And I'll find strength in pain

And I will change my ways

I'll know my name when it's called again

Cause I have other things to fill my time

You take what is yours and I'll take mine

Now let me at the truth

Which will refresh my broken mind

-The Cave, Mumford and Sons

Peter sat on the moving staircase, invisible to all of his classmates and friends. He was in rat form, in one of the thousands of bolt holes and cracks he'd discovered over his nearly seven years at Hogwarts. Today, it was a gap in the fifth stair of the main moving section of the grand staircase. He was so used to hiding here that he no longer even flinched as he watched children step onto the stairs so close to him, the force of their footsteps enough to have crushed him in his Animagus form, if he weren't protected by the stairs themselves.

If only James, Remus, and Sirius had allowed him to, he would have expanded on the Marauder's Map with all the passageways he'd found as a rat. Sure, they were smaller, and some weren't bigger than a House Elf, but they were there, and they might be useful, even for storing contraband The Map could have been much larger than it already was, much more comprehensive, but James in particular had scoffed at the idea. After all, he wouldn't fit into them, and Sirius barely could, in his form. Remus might have as his human self, before he'd grown so lean and tall. Peter had gotten the message loud and clear, though. His contributions weren't as valuable. His voice was not equal.

Not for the first time, Peter wondered if things would have been different if he'd had a different, more majestic Animagus form.

He'd always seen his rat form as a very great comfort. There was nothing more horrible to him than not having a contingency plan. Sure, he was brave, he'd proved that a few times. Bravery wasn't the end of it all, though-he valued the ability to fight another day, especially the decision of when to cut and run and come back with a stronger force. It was only after he'd embraced the rat form for all of its benefits that Peter had started to like the sneakier aspects. He'd never used it to cheat, of course, but he'd definitely scoped out teachers' plans for detentions they were scheduled to serve, and sometimes he'd snuck into other dormitories to listen to the students that held the most threat to him and his friends.

That was when Peter started keeping secrets from the Marauders. He told himself that he had his own kind of moral code, and the information he was hearing in the Slytherin dungeons was too important to be told to stop, because he didn't think he wanted to obey that order. Breaking a promise like that was a line Peter didn't want to cross, and he was honestly afraid of what would happen if he needed to choose between being outwardly compliant with Remus's qualms about spying and the act of finding out more about what Lucius Malfoy was saying when he thought no one but Slytherins could hear. This was important. There was talk of Marks. A Dark Lord. Harm coming to Muggle-born witches and wizards.

Bile rose in Peter's throat, and he coughed, hunched over, his whiskers twitching. He'd been raised to be proud of his blood heritage. His Nan had been hateful toward Muggle-borns, so much so that Peter hadn't met any until he'd started at Hogwarts. Years spent in Gryffindor had mostly taught Peter that he was wrong about his preconceived notions, but there was an uneasiness in his heart that he just couldn't evict, despite spending time around Lily Evans and other Gryffindor Muggle-borns. He knew he didn't want there to be bloodshed or bullying, no matter what the real truth of the matter was. He could get a job somewhere exclusive, maybe, and never have to really come into contact with anyone of tainted blood.

The things he had heard Malfoy talk about, though, those were inescapable. Those things sounded more like a complete purge. That was what made Peter cling to his determination to spy on Lucius, and to hell with what Remus might say. There would come a time when he would be able to prove to all three of his friends how important he was, and when that happened, he wouldn't feel guilty about the looks of regret on their faces. They needed to know how they'd made him feel, but not until he had real, tangible proof of how valuable he really was.

No, Peter would keep this a secret, the spying. He'd keep that quiet, until he could show them how much of a difference he could make.

Hermione was in the library again. She'd partitioned out her remaining weeks in the past, looking for avenues that could influence her friends in ways she dearly hoped would do some good in saving them grief, if not their lives. Last week had been about planting the seeds about magical protection, blood magic, and wedding charms.

This week was about werewolves.

The fact that Remus had been so open to her last week about his condition had made her laugh, at the time, because he could not have known about how she'd structured her 'free time.' She'd almost slipped up and said, 'but werewolves are next week!' The problem now was, her research was mostly about refuting the incorrect and harmful misconceptions about werewolves. To find those, she had to look them up-and now she looked like she'd just learned a dear friend was a werewolf and was poring over books about how awful and evil they were.

It was not a good look, so she didn't take these particular books out of the library. She holed up there, instead, between classes and missing lunch, because that was less likely to garner attention than coming after class and risking Lily or Sirius looking for her in concern.

Hermione didn't know much about why the Marauders ended up mistrusting each other after Harry was born, enough that they weren't in touch, and Remus ended up not knowing which of his friends were chosen as Secret Keeper for the Potters. She did know that Dumbledore had Remus doing missions for the Order, and chances were high that it was to werewolf packs. Her research today had two aims. One, she wanted to learn as much as she could about magical werewolf packs, including their known behaviors, no matter how frightening. Two, she wanted to be able to gather the kind of proof she would need to show that the Order would only be hurt by sending someone as intelligent and talented as Remus to act as nothing more than a lowly liason to a class of people that had already rejected his preferred kind of humanity.

It bothered Hermione to think that this argument might not have been persuasive, if it had been brought by anyone at all.

That was the other reason why she could do this kind of research in between other pursuits. She could only handle the way it infuriated her to imagine Remus being sent like a lamb to the slaughter to try to speak to them.

After she packed up the books to replace them (one of which she was completely done with, thank Merlin), Hermione grabbed the book on the Fidelius charm that she had wanted to read, and headed out. Fidelius was next week, but since she was cross-germinating anyway, Hermione wasn't going to complain.

She was early to dinner, and sat down first at their usual space, trying to decide whether to pull out her notes for their upcoming Transfiguration essay or not.

"That's a serious expression," Sirius said, walking up with his bag casually slung on his shoulder. "You look like you're trying to decide between two world-changing events."

"I don't know if I should bring out my Transfiguration essay to work on now, or wait and eat right away," Hermione said. She hadn't really heard what Sirius said, so when he burst out laughing, she smiled in a bemused way and shook her head. "What?"

"Those are definitely world-changing decisions for you, Mia," Sirius said, sitting down beside her and kissing her forehead.

"If you're hungry I can eat now. We don't have to wait for everyone else," she suggested. The others were often late to dinner on this particular day of the week anyway.

Sirius cast a time charm with his wand, and then tucked it away. "Did I ever tell you how strict my mother was about mealtimes? I'd be happy to flout convention, as she would say."

"Oh, Sirius," Hermione said, feeling overcome with happiness for him.

"What? What happened?" he asked, clearly completely confused.

She slid her hand down his arm and wove her fingers in between his, loving how warm and solid he felt. "You said 'was.' Your language proves you have mentally disassociated yourself from her enough to use the past tense," she explained.

"Oh," Sirius said. His voice was odd, like she'd tilted his world off-kilter and he wasn't adjusted to it quite yet. "Hmm," he said after a minute. "I'm good with that."

They started eating in silence, and Hermione kept sneaking glances at him, recognizing the way he was mentally processing what had just happened. After a long time, he gave a little huff of a happy breath, and turned to her.

"Did your parents have any special rules that seem like they were Muggle rules now, thinking back?"

It was an interesting question, and one she hadn't really thought of before, not about everyday things. "A lot of the hygiene is different in terms of method, but that is the biggest thing to keep track of, in our family. Clean house, clean body, clean mouth," she said.

"Somehow I don't think you mean language," he teased her.

"No," she agreed, laughing. "They're dentists. Teeth doctors."

"There are magical dentists, Hermia," he said to her, sounding a bit bothered by her explaining what a dentist was as if he wouldn't know just by virtue of being a wizard.

"Right, of course there are," she said, covering her eyes with a hand in embarrassment.

"That was an interesting peek into a Muggle-born brain, though." Sirius nudged her shoulder. "I get it. A lot of the Muggle stuff is completely beyond us, even the medical bits sometimes, but not that one."

"I think the part that's hard to get used to about being magical as a Muggle-born is that… it's not that Muggles don't believe in the concept of magic. They do, sort of," Hermione told him. "There are stories with magical creatures, there are magical beings integrated into major holidays, honestly there's magic scattered like stardust all over the place. But the prevailing 'truth' about that magic is that it's not real. An adult Muggle is foolish for believing in magic."

Sirius took a bite of his bread roll and shook his head. "That's crazy," he said, still chewing.

"That's not all, either-by the time you get your letter, you're old enough to be let in on the secret that magic is only for little kids," Hermione said, pouring herself a refill of pumpkin juice. "So there you are, smart enough not to be fooled anymore, and then you and your parents are staring at a letter that-"

"Blows it all away," Sirius finished for her. "Can you imagine a Muggle Walburga Black having to find out there's been magic in the world this whole time, and she wasn't gifted with it?" he said, his eyes lighting up.

Hermione loved the idea, as preposterous as it seemed. "I can't picture my parents as magical at all," she told him. "They're practicality personified. They're… precise. Magic would make them batty."

"I don't know if you've noticed," Sirius said, leaning over to drop a kiss on the corner of her mouth. "But magic makes quite a few people batty."

Over his shoulder, Hermione saw that James, Lily, and Remus were heading in their direction.

"All libraried out already?" Lily asked Hermione cheerfully.

"Yes." Hermione shrugged in as close an imitation to Fleur Delacour as she could. "Turns out I already knew everything about the Transfiguration essay we're supposed to write, for tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?!" Sirius and Remus asked in equally frantic voices.

"I knew it!" Lily said, thwacking James on his head with the parchment she'd been reading when they walked up.

"Hey! I didn't say anything!" he protested, holding his arms up to ward her off as if she were a swarm of bees.

Lily simply reached up and put her fingers on James's wrist. Hermione could tell she was taking his pulse. "Your heart is beating almost twice as fast as normal. Do you have any other explanation for this?"

"You kissed me right before we walked in the room?" James said, clearly improvising madly.

"Hmmph."

"It's not tomorrow," Hermione said, standing up to take her dishes to be washed. "But you should have known that already!"

"I knew that! I am not beyond panicking when I hear distressing news!" Remus called after her.

Hermione turned and smiled sweetly at him, and saw that Sirius was following her with his own dishes. She slowed, so he could catch up, and heard him swearing under his breath.

"What was that for?"

"If it's not due tomorrow, that means I have time to work on it," Sirius told her, clearly very disappointed.

Hermione thought of Harry and Ron, and the pang she felt was acute. She tried to swallow down the feeling of homesickness, and she'd mostly succeeded by the time she and Sirius walked back to gather up their things.

That evening, on Prefect rounds, Remus thought about how passionate Hermione had been about his post-Hogwarts life. Honestly, he'd avoided thinking about it, which was unlike him. He wouldn't call himself a planner, not like she was, with her lists and countless pages of notes about all manner of things. He was at least a ponderer, though, and the bleakness of his current outlook had led him to avoid thinking too thoroughly about his prospects.

Remus was a registered werewolf, since he had to be in order to attend Hogwarts. When he'd first started, he hadn't known this-his mother had kept a lot of the logistics from him, as at eleven, he'd been nervous enough about going in the first place. He found out about the registry when he was thirteen, during Christmas his third year at Hogwarts. The whole rest of that school year he'd been plagued with nightmares. Would someone whose children attended the school with him find out? Would they come to school with a group of Aurors and demand he be removed?

He still had those nightmares every now and then. Something told him tonight might be one of those nights.

The character of the dream might shift, though. As he walked onto the moving staircase and climbed up a few steps, Remus looked at his feet and saw how beat up his shoes were. He'd shot up in height again, this year, necessitating his mother to send along 'new to him' shoes, and they were in worse shape than his previous pair. They were also untied. He hopped his other leg down a few steps and leaned over, tying his shoes and seeing a hole in the stairs right beside his foot. He'd never noticed it before, and for some reason, it was encouraging to him.

The overall look of the grand staircase was as spectacular to him now as it had been when he had first seen it. Something as insignificant as a hole the size of a knut was not going to change his impression of it.

Remus decided that he was going to have to make the most with what he had. The overall picture of 'Remus Lupin, newly graduated member of the workforce' would need to be someone who clearly wanted to work hard, and gave a good first impression. He had some pocket money that his mother had pressed into his hand at the beginning of the year, and he'd hardly touched it so far, having been lucky in the way Peter and James in particular had shared their sweets. As much as he loved being able to buy a chocolate bar at Hogsmeade every time, Remus decided he would save the rest of it. With what his mother and Muggle grandmother usually gave him for Christmas, it should be enough for a brand new pair of shoes.

He wasn't going to buy them right away, though. That would give his feet time to grow out of them. He was going to save his money, look for a job, and then buy the shoes. Maybe by then he'd even have enough for a new pair of trousers, too. A vest would cover up any shabbiness in his good (though old) dress shirt. A haircut for the excess, maybe.

Remus sighed as he walked off of the staircase to the fifth floor to do his rounds there. He nodded to the Hufflepuff prefect who came down the side hallway and headed to the part she hadn't done. There was a sniffling sound, and he saw a young girl wearing Gryffindor robes scrunched down beside a suit of armor.

"Hello," he said in as gentle a whisper as he could manage. "I don't imagine you're lost."

The girl shook her head, her blonde curls bouncing in contrast to her miserable expression.

"Was someone mean to you?" he asked then.

Her face crumpled, and he wished he could let himself just sweep her up and carry her back to their common room, but something told him that wasn't going to help. Maybe for a Hufflepuff student, that would be comfort. For a Ravenclaw, too, being able to abdicate responsibility for a time would be helpful. Gryffindor students, though, he'd learned over the years, felt guilty for being upset, sometimes. This looked like one of those times; he just had a feeling.

"Are they still around? Whoever was mean to you?"

She shook her head.

"Can I walk you back to the portrait hole?" Remus asked, resisting the urge to hold out his hand. He didn't want to look like he was demanding anything.

A stubborn tilt of her chin told Remus there was something he was missing. He cast his mind back, trying to remember if he'd ever seen her in the common room before, and then he remembered her. She was always with another Gryffindor student, a boy, and he was certain that sometimes he saw them sitting at the Ravenclaw table.

Remus crouched down and looked at the girl directly. "I'm Remus. I'm a Prefect, but I think you know that, right?" She nodded. "Were you waiting here for your friend to come back after walking your Ravenclaw friend to the tower?"

"Sort of," she said. "I'm Kiri. When the big blonde Slytherin guy hexed Rolf I hid. I should have stood up to him, like Ianna did!" Kiri buried her head in her hands and started crying again.

Remus took a deep breath, and then he realized he could involve Kiri in his thought processes, because it might help. "So, I want to help you, Kiri, but first, we both have to take some deep breaths. Here," Remus said as softly and encouragingly as possible. Then, he took a long breath and let it out slowly, careful not to blow the air over her face. "Your turn?"

Kiri looked at him with an assessing expression that reminded him very much of Lily. She did a swift breath, and he nodded, deeming it acceptable.

"Now what?" Kiri asked him, wiping away her tears with the back of her hand.

"Now we should look for Rolf and, did you say her name was Anna?" Remus asked her, straightening his body up and only now holding out a hand to help her stand. He knew she'd said 'Ianna' as her friend's name, but Kiri felt like the kind of student who might benefit from feeling useful, even if it was just to correct him.

"Ianna," she said, not unkindly. "You're going to ask what he did to Rolf. We stopped to tie his shoe, and Rolf hasn't learned the spell for it, so he was leaned over to tie it, and the boy in the Slytherin robes came up behind us."

She paused, and Remus said, "Which way? You can tell me more as we walk, if that's all right?"

"Well, I think they ran toward Ravenclaw tower, because that's where Ianna is, but I was hiding my face, so…" she trailed off and shook her head, clearly disappointed in herself.

"I know a shortcut," Remus said, impulsively. It was a passageway that led from a portrait at the end of the hall that had a curving staircase inside it and came out right beside the Ravenclaw tower. It must have been a regular passageway at one point, but had been hidden, probably because of how steep the staircase was. Remus didn't think James, Peter, or Sirius would begrudge his sharing this with a fellow Gryffindor.

"Woah," Kiri said when they'd pressed the wine goblet in the portrait and it slid up and away. "Are you even allowed to show me this?"

As he watched her climb the stairs in front of him, Remus understood just why the teachers had blocked it off. It was stressful just to see one small student racing up them, he didn't want to imagine twenty!

The exit was to sidle along the wall behind the tapestry, and the footing was more awkward than he remembered, for Kiri, but they managed it. When they extricated themselves, they were standing behind Filius Flitwick and two first year students. The black-haired girl in Ravenclaw robes saw them and her eyes widened in shock.

Professor Flitwick must not have noticed her reaction, Remus realized, because when he led Kiri along the wall a bit more and then turned sharply to walk toward the Ravenclaw tower entrance, Flitwick didn't seem shocked at their appearance.

He winked at Kiri, who beamed at him, her golden curls bouncing when she clapped a joyous hand over her mouth. Then, she ran over to throw her arms around her two friends.

"Ahh, Lupin! Perfect. It seems a fellow seventh year is harassing the young ones again. Will you walk Mr. Pettipiece back with you? Miss Stanza will be heading to her bed, I hope, shortly!"

"Kiri! You're safe! I'm so glad," the black-haired girl said in a hushed voice.

"He chased us almost the whole way," the boy said. "Professor Flitwick levitated him sideways!"

"Now, now. He's been handled by his Head of House, and your Prefect is here. Time enough to talk about it once you're safe in your tower!" Professor Flitwick said in his normal brisk manner. Remus made eye contact with him and was gratified to see his professor nod at him. It felt like Flitwick was saying that he'd taken care of everything and that it had felt good to do so. It was going to have to suffice, Remus knew, because as a Prefect, he shouldn't encourage gossip by asking Rolf what they'd missed seeing in person.

He needn't have worried about it, though. As it turned out, Rolf was quite the descriptive storyteller. What was worrisome was that it sounded like Lucius Malfoy was picking on Muggle-born first years.