Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns the Harry Potter universe. I am not J.K. Rowling. Also, the lyrics belong to Andrew Bird who happens to be amazing.
Author's Note: This was an exercise to get me out of writer's block. (It did not work). This did not come out the way I wanted, so I might do a rewrite later. I'm really just trying to get used to writing the Remus character. Any feedback is appreciated.
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I will become this animal
Perfectly adapted to the music halls
I will become this animal
Anomalous appendages
Anonanimal
Andrew Bird, "Anonanimal"
It was no longer the wolf in him that caused him difficulties. It was still there, of course, but as a part of him; inseparable from who he was as a person. When he was younger he had experienced the wolf as a separate identity, as one who was not he. He would be Remus and then he would be not-Remus, divided in his mind as clearly as if he were thinking of two people. It was painful initially, becoming not-Remus once a month, not because of the back-breaking transformation, which was painful in its own way, but because as it began he was very aware of physically, emotionally, intellectually becoming someone else.
For one night of each dark month he would disappear beneath the shaggy and mud-matted hide of a gnashing and mindless wolf, blood-streaked muzzle burrowing into the warm stomachs of rabbits and worse. But even that was not right; he was not beneath or inside or sewn into the wolf. He was simply not there at all. He could not reconcile what he did as a wolf with who he was as a person, convincing himself with some success that because he could not remember the nights he ran hot and wild through the high grasses they had never happened. At least not for him, not for Remus; maybe for some other, not-Remus.
On the mornings that he did remember, waking with dark blood smeared from his mouth to the slope of his cheek, and felt a deep and knotted yearning in his gut to return to the fields, he felt immediately guilty, immediately frightened, terrified of himself and that which he was capable of—capable of becoming. Because as time went on, the line between who he was as a person and who he was as a wolf became blurred like a line of chalk in the rain.
Eventually he grew to embrace the wolf instincts, reasoning that once he accepted he and the wolf were one and the same, he'd have more control over what he did as a wolf. Now when he ran through the fields, the thew of his haunches flexing and powerful with each forward bound, he was aware of every scent, every instinct, every impulse.
When he woke in the morning, he could remember the night in detail and if there was blood or a reason to be sorry he was sorry, but not in the way he might have been before. It was a relief, he secretly thought, to become the animal, to shed the skin of a body that was no longer comfortable or easy-fitting. At the time he didn't realize at what cost his adaptation came, but he had lost the ability to be an unadulterated human the same way deep-sea animals lose their sight beneath dark waters.
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