quidditch if there's practice," the boy promised and disappeared back into the Restricted Section. Sirius stood staring through the bars for a long minute, thoroughly annoyed at having been turned down. So much for James's concerns about Harry liking him; the boy barely recognised his existence, accepting his advances but providing no response to suggest he was either interested or disinterested in what he was offering. He could probably leap naked into his lap and Harry would just complain that he had been trying to read.
"Did you want something?" asked Madam Pince sharply.
"Yeah," Sirius muttered with a bland shrug and wandered back to the Great Hall, dropping onto the bench without bothering to look at his companions.
"Where's Granger?" James asked.
"Library, researching. Doesn't expect to be back until late, maybe not at all," he replied dully.
"Well, that's handy. The full moon is tonight," the boy grinned. "If he knew he was doing us a favour, I'd thank him for it." He turned back to his plate, eating heartily in preparation of the long morning he intended to spend wooing Lily Evans.
Remus shifted closer to him on the bench; Sirius looked at him sideways, confused by the sudden pressing of the other boy's thigh against his own. Surely, his flirtations had not been that far off the mark. Remus was not looking at him in the doe-eyed manner most of his targets wore but with narrowed eyes that glittered with his thoughts. They played at flirting just to gross Peter out, but everyone knew it was a joke… wasn't it?
Remus leaned closer, Sirius wondered if he was aiming for a kiss. "Quite the coincidence, wouldn't you agree?" Remus muttered conspiratorially.
"What is?" Sirius asked, hiding his uncertainty well enough.
"Harry," he replied quietly. That single name set Sirius's heart to beating properly in his chest and his lungs to working again as he let out the breath he had been holding.
"Isn't it amazing that he would get so focused on research the day and night of the full moon?" Remus continued, oblivious to Sirius's temporary crisis. "Like you said, he might not make it back to the dorm tonight."
"Yeah…" Sirius said slowly and watched as his friend's mouth pulled into a knowing smirk he knew well.
"Much like last month when he got so caught up with his homework, he fell asleep in the common room." The boy levelled a look at Sirius that left no doubt of his suspicions.
"You think he's up to something, too?" Sirius asked. "You think he knows?"
Remus shrugged, as if someone discovering his furry little problem was no worse than waking up and finding a spot on his chin. "Unlikely. But if he does, he's not said anything and he's being very considerate to give me space each full moon. Even if that's not the case, there is something off about him. More off than we originally thought, I'm sure of it." Remus dug into the pocket of his faded and worn jeans, pulling out a folded piece of parchment. "I even wrote out my list for you. I remember how fond you are of listing personal oddities… Operation What's Weird About Remus, wasn't it?"
The boy couldn't help but smile. "This time it's Operation Not-Prongs."
"Well, at least the names are getting better," Moony commented.
They put their heads together and discussed in low mutters the lists they had each compiled over the last two months. Burn scars, nightmares, mood swings and knowledge of secret passages, Sirius knew, but their lists had each grown. Two weeks after starting at Hogwarts, Harry helped a first year boy to his History of Magic lesson in a section of the castle he had never been. Having never attended that class, Harry should not have known where it was held, let alone that it was taught by a boring old ghost names Binns, but Remus had heard him talking about it with the first year as if he had been forced to sit through the class, too. On one late-night run to the kitchens, Harry, tired from practice and stupefied by too much food, commented that he was glad his house-elf was not in the kitchens because the elf hated him for a blood-traitor and might try to poison him. Remus had remarked that, being Muggle-raised, Harry could not possibly have a house-elf, but the boy insisted that Kreacher was horrid.
This naturally caught Sirius's interest given that his family's current house-elf was named Kreacher, an odd name among a species which favoured shorter, cuter names like Poddy and Gorny.
"And his scars," Remus said, jotting it down on the list.
"We've already got them," Sirius tried to bat his quill away.
"No, you've got the burn and that one on his arm," he said. "He's got ones on his head and hand, too."
"Has he?"
"How can you not have noticed?" Remus raised that insufferable eyebrow. "You spend enough time staring at him."
Sirius scowled at him, annoyed at having his obviousness and his obliviousness pointed out to him. "Tosser. What sort of scars?"
"A lightning bolt on his forehead. It's small, but looks odd. I don't think it was made by a cut or anything, but I can never get near enough to see without him knowing," Remus said.
The Beater's scowl pulled into a frown as he thought about Harry's face. It was true, he did stare at Harry enough to have seen something as odd as a scar on his forehead, but the boy's hair was so wild and fell into his face so often that he must have missed it… or been staring at his eyes or mouth as he often found himself doing. He cleared his throat, embarrassed, "What about his hand?"
"That's the weirdest one," Remus said, his voice heavy and the glimmer falling away from his eyes. "He keeps it hidden with magic. I've only seen it once before he put the concealment charm on it."
"Why would he hide that one and not the others?"
He laughed darkly. "Probably wants to forget about how he got it. It's not from a cut or burn, Sirius. It's writing and looks like it the words were carved pretty deep."
"Writing?" Sirius frowned.
"'I must not tell lies.'" Remus quoted the scar verbatim. "I can't imagine that's the sort of thing he'd willing have permanently etched into his skin."
Sitting back on the bench, Sirius thought again about the boy he'd taken to flirting with so shamelessly, the dark turn he took, his sister's warning that too many had let him down, scars, secrets and now, apparently, lies he was never to tell. Who the hell was this Harry James Granger?
"Did I mention that neither one asked how I was after the September full moon?" questioned Remus. "They didn't even bring it up. Like it was something they knew they weren't supposed to talk about. Hermione came to visit me in hospital but only because Tildy made her, and she didn't even ask what was wrong."
"You said yourself that they probably don't know about you," Sirius said quietly. "We haven't said a word; Dumbles and Minnie and Poppy wouldn't tell. Only Snivellus knows – still sorry about that, by the way – but he hates Harry for looking like Prongs and Hermione for being Muggle-born. He wouldn't talk to them even to rat you out."
"You lot managed to figure it out on your own," Remus reminded him.
"Yeah, after nearly a year. Clever they may be, but nobody can sort that out with only two full moons as evidence."
"Maybe…"
"Focus on the issue at hand, Moony," Sirius scolded and stabbed the list with his finger. "We're talking about Harry's secret, not yours. Oh, I got another one: He mentioned Zonko's just the other day. He said he was tired of the place, as if he had been there before."
Remus nodded and jotted it down onto their combined list of oddities. He frowned and looked at the list again, marking certain points with arrows and stars for emphasis. "Well, I can't speak to the entire spectrum of peculiarities," he said slowly, "but more than a few of these would suggest that Harry has spent more time in this castle than he claims."
"He's been here before?" Sirius frowned as Remus nodded. The words barely had time to sink in before they caught sight of Harry coming into the Great Hall for breakfast. The pair of conspirators scrambled to hide their list and look as if they had not been talking about him for the last thirty minutes. If they did a poor job, Harry didn't notice. He was looking over his own notes, a list of spells if the butchered Latin was any indication.
"What's that?" Remus asked.
"Just some spells Hermione and I need to test," he replied casually, so casually they would have taken no interest in the list at all if they were not already focused on discovering his secret. If anything was going to help them learn the boy's hidden truth, then the thing he spent hours researching privately would likely be it.
"Sounds fun," the werewolf commented. "Mind if I help?"
"Better not," said Harry with an edge of nervousness creeping into his voice as he hastily shoved the list into his pocket. "You going to Hogsmeade today?"
Sirius watched as Remus nodded and let the boy distract him with chatter; anyone who knew Moony could see the glint still shining impishly in his eyes. Despite outward appearances, he knew his friend was still thinking about the boy's secrets. As the Great Hall began to clear and students started bundling up to walk to the village, Remus stood and grinned, a different sort of glint entering his baby blues.
"Better make sure no one steals your sister away," he said and ran back down the aisle to find Hermione.
"Should I be worried?" Harry asked as he glanced over his shoulder, watching Remus smile winningly at the girl.
"Probably," Sirius smirked, and considered needling the boy further when his focus fell to the wall ahead of them. Through the small crowd that had gathered, he could see the massive stones littered with foul words, dripping red and drawing no small amount of attention. "What the hell?"
Harry, walking beside him, stumbled and fell, crying out at the unexpected turn his world had taken.
"Got you!" the rasping voice of the caretaker called jubilantly. He ran forward on pained, flat feet and grabbed Harry by the wrist, pulling him up and examining the boy's hands, red with ink.
"I didn't do anything!" Harry protested despite the obvious evidence to the contrary. "I just got here!"
"Returning to the scene of the crime, eh?" The old man ignored his declarations of innocence, and hauled the boy away with surprising strength. "Detention!"
"What bollocks!" Sirius shouted, but Filch was too focused on Harry to be bothered with him. "He didn't do it!"
"But who did?" James wondered, looking at the broken ink bottle where Harry had fallen. Someone had set the boy up. "Bet it was Snivellus. That git hates him almost as much as he hates me."
Sirius glared at the wall like it was the one at fault. "Snivellus…"
Face flush with excitement and pride, Peter scurried up. "Great news!" he announced. "We don't have to worry about Harry catching us tonight! I got him out of the way! Did you see?"
The boy shrunk as they turned on him, all the animosity they had been saving for the Slytherin now thrown at their friend. It was enough to make the boy shit himself, which he might just have done.
"You did that?" Sirius grit his teeth.
He could only squeak in reply.
"He was going to be in the library all night," growled Sirius angrily. He was not sure which made him more livid, that their friend had been the one to do this or that it was Harry who had been caught. He suspected that if the same prank had been pulled on Snivellus he would have found it brilliant and patted Peter on the back for his ingenuity. Hell, if he had pulled it on James he would have laughed, but on Harry… He couldn't even express how furious he was.
Peter turned his watery eyes to his other friend, "J-james?"
"What if he gets detention for the month?" the Quidditch captain glared. "We need him on the team."
"B-but I thought you'd be impressed," Peter managed. "He's out of the way…"
"Go apologise," Sirius ordered, his voice cold with hatred. "I don't want to see your face again until you do." He turned and strode away, James along with him.