The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix - Part Two

Influences

It was early in the morning, and Remus was locked in the bathroom at the flat in East London, sitting on the floor, leaning against the bathtub, face buried in his arms, which were folded against his knees.

He had never been so humiliated in his entire life.

"Moony! Come on, come out - please!" Sirius cried through the door. "Please! It's not a big deal! It'll take all of five minutes to fix!"

"No."

"Moony - we never have to talk of it again, please just come out."

"No!"

The closest he'd ever come had been in fifth year, just after the incident with Sirius and the the one blessed thing that had made that better than this was James Potter coming to him, before they'd had any kind of discussion about it, with no idea it had ever happened.

"I don't know what's happening anymore, Rey," James said. "I turned back time and fucked it all up."

"I'll tell you anything you need to know. Anything." Remus said.

James looked up at him, "Merlin's beard, Rey. Tell me everything."

Remus told him almost everything. Almost. But to be fair, telling James that hardly counted as something that James Potter needer to know about his reality in order to get on with it.

It was just a blessing given to him by fate that he knew that James didn't remember it.

Remus had been having a terrible nightmare. Absolutely terrible.

The nightmare went that Sirius Black had stood up on the table in the Great Hall and announced to everyone in attendance that Remus was a werewolf. "Come on Moony, isn't it better now that they all know?" Sirius had chided him, "Now Snape can't hold it over your head anymore and you can just be yourself with everyone! What's it matter if the entire wizarding world knows? Yoooou're soooo vaaaaaaaain for thinking I've done a bad thing." And then he'd broken out singing that blasted song all over again, shouting the lyrics at him like a crazy person... and then in the dream, Remus had run from the room, shaking and crying and directly into the arms of Lily Evans who had looked him right in the eyes and asked, laughing, "Is it true that you wet the bed, Remus?" "No, no!" he'd shouted, but even as he'd shouted it, she'd turned to Severus Snape at her shoulder and said, "This filthy werewolf wets the bed!" and the pair of them had laughed at him until he woke up....

....and found he'd wet the bed.

He lay still, terrified, the wetness all around him as he stared up at the canopy of his four poster. He hadn't done this since before Hogwarts... and even then, at ten, he'd been humiliated even telling his mum what had happened.

"It's the moon, honey, it's okay," Hope had always told him gently, "It's the March moon. Don't you worry your mind for even a moment. Mumma's got it taken care of." And she'd changed his sheets for him, singing the Moonshadow song under her breath and tucked him back in with a cup of ovaltine and a hundred assurances that it was alright and only the full moon.

But now he wasn't ten anymore, Hope was gone; he was sixteen and he was in the last of four beds - furthest from the door - and the other three beds were occupied by four sleeping boys who he would rather die than tell what had happened.

Tears fell over his face.

He couldn't just lie there in his own piss all night.

He had to get up.

His best chance of going undetected was getting it cleaned up as quietly as possible before the other boys woke up. The only good thing was Peter could sleep through a bombarda and he was the closest of the three. Sirius was the furthest away and probably the lightest sleeper. Before everything happened, Sirius would've woken up at the falling of a feather if he thought that feather might disturb Remus, but perhaps his sensitivity to things going on at Remus's end of the room wasn't as heightened anymore - being that he didn't give a damn about Remus himself anymore.