A/N: Credit where credit is due: the title contains lyrics from J. Frusciante's "Time going back" (2004, "Shadows Collide with People"). Listen in, it's a great song. -Isa
Chapter 13 - And when given this life, I want to thank you all who will take it away.
Remus woke to the sound of the odd manual doorbell. He suddenly was wide awake and, seeing Severus on the floor beside him, alseep, went to answer to avoid arousing suspicion on the part of the caller. The blonde man with the missing tooth at the door eyed him strangely as he signed for the rather large carboard box in his underclothes.
"The delivery is here" he said, surprised at the dryness in his mouth. He brought the parcel over to Severus and stopped. Not sleeping.
He looked around him. On waking he assumed that he had fallen alseep after sex. He rushed over to Severus.
"No. No no no. Think!" He said to himself as he felt for a pulse on the blackly bruised neck of the other man. There was none. The body was cooler than when he had last felt it and not stiff yet. Remus tore open the box and rummaged around. The scientist must have had some sort of reanimation device brought over. The plan had been to test... Remus stopped. Had it?
For a second he wondered whether he hadn't yet again been drugged into his bestial behaviour. He hadn't been himself before balcking out. He was starting to feel anger at the scientist's possible betrayal. Of course he would have been capable of manipulating him. Resentment coursed through Remus as he searched through the lab equipment all the same until he found the reanimator. He had only seen one of these once.
Resembling a front-worn backpack which fastened itself to the patient's chest using a number of succion cups, it had an oxygen mask and an automatic intubating mechanism. It was fully automated first-aid. The front event had a monitor which displayed the patient's vital signs. Feeling relief, he hastily moved Severus to a lying position and put the reanimator on him, switching on the monitor. To his astonishment, the vital signs were normal. In fact, the machine declared the patient to be stable after 30 seconds. As Remus looked closer, stunned, he saw a sight that would have shocked him beyond sanity if Severus hadn't described what had happened to the crow: at his ribs, where the outermost succion cups of the machine were visible, the flesh was starting to vanish. Suddenly, having ripped off the reanimator, Remus found himself grabbing at the body that was crumpling in on itself ans sprialling into a unseen drainhole. Faster than seemed possible, Severus was gone.
Remus dropped to the ground. Two things were clear: he had killed. And he hadn't been drugged into doing it. Out of reflex he gripped his own throat. There was no way he could live with himself now. This was the end for him as he knew himself. Whatever had taken over, whether he had lost his mind or whether this whole Lovex reality thing was true and the werewolf had somehow intruded on his actions here, in this world, he didn't care. He wanted to die. Shock reaction. And it had to be now. Looking through the box he found several small containers marked with strings of chemical symbols predicting all sorts of terrible consequences should their contents be leaked. He picked two, opened them and poured them down his throat. The pain was beyond anything he had ever known. He felt his food pipe melt and his stomach be torn apart by the chemicals. He smelled his own body fluids and matter as they leaked out of the broken shell he had made himself into. And soon, his lungs burning, the air he tried to inhale ceased to fill them, like a balloon with a hole. His vision and hearing went next. And all of this, though fast, seemed to take an age of pain. Yet he had time to hope. And before the last beat of his heart and the last electrical signals travelled from neuron to neuron, Remus Lupin felt himself hope to meet Severus Snape again.