Remus sighs as he walks through the Hogwarts Express, going to school for the last time. There were less people here than all of the years before, less first years and hardly any muggleborns at all. The Gryffindor wasn't surprised, not with the way that the war had been progressing, the danger that lurked just from existing. He wasn't surprised at all to see that all of the Gryffindor seventh years had returned, blood status be damned. They were lions after all, reckless and brave.
Sometimes Remus found himself wondering if he was still one of them at all.
Remus walked into the prefect's carriage and grinned at Dora as she smiled up at him, her eyes bright. Nodding at Regulus as he did so back, stretching like a cat.
The three didn't say anything to one another, only that small gesture as Remus sat down on Pandora's other side. They knew that this year was going to be different from the last, people were going to care now what the three did, what the son of two purebloods and the supposed puppet of Dumbledore were going to do. Their group's friendship always raised brows before, but now they couldn't afford for them to do so.
The trio watched as James and Lily walked into the carriage, the pair close in a way that made most of its occupants breath a sigh of relief that they had finally gotten together and would no longer have to watch the pair pine over one another from afar. Head Boy and Head Girl, together at last.
This fact didn't stop James from looking at Remus strangely every few minutes, as if expecting the wolf to suddenly move to another seat while he was not watching. Remus only rolled his eyes, running out the same speech that he had been listening to for years now as he thought of how to adjust the runes and enchantments that the trio had used last year with the shoes to give a muggle motorbike the same properties.
" Lupin ."
Remus looked up as his name was called and a hand roughly shook his shoulder, the voice using a harsher tone than it had in years. Using his last name as well.
"We're discussing schedules, dear," Dora said airily as she shifted to cover up Regulus's retreating arm, but the damage was already done.
Silence filled the room as everyone had seen the mark peeking out from beneath the youngest Black brother's school robes. Remus pretended to be just as surprised as the rest of them, not that James seemed to buy it much.
"Patrol schedules, right?" Remus asked after the silence had dragged on long enough, after the sight had been ingrained in the other's minds enough for the whole school to know by the end of the feast just how the youngest Black had spent his summer.
Remus and the rest of their group had engineered it this way, to see the school's reactions out and in the open, and for Regulus to know those most likely to join the other side as well.
It was a test, as plain and simple as they come.
"Patrol schedules," Lily agreed, but there was fear in the girl's voice. Fear that Remus had intentionally caused. He knew that he should feel bad about doing so, but he also knew that this was for the family that he had chosen, the one that didn't fear the darker parts of himself.
He could live with whatever the costs.
—-
The dorm was quiet when the four boys walked inside of it, Wirius the only outlier as he bounded around the room with a manic grin and grand ideas for pranks spilling from his lips. This was their last year of being children, their last year before joining Dumbledore and the war. He didn't want to waste it.
He couldn't understand why the other boys didn't seem to agree.
" Sirius ," James said softly, too softly for this to be a normal conversation and Sirius felt his heart stop because the other boy only ever used that voice where one group of people were concerned, each of them sharing the same last name. "Please sit down for a moment."
James almost felt his heart break as he watched his brother do so like some sort of lifeless doll.
"What happened?"
"He took the mark."
The three boys in the dorm closed their eyes as the fourth fell apart before them, the anger in Sirius's eyes palpable as the teen himself started to curse and swear at his mother and his father, and at Regulus himself. Magic stuffed in the room, but the teens within it had learned too much control over the past six years for it to do much more than that. James held his brother anyways until Sirius suddenly became quiet, mourning a boy that wasn't even yet dead.
And Remus will always remember that this was the moment that he wanted to tell them all the schemes that he and the others had been creating for the past few months. And he will always be grateful that he hadn't because of the rat in the room.
James looked at the other two boys in the room as Sirius finally began to calm down and found Peter looking worriedly back at him as Remus looked stubbornly away, a distance in his gaze that had been there since the end of their fifth year. James felt foolish for hoping that it would be gone by now, and angered when he realized why it had appeared now.
The Head Boy slid away from his brother and grabbed Remus harshly by the elbow. He knew that the taller teen could easily pull out of his grip if he wanted to, but went along willingly as James pulled him into the hall.
"You knew, didn't you?" James asks as he pushes the other boy against the stone wall, one hand still firmly holding the other even though he knew that Remus could always leave.
Remus looked down at the older boy with a wolfish gaze and all of the slyness of a fox. "I did," he admits easily, his voice empty of any emotion at all.
James startled, but recovers quickly enough after the other's confession, one that he had hoped the teen would deny. " Remus -!"
"I was the one that told him to do it."
James feels his face go as empty as Remus's tone as the other teen's confession settles inside of the Head Boy's mind once more. "What?"
Remus rolls his eyes, annoyed at having to explain something that seemed so clear to himself. At playing checkers instead of chess. "Do you honestly believe that he would have survived the summer otherwise?" Remus asks, scorn making its way into his voice as he knew the answer clear as day, as he knew that he would have had to bury a corpse this summer had Regulus not agreed.
James only shakes his head though. "We could have gotten him out, Remus!" The boy explains with a tone that says that he actually believed what he was saying to be true, a Gryffindor foolishness. "If you had said anything then we could have-"
"Nothing," Remus says coldly as he interrupts his friend. "We could have done nothing . They already lost Sirius, and there was no way in hell that those bastards were going to let Reg go too," the teen explained, a venom in his tone. "Besides," Remus adds with a scoff, "the only chance for him to leave paused when Sirius did, when Dumbledore left him there to rot ."
It was a gamble, Remus knew, to reveal his grievance with the Headmaster as easily as he had, but a part of him hoped that one day the other three would realize that the old wizard wasn't the saint that he portrayed himself as. The rest of him knew that they likely wouldn't.
Remus saw the defiance in the other boy's eyes and walked back inside the dorm.
—-
Remus sighs as he and Regulus patrol the halls, his hip making every step that much slower and more painful than the last. The moons had always been hard, but it seemed that the effects last longer now than they never had before. He was only seventeen, the wolf didn't want to think about how the damage would feel should he live to thirty.
Sometimes, in the quiet of the night, he could almost admit to himself that he didn't want to live long enough to find out.
A warm hand grabbed his own, the familiar bite of cool metal grazing his skin. Remus looks down at the younger teen, finding nothing but understanding in his eyes. An understanding that no one else ever seemed to have, but Remus had seen the scars on the other's body. He was grateful that no one else could understand as easily as they could one another.
He didn't want to share anyways.
Remus allowed himself to be pulled into an abandoned classroom, left over from when the schools used to be larger and NEWTs classes need much more space than they do now. A warm hand rubs circles against his hip and Remus leans down and captures the other's lips in his own.
It was a hurried embrace, it always seemed to be these days, these stolen moments that they managed to take, but when they were connected like this, the outside world didn't seem to matter. There wasn't a war closing in on them, or marks on their skin that neither of them could ever hope to erase. It was only them, two parts of a soul.
These little brakes in their patrol become one of Remus's favorite things.
—-
The Great Hall was quieter than it had been in previous years as less bodies were there to fill it, something that no had truly become used to just yet as the term was only one week in, but one was still there that most people within the school could have done without.
Remus stopped by the entrance to the Great Hall and watched as Snape strutted towards him, a sneer firmly on his face as he did so. The fox had hoped that after the year of peace that he had been given all through sixth year that the other would leave him alone through this one as well.
It seemed that once more Remus had wished for too much.
"Loony Lupin, all alone," the Slytherin goaded as he drew closer, "looks like Regulus is finally done with his little charity case after all."
Snape was smiling something ugly as Remus felt a growl build in his throat, he didn't even notice the other two that had joined them.
"He's ours now, you know?" The snake asked rhetorically, moving his left arm as if to draw attention to it and the mark that was undoubtedly hiding beneath it. "You tried to corrupt him, but I guess he finally realized that you were only a filthy wolf ."
Remus growled as he tried to lunge forwards, but found himself restrained by two sets of hands. Snape raised a brow as he watched Barty and Evan hold Lupin back.
"Slytherins take care of their own," Barty said by way of explanation, just enough to fool the other, though Remus knew that the words were meant for him.
"And we don't fight in public either," Evan reminded the seventh years coldly, but Remus could smell the fear coming from the other seventh year at even the idea of a fair one - on - one fight. He knew that the other had seen the duels that Remus had participated in during Slytherin parties, and Snape knew what he was. He knew that the seventh year Slytherin would never duel him at all.
Somehow that only made the wold want to tear him apart more.
The other three Marauders watched the scene unfold and wondered what game the other was playing.