Saturday 10th March 1973
The marauders could not have been happier to discover that Remus’s birthday occurred on a Saturday that year. This, in their opinion, opened up the day to all sorts of excitement that would simply not be possible on a weekday.
As the day approached, Remus tried to ignore their teasing and heavy handed hints about what lay in store. He didn’t mind what they did, he trusted them well enough – they could be relied upon to make a fool of themselves, but they had so far never made him the butt of the joke. James had been receiving strange lumpy packages bound up in brown paper for the past week and Remus’s only hope was that they weren’t presents for him – he’d never be able to return the favour.
Remus thought a lot about being thirteen – specifically being a thirteen-year-old wizard with a furry little problem. The discovery of the Ravenclaw trophy cabinet had done some very strange things to Remus’s internal dialogue. He’d always thought he had a pretty good idea of who he was – a care home kid, poor, a bit weedy, angry, bad, scarred, thick when it came to school stuff, but clever enough when it counted. Coming to Hogwarts had wrought some changes, of course – maybe he wasn’t that thick, even if he was still sure of everything else.
His father had been really clever. He was in Ravenclaw, after all. The sorting hat had considered Remus for Ravenclaw too, but changed its mind. That hadn’t meant a great deal to him at the time, but now he wondered and wondered about it. What if he’d been sorted into Ravenclaw? Would he know more, now about his father? About who he was?
What if his father had not killed himself? What if he had never been bitten at all? ‘What if’ was a dangerous game.
As he fell asleep on the night before his birthday, Remus slipped into a dream he had not had in a very long time.
He is lying in a bed in a small, pale blue room. It is summer and the sash window is wide open; curtains billowing. The window is huge – big enough for a grown man to get through. Remus is very small and very frightened.
There is someone in the room with him, and they are going to hurt him. It’s a monster – his mother promised they weren’t real, but oh! Oh, she’s a liar, a horrid liar, because there is a monster, and it’s crossing the room now; it’s coming towards him and it will eat him up!
“Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?”
He scrunches his eyes shut and ducks under the covers and trembles and sobs,
Then… then there is nothing – nothing solid, nothing real. He is in pain, there is so much blood and so many tears and an awful lot of noise. He just wants to sleep. Another man looms over him, tall and slender and worried.
“Daddy.”
“LUMOS MAXIMA!”
Remus started awake with a jolt, nearly crying out. The dorm room had filled with bright, unnatural light, it sliced through his bed curtains, making him squint. He just had time to wipe the tears from his cheeks before Sirius and James ripped back the heavy drapes, chanting,
“Happy Birthday, Lupin!”
“It’s still dark out, you pricks.” He squinted, rubbing his eyes and sitting up. He tried to will his heart to stop pounding so hard.
“It is precisely one minute past midnight,” Sirius said, “and therefore officially your thirteenth birthday.”
“Where’s Pete?” Remus climbed out of bed, stepping into the room. They had decorated it haphazardly with streamers which he was sure usually decked out the quidditch pitch on match days, and strings of fairy lights left over from Christmas.
