AN: For Week 2: History Appreciation of Camp Potter II. The prompt was, "Write about Lyall Lupin." and I very loosely used the prompt of Just One Yesterday by Fall Out Boy.
Lyall gripped his glass harder, trying to stop his hand shaking. He barely filled it halfway and it was still sloshing over in tiny drips. Frustrated, he gulped the whole thing down with a grimace. He'd never been one for harder liquors, but he needed something to drown out the noise.
Right now, he thought to himself with a clenched heart, my son is downstairs turning into a monster. Hear those screams? You brought this on him. It was true. It was his fault, all of it. If he'd just let Greyback go, if he'd taken him a little more seriously when he threatened the lives of his family, maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe his boy could have had a life.
Somehow, this wasn't what Lyall expected from Greyback. When he heard that there was a breakout and that Greyback had been one of the escapees, he kept his wife and son close. He warned Remus not to go out after dark alone, told his wife not to spend too much time in the woods. Hope had always loved the woods and nature. She'd not liked being restricted by her husband, but she did it for her son.
Hope and Remus had always had a special relationship, one Lyall had been excluded from. This hadn't ever really bothered him. He knew there was a bond between mother and child that a father just couldn't understand. Now, he wished that he could understand it. He wanted to be part of it. Remus would forgive his mother anything. Once he was human once more, he would never love Lyall again. Of this, he was certain.
He downed another glass of something; he wasn't quite sure what it was, but it tasted awful and he was certain it would get him drunk. Hopefully, drunk enough that he could ignore the sounds coming from the basement.
Remus is only a baby, he thought as he curled up in his chair, staring at the fire. The whines and howls of pain and anger he could hear through the floorboards were those of a cub. It sounded like a young wolf imitating an adult from the pack and trying to be fearsome. Remus wasn't playing, though, and this was only the beginning.
Hope hadn't liked hearing it, either. When they first started, they had been the loudest and the most heartbreaking. You could still hear some of Remus's little voice seep through as his vocal cords were ripped apart and pieced back together, just like the rest of him. Lyall had to physically restrain her from running to him. Eventually, after much struggling and crying on both sides, he'd put her to sleep with a muttered spell. It was a selfish act as much as it was a merciful one. He'd let her sleep through the worst of it, but he did it because he couldn't stand to be faced with his mistakes. He couldn't bear that Hope the curses and insults she threw at him weren't even the worst of the situation, or that everything she said was true.
So he sat alone, pretending that he was another man in another world, far away from this house. Perhaps if he told himself enough times that he had no werewolf son and no wife that would hate him tomorrow and forever, it would be true. At the very least, his alcohol-soaked brain would believe it.
A shot gun hung above the doorway of his home. It hadn't been used in years. He hadn't actually been hunting since he was a young man, but when he got married and moved into the house he'd taken it along anyways. Hope hadn't liked it; she thought it was ugly and if he was going to have it, couldn't it live somewhere else? He'd argued, though. What if there was an intruder? The gun might be old and dusty, but it would sure scare a robber. Finally, she'd consented. Lyall wondered if it would still even fire. He hadn't even bothered to clean it since Remus was born. Even when Greyback escaped, it didn't occur to him. It had become nothing more than an odd decoration over the years.
For what wouldn't be the last time, Lyall wondered if it would be more humane to take the gun and put his little boy out of his misery.