Soup

By dented-sky

       

Remus woke up sweaty and disorientated, his vision blurred at the edges like dirty water. He rubbed his red rimmed eyes and got out of bed. On the ceiling animated wooden birds were singing: cook-coo, cook-coo, and the walls were lumpy and moving as if they were made out of bubbling glue.

He thought nothing on this. He registered it as normal, and knew that when he got down stairs he would find Lily Evans sipping from a mug. “Oh, hello,” said the only girl in the room. Her red hair came alive and twisted itself around her neck tightly. “Would you like some soup?” she asked as Remus approached.

He looked at her and then down into the mug. Eyes peeked out over the edge and stared and wobbled. It was then that he finally felt some emotion: disgust. “The soup is watching me,” he told her.

She said, “Yes, it does that, and I don’t much like it either. But they had no veal.”

“No veal?”

“No veal. Only rats’ eyes. Oh, no taste. Ippy sticky.”

“Gooby wooby,” said a child’s voice from behind.

A blonde boy, about ten or eleven, stood behind Remus and picked his nose. “Izzy feckle gwosh,” he said with a giggle.

Remus turned around and walked through the wall.

“Oh no!” said Evans, her voice muffled by the fact that Remus was trapped in a wiggling wall. “That wall is full of poop, that is!”

A large brown snake-like thing was running through the corridors of Hogwarts. It had no face, just a squashy little opening that reminded Remus of bum hole. It passed him as he came through the other side.

“You’re a fool,” said skinny little Snape from beside Remus. “A fool! And to think I actually bothered to warn you about the slimy worms.” He reached a hand to his greasy black hair and pulled out a white worm, then he gingerly handed it to Remus. “Cut open your wrists like you want to, and put this inside.”

Remus read it as this: if he put the worm in a wound it will wiggle just under the skin, and protect him from the big snake. He found it absolutely plausible.

“It’ll come back for you!” Snape shouted after Remus’s retreating back as he ran away. Even with a big snake on a rampage, no way was he going to pay the price of having that worm under his skin, even if it would save his life.

He ended up in the Charms classroom, somehow. Sirius stood from where he was sitting on the desk. Next to him, the blonde boy said, “Ogzy fogger warrrrrk tach!”

“Who is he?” Remus asked Sirius.

Sirius grinned. “That’s our Headmaster, Dumbledore. Would you like to see the cock Jesus gave me?”

Remus recognized that the dream was going to turn into a wet one. “Let’s get married,” he answered.

At that point the big snake found them and stuck its head through the door. It spurted thick white liquid on them.

Evans, who was suddenly in the room too, laughed her head off. On her lap Prongs lay, his long furry snout nuzzling her knee. She was chewing on one of his bony legs. “Now, look here, Lupin,” she said sternly, “I tried to tell you, didn’t I? The walls are full of rat poo! There are just too many in there!”

Remus went down stairs and into a bathroom. A cage hung from the ceiling, and Sirius’s brother was inside, bloody and pale. There was a real snake, this time, woven through his body like a worm through a rotten apple.

Remus started looking into each and every toilet cubical as Regulus wailed. “Don’t marry for love, no, and the traitor, he has no money!”

Remus knew who the traitor was: Sirius, for letting Snape into the Shrieking Shack.

“No, you wanker,” said Moony, the angry ugly wolf, from in the last cubicle. “Not that traitor!”

“I’m only hiding from the walls because the snake might come,” said Remus, before he woke up.

He was back in the dorm, all other beds occupied.

“Oh, you finally woke up!” said James, exasperated.

“What - “

“Big flu going around the school.”

“Oh.”

“We thought you’d never wake up,” Peter put in. “You should have some soup.”

“Nooooo!” wailed Remus. “Not the eyes!”

“Actually it’s just chicken and corn,” said Sirius sympathetically. “What you dream of? Because I kept trying to show you my willy.” And then he laughed.

Everyone stared.

Remus grabbed the mug that was on his bed-side table, and sipped it, and hoped to Merlin no one was watching from within.

-End.


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