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A Wolf to Potters	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 2652 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Thank you for the reviews! This story will need to be a three-shot after all, so one more chapter next week.
            Harry sneaked carefully along the corridor. He knew Snape would probably think he shouldn’t be out at night, but what Snape didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
            He heard hissing, and for a second, he stood still, holding his breath. He didn’t want to hear that horrible voice that spoke through the walls, and at the same time he did, because he might be able to follow it and find out if it was really coming from the Chamber of Secrets.
            They were voices, though, and the words were normal, just angry. Not horrible ones about ripping and tearing. Harry relaxed and moved cautiously forwards. There was a door ahead that had light spilling from underneath it. That was strange. Harry knew this corridor was only used for storing a few things, and was otherwise disused classrooms.
            “—if you think for one second that I ever want your pity—”
            “I’m not offering you pity, Severus. Just forbearance.” The other person gulped and continued on. Harry, listening in fascination, was pretty sure that he’d never heard this voice before. “And the company of someone like yourself. Not even all the time. Only when the full moon is in the sky.”
            Harry gasped behind his hand. How did this person know about Snape being a werewolf? And why hadn’t Snape made him take a potion that would keep him from saying anything? Why had he given Harry the potion and not this person?
            Probably because he’s an adult. That was the answer to most questions Harry had.
            Hoping he was secure under the Invisibility Cloak, even though it hadn’t kept Snape from sensing his scent before, Harry crept towards the open door. Before, Snape had been sniffing for students out in the school at night. This time, though, he might be involved in the conversation and not notice.
            Harry peeked in. For an instant, the light in the room made him blink. There was a lit fireplace in one wall, and lit torches all around, and even a fire burning in a brazier near Snape’s feet. He stood with his arms folded, snarling at the man who almost slumped over a desk in front of him.
            The man was one of the most weather-beaten Harry had ever seen. He had amber eyes and grey hair and clothes that looked as if they would fall off him any second. Harry ached with empathy. He felt like that with Dudley’s clothes all the time.
            At the moment, the man was staring at Snape, who avoided his gaze and stared into the fire instead.
            “Please, Severus,” the man whispered, holding out his hand and moving forwards. Snape turned away from him as if he didn’t see, and Harry froze, because now Snape was facing the door. But he still didn’t seem to sense Harry. Maybe the smell of the fire was covering up Harry’s scent. The man stopped. “I only want to make it better. I want to ease your life. Since I was the one responsible for cursing it in the first place—”
            Harry gasped, but he was sure, or almost sure, that the sound vanished into the croaking way Snape laughed then. “Since you’re the one responsible for cursing me in the first place,” he said, “you’ll never be allowed to do anything to ease it.”
            The man bowed his head. Harry stared at him. He supposed the amber eyes were sort of like Snape’s, and the grey hair could look like shaggy grey fur if you were squinting.
            But there was something even more important than that. This man was a werewolf, but he was also friends with Harry’s father and the mysterious Sirius Black. Harry had decided, just from listening to what Snape was saying about his dad, that there must have been something wrong with his father. If he was friends with a werewolf who attacked people and Sirius Black who tried to kill people, then how could he be a good person? Dudley had friends who didn’t even do things that bad, and they were still horrible people, and so was Dudley.
            Harry hadn’t thought much about his dad in the last year. He wanted to wince whenever he did think about it.
            But now it seemed horrible that he hadn’t tried to be fairer to his dad. Here was someone who knew the truth. Here was someone who could tell him. And maybe it wasn’t so horrible after all, maybe his dad had just tried to do a good deed and Harry’s imagination had jumped to conclusions—
            Harry couldn’t let the other werewolf leave without asking him, even if Snape took a million points from Gryffindor. He walked into the room and took off the Invisibility Cloak.

            The instant he started pulling it off, the other werewolf stared at him. And then Snape saw Harry.
            He snarled, and Harry flinched before he thought about it. But he stood there, because this was more important than points or detentions, and he demanded of the other werewolf, “How could you attack Snape? And why didn’t my dad save him on time? And what was Sirius Black like? And who are you?”
            “Sirius Black is a murderer,” said Snape.
            The other werewolf didn’t move. He simply looked at Harry with his eyes wide, as if Harry was the magical creature, and then he whispered, “My name is Remus Lupin. I was the werewolf who attacked Severus, yes. Not on purpose.”
            “It doesn’t have to be on purpose to ruin someone’s life, Lupin!” Snape roared the words.
            Still Lupin didn’t move, like he’d also decided to ignore Snape and forget about points and detentions. He hunkered down until he was almost the same height as Harry. “You look like your father—so much. But you have your mother’s eyes.”
            Harry had heard this to the point where he was sick of it. He wanted to hear something new. “But tell me what I asked you about,” he said, the words spilling out of his mouth. “I thought my father was a bully—I thought he was horrible—but he wasn’t, was he? I just thought—I made a mistake, I assumed—tell me—”
            Lupin reached out and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. Harry shut up and stared at him. He knew Lupin had probably meant to make him shut up, but still. It was just so startling to be touched like that.
            “I’m sorry no one’s told you this before,” Lupin whispered. Harry thought he really wanted to look at Snape, but he didn’t. “I don’t know that this is the best time. Perhaps we can go somewhere else, and talk more comfortably there?”
            “Oh, no, Lupin.”
            Harry jerked away and turned around in alarm. Snape had taken up his position in front of the door and stretched out his arms across it. His jaws were parted in a hungry grin, and Harry thought for a second he knew what Snape would look like when he’d transformed into a wolf and was lunging at someone.
            “I have no desire to see you go elsewhere with the little brat.” Snape had huge teeth, when he wanted to bare them. “I have a desire to see justice done right now.” He lowered his head and edged a little closer to Lupin, something like a whine bubbling in the back of his throat. “Tell him about Black, Lupin. About you, and Potter, and what you did to me.”
            Lupin seemed to have frozen. Harry looked back and forth between him and Snape, not knowing what he should do. He’d never thought he’d have to protect one adult from another adult.
            “Tell him,” Snape said, and his voice was almost hypnotic, the way Harry remembered hearing it on the first day of Potions class, before Snape had revealed how badly he hated Harry. “It’s his heritage. He never knew his parents. Shouldn’t he have the right to do that?”
            And he laughed, hard enough to make his chest shake and Harry to fold his arms and shiver.
            Lupin stood back up. His eyes had gone more yellow, but Harry didn’t know what that meant, if it was a good sign or not. After a second, he sighed and turned to Harry.
            “We can’t go somewhere else, then,” he said. “But we can at least make this room a little more comfortable. Do you know any Cushioning Charms?”
            Harry nodded and cast them on a broken, splintered chair and table. When they sat down, Harry in the chair and Lupin on the table, Harry gave Snape an instinctive glance. But he remained by the door and watched them with those mad amber eyes.
            Harry shuddered and faced Lupin. “What was my dad like?” he whispered. “Really?”
            Lupin gave him a gentle smile that made Harry think he wasn’t so bad, even if he was the werewolf who had bitten Snape. “A brilliant Quidditch player. Brilliant at Transfiguration. A prankster and a jokester who was proud to be in Gryffindor—”
            Snape growled, a second that rose and fell like hills someone was trying to mash down with a spoon. Lupin stiffened in response, and then sighed and continued.
            “And that joking was what got us in trouble. We were enemies with Severus since our first year.” He kept his head turned away from Snape, although Harry didn’t know why. He almost wanted to look at Snape just to see what effect the words were having on him. Lupin was the only reason he didn’t. “We played pranks on him, and we bullied him. He played pranks back, or tried to, but he was only one and we were four.”
            Harry was silent, thinking. That did remind him of Dudley and his friends. There were always at least two or three of them with Dudley, and they would chase Harry, who was only one.
            “Don’t confuse him with the truth, Lupin. I suspect Saint Potter can’t even understand the concept of less than perfect sainthood for his father.”
            “I wouldn’t have asked if I couldn’t,” Harry snapped, and this time, he did turn around to look at Snape.
            Snape had moved a little away from the door, but Harry suspected he would dash back there in a second if Harry or Lupin tried to get out of the room. He wrinkled his lips back as Harry watched, and showed those dirty yellow teeth.
            “You don’t know what being bullied is,” Snape whispered, with the shadow of a growl to his words. “You don’t know the first thing about what I went through.”
            “Funny,” said Harry. “Because my cousin bullied me. And even though you’re probably about to say that you never knew my cousin and that doesn’t matter,” he added, as Snape’s mouth opened, “there’s someone named Draco Malfoy who does the same thing here. If you notice and smell things all the time with a werewolf’s nose, you have to know he was the reason that some of my potions didn’t work.”
            Snape just stared at him with flat eyes. Harry turned back to Lupin. “What really happened that night that Snape got bitten?”
            Even though he was the one who had told Lupin to tell the story, Snape snarled again. Lupin lifted one side of his mouth, showing off the edge of a canine tooth, and didn’t glance at Snape again. “I had turned into a werewolf. Sirius, who was the worst of us when it came to Severus, thought it would be funny to tell Severus how to get into the Shrieking Shack where I stayed.”
            “Not all the time,” Snape said.
            Lupin ignored that, too. “Sirius was—he came from a family that had traditionally been Sorted into Slytherin and been Dark. He was the first Black ever Sorted into Gryffindor, as far as I know. He was fierce in protection of the rest of us, because we were his only friends, and he decided that if James hated Severus, he should, too.”
            “Why did my dad hate Snape?”
            “Because he was arrogant, and wanted what he should never have had,” Snape whispered.
            Lupin had tensed up, Harry saw, but he answered honestly as far as Harry could tell. “Severus and your mother were friends from a young age. James wanted to date Lily and was constantly competing for her attention. Plus, I believe there were a few incidents on the train when they were coming to Hogwarts that made them hate each other.”
            That’s stupid, was Harry’s first thought, but his second thought was, Like me and Malfoy. If his dad and Snape had fought about something like that, Harry supposed he couldn’t really blame either one of them.
            “He never should have been able to touch Lily,” Snape whispered. “He should have left her alone.”
            Harry glanced sideways at Snape, and away again when he saw the mad gleam in his eyes. Snape looked like he was longing for the full moon so he could bite somebody—but Harry didn’t know if that person was actually in the room or not. His skin tingled with nerves. Snape might just decide to bite Harry because his dad was dead.
            “I didn’t know that,” he told Lupin. “Hardly anyone talks about my parents. I didn’t even know Snape and my mum were friends.” Or that Mum and Dad weren’t always friends.
            Lupin nodded, his eyes sad. “I wouldn’t be telling you this, Harry, except I think you deserve to know.” He paused. “I’m afraid that I also have to tell you Sirius was the one who betrayed your parents to You-Know-Who. He was the one who kept the secret of their whereabouts, and he turned out to be a Death Eater.”
            “Death Eater?” Harry didn’t think it was his imagination that he saw Snape twitch, although maybe that was only because he seemed to hate Black even more than Harry’s dad.
            “One of You-Know-Who’s special followers,” Lupin explained. “They were branded with a snake and skull on their arms, and they served him in killing Muggles, torturing people, leading battles—whatever he desired.” Lupin took a deep breath. “Sirius betrayed your parents and killed another friend of ours, Peter Pettigrew, who tried to stop him. He’s in the wizarding prison, Azkaban, now.”
            “The perfect place for him,” Snape whispered.
            Harry closed his eyes. It was no wonder Snape had thought it was strange, last year, that Harry didn’t know who Sirius Black was. Even if he had never heard of him being one of Dad and Mum’s friends, he still should have heard of him as the man who had betrayed Mum and Dad.
            Harry’s throat and eyes felt sticky. What else was he ignorant of? What else was out there that people just refused to talk about?
            He understood why Snape hadn’t said anything about being friends with Harry’s mum. Snape hated Harry and didn’t want to tell him anything that might make him happy, only things that might make him angry. But Harry didn’t understand why Headmaster Dumbledore or Professor McGonagall or somebody hadn’t told him. They must know about Sirius Black’s trial, at least, if nothing else. Did they think that Harry wouldn’t want to know?
            “Why did you wait so long to come here?” Harry asked Lupin, looking up at him. “Why didn’t you—why weren’t you there when I was a kid, or before now?”
            “What an excellent question, Lupin.” Snape was leaning against the door with his arms folded. “Why don’t you tell the child the truth?”
            Lupin shut his eyes. His face had tight lines of pain on it, but that didn’t impress Harry. He’d seen other people look that way, and he’d looked that way himself. That didn’t mean Lupin could get away with just brushing off Harry’s question. Harry wanted to know.
            Lupin finally said, in a soft voice, “They wouldn’t have let me adopt you, because I’m a werewolf and they think werewolves are a danger to all children. I was told that you were happy in your new home, and that your Muggle relatives would protect you with their love and care.”
            Harry laughed. Then he laughed some more. Then he leaned against the wall and wheezed, while the Invisibility Cloak slipped down his shoulders and Lupin stared at him with pained eyes. Snape was watching him too, but Harry almost didn’t care. He knew one secret about Snape. He didn’t care if Snape knew this about him.
            “They don’t love me,” he told Lupin bluntly. “They never told me about magic, they told me I was a freak, they made me sleep in a cupboard, they hate me.” He shook his head. “And it has to be a lie, what you’re saying about werewolves,” he added. “Because Professor Snape is teaching here—”
            Suddenly Harry’s voice was gone, probably because he’d come too close to saying the truths that the potion Snape had fed him made him keep quiet. But he didn’t care. Lupin knew what he meant.
            Harry stared at Lupin, and waited for some sort of answer.
            Lupin finally spoke, and it sounded as though his tongue was about three sizes too large. “That—was a special arrangement that Headmaster Dumbledore made when he accepted Severus as Potions master. It would take someone with his power and influence to make it possible for me to adopt you.”
            “And you don’t think Albus would do such a thing for the last of the Marauders?” Snape sneered at once. “The four students he favored more than anyone before or since? The students he let go with barely a slap on the wrist for turning me into a beast, because they were his favorites?”
            Lupin sighed. “Headmaster Dumbledore only reigns supreme in the school. He would have had a much harder push to make it possible for a werewolf to take in the Boy-Who-Lived.”
            “But you never asked,” said Snape. He sounded satisfied.
            Silence, and then Lupin said, “No. I never did.”
            Harry just looked at Lupin and said nothing. He believed the man, everything he was saying. He believed that his dad hadn’t been as bad a person as Harry, with so little knowledge to go on, had been picturing. He believed Sirius Black had been worse.
            But he didn’t have to like it.
            He said, “I hope you’ll understand when I say that I don’t like you much. Maybe I would have liked you more if you’d come to me before this and told me everything. But as it is, I don’t like you much.”
            “Harry…”
            Lupin only stood there, though, and Harry turned away. “I don’t know whether you thought you would bite me or you didn’t have anyone who could baby-sit me during the full moon,” he said over his shoulder. “But even if you bit me, being a werewolf would be better than the way my relatives treated me.”
            Snape loomed over him for a second. “Do not speak of what you do not understand.”
            Harry just stared at him with dead eyes. Snape waited for a second, looked Harry over, nodded to himself, and opened the door to let him by.
            Harry heard him say to Lupin, “Well, that was certainly a more complete vengeance than anything I could have designed.”
            Harry shut his eyes. One of his father’s friends was in prison, and one was dead, and one of them didn’t want him.
            He went back to bed and curled up and went to sleep. The voice in the walls wasn’t important right now.
*
     Chester: Well, as you can see, it had to become a three-shot. I thought the second part would be really long, but it works better dramatically to split it up because there’ll be a slight time-skip between this part and the next one.
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A Wolf to Potters