~ wounds of time ~
Remus Lupin. T. 1,043
"My chest tightens in a loneliness so deep and so complete I can't breathe."
Bitten by Kelley Armstrong
child
Six-year-old Remus knows it's his eyes that make the other children avoid him. They're just too different. All of the other kids he knows have nice eyes of grassy greens and big watery blues and dark chocolate browns that invite others to befriend them, but not him. Remus Lupin has yellow sunrise eyes, eyes that burn with a vibrant wildness.
"Only freaks have eyes like that," Sandy, a ten-year-old Muggle with green eyes and red hair, tells her siblings while they are at the park one day. "He's not normal."
They can sense the monster inside of him when they look into his eyes; they can feel the wolf that lives deep inside of him and they avoid him for that reason even though their Muggle minds cannot pinpoint exactly what is so freaky about him. They can't possibly know he is a werewolf. Still, they are afraid.
He hears one of the kids say that he is adopted and that all adopted kids are freaks. Sandy's littlest sister thinks that he has a funny accent and that they shouldn't talk to him because he's not one of them, while a young boy offers that Remus scares him like the bogeyman.
Their reasons don't matter to Remus, honestly. It's only the fact that they hate him without even giving him a chance that hurts him so much. He always offers them the swings when they want on them, he shares his food and his crayons and his toys. Remus has done everything to be nice to them and still they dislike him.
"I don't wanna play with Remus," Jacob, the little boy, whispers to Sandy, his voice soft and nothing more than an exhaled breath to anyone without werewolf hearing. "Let's tell him we're leaving, okay? Please?"
Remus, injured by this, turns his back to the playground and walks away as the tears slowly burn his eyes like fire. All he wants is someone to laugh with, someone to play with, a person who can take away this horrible loneliness in his chest. He's not a monster nor is he a freak and he has the same accent as the rest of them but they won't give him a decent chance no matter how hard he tries.
That, more than anything, is what wounds him.
teen
Remus Lupin is truly a monster on the nights of the Full Moon. He is something that could have walked right out of a Muggle horror movie, a creature with snapped bones and rolling eyes and hair that sprouts out of his skin.
He is a fourteen-year-old boy all alone, the loneliness crushing him, stealing the breath from his lungs and leaving him a gasping, writhing thing on the floor. There is no one here to comfort him as his body twists and changes into something other, no friends or family to tell him it will all be alright, there is no love in this place.
And it will never be alright, of course, because he will be like this forever.
Remus will always be a mockery of a man and a parody of a wolf, a living being somewhere in between the two things which are trapped in his own body. He is a howling raging thing, driven to tearing apart whatever is nearest.
After his first few stays the shack is made of torn walls and rickety floorboards covered in layers of deep scratches, the marks left by a boy's fingernails as they turn to claws when he needs something to hang on to.
He screams from the pain-the burning inside his limbs, the ache of his bones, the darkness that eats away at his mind-and he drags his nails down the wood and smashes the bed and rips open his skin.
Soon the scratches on the floor become little valleys with rivers of his blood running through them, the fresh red overlapping the crusted old as it drips to the floor like rain.
"My transformations in those days were...were terrible. It is very painful to turn into a werewolf," he will say years from now to a boy who will look just like another. "I was separated from humans to bite, so I bit and scratched myself instead."
Remus is all alone in these nights, his three best friends not yet having mastered their second forms, and he will be torn apart by this loneliness for a long time yet to come.
adult
Sometimes, after Remus has been through a Full Moon horrible enough, his nightmares are merely the things that he recalls from his waking hours. His dreams are fashioned and created out of the unspeakable things that he has seen and done in his wolfish form which lives just under his skin and he cannot stop reliving his torture.
He can't get away from it by waking up.
He can't get away from it by going to sleep.
Remus is trapped in the cage called life and because he's a coward, because he's scared of what lies beyond, he can't truly find escape. He's afraid to die and there are still things that he would live for: the taste of red-bush tea as the steam rises into his face and the feeling of sunlight burning his skin. So he depends on the anodyne effects of a hard binge of alcohol after the Full Moon to get himself over his pain.
It really isn't much for him to knock back the Butterbeer, and later on the Firewhiskey. It isn't difficult to swallow the last gulp of burning liquid and wish that it will wash away the scalding sting of loneliness. Remus cannot go on much longer like this, a man starving for the times of memory long gone. He is half a ghost of the man he once was and he needs to forget to become whole.
Easier said than done, of course, but alcohol provides an escape for a little while as it slides down his throat. The lights of the world are switched off for a while to leave him in temporary darkness, floating in an abyss.
It's not much and it doesn't cure all the old wounds of time but it's just enough to get him through the day.
first draft: 11-15-09
revisions: 6-25-12