Note: Originally written for The Original Horcrux's 100k Multi-chapter Competition. This will be long. And real dark!fic. I'm rating it T because I don't think it will become extremely graphic, but that's subject to change. Feedback appreciated!

WARNING: Contains murder, cannibalism, and other dark themes. Proceed with caution.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
—Revelation 6:8

In their eyes there's something lacking,
What they need's a damn good whacking
—Piggies, The Beatles

BAD BLOOD

Chapter One

The difference between the werewolves and the Normals, thought Greyback, was that the werewolves were well aware of the damage they were causing. For one thing, they actually had to go through it. And they had to see everyone they knew go through it, too, because that pain wasn't exclusive to the first time, and there wasn't anyone running in their circles who had managed to cling to humanity. Well, there were a few who worked for the Dark Lord and came in from time to time and didn't dare to sneer, but they didn't count as friends. No, they were the humans, the high and mighty, never the scum of the earth, always superior, no matter what they might have done.

Now, perhaps Greyback wouldn't have wanted to retaliate if they hadn't been maligned as they had. Perhaps, even if he'd been left alone when he was younger, and allowed to hold a quiet, steady job, and pretend he was just a wizard with a 'condition', he wouldn't have minded so much. He may even have started to believe it. But it just wasn't true, as he understood now, with the young man's ignorance put away and years of bitter experience behind him. There was a marked difference between him and his kind and the Normal people, and it was simply that the Normals refused to recognise the monsters within themselves.

When he looked at them, he saw pigs. Grunting, sweaty pigs, clambering over each other for fame or fortune or ways to better improve their already undemanding lives. Oblivious. Animals that were only useful, he knew, as meat. And the most wonderful thing about pig meat was that it was disposed of – the fatty, grisly pieces as well as the leftovers – and sent back around in the cycle as slops.

The werewolves – his werewolves – received a lot of flak for being monsters, and he knew it was largely his fault. He was, and unashamedly, what he was, but he didn't want them tarred with the same brush. Most of them he had known since they were only children, and most of them, he knew, saw him as their father. He was angry at the world, and he killed out of despise and contempt, but his children were not the same as he was. His children killed when they needed to eat, and yet that was something that remained largely misconstrued by the Normal society, who refused to entertain the notion that the lack of food was their responsibility entirely.

Fenrir Greyback was, as far as wizards were aware, dead. He had dropped off the earth, where they were concerned, in the winter of 1981. The Dark Lord had vanished, and there was no war left to fight. Greyback was sick of seeing his children slaughtered in a wizard's war in any case. The werewolves hid themselves at his command, and they lived in small groups, scattered throughout Britain, and they tried to stay alive.

But the small town he'd settled just outside, living with his offspring in the cellar and the upstairs living quarters of an abandoned old pub, was full of wizards as well, and he could see the looks of hatred on their faces when they walked past them and he could smell their soap and when he looked out of his window he could see the Muggles taking their kids to school.

Greyback had always liked kids.

He thought he might be going out of his mind (or what little he had left of it), sitting indoors all the day long. He read and re-read the paper, and wished he had books. The others in the house did not seem to mind as much. But some were not very intelligent, and he wished he'd brought a more dexterous bunch with him. He could only really bear the company of Ettie, the girl, and of Loki, who was the first, and named for Greyback's father. The rest made entertainment for themselves by tearing at the old furniture, by getting into fights with one another, by picking at their scabs.

He just sat and stared out of the window with his fingertips pressed together. He wasn't happy; it had been a long time since he was really, properly happy, but he knew when he felt best, and that was when he was showing the Normal people what was what. Doing everything that flew in the face of what they believed in. They wanted their nice, cosy little houses and their warm firesides, and they thought that that was enough. Everyone could be happy, as long as they had that. But that wasn't the case. Greyback had has house, and it was warm enough, and he had his family – a bigger family than he could ever have wished for, but he wasn't happy. While the wizards and the Muggles went about their business, happily oblivious and considering themselves at the head of the world, the werewolves starved.

The wizards talked of giving them fair and equal treatment, of neutralising the threat. The wizards ran the Werewolf Capture Unit. The wizards thought them less than human. The wizards were wrong. They weren't human, not any more. Being human, Greyback knew from bitter experience, was not something to be proud of. He was ashamed to look back on his youth and remember that he'd once had the same prejudices as the wizards of today – but he understood now, he understood so much more than anyone who was Normal, and even more than most of the other werewolves.

Some werewolves, ones that he'd bitten but that had been left with their parents, still tried to be like the Normal people. They still tried to fit in, to live among the wizards and hold down jobs. It was pathetic, them grovelling like dogs begging for a scrap of meat. They weren't dogs. They weren't human, though; they were something else entirely. A binding of two spirits, the man and the beast, and the beast was freedom and rage and it was nothing if not superior in every way to the Normals.

Being so much greater and more terrible than they, why then, thought Greyback, were he and his family were forced to live in a covert old pub and slowly starve lest they risk harming any one of the precious Normal children? They had the somewhat unique virtue amongst once-human creatures of being able to incite fear with their very presence. The War had proven that (they called it the Wizarding War, but that was it again, their arrogance, their refusal to accept that an equal amount of the battling had been carried out by the werewolves, by the Inferi and the giants and all the others). He regretted what came with consenting to ally himself with the 'Dark Lord' – the assumption that he did not consider himself above working below a wizard. And yet he knew he'd have no choice but to do the same again, did another opportunity ever arise. He knew the so-called Dark Lord's stance on what he thought of as half-breeds, but the offering of no longer having to skulk in the shadows was decent enough for him to instruct his sons and daughters to go along with it. But it was never his war, and he ached for every child of his that had been lost. It was a means to an end, and nothing more.

Here, he was left alone to think, and he was dangerous when he thought. He thought of the poor misguided souls outside his window, the ones who hurt the natural order of things with their very existence, toiling away in the Ministry of Magic, remaining silent as bills passed that meant the werewolves were treated ever more like stray dogs. Hiding their children from his as they passed in the street. Oh, and the children. The innocent ones, the ones who wouldn't have known how to hate him if it wasn't for their toxic parents and their hate-riddled minds. The children who'd been born in the last decade, who'd grown up knowing his name, but never his face. The children to whom his name was invoked as a threat for not finishing their vegetables or staying up too late. The children to whom he was the monster lurking under the bed. The children. The collateral damage.

The thought of the parents and he thought of the children and he thought of the pigs, those ignorant, blinded pig, mucking about in their pools of mud and trash, content enough to pretend there wasn't a world going on outside the flat white walls of their sties. Content to pretend that they were in charge here, that nothing was going to upset their seats at the head of this world. That they could while their days away and gorge themselves on slops 'til they grew fat and that their children could do the same. So utterly blind to what was really happing outside their four walls that they probably wouldn't notice if they were being fed pork rinds.

And pig meat did taste so much like human.

His favourite parts were the buttocks, as well as the flesh on the upper arms and the cheeks of the face. They were the most tender, and he didn't like the gristle. His children often fought over thighs, and chewed on the bones that were left over. They liked the back meat and the ribs, maybe because the ribs were so close to the heart. When they killed, they did so out of necessity, and that meant that they wasted nothing. They'd even crack open the skull and scoop out the brain, but he'd never been fond of it himself. He preferred the good cuts of meat, the sort that would be made into the best chops were it from a pig and ever to make it as far as the butcher's. And he liked it raw. He liked it hot and bloody and he liked to feel the skin on his lips.

But most of it was good to eat. The gristle and the scraps and the fat could even be scraped together and pressed into flat burgers, which, if they were kept cool, lasted a while, although they were largely tasteless. They'd move onto those parts after they'd finished with the rest and had otherwise licked the bones clean.

They rarely killed, but when they did they took whatever they could get. They found it best to stay out of the way of the Normal people, and not to attract attention, so when they killed, it was often a tramp they'd found in an empty street, or someone walking home alone. Bigger people were harder to get a hold of, though they preferred them, and if there were several werewolves, it was easier. They tended not to travel in packs, though. Greyback usually went out alone, and when he wanted to eat, he preferred the young. Their skin was softer and their flesh less tough, though they were smaller and didn't go around so well. He liked girls especially. They were largely hairless.

Normal folks used it as a scapegoat, because they saw them as less than human anyway, but they pretended that it was the werewolves' desire to eat that repulsed them. Hogwash. It was the Normals' skewed perception of humanity, and nothing more. Would they, thought Greyback, be so quick to condemn them if they were themselves backed into a corner? If they had no other choice?

Greyback watched pigs walk past with their children, and for the first time in a long while, he felt his lips curl into a smile.