Remus pushed the window open as wide as it would go, allowing the night to seep through. Although it was late September, 1966 had been a hot year, and it looked like it would be well into October before it cooled, even in this northernmost tip of the united-kingdoms. He had been gone from his family for a month, and he knew that over-heating and a heavy dinner weren't the only things causing his stomach to turn.
The early morning moon shot silver through his dark hair, and dust motes swirled in the still air. The air seemed to shimmer with heat, ripples blurred the edge of the far off quidditch stands, and Remus briefly imagined what it would be like to fly through the air, ice wind whipping his hair back and forth, reaching out with a club to smack a bludger into an opponent, the roar of the crowd drowning out all else as he did a lap around the fields in his scarlet robes. A fly landed on his sweat stainedface, and this shallow pool of vision ripple out of existence. He swatted it away and pressed his face against the window pane, wishing he could draw some coolness from glass, knowing he could not, no matter how magical he was.
He turned away from the window and took in the room in one long look. The thick walls surrounding this deserted tower cell would have withheld the scream of a banshee, and the door was so heavy that the small frame of a first year normally wouldn't have been able to move it at all. But Remus wasn't a normal first year, and panic could produce great strengths in anyone. The room couldn't have been more than ten by ten foot, dirty and grimy through decades of neglect and misuse. He had tried to make it liveable in the last three days, which, for the small boy, meant a half-hearted attempt at sweeping away the grime, and some blankets tossed into the corner, comfortable as a feather mattress after the hell that he had just gone through. He had collapsed there, panting and retching, body racked and bruised from the beating it had taken from the stone walls, which absorbed and held all the abuse he hurled at them, returning it in their own mute way. Half an hour later and his skin still itched, his wolf limbs rejected this stone prison, ached to fight free of his body and run wildly across the dawn, through the forest, snapping with adolescent jaws at birds and the various animals that must inhabit it. His wolf self ached for a pack, for wolves to play and yelp and change with.
He shivered and coiled in on himself, bare skin cooling against the stone. He rubbed his arms, ran shaking fingers gently over what would be yet another scar, where he had whipped at the walls with his hind legs and had received a deep wound for his troubles. A sunbeam shot through the window and lit up his back, sending a golden portrait of him onto the opposite wall, and he pondered at how small he seemed to himself, now. And he worried. If he could do this much damage to himself, at this age and size, what could he do to others, later, when he was fully grown? He tried to get rid of the thought, and wildly shook his unruly hair, smoothing his fringe over his face automatically and shuddering against the wall. Surely the only humane and fair thing to do would be to prevent himself from ever getting that big, big enough to kill. Self murder wasn't cowardly if it was for the good of others, was it? Or was he still a coward, because he was too afraid of what he could do, and what the consequences might be?
As the sun turned his bare back sticky with the beginning of the days perspiration, he shivered with cold. He wondered how many more times this would happen, left alone after his change, no pack beside him to put at bay these feelings of loneliness. As the sun rose on Hogwarts, on the sleepingstudents and teachers, and this small boy, sitting in the window of a deserted and barricaded tower cell, Remus wondered how soon it would be until the loneliness swallowed him whole.