Prologue: A Girl in the Boy's Lavatory

Remus stood with both hands firmly bracing the cold, unforgiving porcelain of the bathroom sink. Water cascaded from the teen's frightened features, catching unnaturally in the deep divots that were scars. The boy's bathroom always smelled horrible, but the second one in the fourth corridor on the left hand side had recently undergone a very lovely redecoration, compliments of James Potter. How did Remus guess this? Potter's name was scrawled on the far wall, just above an active dung-bomb.

Remus, however, didn't give a darn about any of the room's décor. The fact that breathing was becoming nearly impossible was what frightened the brown-haired youth past caring.

Defense Against the Dark Arts class had been a nightmare, and the subject of bogarts hadn't even been breached. In fact, the only thing they had covered in the time slot was how to subdue a werewolf. This branched off into several new directions when the Professor asked why somebody would want to kill such a beast. The long talk even included the rather descriptive and analytical input from Severus Snape and Lily Evans, going so far as to comment on the qualities of werewolf blood and fur in potions, which was extremely hard to obtain from a living specimen.

Jacob Abbott told the class how vengeance would be another reason, seeing as how many of the fowl creatures killed their victims. Another student simply stated that werewolves were a bane to the wizarding world.

James, one of Remus's three room mates, and the same boy who destroyed the bathroom, brought up the fact that werewolves were being recruited by The Dark Lord's army. More and more muggle children were being found bitten and dead in attempts to scare people into believing in the new cause and frighten others into submission.

Peter even spoke up, which was rare, saying that some families might do it for sport, while Sirius added that they might do it for blood purities sake. These were Remus's remaining two room mates.

Remus's small, shivering fingers finally unlatched themselves from the sink long enough to begin to unbutton the dress shirt and shuck the heavy robe to the floor. Remus hoped that doing that would make a difference, but it didn't. Breathing became more sporadic as shoes tangled with limbs in a hurry to reach the toilet.

Slamming the stall, Remus flung onto the ground before the bowl as quickly as possible, tearing at the remaining buttons and ignoring when they scattered the stone floor around the toilet. Remus knelt before it as though in some form of prayer before spouting the contents of lunch into its musty depths.

Remus feverishly continued to remove the buttoned top, then tore at a layer of thick bandages around the torso, just above where a large chunk of flesh seemed to be missing near the stomach due to an animal bite. A rather large animal bite.

A werewolf bite.

This was one of the few times in Remus's horror filled life that God actually took pity, because nobody walked into the men's restroom while the small, sickly child had its panic attack. If they had, they would have quickly noticed how Remus was hardly the little boy they thought he was beneath all the bandages, scars, and robes. In fact, once Remus pulled away the final chest-binding bandage, it would have become apparent to anybody watching that Remus was not Remus at all.

Remus was a girl.

At times like these, the dainty fraud wondered how she even managed to be sorted into Gryffindor, or why she was living this lie when it was obviously weighing so heavy on her soul.

Then she thought back on how she came to be, and wept until she could breathe again. Thankfully, nobody usually found her in such a state of disrepair. Privately though, she wished they would have. She really could have done with some form of helping hand. Her school life was nearly as stressful as her childhood, and that was terrible enough even with the memory loss.

Her breath slowly began to hitch less often as she recalled the events leading up to her arrival at school. They weren't pretty memories, but they gave her current life meaning. It wasn't like she had many good memories to start with, and pretty wasn't exactly a word she often thought could be used to describe her. Monstrous was a much better descriptive.