All the Young Dudes ( Sirius' Perspective )

Third Year : Chrysalis

Friday 9th November 1973

By the next weekend, Sirius was no closer to figuring out Moony’s secret. Between the strange encounter with the girl at his birthday party and Remus’s obviously false story about inheriting money from his “aunt,” Sirius figured that his friend must be running some sort of underground business—but what?

At first, he thought it must have something to do with school—maybe Remus was selling his notes, or doing other students’ homework for them. But it wouldn’t make much sense for a sixth-year to be looking for a third-year to help her out with assignments, so he scrapped that idea pretty quickly. His next thought was that Moony must be making something—maybe he was secretly brewing love potions behind Slughorn’s back? But that seemed unlikely, as it would be extremely difficult to brew potions secretly without the proper supplies, and besides, Potions had always been one of Remus’s weaker subjects.

Unfortunately, Sirius was unable to conduct a proper investigation over the course of the week; he was too busy doing homework for classes, planning out pranks, and pestering James and Peter about their animagi project.

James had completed his reading of the research, as promised, by the end of September, and had then promptly passed the sheaf of parchment off to Peter. Sirius spent quite a bit of time throughout October pestering the smaller marauder to read faster, to no great effect. Peter struggled to stay on top of classes and homework even more than the rest of them, and he worked through Sirius’s animagi research at a snail’s pace.

Once both boys had finally finished reading, they had come back to Sirius with a list of questions. Peter mostly just wanted assurances that they wouldn’t get in trouble, but James actually pointed out a few conflicting pieces of information and areas where they’d need to gather more details if they wanted to be sure that this was something they could pull off. Sirius reluctantly admitted that there were a few more details to work out before they approached Remus with the idea, but insisted that James and Peter actually help him with the research this time.

Of course, organizing study sessions around three schedules was much more complicated than just going to the library on his own—especially because they had to make sure Remus didn’t catch on to their secret project, which meant waiting until Lupin was otherwise preoccupied to sneak off. Eventually, Sirius admitted that trying to force the other marauders to take on equal shares of the work was just slowing them down. He assigned James and Peter each specific bits of information to look into, and the three of them continued their research separately.

That was why, on a sunny Friday afternoon, Sirius was sitting alone amongst the dusty shelves of the library. There was just one final question that James insisted they needed to answer—whether the Death’s-Head Hawk Moth chrysalis needed to be fresh, or if they could use preserved ones—and Sirius was completely stumped. He knew that attention to detail was important in potion-making, especially with such sensitive magic as animagi transformations, but as he shut his seventh book after yet another fruitless search for information, he was beginning to think that he would rather take his chances with accidentally turning himself into a half-animal mutant.

“Sirius!”

The cheerful, familiar voice set his pulse kicking. Sirius turned and, sure enough, caught sight of Mary and Marlene, arm in arm, making their way through the stacks.

“Macdonald,” he nodded, “McKinnon.” Mary marched over, towing Marlene along with her.

“What are you up to?”