He's knocked like a twig to the ground into Death and he doesn't remember how to fight that, so he doesn't. It's come for him, a loose thread of Night, as it was always going to.
A few seconds after Death he becomes aware of this horrible agonised scream that makes him feel like his blood is hardening into ice in his wrists. He wishes he can close his ears against it, because it's truly horrifying and heartbreaking, but it does mean one thing. Someone has seen.
Someone's coming to save him. The scream is hideous, like some tortured animal dying. He covers his ears with his little fists and waits. His limp body is wet, he realises, with blood. It trickles down his neck, and licks down his back. The immense being above him plucks at his right side and he shivers, his limbs slopping over each other like jelly.
He realises that the cry it coming from him a few second later and with faint amusement and then dull pain begins to set in, a twinge of aching muscles that he'll come to understand. He quiets then. He whimpers and begs, little bleats that are soaked up cruelly by the howl and the hound.
And so the shrill tortured screams that echo and ring out from that fateful bleak countryside quiet and the animals dip their heads and go back to grazing. The piercing, horrible dying noise stops. Remus pleads gently to himself, arms wrapped around his head, eyes dribbling pathetically even thought it doesn't hurt. He feels nothing, slight discomfort from cold, and fear, paralysing fear, but no pain at all. Daddy, please. Come help me, before it's too late.
The huge solid hot breathing mass stands over him and trembles wickedly, drawing its teeth down his back. It flips him, ripping his skin. He hits the ground and bounces jerkily, a tangle of meaningless limbs, sprawled in warm blood. The wolf howls and Remus listens. He's rooted to the spot with terror, and that awful trauma-shock, although he doesn't realise it. In his mind, it's all peace; Death is peaceful.
The twanging howl pulses through his consciousness. Oh, how he will come to know and despise that sound. It's so meaningful, right from the pit of the monster's belly, a desperate, urgent lullaby, putting Remus to sleep, to Death. The beast sings its desperate song at the pasty little moon once more before it dips its head and bites down hard on his left side and someone arches and screams in pain.
Oh, what have you done to me? Please, come back; it's me, Remus, your only child, your son. Oh Daddy, why have you left me here to die?
They found him in the morning, a little red scrap at the bottom of the hill in a pool of saliva and blood and rags, barely alive, his pulse a weakening, faltering throb through his wrists and his open wounds. The muggle teenager saved his life that day. He'd breathed oxygen back into Remus's floundering body until Remus spluttered and sucked in air like a drowning fish.
He'd carried the limp remains to the boy's home and got blood and filth all over his tee-shirt in the process. Remus doesn't remember meeting him at all. He remembers the sweet smell of the night and the sickly call of the wolf and the dull presence of the moon, hanging there in the sky looking like it was fake, a sticker falsely and gaudily pasted onto the sky. Surprise! He remembers sweet rest and peace, and then he remembers waking up frightened and paralysed and in terrible pain in St Mungo's, having been dragged, kicking and screaming, back from the brink of death.
Whenever sixteen-year-old Remus Lupin shuts the world off because he's madly in love with someone who has no idea how to love him back, it shudders back into him, an endless movie playing inside his eyelids.
John Augustus Lupin's face looms morbidly over him, whiter than paper, his lips draining to almost grey. He makes a terrible face, a sickly jade colour finding his cheeks and immediately vomits onto the floor beside the bed. Smiling, gleeful Caroline Hepworth Lupin sits motionless by the bed, holds his hand very tight, immobile, and presses her lips together very tightly and keeps her eyes focused on their hands intertwined. Mummy, answer me, please. What's wrong? Mummy.
That damned family: poor silent mother and green shaking father and tiny limp boy, whose smile is weak and brave.
Oh, Daddy. What are you to do with me now, your poor hollow scraped-clean son, whose life stops here, at six short years old? Ten years later I'll still be here, the exact same werewolf. An awkward walking misfit photograph of this moment. I'll always remind you of what you carelessly did, and how I paid. My bravely smiling face will wander through your dreams from this day.
John. It's your own personal curse that your son must bear the whole weight and you mayn't even mourn my death, feel that relief of pain, because I must continue to breathe and feel and suffer and grieve my own self. Shouldn't that catch drive any parent insane? Yet you, you were selfishly glad that I lost not my life and merely my heart.
Mary Hepworth is Remus's Aunt. It's like with Lily and Petunia: the older sister who never got a Hogwarts letter, never even heard of Hogwarts until younger Caroline was introduced to the exquisite world- was beyond normality. Bitter. Left behind.
When she visits, all stiff-upper-lipped and curious, Mary gawps at Remus. Doesn't know any better. Remus flushes and wishes he could move, to cover some of the damage. He is an exhibit, immobilised and strung up for the world to see, and outside he knows the waning moon is somehow false and he feels it itching in his blood. His bandages may as well be nooses wrapped around his neck. He shuts his eyes in shame, one of the few things not yet taken from him. One of these days they'll put matchsticks under his eyelids and then he'll be completely a doll, a puppet, an exhibit entirely. Yet he'll also never be entirely one thing anyway. The halfblood; halfbreed.
Mary, plain Mary, talks to the Healer and she smiles with her mouth but not her eyes, like Remus's mother does when he asks things he's not supposed to, and when Mary stops talking to the Healer and starts talking to Remus's Mum, she strikes Mary right across the face. Hollow like Remus and full like his moon, that's how it sounds: thwack.
Remus starts in panic as if it's him that's been slapped. That makes them both jump. His Mum rushes over and apologises again: another long bubbling stream of heady nonsense and pillow-straightening that Remus wearily agrees to. They two have Words again, much more discreetly, giving him short suspicious glances from across the room, and then after a while his Mum returns and Remus never sees Mary again.
Sometimes nowadays, he still wonders whether Mary can really have been arguing on the side of euthanasia, and if maybe there's another less crushing alternative to what happened. The only person he's ever talked to about it is Sirius, and he's not so good at the talking it out. He cried real tears and held him close as if his heart was breaking. Remus didn't cry. He wasn't even upset.
Sirius ran his fingers over Remus's scalp until Remus could sleep, but he did so fitfully, his poor grey mother haunting his dreams, drained of everything she once was. He hopes Mary is dead. He doesn't really. Sirius does: he said so. Remus wakes up and he cries desperately but he doesn't have a reason.
He thinks about Mary and Mum and the decision that parted their ways and it's true: when push comes to shove, even the werewolf thinks his own life valuable enough to guard. His sense of self preservation isn't affected. He'll try to save his own skin and apparently his flesh and blood did too, because he was taken home safe after that horrible fight and Mary was never spoken of again.
One more thing to remember not to mention. The eggshells in the house become as dangerously sharp as razors. Remus is so anxious not to step on one that he's constantly watching his feet, never really looking up, forwards at the future. It's why he finds things can be staring him in the face and he won't notice. He lives in his head, picking over the past. Almost still in denial after ten thorny years of secrets and lies and complications and razor eggshells. One more thing to remember. Mummy, I don't want to drink it. I don't want to go. Please, Mummy, help me. Don't make me change. Wait till tomorrow night. I'll be ready then. Mummy, please. She doesn't cry when her son begs her for help as the first pains begin to slice through his shoulders.
Poor mother. Her hair is so very grey, nowadays, and her smile so warm one second, then the next, tinged with desperate grief. He will never be free of that smile as long as he lives. It's curved widely and falsely, just like the perfect curve of the moon.
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