So writing something un-Weasleyish is a nice step in a new direction for me! Thank you very much for those who have begun reading, and I hope I don't disappoint! Reviews are always much appreciated!

Please enjoy!

The Call of the Moon

Chapter 2

There were three things that could have woken Lyall Lupin that night, and he would never remember for sure whether it had been; the crashing and shattering of a window and part of the wall, the terrible howl of a werewolf, or the screaming of his son. It was just after midnight when Lyall and Hope launched themselves from their bed and thundered out of the room down the hall.

Remus was screaming so terribly he sounded like he would die. There was a great crunch as the bed splintered and the snarling of a beast that could kill him in half a moment. Perhaps what was more terrifying though, as Lyall Lupin blasted the door off its hinges, was the moment that his son stopped screaming. The door flew with a crash into the wall and Hope screamed as her husband threw out his arm and pushed her back into the hall.

A huge, snarling wolf stood there atop the rubble of a broken wall. Its jaws were dripping red as it dropped the small body of Remus Lupin from its teeth and sprung at the boy's parents with claws that glinted in the moonlight.

"NO!"

There was a blinding flash of light and an angry yelp as the beast flew back and nearly out the hole in the wall. Curse after curse Lupin rained against it and before it could lunge again and finish all three of them in a few swipes, the werewolf stumbled back blinded and was blasted through the hole it had created in the wall. But not before Lupin had gotten a long enough look at its eyes. It hit the ground hard and didn't return to the fight. It ran, temporarily blind but following its nose away from the house and into the night.

As soon as the wolf was gone, Hope, though nearly paralysed with terror tore into the room, screaming for her son as she threw herself down beside his crumbled and bloody form where the remains of his bed was.

"REMUS!" She shrieked, sobbing hysterically as she looked frantically at her husband who tore away from the hole in the wall and ran to her side. "LYALL!"

The four year old boy was trembling so terribly that Hope could barely keep a grip on him. His skin was deathly white and blood poured from his neck and shoulder where the wolf had bitten him.

"HELP HIM, LY-" She dissolved into sobs, unable to form any more words as Lyall threw a blanket around the boy and gathered him from her arms into his own.

"No, no, no…" He felt tears running down his cheeks as he hurtled downstairs as fast as he dared carrying his son. He nearly fell flat over his feet and caught himself just in time as he staggered into the living room. He couldn't risk St Mungos, his boy would most likely not survive the trip whether it was Floo Powder or Apparition. Lying Remus down as gently as he could while he was shaking so badly, Lyall rummaged madly through his potions trunk in the corner of the room.

He grabbed two bottles, one with a greenish liquid, and the other containing Essence of Dittany and hurried back over to his son. At that moment, Hope, whiter than a sheet, stumbled down the stairs and pulled her son into her arms. His shaking was slowly easing into small twitches and his breathing was slowly started to decrease.

With shaking hands, Lyall slowly drew his wand over the wounds. "Vulnera Sanentur…"

The blood flow slowly seemed to ease off and Remus went still. Lyall and Hope exchanged tearful looks at this before noticing that his breathing was still there. Sniffing, Lyall tried to regain some composure and repeated the spell.

"Vulnera…Sanentur…"

The deep wound in the little boy's shoulder started to heal, slowly, but surely it began to knit itself back together. The scar would remain forever. Dropping his wand, Lyall cupped his son's face tearfully and tried to fight back sobs. After a long minute he kissed Remus' head and withdrew his hands to look at them. They were covered in blood but all that mattered now was that Remus survived. So he forced himself to still the shaking and picked up the small bottle of greenish liquid.

"Hold his head up…" He instructed and without question Hope tried to do so.

Unstoppering it, he carefully held the vial to his son's lips and trickled a small amount into his mouth.

There was a choking and spluttering but it went down and Remus let out a small sigh and went still in his mother's arms, his breathing evening out finally.

With a long sigh of relief, Lyall slumped back and gripped at his hair.

"Will…did you…is he goin'…" Hope trailed off and Lyall responded quietly without looking up.

"I think he'll be okay." For want of a better word. He would at least be alive.

His thoughts travelled to the werewolf, its jaws around his son and staring at him with hunger in its eyes. In its blue, human eyes. There was not a doubt in his mind that was Greyback come for revenge. And he had gotten it. The curse was in Remus' blood now and he was terrified at what it was going to do to his boy…to his four year old boy.

"That….it wasn't an ordinary wolf…" Hope sniffed and wrapped Remus tightly in the blanket, cradling him gently in her arms. Her eyes were wide and wet as she stared at her husband, dreading what she might hear.

"That was a werewolf, Hope…and it's bitten him."

"Lyall…don't you dare lie to me now, what is going to happen to him?"

There was a whole minute of silence before Lyall finally found the strength to meet his wife's eyes.
"It's in his blood now…I think he'll become one."

xxxXxxx

"Am I going to die?"

Hope smiled softly and stroked her son's hair back as he lay tucked up in bed. Remus was still frightfully pale and too unsteady on his feet now to be allowed out of bed yet.

"No, dear. Of course you're not going to die…" She said and kissed his forehead before offering him another spoonful of soup. "Why would you think that?"

"Because I'm sore." Remus pouted and wriggled around in the sheets. His shoulder hurt and he felt sick all the time. He couldn't remember what happened to him very much, only a big dog smashing his window and waking him up. Then there was lots of pain and he couldn't remember anything.

"You'll be alright." Hope reassured him and tried to reassure herself. She didn't know anything that was going on anymore. Suddenly there were werewolves in her life that had once seemed so simple, suddenly she was terrified that her own son would turn into that beast that nearly killed him.

"Hey…" She set down the bowl when Remus stubbornly shook his head and refused to eat anymore. "A little birdy told me-"

"Hippogriff."

"…sorry, what was that?"

"Hippogriff." Remus repeated. "Not a bird. It's what Daddy says."

"Well, Daddy might say that, but I say birdy." Hope smiled and leaned back against the back of her chair. "You remember that we're not all like Daddy and you are. A little birdy told me that today is a very special day…but I can't remember why?"

Remus frowned and just watched his mother for a moment. How could she forget it was his birthday today? It was his birthday today! He suddenly grinned and held up one hand.

"I'm five!"

"Are you really? No, no, I'm sure you're only four…" Hope feigned ignorance and beamed at the happiness that finally lit up his little face.

"Five!" He argued and laughed. "Is Daddy coming home soon? Do I get presents?"

"He's home now!" A voice called from down the hall and his father appeared in the doorway a moment later. He looked tired and worn and hadn't been into the Ministry since that night. Nor had he explained his absence truthfully. If he told them that his son had been bitten by a werewolf and so would most likely become one, he would lose his position and now more than ever he needed his job. And so he had owled in with a case of the mumblemumps.

Lyall smiled, one hand behind his back as he walked in and sat on the bed next to Remus.
"And I do have something for you…but you can't use it until you can get out of this bed."

Bouncing with excitement, Remus waited patiently. In his eagerness, the teddy bear beside him started to bounce too.

Slowly, Lyall brought the hand out from behind his back. His fist was closed and didn't look like there could be anything hidden there. Until he clapped his other fist to it and pulled them apart quickly, revealing a small toy broomstick.

Hope smiled fondly as Remus beamed and hugged his father happily.

"Lyall, let him get some sleep now. He says he's not tired but I know he is." She fixed her son with a knowing look when he just pouted at her and then gave in and lay back. The poor boy really was exhausted.

As they closed the door behind them and stepped out into the hall, Lyall pursed his lips into a thin line and rubbed his wife's shoulder. "We have to leave."

xxxXxxx

That was the first of many relocations that Remus would have to endure in his childhood. When he asked why they had suddenly packed up bags and left, Lyall just said it was further away from the wild animals that had attacked him.

They moved to a small cottage on the outskirts of a small muggle town near Bristol. Remus was getting better, and within two weeks of the attack he was on his feet again and moving perhaps a little too excitedly around the new house. He went with his mother to the shops one day while Lyall was at work and was so thrilled at not being cooped up in bed that he ran ahead and left her frantically running after him.

At five years old, Remus was reading and writing better than most children his age under the tutorage of both his parents. He knew he wasn't like the other muggle children, but he didn't understand why his father never used magic outside the house.

The day of the full moon in April, Lyall didn't eat more than a bite of food all day. He was worried sick about what would become of his son. Remus too, complained about not being hungry and was pale and sick looking. He only ate a few bites of his breakfast when his mother insisted that he couldn't go without eating.

Lyall returned from the Ministry well before sunset and sat sullenly in an armchair. His jaw was clenched hard and his fingers gripped the arm of the chair with a vice like grip. Remus didn't know what he was, or what was bound to happen to him.

"Lyall…" Hope said softly, gently resting her hands on her husband's shoulders. "What's going to happen to him?"

The wizard merely shook his head and gripped the chair tighter.

"Are you going to…to tell him?"

The wizard sighed and closed his eyes. "I don't know. I don't even know if he'll remember."

He didn't tell Remus. As the sun set he took him upstairs, ready to put him to bed and sat down on the bed with his son on his knee.

Looking fearfully out the window and then back at his son, Lyall could already see the signs. The boy was pale and his eyes were slightly sunken.

"Daddy…I feel funny…" Remus said in his small voice, leaning against his father's shoulder.

Lyall swallowed and looked once again out the window before he turned and set his son down off his knee onto the mattress.
"You'll feel better after you sleep, my boy…"

"Can't I say goodnight to M-"

"Not tonight, Remus." Lyall said so quickly and sternly that his son cringed a little. He leaned forward and kissed Remus' forehead. "She's lying down too." He lied. "She's not feeling well either. Now…it's time you should sleep, Remus…"

He rose as Remus wriggled under the blankets and drew the curtains across the window. The full moon would be high in the sky within half an hour.

"I love you." He whispered as he leaned in the doorway and the young boy lay back, wide eyed and wide awake but did not complain. He felt too ill to want to be up longer.

The door clicked softly as Lyall closed it and with a reluctant sigh and trembling hands he pointed his wand at the door. He waited a long moment before he tapped the wood of the door lightly and from the inside, Remus thought he heard the clicking of a lock.

"What are you doing?" Hope whispered as she froze at the top of the stairs as she watched her husband pocket his wand. "Did you just…"

Lupin pressed a finger to his lips and motioned for her to turn around. Together they went back downstairs to the living room where Hope rounded on her husband.
"Did you just lock him in his room?"

"Hope, don't fight me on this…"

"No, I will. You just locked your five year old in his bedroom!" She stared wide eyed at her husband and fixed him with a lethal glare. "You go and unlock that door right now, what if he needs us?"

Lyall sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was torn about what to do, but he was sure that whatever happened tonight, he needed to take precautions against.

"I don't know exactly what's going to happen to him, Hope, but it's a precaution I have to take-"

"He's a little boy, he's not a monster."

"I know that!" Lyall hissed, looking towards the stairs. "But I also know that it's safer for everyone in this house, including Remus, for him to be alone. At least until we know what's going to happen…he won't even know I locked that door."

As the full moon rose round and eerily white, it began.

Remus, who had lay awake and still in his bed suddenly cried out loudly. He shot upright as pain coursed throughout his entire body. He screamed and cried and tried to stumble out of bed and run for his parents but fell hard onto the wooden floor. Pupils dilated and his teeth began to sharpen into points.

"Mummy! DaaaAAARGH-"

Somehow, through the agony that pierced every bone in his body as they grew and changed, Remus managed to crawl to the door. They always left it open a little so he could open it and find his parents if he needed to. But it was closed, why was the door closed?

He screamed again, loudly and more terrible than any of the others and struggled desperately to breathe as he stared at his small hands. His fingers were growing, sharpening into pointed claws and hair was beginning to sprout out of his skin.

Outside there was the thundering of footsteps and he scratched on the door trying to get their attention. And then Remus Lupin fell backwards, a tufted tail sprouting as his pyjamas tore and fell away.

"No!" Lyall cried, wrapping his arms firmly but gently around his wife as she rattled the doorknob, crying desperately for Remus. Every scream was torture, every desperate cry that steadily sounded less and less human cut the terrified parents to their hearts.

"No, no, no…" Lupin groaned, clutching his wife tightly to his chest as she cried into his shirt. "Oh my boy…"

Suddenly there was a loud thud and the screaming stopped, replaced by a single high pitched yelp.

Lyall and Hope Lupin breathed slowly, straining for any other noise from the room, there was only the sound of something scraping against the floorboards and slowly Lyall unwrapped his arms from his wife. Carefully he guided her to the side where she stood trembling and watching as he cautiously lay one hand on the doorknob and held his wand up. "Alohomora…"

The lock clicked and, keeping his wand raised, Lyall very slowly opened the door enough to slide half of his body inside. He tried to steady his breathing as he stared wide eyed at the sight that greeted him. Remus' pyjamas were in shreds on the floor and where there had once been a happy, five year old human boy….there was instead a furry brown shape huddled under the window where a thin stream of moonlight shone from between the curtains.

Vaguely registering his wife peering into the room, Lyall took a slow step forward and muttered "Lumos."

The light from his wand bathed the creature and he saw it clearly. The werewolf was small but larger than Remus was as a boy. It was coated with coarse brown fur and its breaths came in heaving pants as it huddled there with the remnants of tartan pyjamas at its paws. Its hind legs were slightly more raised than those of a true wolf and its body was longer. Small whines came from it as it turned its short snouted head and looked at them with the wide green eyes of Remus John Lupin.

Hope's mouth opened and closed like a fish and her scream caught in her throat as she stumbled backwards.

Lyall kept his wand up, though unwilling to ever use it on his son. But the young werewolf cub was in its mind no longer Remus Lupin and knew only one thing. Attack. It stared them down before its jaws parted in a growl and without warning it lunged clumsily at Lyall who cried out and pushed his wife behind him and out of the room.

Not yet used to its wolfish form, the wolf fell clumsily sideways and whined before it pulled itself back onto unsteady legs and poised to leap again. As it did, Lyall slammed the door closed and staggered backwards into the wall of the corridor, locking the door with a wave of his wand.

He clapped a hand over his mouth in an effort to control his breaths that came in rapid gasps.

"H-Hope…"

His wife didn't answer him and he hurried to where she lay on the floor. She had fainted.

xxxXxxx

The door was only opened again when the sun had risen. Lyall and Hope had not slept at all after she came to and Lyall had spent almost the entirety of the night pacing through the house frantically and trying not to hear the crashing and growling from his son's room.

The door opened slowly. The room was a disaster. In its restlessness, the young wolf had done any damage it was big enough to do in that room. Sheets were torn and strewn around the room, one of the legs of the bed was broken, the curtain had been pulled down and there was scratches all through the wooden floorboards. There, in a pile of ripped curtain, lay Remus. He had returned to his human form and there were bruises forming on his arms. He was asleep, his chest rising and falling softly as his mother rushed over to him, unable to stay away from her son any longer.

The boy woke with a quiet groan in the warm embrace of his mother. He squinted around in shock at the state of his room…and why was he on the floor? He didn't remember falling out of bed, even his pyjamas were in pieces, he saw a sleeve lying by the window.

"Mum…" He whimpered, suddenly frightened and cuddled into her shoulder. Had the wolf that had attacked him come back when he was asleep?

The second and the third night were much the same. But it was a full year before the truth of his condition was revealed to Remus.

xxxXxxx

During that first year of Remus' lycanthropy, the Lupins moved towns three times.

After he turned six, Lyall sat his son down and told him about werewolves. Though he was only a young boy, Remus soon understood what his father had meant. He started to understand why they never stayed in one place for long.

Amongst the places the Lupin's stayed in longest, was Tinworth.

Remus was seven years old when they moved in and beginning to feel the effects of his increased isolation. Each month he grew quieter and more sullen for a child that should be full of energy and fun. He ached to go outside and to have real space to run and play but was not allowed further than the yard, and not out of the house at all the closer it got to the full moon.

He loved his parents and he knew they loved him dearly, but what Remus longed for more than anything was a friend. Someone he could play with, even a muggle who he couldn't talk about magic with.

Lyall and Hope both grew thin with worry for their son, and Lyall's desperation to find a cure saw him return home much later in the evenings and preoccupied most of the time.

If the Ministry learned of an uncontrolled werewolf, he didn't know what they would do to his son. He would lose his job immediately, the prejudice against werewolves, of which he had once been a part, was higher than ever.

But with each year that Remus grew, so did the wolf inside him, each year that he grew stronger, the wolf did too. With each month, Lyall increased the security ever so much. The strength of his spells and silencing charms increased and they would have no choice but to lock Remus in an empty room during the transformations to reduce damage to both the house and himself.

It was on the third month of their stay in Tinworth, a week before the full moon, on one of the rare times that Remus found himself reading a book quietly outside in the fresh air, that he almost made friends.

Three older muggle boys were laughing amongst themselves as they passed the house. The boy with red hair and freckles carried a football under his arm.

Remus looked up curiously as they passed and was so surprised at the sight of other children that he didn't realise he was staring at them.

"Hey!" One of the boys waved to him and young Remus looked around in bemusement before he realised they were talking to him. He pushed back his brown hair and ran over to the front fence.

"I've never seen you before…" The red headed boy, who looked about eleven, tilted his head and smiled. "What's your name?"

"Remus…" Remus answered quietly.

"That's a cool name." A boy with blond hair grinned. "You wanna play football with us? We can use a fourth player."

"Yeah, will your mum let you?"

No, she wouldn't let him. Remus knew that, but he didn't want to tell them that. He was suddenly struck by a streak of rebellion, and desperation for companionship that he wanted to go and play football with them. Nor did he say that he didn't know what footwall was or how to play it.

"Yeah." He nodded and waved to the window where he pretended his mother could see. "…Can I play?"

"Sure you can." The first boy grinned and waved him over.

Remus felt a pang of guilt as he looked back over his shoulder and edged through the gate. He knew he shouldn't. He knew how much trouble he would be in when they found out he was spending time with other children. They said he was too dangerous to play with the other boys, even when the full moon was still a week away. But the thrill of meeting new people, and playing games with other children was too great for him to ignore.

It was a pity for Remus that he never did get to play football.

Just before he could make it more than three steps away from the gate, he heard the front door close and his mother rushed out.

"Remus!"

He turned around, his pale face went paler and he sighed. He had been so close.

"Remus, come here right now." Hope called as she stared wide eyed at her son and waved him over. When he didn't come and just looked at her with a pleading expression that nearly made her give in, she hurried right over to them and turned him around by the shoulders gently.
"You know better than that, Remus. Come inside."

"But-"

"No buts." She turned and forced a smile to the other boys. "Sorry boys, he won't be playing with you today." And with that, Remus was whisked back inside to his lonely childhood. Though they sometimes looked into the quiet house when they passed, and sometimes they saw him at a window, those boys never asked the strange, pale boy to play again.

One month later, when the muggle police came to investigate the house where strange noises had been coming from, they found it empty.