Disclaimer: I am not J.K. Rowling
Blue by Rockinfaerie
The Cold-Blooded Dawn
He wakes up slowly and the morning is soft; he inhales and a cool rush of salty air enters his nostrils
Something is painful and he opens his eyes. Fragments of blue peer through the trembling leaves and the trunks are high and dizzying and look as though they might tumble upon him. Birdsong flutters confusedly through the air and something is salty. He listens for that soothing slap of the waves but it does not come, and with a slight movement he gages something - the aching stiffness in his body, the deep scrapes across his stomach - which he has not experienced for some time. He hears no waves, and yet the salt continues to invade his senses, until he forces himself to sit, wincing, and blearily seeking the calming sea.
But all around him is dense wood, and as that cool rainy mossy smell greets his nostrils he feels both sensations clash horribly; he brings a hand to his mouth in a yawn and on moving it away freezes, staring at the streak of salty blood on his palm. He claps a hand to his mouth again and brings away yet more, and now tastes it flowing from his mouth, and feels the stiffness of his chin where it has dried, and in a mad flurry he gains his feet, twisting about in terror and recognition.
He has bitten someone. This is Hogwarts and he has bitten someone.
He cries out, and in his mind the hallmarks of a transformation - the aches, the scrapes, the memory-void - are all there; it has happened... what has he done? He is shaking and tears at his mouth again. Whose blood does he taste in his mouth? Who has he contaminated - who has he condemned to a life of exile and pain? Or killed? The tattered clothing that remains on his body is wet from the slippery leaves and the twigs crack beneath his bare feet like breaking bones. He forces himself to move - he stumbles beneath sharp blinding branches and his feet slide in the muck of hidden hollows, and with every snapping twig and turn of his head he fears that he will see his mauled victim. He is sobbing in short gasps of breath and his desperation mounts as he reaches the edge of the forest where he sees himself, reflected in the small windowpanes of Hagrid's hut.
There he is in the early morning sun - thin and grey as death in the cold dawn and his face drenched with blood. He steps closer and sees his eyes and questions them, but the taste in his mouth tells him that he is a monster, that he is incurably vile. He grasps the sides of his head as though in an effort to press this unbearable guilt from him, to become once more as he had been last night, to become all he deserved to be: a blank beast of carnage. He looks beyond the glass and at the snoring form of the gamekeeper, and acknowledges immediately that the life of a social outcast is now far too good for him; any life is too good for him... And suddenly he believes the Ministry - the remorse rises bitterly and he believes that he should have been slaughtered long ago, slaughtered to prevent further slaughter. But he looks again beneath those brows in the window, perhaps to confirm to him that there is nothing about him worth retaining.
And he spits at himself; the blood spatters onto his wretched reflected face and his bottom lip stings excruciatingly. His spit dribbles down the window and he peers closer at that mouth, the mouth that tore human flesh.
And then he pauses, a shudder running through him, and stares again... there is a deep gash running through the lower lip, like an aerial view of a dark ravine, and it oozes... and it is the deep cut of teethmarks. He brings his teeth down upon the ruptured tissue and winces, but his bite matches the line directly.
He steps back and views his fingernails. Dirt, but nothing else. His tattered front is scraped, but by wolfish claws and not by human fingers. Looking back at his anxious face, he sees that his nose is clean - no evidence of snout-rummaging into raw meat. He wipes his mouth again and knows suddenly that this is his own fresh blood that he tastes, and his mouth is beginning to swell.
The lake is a silver sheen of early sunlight, and he moves towards it with something between a cough and a laugh, the realisation rising - slowly, cautiously, but determinedly - until he must accept the reality of the situation. He collapses onto the cool grassy bank and settles back, initial relief returning to the shock and horror of what could have been, manifesting itself in a shaky shuddery mantra as he stares at the lightening sky:
"I could've bitten somone... I could've bitten someone... I could've bitten... I could've..."
And the first of the jumbled memories to charge at him from the previous night (before they are ordered by logic), is that they had all been at the Shack. All of them. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs. And for a confused and fleeting moment he is so filled with this conviction that he jolts and stares transfixed at his pale blue-veined hands and wonders why he has aged.
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