Remus J Lupin

Remus had been keeping an eye on the moon. He had arrived to a sharp sliver of a crescent, barely there, no more than two days out from a new moon, and he had watched that crescent wax into its first quarter with a removed sort of unease.

He'd been told, over and over, now, that magic didn't work on the island, that old curses were rendered null. He'd been told, but he was having difficulty believing it. It seemed too good to be true. Living day to day without magic was a special kind of misery, one he'd never anticipated having to experience, but if it meant the transformations were over, for good... He wasn't sure it was a fair trade. It was difficult to say. Intellectually, he didn't think it was. When he awoke in the morning to no wand, no magic, getting out of bed seemed more daunting than usual, and it was rarely something he did with much enthusiasm, anyhow. Maybe once the cycle was done he'd be able to judge. Maybe once it sunk in that he was no longer what he had been.

Only he'd been one for so long. He'd been a werewolf before he'd been a proper wizard. It was as much a part of him as his magic, he'd come to accept that. So while he believed what he was told, because no one had any reason to lie to him, he certainly didn't feel it in his bones.

Until the moon neared full, and he didn't feel it, literally, in his bones and his blood and muscles, and then a desperate, wild hope had begun to flutter around in his chest. He kept an eye on the moon when it was pale and visible in the day time, and stood outside- always under the canopy of trees- to watch it glowing, luminous and white, at night.

And he felt nothing. There was no pull, no slow build up of energy. Being too near the sea for too long back home had made him feel disturbingly connected to the passage of the tide, and connection was not something he'd been looking for, but here, next to so much ocean, he felt nothing.

And then the moon was full. He knew, when he stood from the simple wooden chair he'd gotten his hands on and set his book down, it would be there, already hanging in the sky. He let out a long, slow breath, standing in the warm light of the front room, then stepped out into the thick night air and the pale moonlight.

A field of tall grass, so tall it was over his head, surrounded him. Not far off rose the shadows of old trees, and above them was a navy blue sky, so dark it was nearly black, as the very last vestiges of the sun faded behind him, leaving a wash of red by the horizon. The stars were already out in force and a full moon was rising up from behind the gnarled black shapelessness of the forest.

He hadn't had this dream in years, and it hadn't been so vivid since he'd been in school. It was quiet, not even the sounds of a village shifting from its work day to its weekend evening audible in the far reaches of the field behind his house. He turned, small fingers brushing along the grass, absently tonguing the place his first baby tooth had fallen out, to look back toward his home. He could see the roof, but he was too small to see much else. His mum was there, getting dinner ready, unaware that he'd wandered so far. His father was home, or was about to be, and would probably set to reading or doing work at his desk. Remus wasn't exactly sure what his parents had been doing, when he'd been bitten. He just knew they'd been so close, but not nearly close enough.

In fact, turning was a mistake, because he knew what would happen when he turned back. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as he heard them, the softest of footfalls.

Still human.

Remus Lupin, age 6, turned away from the sun as it set on August 31st, 1966, to face his future.

When he would confront Fenrir Greyback as an adult, the man, if he could truly be called such, would still be imposing. Possibly some of that was left over from this first impression. He was huge, so tall and broad that he blocked the fading silhouette of the forest. The sweet, end-of-summer air smelled suddenly of carrion, and everything in Remus told him to flee, to fly. He didn't though, fear and perhaps fascination holding him in place, coltish little legs locked rigid, eyes round and apprehensive in the dark. He knew this part, he didn't want to see this again, didn't want to feel it. It was so damned real.

"You're the Lupin boy," Fenrir said in a voice like gravel, his own eyes winking in the dark like headlamps. Remus felt himself shaking and couldn't reply.

"I have a message for your father," Fenrir continued, grinning in the dark as the moon came up from behind the trees. Remus could see his teeth. They were changing. Or they were always like that. It was impossible to say what had been real and what fear had made him see. A 6 year old's eyes were ruled significantly in part by a 6 year old's imagination. A twenty six year old man's eyes, though, should have been able to see more clearly.

He couldn't though. He took a half step back, chewed up canvas loafer snapping a few spades of dead grass.

"Don't run," Fenrir said, and either his shoulders hunched or he curled over, but either way he looked like he got bigger.

"Yet."

Remus turned and bolted. A burst of adrenaline flooded his bird like frame and he sprang forward to run, uselessly. From another perspective it would have been embarrassing- he hadn't even outrun Fenris's reach in his human form. The hand caught the back of his shirt and pulled him back, throwing him roughly to the ground, and all the air was gone from his lungs and his head suddenly ached something terrible. A nail scratched his cheek and Fenris caught his head to push his chin up. There was an unyielding pull and his shirt ripped, and that hurt Remus's neck. He didn't remember being so dizzy for all of it. There was the scratch, so sharp that in the moment after it didn't hurt, and then it stung fiercely, of a nail dragging along the skin of his shoulder. It made everything clearer and Remus whined, a soft, panicked sound. Greyback didn't chuckle so much as growl, but it somehow implied amusement.

"Now," he said, crouching back, nails long and getting longer, eyes burning awfully in the dark, "you can run."

Remus rolled onto his stomach, his hands level with his shoulders, and pushed up with all of his strength. He ran, grass scratching his face, breath hitching in his throat and burning in his lungs. There was a terrible ripping sound behind him and the groan of something animal. The sun was gone and he had no idea which direction he was running in. It didn't matter, though. It couldn't have mattered less.

He didn't know which direction Greyback appeared out of, how the wolf knocked him to the ground, how it managed to pin him with one huge paw pressing down on his back like a stone slab, but then its jaws were closed over his shoulder, ripping, tearing in, and it wasn't just the excruciating pain of the sheer physical trauma but something worse, something in the wolf's saliva, and it felt like lava, like poison, racing through his veins. His scream- because he had screamed, had forgotten, actually, that he had- cut off as his throat tightened. The pain was blinding and seemed to last forever, and then he was seeing stars, the actual stars, and the big, bright moon he'd gone out to look at in the first place, and he heard Fenrir tip his head up to it and howl.