Author's Notes: There are quotes here from J.K. Rowling, The Prisoner of Azkaban, at the end of section six. You'll know them when you see them. I apologize, as usual, especially to Amity, for my terrible delays. I just recently got into UC Berkeley and UCLA (yay!) and paperwork is a nightmare, not to mention the choosing. I hope you enjoy—I'm particularly proud of this section.
Part Five
Thump, thump. Thump, thump.
They did not know—had no way of knowing—that this would be the last time they would run together, listen together, be themselves in their purest form—simply be—together. After four years away, only returning for urgent meetings with Dumbledore, the Marauders, sans Wormtail, who'd had something urgent to take care of after they'd spoken in the bright interior of the Headmaster's office, had taken to the Forbidden Forest; they'd snuck around Hagrid's cabin on silent feet as in younger days.
Twenty-one is an ambiguous age. Though James had wed, though they'd danced at his reception with numerous bottles of scotch between them, though they'd gotten jobs, entered internships, gone to university, though they'd tossed back their heads in glorious defiance in the face of Death Eaters and narrowly escaped with their young, lithe lives, they had not long left boyhood. In fact, had not a child entered into their delicate sphere, they would have continued, the youngest members of the Order and some of its most daring, most triumphant, most alive, embodying all the ideals it stood to protect:
Freedom. Light. Companionship. Camaraderie. Triumph. Life. Love.
No longer students in uniform, laughing in heedless abandon, shucking responsibility like a husk—now teacher's aides, soldiers, fighters, husbands, lovers, fathers.
Thump, thump.
Their hearts whispered together with the beat of the recent, shaking memory, reverberating through their lives forever. A neutron, Dumbledore's words. Wormtail's absence itself sent an ominous shiver through them, this once-collective, unshakable unit, a dragon of loss.
Remus bent over the sink; his eyes glassed over, as he lost himself in a small, drifting flight, lilted by a steady sound—drip, drip—drip, drip—the sound of his heart, drip-dripping out onto the lovely, white porcelain, creating swirling, half-smoke and half-dreamscape patterns in miniscule puddles of clear, cool water. Hot met cold, all turned to room temperature. He was melting back into that pure, last and first, indelible state, the atom that can be reduced no further. This was the truth of the wolf, and the boy, the pack mate, the Marauder.
Only that blossoming, blood red piece of him, stained and tainted with the smell of rotting lilies, harbingers from beyond the Veil, fingers of asphodel, the piece who dared to become a man, knew the truth.
Atoms can be split. Worlds can end. Matter and energy, love and friends and light and life, effort and relationships, closeness and connaître, can be destroyed, with nothing more than a breath from the future, howling through tunnels of silver smoke.
August now. Just on the verge of notice, the world had begun again to descend into snow and long nights. It would be a deep dark winter; Dumbledore's weary, wrinkled face reminded these so nearly once-boys as they treaded into his office, James in the front.
"Ah, Remus, there you are—feeling well, I hope? Good, excellent. And Sirius, you're looking as dashing as ever, one would never think you were almost decapitated by Mr. Mulciber last Sunday. Hello, Peter, hello. Yes, do take some Ice Mice, that's what they're there for. Tea, anyone? Ah, Remus, Sirius, and of course sugar for you both, you never change."
Dumbledore then nodded, somewhat gravely, at James in the way of a pleasantry, and it was quite plain, once the door had closed to, that they would not be sharing tea and comments on the weather. Remus, Peter, and Sirius sat down. James and Dumbledore remained standing, the former with his hands clasped behind his back. He had never appeared before them so serious—not even at his wedding ceremony—and for once, his body truly could not tell them that once-truth, now an everlasting lie: Everything's gonna be alright.
"Now, James has brought you here," Dumbledore said, with sober energy, "because he had a son on the 31st of July this year, as did Frank and Alice Longbottom, and there is now serious cause for each of you to know why the birth of these boys is significant—as well as a significant danger to us all."
Peter stopped eating directly; his eyes turned eager, shocked, as though he could not believe any of this was being uttered in his so insignificant presence. Remus leaned his elbow against the armrest, cocked his head, held his chin in hand thoughtfully, remained silent. Sirius leaned forward.
"A danger? James's just had a boy, we ought to be thrilled, not calculating threats against the Order. What does Voldemort care about an infant?"
"Quite a bit, actually," James whispered, his voice strong in the office interior, yet somehow sad.
Dumbledore nodded toward the silver Pensieve in the center of his desk, its swirling, gaseous contents molding slowly, mesmerizing, into a shape with large eyes and a harsh, demonic voice.
Crash. Sibyl Trelawney disappeared in a whisper of indefinite smoke, vaguer than the premonition that passed her phantom lips—but even before she concluded her dark prophesy, the tea cups had dropped from both Sirius's and Remus's numbed hands to the floor.
James closed his eyes. The pain that lie there glinted, brighter than any the Cruciatus could ever inflict.
Remus squeezed his eyelids shut, securing his mind from the lonely sight of those singular droplets. Could he not create a vat of their blood?—Lily, James, Peter—Sirius, once Remus had had his rightful revenge—dig a mass grave, throw himself in, lose his own swirling, confused, screaming individual mind shorn off from all the love in that great, lonely world of unfamiliar faces, of lonely, soundless nights—an eternity of nights before him on winged paws, searching for more who loved as he loved, in a flurry of paws and fur and blood and memory and electricity, scent and color and the music of hearts.
A door opened somewhere, so far away, outside the invisible walls of the roaring in his ears, the last, trickle in the well desire to die and slip away, the sound of Dumbledore's footsteps. So, Remus Lupin and the wolf would live, after all.
Thump, thump. Thump, thump.
Adults now, they ran for what they could never know was the last time. And still they were breaths of air, of eternity, of lives transcending human limitations, extending past the molecules of air and skin between them, becoming one another in the harmony of footsteps, breath, heartbeats, the reverberation of a howl, violets and lemon tea and pine trees, leaking sap and ginger and new grass, earth, dark chocolate, old books, the flashes and touches, the vision of a smile in a dormitory, laughter and shouts and calls of panic, coming fresh from adventure and danger, blazing, afire, smoking in triumph—daring Fate and Death just for one more day—
"All right, I'm bloody bad at toasts, so somebody come up with something!"
Remus and James doubled over laughing while Peter giggled behind his cup; the wedding party was for the most part smashed and dancing wildly. The Marauders themselves, plus Lily (who'd already fallen out of the running) had descended into a drinking competition.
"Wait, mates, now I've got one. To honor—get on 'er"—
"NO!" James and Remus cried in unison, still laughing. Remus lifted his glass.
"Okay, here's one. To… er…"
"Wisdom, books, and good English Algebra, right Moony? I swear, you couldn't even be a vicar"—
"Shut your hole, Sirius," James laughed, and tipped his glass at Remus as a sign to continue.
"Well… how about to James making all the mistakes in marriage, so the rest of us can stay bachelors our whole lives and spoil his kids rotten?"
"All right, that's a bloody good one," Sirius chuckled and clinked, smiling rakishly. "Exactly what I intend to do, eh, Moony?"
James clapped Remus rather hard on the back. "I don't believe you for a second, Moony," he said, rather soberly. "I think you'll make a great dad, someday."
Peter appeared wary; Sirius paused half-way through his glass; James, in his still-drunken stupor, realized slowly the folly of his words.
"Oh—Remus, I'm sorry—I'm not—you know—cone sold sober…"
Remus smiled a small, resigned grin, and downed his glass. "Don't worry, Prongs. I'll get my revenge when I've got your kids in my hands. Send them off to the Big Bad Wolf, see if they come home without pounds of chocolate in their pockets to make your life hell."
James paused, then finally laughed. "I love you, mate—I've never known any Big Bad Wolf who could pound down four glasses of scotch and a pound of chocolate besides and still dance—think you could handle a fifth?"
"Well, it is a wedding, and nobody's pushed that open bar for what it's worth," Sirius answered for Remus, whose smile had turned warmer. "Shall we, gentlemen?"
They ran for what they could never know was the last time—because, after all, Marauders are immortal. Marauders do not know death, decay, age, sadness, or fear; only glory, triumph, a flash of heartbeats and eyes in the forest of ages, are there. Marauders are soulless, ageless, living at the core of those shadows always seen at the edge of the sight in the Devil's hours and at the last breath of sunset. A final aria, the last howl on the last day, somewhere in the distance.
We are Marauders, and we're going to live Forever.
Part Six
You don't remember me but I remember you
I lie awake and try so hard not to think of you—
But who can decide what they dream?
And dream I do.
I did not sleep that night for a very, very long time. As the seconds lengthened, I attuned the sounds of the clock to his breathing—in, out, tick, tock—sitting and not moving, hardly daring to breathe, as though the spider's web might be disturbed with an intake of air. At this point I choose not to think of what others would say or believe about my actions, or try to justify them, because I know my own thoughts, and frankly I've ceased to care. The breathing and the clock continued; I remember slipping in and out of conscious thoughts, drifting occasionally into the illogical which precedes dreaming. He was warm, an arm draped over my chest in the carelessness of sleep, forehead in the crook of my neck—my mind wandered often to every poem and song and requiem of loss I've ever happened upon, and I wasn't sure why. All I could do was gently stroke his warm back and listen to those gentle, wonderful, living sounds—so unlike the death-rattling rustle of leaves out of doors, the cold, long-dead light of stars—though I know in my soul there is more life in these things than I cared to admit. I remembered a time when I knew sunlight, and dappled water and laughter in corridors was the only pure life—that the savage wilderness was other, was wrong, shameful and inhuman and uncivilized, sick and diseased, rotten and disgusting and putrefying… and in the right of rights, I would return him to the simple, uncomplicated world of Hogwarts. But to be adult—and to be Remus Lupin—is to know there is light in other places as well. After all, I can think with a secret smile only in the dark, we Marauders were boys on summer-shine banks, and animals in the shadows—parents and university students and laughing café patrons, as well as survival-driven maniacs in dark alleys, surrounded and outnumbered, vicious and desperate.
I dared not think of him this way… but it crept upon me just as well, in all the imprecise vicissitudes I've seen of him… the smiling Quidditch seeker with a confident tread, the brooding loner, the flare of righteous anger and bewildered outrage—the wild screams of revenge—the savage fight to join Sirius in death, to destroy Bellatrix Lestrange—but hold. I pushed these thoughts away… but too late. I gripped his shoulder tighter even as I felt sunlight come through vague windows at the back of my eyes, saw white corridors….
This is the story I would tell you, were I a braver man.
A werewolf cannot have children. Nor can he adopt them—he is too dangerous. But the desire for a child—for companionship—for progeny—is stronger in a werewolf than in any other creature, including human beings. And I know then what you'll say: I am human. But it isn't true. It's others that make the werewolf human; and though my parents feared me and misunderstood what I was, they loved me in a way I fear you cannot remember, and thus do not know. James and Lily—as your parents, they belong to you; but as teenagers they belong to me—and there is no way to describe how I loved them. They were air. James and Sirius and Peter… air, Harry. They were my world for eleven long years. My happy memory.
You are not a memory. You are here, living and breathing in my arms, a walking elegy. The day you were born, I looked into your eyes, your silent, watchful eyes, and I wanted you like I have wanted nothing else in all my life. In the green I saw a glance of immortality—the sun through leaves, jade shadows, emerald perception—and I became aware that reality had ceased to exist. I didn't notice Sirius's suspicious glance. I wanted to rip out his eyes and pull the hair from his bleeding scalp the day James declared him your Godfather, even though all logic pointed to it as the right and logical course down every path. And after that day, I found myself suspicious of him, and Peter ducked down beneath our notice when it should have been so damned obvious…
Were I a braver man, Harry, your world would be a very different place. I would like to tell you that the monster of war destroyed your parents—the monster of societal convention, the fear of a werewolf, the frenzy of loss… but there is another side of the truth. Sirius loved you—he loved you too much to see the truth. I loved you. I loved you too much to protect you from myself.
And I haven't changed.
I tangled my hand in Harry's tousled, unruly hair, half-dreaming. I saw his bright eyes the day he was born, the way he called me 'Uncle Mooie' when he'd learned to talk, the adoring way in which he watched his father, the thrill with which he regarded Sirius, the content in his mother's arms, the moments of perfect happiness among us as we played with him or sat down to dinner and laughed as though the world were perfect—
And then the slight, millisecond hush, remembering that one of us wanted him dead, that one of us would dare to try and take him from us, that one of us would destroy that perfect peace, and that we had to stop him at all costs. I smiled in the dark. Married to irony.
We sat, for the last time seemingly, together on opposite sides of the table that morning, and it only took a quirk of my eyes to ask him what he thought of Knowles's A Separate Peace.
"I haven't gotten very far—I don't like Finny all that much, though. He seems like a bully," he said sullenly; he was slightly embarrassed at the thought of the night before, as he is unused to crawling into the beds of others.
"Really?" I mused—Harry is very different from the sixteen-year-old James, and I am sometimes loathe and often thrilled to admit it. "This might just be an old man talking, but doesn't he strike you as much like all boys his age?"
Harry's eyes snapped up as though I'd offended him—I rather thought he believed me to be comparing his foolish recklessness to Finny—and, in doing so, again implicating him in Sirius's death.
"You're not old, Professor—Knowles is stupid if he really thinks sixteen is the natural age for anyone to be."
I was silent at this for a long while, and did not push the book further. It occurred to me then how much older he looked; how his cheeks were no longer pale white dove feathers and puppy down… how he was catapulting but already stagnating… perhaps I haven't a very healthy outlook on aging. I used to have nightmares about my teeth turning to wet sugar and crumbling—blame the cliché "sweet tooth" all you want—I was terrified all the same.
Neither of us breached the silence, until I knew that the bubble had to break eventually.
"Tonight's the full moon, Harry—I'll need you to stay in the house until morning." My voice was very calm, cool, unaffected. I was screaming inside.
He turned away, a clench in his jaw—I saw the hollow of his cheekbone as the mandible muscles worked tensely, heard the salivary glands stop, the fearful drying of his mouth, saw his throat tighten—the wolf whispered Just reach out… It would be so easy to tear into the tendons, and feel their sanguine resistance… already my teeth had begun to elongate, I felt them jutting painfully out of my gums, the hum of static, a pulse of blood, some bright shell of power at my core whirring and setting reactions into place and catalyzing—the popping of joints in my fingers, rubber-band potential energy balling up into each one, gathering it all together to strike and tear and kill and consume and own and know… It was a struggle to stop his ears from hearing the powerful roar of a thunderous heartbeat ready to explode, my diaphragm which threatened to break, ragged gasps—Get out of the room battling in the first, preliminary stages with another voice, deep and growing—Don't you see how much I want you! Scholar's voice again, just at the back, sitting resignedly, watching the match with a touch of amusement: he already knows, and he's using it.
"You… you promised me, back in the Ministry, that you wouldn't leave me," he said, just when I thought he wouldn't answer me.
I took a shaking breath, not realizing I was speaking honestly. "Harry… when I become a wolf—I do leave you. You don't know… you've got no way to understand…"
He half-turned; we're coming even in height; it was only then that I noticed, when sunset framed him in the kitchen door, his profile, his squared shoulders, the defiance in his jaw something akin to responsibility, a shadow in his eyes. When, I supposed, would he call me Remus, in that sober voice he sometimes gleans upon in moments of new clarity?
"Know what? What it's like to feel tainted, as though I'm not completely myself, as though I don't own my own soul? As though I'll suddenly lash out and take everyone I love down with me—infect them or poison them or endanger them or kill them? You think you're teaching me something? You think I'm whole or undamaged or perfect just because I'm young? I see it, in the way you watch me when you think I'm not looking, the way you talk to me—you think I'm innocent, you think I'm like how you were when you were sixteen and seventeen and you're wrong. It excuses the fact that I killed Sirius, because I'm ignorant, because my world possesses some separate peace just like Devon the way Knowles wrote it—but Hogwarts isn't to me what it was to you, or what it is to Ron and Hermione—I've seen blood in its corridors, and I know Voldemort's mind, I know what he intends to do with it—I know that people who're boy and girls just playing stupid games turn into Lucius Malfoys and Bellatrix Lestranges, and kids who're funny and brave and get good marks turn into killers and get killed…" He ended on a strong note, a small strangle in his throat, as he looked into my face, something steely in his stare.
I was not prepared for this. I hadn't come to conclusions like his at sixteen—they came upon me gradually, and I profess I didn't dwell much on them as much as accepted them—they came on a November morning in glimmers, dull flashes off white porcelain, the steady sound of a drip-drip outside a murky fog, a slow-motion rushing sound, flashes of faces in trees, familiar demons everywhere… Lily, James, Sirius, Peter, Harry, Lily, James… I could have been ticking off the names around rosary beads, savoring the customary, habitual nature of their sound; until I'd said them over and over so many times they lost their meaning: just words. Angels fall forever in the corner of our sight, the margins where vision blurs in tired nights, beautiful forms mutate with the slight relaxation of the retina when we stop toeing the line, and demons live in the shadows between dendrite and axon. Nothing is concrete, known, certain, or stationary—I know these things—yet I was not expecting this.
"You don't know… what it is to be me, Harry. I don't let you know. Professor Lupin—the person I am right now to your face, the person you talk to, the face you see—stops existing out there, in the forest. He has nothing to do with the wolf—Professor Lupin is the part of me that exists to counter everything that the wolf is and does; you don't know who I am, or who I was, or how those people compile together to create the man that I have to deal with, and who has to deal with the wolf. You didn't know me—you don't know the changes the wolf has made to me, you haven't seen the progression or felt the time, or lived in this house long enough to start hearing things and seeing things that nobody wants to acknowledge—but they're there, Harry, and I wish I hadn't ever seen them."
I blinked; he blinked; we both seemed to realize at the same simultaneous moment that I'd said more that I'd wanted to on the subject, that I was laid naked at his feet, that he was given the skeleton key to unlock the things within my mind that I'd concealed so artfully and so cleverly for so many years from the world, that were once such simple, innocent truths. I gasped slightly, a cold fanning around my cheeks, curse-magic creeping up my veins, ice on the surface of a lake, a pull around my follicles, each hair a lightening rod, each becoming coarser and fuller and longer, incrementally less like the invisible insulating layer of human flesh and more the pelt of something fierce and lupine—it began to push outward from my heart, a layer of meaning and sensing beyond myself, heavenly and hellish, enlightened and savage, advanced above me and debased below—I wondered if he'd find it beautiful.
"Stay in this house," Professor Lupin commanded; the wolf raged at the edges of his words, fire on the fringes licking upward, clawing to be set free on the other side of rice paper doors. "Promise me—promise you won't let me back in, you won't come looking for me no matter what you hear or see—promise you'll be stronger than I am, Harry…"
My limbs were shaking; he'd been left speechless—but, looking into my face, seeing, I'm sure, his old Professor Lupin in those flashes I grabbed out from deep down within me, struggled to wave about just at the surface to make things okay for him, I saw him nod—oh, I wanted him to understand, wanted him to see the wolf clawing at my very eyes, watching him, causing my ears to prick at each move he made, take it in and file it away in some sinister cabinet for future reference—for when he would be my prey… And perhaps it occurred to me that my attempt at willful deception, this distancing from my capabilities, from the real danger he was in, from my own wants and desires, and my very real power to fulfill them, was creating the very prey that the wolf needed—but I continued to hide under that school teacher mask, drab and gray and indifferently adorned, far from the electric-bright moonlit thing I was to become, the sea of sun-drenched and bloody colors, the wave of sensations I held, and those I could give to him, and those we could gain together, two rather than one around a nucleus of bundled power and passion, around something uncoiling even as I turned from him—and it was the slowest movement I'd ever made, took every bit of strength in me not to drop down to him in love and, in a second he would never see but would mean everything in the world, send that powerful hand with energy longing to be released out upon his throat—and run. Teeth elongating. Hair coarsening. Currents buzzing. The smell of rapid-fire mitosis, the breaking of bones in a series of fearful snaps, skin cells struggling to keep up in a wave of bright curse magic coursing up and down and around me, up my spine, drove after drove of signals, the call of calories from every resource available, the stored energy in my body broken down by the curse and sent all into one place in the center of my chest—
I don't know what he saw. I don't know if he told me the truth, when we sat down, shaken, a few days later, to compare notes. I told him once that I remember everything I do after I transform—but what it is going through the wolf's mind isn't always fathomable to memory's hind-sighted vision. The truth is, I don't know at all how to describe the essence of the transformation; it is somewhere in this in-between place that flickers of understanding start to make their way forth; that the things we push to the backs of our minds, things we might glance at in twilight moments between sleep and waking, the things that burrow in the mud, that buzz around the kill, that creep in the margins, the lie in uncertainty, memory's dreams, the things we're sure never happened, start to stir.
"When they get near me… I can hear Voldemort murdering my mum."
"I heard my dad… that's the first time I've ever heard him."
"I trusted you! And all this time you've been his friend?"
"I'm doing this because—I don't reckon my dad would've wanted them to become killers—just for you."
"You're not old, Professor—Knowles is stupid if he really thinks sixteen is the natural age for anyone to be."
"I've seen blood in its corridors… kids who are brave and funny and get good marks become killers and get killed… you think I'm innocent… and you're wrong."
Snap.
I didn't know if it was the door or my bones that made the sound. My legs crumpled under me even as I started away from the house, into the dark embrace of a new night… the moon was revealing herself from a layer of cloud cover—I heard screaming, and wondered briefly if I'd wandered into Harry's mind before I heard my own throat filled with blood erupt into a howl which ripped air out of my lungs, filling them with a deep cold—this time I had been ripped open, I must have been—a force slashed through my femur, splintered upward along the grain, my legs broke even after I fell, invisible hands snapping them like twigs in every place possible—the arms supporting me crumbled—what were pillars I believe so strongly in for my day-to-day life—walking through universities, browsing the shelves of books, fingers that flip pages and annotate and instruct and gesticulate during lecture—all descend with a popping, a crunching, a withering—as they're broken down into their elementary parts and rebuilt, into a monster.
And the voice that instructs, that gently reminds, that quietly suggests and persuades from the back of a room, grafted and garbled, the words were lost in nonsensical growls and whimpers and in the snarling and snapping of jaws—the eyes that observe from opaque curtains of reserve disappeared behind a flooding of broken blood vessels, before reemerging, bright and amber, flashing with night vision from the shadows—all in a magnificent buzz of sweeping blue and white electricity, the crackling, crying, sulfurous and cold, memories and whispers of lost generations, potential waiting and yet-to-be fulfilled, the heedless splendor of horror—Hell frequencies, only the werewolf can hear. The man… the man who is, to Harry, Professor Lupin—to the Order, Remus—to the Marauders, Moony—the Ministry, a faceless number—to Shadow Wood, a pedagogical recluse… the man at last was wrenched away from the nerves, in exchange for a shadow, who emerged in the blazing bright, howling triumph of curse-magic.