Punitive transfiguration isn't Remus' style, and if it were he wouldn't want a toad. Maybe an owl. He's never had his own owl, and he'd take very good of one. But he isn't annoyed, in any case, and his second step away stalls with his weight balanced on his back foot's toes and is then aborted, turned into a fidgety rocking motion on his feet that doesn't ultimately move him further away.

He crosses both arms low around his middle, more like he's cold than like he's wary or defiant. One of the seeds in his fist is turned around longways and poking into his palm. He was joking, about melancholy, though this is certainly odd, not what he would expect from William if he had the right to expect anything from someone he knows so little about. He thought he knew boisterous and funny and shameless, but he didn't know eight foot tall concrete bar-brawler, so expectations are right out.

"When?" he says, and it's a credit to Severus that he doesn't even worry William might know what he is, like he would if someone asked him that question at home. If Severus hadn't told Charles, of all people, surely he hasn't told William. "When I would start changing things? Four. If that didn't work, eleven. Twelve. Fifteen. Twenty-one. Something would be bound to stick eventually."

It's a shame that keeping a catalogue of his mistakes isn't enough to keep him from repeating them. He's still smiling, sort of, faint and distantly friendly and only defensive in purpose, not appearance.

"Why? Is there something you'd change?"