All the Young Dudes ( Sirius' Perspective )

Fifth Year : The Surprise

Everybody here is outta sight

They don’t bark and they don’t bite

They keep things loose, they keep things light

Everybody was dancin’ in the moonlight

Dancin' in the moonlight

Everybody’s feelin’ warm and right

It's such a fine and natural sight

Everybody’s dancin’ in the moonlight

 

Saturday 20th September 1975

Sirius didn’t see much of Moony after the help with his cuts. He might have suspected that the boy was avoiding him, using busyness as an excuse—except that everyone seemed to be swamped that September, with hardly a moment to spare. OWLs were coming up, which meant half of their class was already spending every waking second in the library—of course, this included Remus. He could often be spotted with Mary, Marlene, Lily, or some combination of the three, quizzing each other and flipping through the pages of their books.

When he wasn’t studying, Remus had his prefect duties, which kept him out late for patrols and meetings. Most nights, he returned to their dorm room exhausted and fell straight to sleep.

Of course, Moony wasn’t the only marauder with a tight schedule. James was running the entire quidditch team ragged with practices, waking Sirius at the crack of dawn almost every day of the week. And Peter had his own activities to keep busy—talking to Desdemona, talking about Desdemona, snogging Desdemona, talking about snogging Desdemona...

Plus, with OWLs coming up, Remus wasn’t the only one worried about grades. Peter had frequent meltdowns while trying to complete homework assignments, during which he moaned that he would never pass anything and insisted that he would be the first student to get kicked out of Hogwarts for failing all his classes. Sirius found it incredibly irritating, but he had to admit that their workload was enormous—even he found himself struggling, sometimes, to keep up.

Aside from the heavier workload, there had been another noticeable shift in their classes that year. Though nobody seemed willing to say anything about it, Sirius got the distinct impression that their professors were trying to prepare them for war. McGonagall had them working on concealment, Slughorn seemed to have become obsessed with poisons and antidotes, and their Defence Against the Dark Arts professor was a right ray of sunshine, warning them ominously at the end of every lesson that, “You never know when you might need this outside the classroom...”

Put altogether, it was not exactly the most cheerful start to the year.

As September drew on, Sirius kept careful track of the passing days. The full moon would be coming near the end of the month, and when they weren’t focused on schoolwork or quidditch (or girlfriends), the marauders were practicing their transformations.

They had to be careful about it, of course. Their dorm room was only safe when Remus wasn’t there, and it didn’t exactly provide ample space for James and his unwieldly antlers. The tunnel to Honeyduke’s was marginally better, but they had to make sure that someone was always on watch just in case Remus checked the map and came to find them. Some nights, when they were sure that Moony was really, deeply asleep, the other three boys would creep out under the invisibility cloak and sneak into the Forbidden Forest to practice—they stayed close to the fringes, of course, hidden behind the cover of trees but near enough to the castle to remain out of harm’s way.