At noon, after Damien and Remus finished lunch with their classmates, Damien spent some time trying to cheer Remus up; things clearly hadn’t been going well for him.
When Damien glanced up at the clock again, there was only half an hour left before afternoon classes.
The tight, intensive curriculum was already numbing him.
In terms of classroom atmosphere and pace, though, it was anything but easygoing.
After asking the nearby students and learning that doing practice problems in class was a daily routine, he completely gave up any remaining illusions about a carefree school life.
He really should’ve seen it coming.
Hogwarts’ third-year timetables were notoriously crammed, with homework measured in feet of parchment; there wasn’t a shred of “well-rounded education” about it.
It was only because Ron and Harry were always slacking off and copying Hermione’s homework that people got the impression Hogwarts was easy.
If you remembered that Hermione had pushed herself so hard she needed a Time-Turner just to attend all her classes in third year—and was eventually forced to give it up—and that Percy and Bill Weasley had both managed twelve Outstandings, then Ron being a “nobody” at home suddenly made perfect sense.
For anyone who wanted to stand out, the first step was becoming a full-on grind king.
Of course, Damien didn’t need to go that far; he just had to work steadily and keep unlocking his talents.
While Damien was quietly digesting this new wave of school-life “insights,” a few boys wandered over from not far away.
At the front was a chubby, broad-shouldered boy with a ruddy face, a pair of boxing gloves dangling from his hand.
The resemblance to Dudley was uncanny.
Staring at the boy’s age, era, and almost identical build, Damien couldn’t help sinking into thought.
This time period, this face… no way.
Don’t tell me this is Vernon?
But the chubby boy quickly proved Damien was overthinking it.
The arrogant kid smoothed back his blond hair, then gave Damien and Remus a slow, evaluative once-over.
Remus instinctively shrank behind Damien under that gaze.
The boy let out a scornful snort, shook the boxing gloves in front of Damien’s face, and declared:
“You two newcomers, from now on you have to listen to Boss Maim.
Every day when you see me, you’ve got to bow and greet me.
Got it?”
The scene was so oddly innocent that Damien almost laughed.
The world really was simpler in this era; even a so-called school bully had such modest demands.
With a faintly amused smile, he addressed “Boss Maim”—
“And what if we don’t feel like obeying?”
“Don’t… don’t feel like obeying?” the chubby boy stuttered.
He clearly wasn’t used to anyone not being cowed by his size.
After hesitating for quite a while, he finally managed to spit out a vicious threat for the two handsome newcomers:
“Then I’ll come steal your sausages every day at lunch!”
Damien stared at the boy, momentarily at a loss for words.
If it were a proper thug, you defended your dignity, no question.
But what were you supposed to do when you ran into an idiot?
He glanced at Maim’s little followers with some sympathy—only to find, to his surprise, that they actually looked proud to be standing behind him.
For a moment, Damien genuinely couldn’t tell whether the real fool was Maim… or himself for overthinking it.
The ruckus soon drew a teacher’s attention.
Maim, who’d been swaggering just seconds before, spotted the approaching teacher, hastily jammed the boxing gloves under his chubby belly, and bolted.
His lackeys scrambled after him, not daring to look back.
Seeing this, the teacher who had been heading their way simply turned and walked off in the opposite direction.
From behind him, Remus asked in puzzlement, “Damien, I feel like that Muggle is really strange.
Do you know what he actually wanted from us?”
Damien gave a helpless shake of his head.
“Remus, just think of it as his way of introducing himself.”
“Oh.” Remus was clearly taken aback by Damien’s answer.
He stood there, dazed for a moment, before muttering, “Then that Muggle really is strange.”
In the blink of an eye, the school day was over.
That evening, when Remus and Damien sat down to their second plate of fish and chips in three days, both of them were moved to tears.
Damien even sighed from the bottom of his heart, “As expected of Britain’s national dish—I love fish and chips!”
It wasn’t hard to understand why.
For the past few days, all their meals had been prepared by two mothers who possessed the spirit of scientific research and exploration… but absolutely no kitchen skills.
As a result, they’d had the dubious honour of sampling all kinds of bizarre, inedible “Dark Cuisines.” The worst part was that both women were completely confident in their own cooking.
Since Damien couldn’t reveal his true identity and wander into the kitchen to prepare proper food himself, all he could do was steel his nerves and force down as much of each experimental dish as he could manage.
After dinner, Remus sat beside him, doing his homework.
As he wrote, he let out a sigh and said to Damien, “Brother, I miss Dad and Uncle Robert.”
“A-choo!”
In a fir forest in Scotland, Lyall let out a sneeze.
Robert glanced over and couldn’t resist teasing him.
“What’s wrong?
Still not used to the Scottish cold?”
Lyall shook his head.
“There’s a saying in the East: when you sneeze, it means someone is missing you. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
I’m sure my son must be thinking of me.
“Robert, you see, you’re not sneezing at all.
Damien and Catherine must be having a great time.
He doesn’t need to miss you.”
The smile on Robert’s face slowly faded.
After a moment’s thought, he turned toward a fir tree and deliberately sneezed five or six times in a row.
Then he turned back, trying to sound casual.
“Oh, looks like my dear son misses me too.”
Lyall stared at the childish man and sighed helplessly.
“Generally, that only applies to one sneeze.
If you’re sneezing that many times, it just means you’ve caught a cold, Robert.”
“Huh?
Really?
Hahahaha…”
Robert used loud laughter to cover his embarrassment, but he fell silent at once when he saw Lyall suddenly raise a hand.
He watched as Lyall slowly crouched down to examine a scratch on the trunk of a fir tree.
The mark was very shallow, the kind of thing an animal might have left by accident, but Lyall studied it with complete focus.
He not only looked it over carefully, he also drew his wand and cast several spells on it.
At last, a faint smile tugged at his lips.
He turned to Robert and said quietly, “We’re close to him.”
Robert’s eyes lit up at once.
“Then what are we waiting for?
Let’s go give that damn bastard a shock of justice!”
Lyall looked at the excited Robert with a smile, but inside he was thinking silently,
“Fenrir, you’d better run fast.
Otherwise, I will completely—tear you to pieces.”
Remus adapted to Muggle school life very quickly.
It wasn’t that he lacked intelligence; he’d simply never been in this kind of environment before.
In truth, most wizards’ ignorance of the Muggle world came more from arrogance than from stupidity.
But nine-year-old Remus hadn’t yet been tainted by that bad habit.
Every day he went to school with Damien, diligently doing his homework and carefully working through different science experiments.
Learning to plant a flower, kick a ball, read a book—the rich spiritual world of Muggles unfolded, bit by bit, before this nine-year-old child.
On weekends, he and Damien roamed the streets and alleys of Cokeworth, staring up at the factory’s enormous chimney and marvelling at Muggle technology.
When he watched the sewage pouring from the factory into the river downstream, he was shocked by the short-sightedness and cruelty of Muggles.
Only at night, when Damien opened his various introductory magic books, would Remus suddenly remember where his own true talent lay.
Three months slipped by in a blink.
Cokeworth went from the cool touch of spring to the heavy, stuffy heat of midsummer almost overnight.
With it came Remus and Damien’s first Muggle summer holiday.
The midsummer sun beat down with relentlessly, but even that blazing heat couldn’t smother a child’s urge to bolt out the door the moment school let out.
Damien, however, was being hauled along in pure misery.
Remus, practically vibrating like an overexcited puppy, dragged him down the street under the scorching sun.
As an adult at heart, the idea of not staying home with cold drinks and a shady corner on a day like this—and instead voluntarily stepping out to be roasted—was something Damien simply could not accept.
Remus, of course, felt nothing of the sort.
Under those shining eyes and pitiful pleas that had started at seven in the morning, Damien finally dragged his half-baked body outside to accompany this menace on his grand summer adventures.
But the midsummer sun really was beyond what Damien could tolerate.
For the sake of his own survival, he decided to try and calm the frolicking Remus.
“Remus, stop running.
How about we go fishing?”
As expected, Remus—who had just been enthusiastically greeting all the neighbors’ dogs—froze.
His light brown eyes lit up at once.
“Really?
Damien!
I’ve never been fishing before!
You definitely know how, right?
I remember Mum saying you caught a big fish when you were really young!”
“Oh, it was nothing, nothing at all.
Pure luck.”
Putting on a show of modesty, Damien casually nudged the conversation toward fishing.
Sure enough, Remus’s attention was immediately hooked.
“Damien, we don’t have fishing rods.
And didn’t Aunt Catherine forbid you from fishing?”
“So what?
Who says you need a rod to fish?
I can fish with a willow branch.”
Damien glanced at the lone achievement on his system panel and nodded to himself.
With that as a safety net, he shouldn’t end up making a fool of himself.
Remus, standing to the side, was visibly intrigued.
“Damien, I believe you can fish, but I don’t believe you can fish with a willow branch!”
“That’s nothing.
You’ll believe it once we try.
Come on, let’s find a river and I’ll show you!”
“Try it then!
Let’s go, there’s a park twenty minutes east with a small lake.”
Only then did Damien calmly unveil his true purpose.
“Remus, fishing takes patience.
You have to sit still and wait quietly with me for the fish to bite.
If you run around and scare them away, you can’t blame me.”
“I definitely won’t move.
I’ll just wait and watch you catch the fish.”
Hearing that simple, serious answer, Damien finally let a relieved smile tug at his lips.
At last, he didn’t have to keep sprinting around under the sun for no reason.
At the very least, he could sit down somewhere shady and rest.
As for the actual fishing—if his achievement was impressive enough, it would be easy to fool little Remus.
If it wasn’t… well, he could always toss a stone in the water and blame Remus for scaring the fish off.
Plan: successful~~~~
Gryffindors really were too easy to trick.
Damien strolled at an unhurried pace behind Remus, who was dashing about excitedly in search of willow branches, as they made their way to the park.
By the lake, Damien’s gaze was immediately drawn to a graceful weeping willow.
Its lush curtain of branches promised enough shade to spare him any further torment from the sun and give his sun-dazed body a proper rest.
But when he stepped closer and moved around to the other side, he realized his perfect spot had already been claimed.
Two children about their age were sitting there.
The boy’s hair was lank and oily, plastered to his head, and his skin was so unnaturally pale it almost looked sickly—yet, strangely, he still looked clean.
He sat very properly on the side closer to the sunlight, leaving the deepest, coolest shade beneath the willow for the girl beside him, whose hair was a vivid, dark red.
Though still just a child, the girl already hinted at the beauty she would one day grow into.
Her bright green eyes were wide and fixed on the boy opposite her, who was smiling at her a bit foolishly.
‘…Huh?’
Red hair and green eyes.
Greasy black hair and a pale face.
Damien instantly put the pieces together and very nearly turned around on the spot to look for another place to sit.
This was no joke.
Professor Severus Snape had spent his whole life as a devoted, heartsick lover, clinging to a handful of beautiful memories from these very years.
Damien absolutely did not want to be the unwelcome intruder who barged into the best days of the man’s life.
Unfortunately, just because Damien understood this didn’t mean Remus—whom he’d gone to so much trouble to trick into coming—understood it too.
Remus, full of energy, charged straight toward the willow tree, calling over his shoulder—
“Damien, aren’t these willow branches?
Quick, pick the most suitable one and show me how you fish!”
At the sound of his excited shout, the boy and girl under the tree both froze, startled by the sudden interruption.
It wasn’t until Remus got close that he realized, a bit late, that he might have walked right into someone’s “date.”
Awkwardness flooded his face.
He could only offer a goofy smile and blurt out a clumsy greeting.
Seeing this, Damien could only shake his head and sigh.
He stepped forward, forcing himself to take the initiative.
“Hello, I’m Damien—Damien McGonagall.
This is my friend, Remus Lupin.
We didn’t mean to disturb you; we just wanted to pick a willow branch.”
The boy under the tree stared at Damien, momentarily stunned by his cheerful manner.
The girl, who had been sitting quietly, rose to her feet and replied,
“Hello, I’m Lily—Lily Evans, and this is my friend Severus Snape.
Your friend just said you’re going to fish with a willow branch.
Is that true?”
Faced with the red-haired’s curious question and Snape’s somewhat bewildered expression—clearly still trying to process this string of surprises—Damien glanced helplessly at Remus, who was still bouncing about beside him, and sighed again.