Author's Note: This fanfiction is the English version of "Chocolated Lupin", a fiction I wrote in French 11 years ago. Now that my level in English has improved (compared to what it was 11 years ago), I've decided to take up the challenge and translate my whole story from French to English. This will take some time, but I'll do my best. Of course, as English is not my mother tongue, you may find some grammar or syntax errors... Please, let me know if some words or sentences need to be rectified. Also, I'm looking for a native English beta-reader who could read my story and correct my English mistakes before I publish my chapters. If someone is interested, please contact me by PM!

I don't really know why I feel like writing this, as the summer holidays have just started... Probably because I want to dry my tears, cheer up, and remember my fifth year in Hogwarts. The year which was by far the best, full of happy memories: a book of Defense Against the Dark Arts, a failed Patronus, a white and full moon, a tie, an apple, and... A chocolate cake...

¤~ Chocolated Lupin ~¤

Chapter 1
A brief taste of chocolate

Once again, Cathie Mist had arrived early. She wasn't used to being late, but she wasn't used to arriving right on time either. Instead, she was always the first to show up at a meeting point, and, this time, she had reached Platform Nine and Three-Quarters far too soon. It was ten in the morning, and the Hogwarts Express was supposed to leave at eleven.

Cathie stopped pushing her luggage trolley and made a halt, silently looking at the train station.

As expected, the platform was almost empty. Only three first-years stood there, and even though their parents were with them, they seemed quite lost and anxious. Considering this was their first day of magical school, they had probably preferred to come here earlier, in order to be sure not to miss the train.

The Hogwarts Express was already standing next to the platform. However, the tall chimney of the scarlet-metal steam engine wasn't releasing any smoke plumes yet. Cathie sighed. She didn't have much choice: she just had to wait...

"Sorry, Miss, could you step aside, please? You're in my way," said a voice behind her.

She suddenly woke up from her slumber and stepped aside, so that an old wizard with a ridiculous check suit could walk past her. She grumbled while watching him walk away. She couldn't be left alone, could she? The platform was practically deserted, but the only nuisance of the station had just chosen to bother her. Yet, when she turned back, she realised that the barrier wall which was used as a way between Platform Nine and Three-Quarters and the Muggle platform of King's Cross was just twenty inches behind her. If she kept standing here, then she was indeed going to bother many wizards... So she walked a bit further, pushing her trolley with a metallic noise.

Today, Cathie Mist was starting her fifth year in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The Sorting Hat had sent her to Ravenclaw, the house of serious and rational students. "Serious"? Yes, she could be serious... But, sometimes, she could as well be totally crazy, immature, hysterical, and her friends were unfortunately there to testify... As to "rational"... No, honestly, the Sorting Hat must have made a mistake! She could be really stupid, sometimes... So stupid that she liked to call herself "Cat", as an abbreviation to Cathie, in order to give her name a more elegant and less ordinary style. "Call me Cat!" she would often say with a classy and mysterious voice to her friends. But then they would stare at her, looking skeptical and worried about her mental health. "If you want..."

While she was walking along Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, she felt a cool breeze in her brown mid-length hair. Her chocolate-brown eyes stopped for a few moments upon the posters on the wall, showing Sirius Black. "Have you seen this wizard?" was written on the posters, with a picture of the man who had managed to escape the Azkaban Prison. Cat was of average height and rather thin. She wasn't used to wear warm clothes, and today wasn't an exception. Even though the weather was pretty cool and wet, she only wore a white tank top, blue jean shorts and black sneakers.

As she was walking by a group of students and their parents, loud raucous meows suddenly came from her trolley. With a scarlet red face, Cathie looked straight ahead, in order not to see all these surprised faces that had just turned towards her. She kept walking, trying to look as innocent as possible. But the plaintive meows recurred with greater intensity, and Cat had to stop. It wasn't possible! It wasn't possible not to get noticed, with him!

"Grrrr! You're really doing it on purpose, aren't you?"

"Meoooow!"

Blushing with shame, perfectly aware that everybody was now looking at her and at the source of the noise that had sounded like a tiger's roar, Cathie took a heavy wicker basket from her trolley and put it on the ground. The basket was containing a huge ginger cat. The young witch turned her head towards the group of people who were staring at her and laughed stupidly, as a drop of sweat was running down her temple.

"Huhuhu!"

Then, she said to her cat, with clenched teeth:

"You'll pay for this!"

She continued emptying her trolley and took out a big cauldron full of books. She put her hand in her pocket, took out her wand – a thin greenish stick, made of linden and unicorn hair – and pointed it to the trolley, pronouncing:

"Reducto!"

She bent down to pick up the tiny trolley – which was now about an inch long –, stored it in her pocket, and started walking again, now loaded down with her luggage: her cat basket in one hand, and her cauldron in the other.

"Meow!"

Cathie raised desperate eyes to the sky, asking Merlin why on earth she had deserved that. Not only was her cat particularly heavy, but it was as if he was trying to do his best to attract attention on his mistress. Cathie's life was so cruel...

Plumpshanks – that was the feline's name – weighed about twenty pounds. He had spent the nine years of his life devouring and gulping down his meals, and now his body consisted of a reasonably thick layer of fat. But in spite of his little overweight, he looked very beautiful: he had a short and blazing red hair, pale green eyes, big white whiskers and a small pink nose. Yes, he was very cute. A little heavy, but very cute.

With her last breath, Cathie put down the basket and the cauldron faster than expected. Leaning forward, her hands on her knees, catching her breath, she wondered what she was going to do for the time that remained before the leaving of the Hogwarts Express.

The doors of the train were already open. Could she get on the train right now? Her friends had told her that they would come to the station at half past ten. Therefore, she could save them a compartment and wait for them inside.

Considering this was a good idea, she took back her burden, and walked towards the door of one of the carriages. She minded the gap between the train and the platform very cautiously... All right, she wasn't that stupid, but sometimes, well... you never know! Cathie Mist could be very absent-minded, very slow to react, and the assumption that she could stumble over a step or something was not to eliminate.

Another curious personality trait of hers was that she sometimes talked to herself. Maybe not loudly, but at least inside her head. For some time now, a small resonating voice had chosen to live in her head and to bother its host. Cathie thus spent hours deliberating with her conscience, even if, most of the time, it never led to anything...

"Of course it leads to something!"

"Sure..."

Clearly, a lunatic had got on the Hogwarts Express. And it could become dangerous, beware...

Now the lunatic was looking for a suitable compartment. In fact, there was plentiful choice, as all the compartments were empty. However, Cat seemed a bit difficult, as she passed in front of several compartments without stopping by, not examining them for more than three seconds, inexorably walking towards the rear of the train.

"Hmmm... Too small... Too big..."

Apart from the fact that both compartments were identical, everything was fine, really...

"Okay, let's have a look at this one... Hmmm, nah, the mattress of the left seat seems a bit too flat... Let's see the other compartment, I'm sure it will be better... Hmmm, nah, it's a bit dirty... Okay, next one..."

Cat stopped before the compartment whose windows were covered with black curtains. Then she imperturbably resumed her walk in the corridor.

"Too dark."

Well, the only thing to do was to open the curtains...

"So, now, if the next one is not okay, it will mean there's a problem somewhere..."

Anyway, she didn't have much choice now: it was the last compartment...

"Ah... Ah, yes... It's the last compartment..." Cat noted, looking alternately at the door of the last compartment and at the wall in front of her and that marked the end of the corridor.

Indeed, she had arrived at the rear of the last wagon.

"Well, come to think of it, this compartment is not so bad" Cat said, putting down her basket and her cauldron and sitting down on the green mattress of the left bench seat, next to the window.

Cat kept talking to herself, but apart from that, nothing wrong...

"I don't care if I talk to myself! There's nobody here!"

But, who knows? A handsome young man could enter the compartment and hear her...

"Nonsense!"

Cathie found a comfortable position, stretching her legs, folding her arms behind her head, and leaning the back of her head against the palms of her hands. After all, it wasn't her fault if she had arrived at King's Cross one hour earlier. Her mother, a witch, had dropped her off at the station sooner than expected because she had to urgently drive her father, a Muggle, to the St. Mungo's Hospital. Incurable disease? Serious injury? No, no. He had simply been bitten by a copy of The Monster Book of Monsters, while trying to help the bookseller from Flourish and Blotts catching the vicious book. Alas, he hadn't realised the extent of the danger, and he had finally taken the ferocious book away from its cage, hooked to his finger. The book had been toughly closed and sealed with a belt, but unfortunately it hadn't prevented the father's injury to get infected this morning.

What an idea, for that matter, to ask the students to buy such a thing... Especially for the class of Care of Magical Creatures... As if these lessons weren't tiring enough... Tiring... Was it going to be the same for the end-of-year examinations? The O.W.L.s... Oh yes, the O.W.L.s! Cat had almost already forgotten them. No, frankly, this year was going to be even more tiring than the other years... Apart from a miracle, it was going to be as boring as the years before. Always seeing the same faces, the same students, the same teachers: strict Professor McGonagall, Binns and his deadly boring classes of History of Magic, Trelawney and her eyes unreasonably enlarged by her big spectacles – which usually made Cat burst with laughter –, Snape, his obvious sadism and his sarcastic replies, which were, after all, piercingly funny... Alright, there were good things in all of that. But she wasn't going to say she liked Snape's classes, was she? No, but... Hmmm... And, come to think of it, Cat also wondered who was going to be her new teacher of Defense Against the Dark Arts...

She was suddenly roused from her thoughts by a short knock on the glass door of her compartment. She instantly turned her head towards the noise source, and saw a man standing there, as he had just slightly opened the door.

"Excuse me" he said with a friendly voice, "would you mind if I sit in your compartment? I've got my hands full, and I don't have the courage to go through the whole wagon to find another compartment... This one is the first I found..."

Cathie didn't answer immediately, because she was too busy staring dumbly at this stranger. So it was him, the handsome young man who was supposed to enter her compartment? Um... In fact, he was supposed to be a little bit younger... But it didn't matter. The wizard was in his mid-thirties. He was tall and thin, and was indeed carrying a huge suitcase which seemed as heavy as the cat basket Cathie had painfully carried. It was so heavy that the man seemed exhausted. He had chestnut hair, with some grey and white hair strands, and he had two big scars on his face, two scratches which were, nonetheless, quite discrete. He was so pale that he looked sick. He had amber eyes, and a very thin light brown moustache above his upper lip. His clothes looked miserable. He was wearing a big and thick dark grey cloak, a greenish old suit, patched in some places with mismatched pieces of cloth. Under his jacket could be seen the top of a greyish shirt, with an old black tie around his collar.

Worried about Cathie's silence, the man raised his eyebrows and slightly tilted his head to one side, to see if the girl was alright. Cat finally noticed that the man was looking at her questioningly and was waiting for her to say something.

"Oh! Er... Yes, of course! Sure, come in!"

The wizard, apparently relieved, smiled back at her. It was a gentle smile, which raised his thin moustache and gave Cat this impression that she had just invited in her compartment a very kind man. Anyway, it was strange that, this time, Cat wasn't complaining that she was being disturbed by the second nuisance of the station, who, as if by coincidence, decided to sit in her compartment, whereas all the other compartments were empty... Yes, but this time, it was different.

"I can understand why you're surprised" the man said, entering the compartment, not without some difficulties, because of his huge suitcase which could hardly get through the door. "Surely you don't usually see adults on the Hogwarts Express... Normally, this train is for students only."

Cathie nodded to agree, while the wizard walked past her, towards the luggage net.

"Unfortunately, I couldn't find any other means of transport to go teaching at Hogwarts."

"Teaching?" Cat repeated, while her heart skipped a beat. "You... You're a teacher?"

"I am" he said, lifting painfully his old dented suitcase, in order to put it in the luggage net. "I'm going to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts. I'm Professor Lupin."

"Ah!" Cat said, with a little surprise, because a few seconds before she was asking herself who was going to occupy this cursed post, and now the professor involved was standing right in front of her.

She didn't know what to answer ("Nice to meet you!", "My name is Cathie Mist, but you can call me Cat!"), and she simply watched him open his suitcase, which was already in the luggage net. He seemed to have forgotten something in his bag, as he was mechanically searching inside, but trying not to make a mess. He finally found what he was looking for, and, taking a glass bottle of water out of his suitcase, he inadvertently dropped something onto the floor. Instinctively, Cat leaned forward to pick it up and spare Professor Lupin the effort of doing it. However, she was quite surprised to find a chocolate bar on the floor. "Milk chocolate" she read on the red and green wrapping paper. This teacher certainly had good taste... (no hidden message in this phrase, of course).

"There!" Cat said, giving the man the chocolate bar. "It dropped from your suitcase!"

"Ah! Yes, thank you!" Professor Lupin said. "You can have a taste, if you want! It can only do you good!"

"Er... Are you sure?" Cathie asked, a bit embarrassed.

"Sure! Go on! Don't worry, I didn't poison the chocolate!"

Cat couldn't help laughing. She carefully tore the wrapping paper, revealing beautiful squares of chocolate, while Lupin opened his bottle. This was turning into a pleasant morning, after all: Cat, who had planned nothing special except waiting for her friends until half past ten, was now eating with a teacher. As Professor Lupin raised the bottle to his lips, Cat took a small piece of chocolate with her fingers and ate it. Her face beamed with bliss. Merlin, this milk chocolate was so delicious! Its taste was so wonderful! It was sweet, fine and warming. It was probably the best chocolate Cat had ever tasted, and she strongly wondered where on earth Lupin had bought it, and if she could take another piece. But she preferred not to abuse Lupin's kindness, and she simply gave him back his chocolate bar, when he had finished drinking and had put his bottle on the windowsill of the compartment.

"So?" he asked, storing it in his jacket pocket, with satisfaction in his eyes.

"It's really good!" she brightly answered.

"I agree", Lupin said, now closing his suitcase by carefully tying a long string around it. "I usually give this chocolate to people who've just come across a Dementor, so they can calm down and recover. But let's say that this time is a bit special: you kindly invited me into your compartment, and I had to thank you by offering you some chocolate!"

Cathie could clearly feel that she was blushing. The man finally sat down on the right bench seat, next to the window, precisely in front of the young witch. He gave her another one of his friendly and comforting smiles, and Cat felt her heart leap, without knowing why. She turned her head away, and looked at the platform through the window.

Even if this man seemed really nice, she now felt a bit embarrassed to find herself alone with him. Had he been a student of her age, it could have been acceptable... But he was a teacher. And so what? Where was the difference? Well, the difference was that a good little girl like Cat, finding herself all alone in a compartment with an adult man, it could seem a bit shady... Hmmm, yes, very shady... That thought made Cat turn her head towards the door of the compartment and stare at the corridor with horrified eyes, as if she had just realised something awful.

A light rustle of cloth coming from Lupin made Cat turn her head towards him. He had just wrapped himself a little more warmly in his dark cloak, and covered his nose with it. Through the window, Cat noted that the Platform Nine and Three-Quarters was now quite full with witches and wizards who were accompanying their children. Some of them were even getting on the train, as Cat heard more distinct voices coming from the corridor, as well as the slamming of some doors. Her friends would probably arrive soon. The platform was more and more crowded.

The door of Cat's compartment was suddenly opened, and a second year, who seemed to be looking for an empty compartment, said: "Oh, sorry!" before instantly closing the door. Cat turned red and felt a drop of sweat trickling down her temple. Honestly! Why did he say "Oh, sorry!" like this? What did he picture? Furious, Cat looked again at the professor. He was carelessly leaning against the wall of the window and his face was almost entirely covered by his cloak. He was probably sleeping. Cathie was cautious not to make too much noise...

Once again, the compartment door swung open violently, with a noise more deafening than ever.

"CAAAT!" a tall blond and blue-eyed girl cheerfully yelled, with open arms.

"Er..." Cat said stupidly, half sickened by all the noise her friend had just made.

"What in ze world are you doink here?" the blond girl said. "We'fe been lookink for you for one hour!"

"Well, I saved you a compartment..."

"Ahrr! Nein! We found anozer compartment, a bit furzer. Come on, eferyone's zere already!"

So she had saved this compartment and waited inside for nothing... Slightly disappointed, Cat stood up against her will, took her cauldron and her basket, and walked towards the door, following her friend. Whereas the blond girl was already going through the corridor, Cat, who was about to shut the door, turned to Professor Lupin one last time.

"Er..." she began shyly, wanting to say goodbye, but she realised he was definitely sound asleep.