Hiya! This is for Dazzled-Midnight-Melody's 62 Hardships challenge. We were given a hardship that can be attached to wizarding life and I got 'accidentally killing someone' and the character of Remus Lupin. Let me know how this turned out?

Remus understood that there would be hardships in his life when he truly began to grasp what magic was. He was a half-blood so knew very well how the 'other half' lived. However it took him until he began Hogwarts to really realise what a privilege being a wizard was. The other students at school didn't seem to understand what he meant when he tried talking about it in the common room. James and Sirius, for example, were pure-bloods and found it much harder to imagine life without magic than he did; not that he found it easy, oh no, it seemed incomprehensible that people could survive without the day to day magic that he'd seen his parent's so rely on. He often thanked...well, something (he wasn't particularly religious and didn't really believe in fate) that he'd been born with magic in his blood.

He knew that being a wizard was immensely advantageous but, in his experience, good things tended to come with consequences. He supposed the world was in a finite balance of luck. A bit like a principle in one of his Dad's muggle physics books. The muggles had a science that definitely seemed to make sense to Remus and before coming to Hogwarts he would spend hours with his head buried in some tome or another. When he thought about the balance of luck – being born a wizard had to balance out somehow – it reminded him of what a man called Einstein wrote. 'The total amount of energy in a system remains constant over time' and Remus thought of a person's luck as positive and negative 'energy particles'. So if the good luck of being a wizard equated to a great many positive particles, then there must be something pretty bad out there to balance it out. This troubled him but when he shared it with the marauders, Peter didn't really understand, Sirius just laughed at muggle 'science' and James, whist trying to be empathetic, told Remus he was thinking a little bit too much.

Remus did his best to put it out of his mind, especially when he considered what had already happened to him. Being exposed to the world of magic meant much more than wand work and potion brewing; it was a completely different existence with its own dangers. One such example of this being the existence of magical creatures; some were perfectly charming (unicorns), others largely benign (centaurs) but then there were the monsters that muggles only told tales about. It didn't mean they were protected obviously, but much less likely to come into contact with the monsters. Remus hadn't been fortunate in this way and often hoped that his energy had already been balanced out by the werewolf bite he'd received when he was a young boy. Maybe his luck debt was already paid?

He had thought that the agonising monthly transformations were bad enough. The secrecy and isolation he'd lived in must have been a high enough price to pay? Surely? He'd often debated with himself whether or not he'd rather be a muggle with a completely mundane life than the secret wizard werewolf. The extremes of muscle-screaming pain and almost incomprehensibly beautiful magic or the completely average life? Remus usually settled on the life he lived – the magic outweighed the pain. At least it did until that night.

James was dead. Peter too. And Sirius; Sirius was the cause, the catalyst for the whole terrible situation. Remus was going half out of his mind trying to fathom how a person's whole world can collapse in such a short amount of time. The rest of the wizarding world celebrated, even people who had know James and Lily and Peter and Sirius. Lupin couldn't join in even though he knew he should be at least relieved that You-Know-Who had gone at last. He couldn't make any sense of his feelings when he let himself have them or he just left himself numb to the world.

He missed all of them which was perfectly understandable. But he felt guilty for missing Sirius. How could his best friend have played such a part in the murder of his other best friends? And why did he ache for Sirius at least as much as he ached for the others? Sirius had lead to murders, committed murder and left a young boy orphaned. Yet, Remus reasoned with himself when he felt guilty, sometimes emotions can't catch up to events that shocking very easily.

He still couldn't face anyone though. Time itself had lost all meaning and people held no interest for him anymore. After another day of staring at the four walls that had gone some way towards containing his confusion, his hurt and his sense of loss, Remus decided to walk. He was following a path into the wood near his cottage tasting the pine needle scented air and wondering how such beautiful and normal things could continue to exist after all that had happened. Just as this thought had finished, a familiar tightening sensation in his calves brought him to his knees. Hackles ripped into the flesh in the back of his neck and the most urgent, clear thought he'd had in weeks tore through Remus' mind. Time losing all meaning is one thing to an ordinary wizard but when you're a werewolf...

He woke up naked in a pile of leaves on the forest floor. It took him a moment to adjust and realise why he was there and then...why was he covered in blood? He sat bolt upright and saw the lifeless body of a man who was clearly a homeless muggle sharing the leafpile-cum-bed with him. Now he knew the real price of him being a wizard; becoming the monster you would never have believed in. Maybe some wizards' total energy to be conserved was higher than others. Who knew? But after that night, Remus answered his own question differently. He'd rather be a muggle than the monster who had killed an innocent man, even the most wonderful magic couldn't change what he'd done. That innocent man had died as a result of his carelessness and self-absorption. He vowed it would never happen again.

All his friends had paid a price. Two with their lives, one with his morality. Then there was him. He'd paid the price of hating himself every day and becoming someone he could barely stand to be. There was definitely a price to be paid for being a wizard, Remus had decided, but whether or not the hardships were worth it he had yet to decide.

R&R?