Disclaimer: I am not J.K. Rowling.
Blue by Rockinfaerie
Chapter One: Survival
He wakes up slowly and the morning is soft; he inhales and a cool rush of salty air enters his nostrils.
This is the only tolerable moment of the day, when the gentle slap of the flat blue sea can be heard as its hits the old stone walls. Through the fluttering spaces between his eyelashes the brilliant sky dazzles. It glares in fragments through the wavering palms. His focus adjusts and he can hear the material flap of striped beach umbrellas. He does not turn but he knows they are striped and greying and tattered, like an old t-shirt from a distant past.
The sun is gloriously weak. But soon it will climb the sky and stretch out its rays and burn his skin and eyes and lips if he reveals himself to it. Worse, the strong sun will bring the people who unfailingly come to throng the seafront. First a trickle of plastic spade-wielders, then a clatter of deckchairs, until finally there is nowhere where there isn't people, and he must run, and hide himself away, for he can't bear their happy voices, their children's laughter.
It is early yet. Now he may stay. Stay for a little while. This is the great in-between, his senses beginning to sharpen but his thoughts too slow to register anything but hunger-pain. The rough uneven wood of the bench has been digging into his upper spine, disrupting his sleep. He is glad of it; this is preferable to deep slumber, which would seize its chance at any moment to propel him backwards into the warm wavering realms of once-known joy and suddenly, violently, return him afresh to this miserable scum-coated surface.
Slowly, stiffly, he sits up to the flares of early morning traffic and to the peeling ice-cream signs, his mouth as dry as the crumbling vanilla and chocolate that flakes onto the cracked grey concrete. Soon he must go elsewhere.
He knew, emerging from that thick black stifling fog of horror, that he could no longer live a sedentary lifestyle, with all its ritual and contemplation; his path has become that of an unmagical scavenging nomad, stripped to the instinctive fundamentals of eating and sleeping. An unending and difficult quest for food constantly dominates his thoughts, barring all others from registering. These days and months and years are spent wandering from town to town to village, rooting through dustbins of restaurant kitchens or raiding unattended chicken coops, remaining unacknowledged or reviled by all who pass him.
This is his existence, except for when the full moon turns to face him and then he must incarcerate himself into some remote pit, and his wolfish mind, once unleashed, tears through those mental barriers he has so persistently erected, savaging all that is behind; for subsequent days he is doomed to contend with these old shards of memory that appear before him, voices heard sharply in his ear as though beside him, all the smells and comforts and smiles of an old world that crumbled away from him. These rotten fruits of his self-imprisonment, though excruciating to behold, are yet not destructive to anyone else, and so their monthly invasion is silently justified. He has not lost that part of himself.
He stands and stretches his back which is bruised from the bench, and begins to walk by the thick uneven wall, casting his eye out to the sparkling blue, where white sails drift lazily towards the medieval quarter of the peninsula. The familiar acid grumblings in his stomach berate him. Soon he must go further into town, wandering the cool alleyways until the lunchtime of others, when the chance of tracking down an edible meal is at its highest. For the tanned beach-goers are starting to make themselves known, and he, with his dirty ghostly-pale skin, cannot possibly hope to remain inconspicuous. But, with its outdoor cafés and warm nights, this coastal region suits his current existence.
Perhaps too much.
He will move northwards; the biting snow and ice of a St Petersburg winter are inviting prospects to a body desirous of further pain.
A figure stands beside him, old veined hands resting on the wall and also looking out at the calm glittering expanse. He ignores human faces - disengagement from those around him has been key to his purposeful detachment from the life of his former self. But the figure is unusually tall for this region, and it is perhaps this factor more than any other that causes him to glance up. And in the instant of this glance he sees the distinctive profile - that crooked nose, that beard shining in the sun - and turns to move away, but the older man has gripped his arm firmly and, though he writhes to escape, will not let go.
"Remus", says the old man.
This familiar voice issues both respect and fear in his heart, bubbling through the stiff film formed above his emotions which he has dared not stir. Turning from the man, refusing to look, and yet aware of that powerful grip on his wasted wrist, he answers by way of a nod, suddenly aware that his current appearance might necessitate confirmation. Still he can say nothing; spoken language, along with social interaction, has been abandoned in pursuit of unfeeling.
But tears pool in the twenty-three-year-old's eyes at being addressed so, at hearing this real voice of the old days - from which he had once purposely fled, fearing his words of comfort, his attempts at encouragement, his pity...
The street has blurred and his eyes are hot and he looks at the irregular stones that compose the wall and still that hand holds his wrist, as though checking for life. And part of him wants to scream out that he is still here, still here, buried somewhere within that ravaged tormented Other. And so he does not resist as his old headmaster leads him from the uneven yellow wall to the shade of those cool hushing palms.
The older man's speech is strange to him at first - now the structures and expressions and modulations of his voice require effort to understand and follow. But as he hears these words and the compassion behind them, a part of his mind long kept dormant by shock becomes suddenly agitated and erupts, unleashing streams of sad knowledge into his famished soul. They sit on the parched brown grass and he accepts the cheese and loaf of bread offered to him. And he devours it, even eating the crumbs that have fallen into the dry mud between the roots of the bleached blades. As he does so, the blue eyes of the speaker survey his condition, his talk faltering, and trailing off into the warm Mediterranean air.
It is his turn to speak. The older man is expectant, and in indebted desperation he reaches into that turbulence which lies within his heart. He raises a hand to his stiff jaw, to the short scratchy beard there, and with a sudden movement forces that odd word from his dry throat.
"Today."
It comes out quietly, stiffly, rigid, and miserable.
Dumbledore understands. He nods, his kind eyes gently pressing him to continue. But for several moments Remus cannot. He waits as his mind elaborates what his mouth cannot do until the moment when he threatens to burst passes. When it does, he arranges the words in his mind, placing them in sequence in his mind's eye as though reforming a shattered image.
"It's..." he begins, forcing those jagged and familiar pieces from himself. "It's... his third birthday. Today." He looks at Dumbledore, tears crawling down his dry face as a jumble of forgotten emotions splash over uncontrollably and scald him. "He's three. Today."
And then he is no longer aware of what is being said and who is saying it, of what is being sobbed and who is sobbing it; he only knows that this shoulder is soft and solid and that from the shore come sounds of young laughter and the soft splash of low blue waves against the firm warm shore.
Author's note: This is "Blue" from what will hopefully one day be a Four House-Colours series - "Red" and "Green" are already up.
Please review to let me know what you think!
