A/N: Thank you for the review, brittannes!
"My greatest fear? Myself."
—Subject 17
I could never handle boggarts.
For someone who lived with a fear like mine—constant high alert, adrenaline perpetually on the cusp of a spike—I knew there wasn't a chance of holding my own. Even the idea of contending with one in the confines of school was embarrassing—in front of my classmates, in front of my professor. The day Remus taught them in class was a memorable experience, early on in the semester, which cemented him as the best Defense teacher we'd had in seven years—or so I was told. I pretended to be sick that day, instead passing the time wandering corridors, following ghosts around, trying not to think about the things that frightened me. But I joined up with some classmates for lunch in the Great Hall afterwards and I knew Remus saw me there, my excuse of illness disintegrating with every bite I took. It was, at this point, too early in the year to know what he thought of me. It was before Black's night. Before the stairs.
Months later I found myself slipping into his classroom to wait for him. It was after Christmas, after I'd seen his wolf form and after things between us had resolved into something better but more intense, and we were now spending most evenings together, since he had nothing left to hide from me. Tonight, I thought, as I closed the door to the classroom behind me, we could sneak off to Hogsmeade, perhaps, a late-night trip to the Three Broomsticks, or—more likely—he'd gently coax me into continuing my NEWT studies, opening the Defense text to random pages as questions spilled out of him. Personally, I was leaning towards the butterbeer.
I walked across the room to his office and took a seat in the chair on the other side of his desk to wait for him. It was then that I noticed movement under the table—something in a trunk was shaking hard enough to wobble the legs of the desk itself. At this point in the year I was no stranger to the dark creatures that populated Remus' office—more often than not I'd enter the classroom to meet the eyes of a foul-intentioned grindylow, the crafty smirk of a red cap.
But this was different. A terrifying curiosity overtook me—one that I've never quite been able to explain, no matter how many times I think back over this moment. It's possible that I am drawn to what frightens me.
Slowly I crept around Remus' desk to better see the trunk. It continued to rock and shift, a brass clasp securing the lid in place—just barely, from the looks of it. Whatever was inside wanted out. I hesitated, though not long enough to truly think about what I was doing. With trembling hands I reached for the metal clasp, and lifted. And then, as I stumbled back onto my hands, Leonard rose from the trunk.
He seemed even taller—more menacing, somehow—and the expression on his face twisted into one of pleasure when he saw me cowering on the ground. I understood, in a vague sort of way, that it was not really him, that I should not have skipped class on boggart day, that avoiding hypothetical fear only meant the real thing would come for me later. I froze.
The thing pretending to be Leonard cackled and walked over to the office door, pushing it shut with a dull thud, mirroring the action Leonard had taken in the bedroom just a summer before. It was Leonard and I in the room again, together, alone: a living flashback. I could feel my breath speeding up. My chest began to heave. I scrabbled for my wand, which had fallen from my robes and rolled away. Even if I'd had it, though, I wouldn't have known the incantation that could save me.
Leonard advanced. The boggart, I noticed, did not get his stride exactly right—his expensive loafers levitated slightly off the ground, creating an eerie hover. He stalked toward me on an inch of air. I dove for my wand, which had rolled back under the desk, by the trunk, and leapt to my feet, my back pressed to the wall. He stood between me and the door, again, just as he had last summer. The boggart must have been picking through my memories of Leonard to find the ways to terrify me best, settling upon a symmetry with our last encounter. I held my wand out in my shaking right hand.
"B-bombarda! Reducto! St-stupefy!" Had I been in class, of course, I would've known the boggart to be impervious to all of these. Not to mention that the spells themselves were hardly functional, given my mental state.
It moved like Leonard, it smiled like Leonard. When it spoke, it sounded like him, too.
"You're mine now." Dark, horrible laughter spilled from his throat. "She doesn't want you anymore. She's given you to me."
My mother. It even knew about her.
He paced closer with an agonizing slowness. I could see the whites of his eyes. I continued to scream spells, waving my wand uselessly; only a few hapless sparks emitted. At this point I could barely cast. He had almost reached me. I realized he'd been laughing all this time. I realized the other sound in my ears was my own sobs. I was hyperventilating. I didn't know what would happen when the boggart got to me—whether or not you could be killed by the manifestation of your fear—but it seemed as though I was about to find out.
"CORA!" Remus. Outside his office, in the classroom. I remembered him. I remembered where I was. The boggart turned, too. I heard my teacher's footsteps, the desks clattering as he pushed them out of his way in his haste, like he already knew that something was wrong. The boggart and I looked at each other. I saw Leonard cower for a moment—and then—
It shifted. There was a gray whirl, wispy like smoke—I could have run my fingers through the haze, he'd been that close—and then I was face-to-face with a wolf. A werewolf.
Remus burst through the door just in time to see the beast whip its claws into my shoulder. I cried out. My body went slack. I would've fallen, but the wolf was pinning me in place with just an arm. All I could see were teeth, then a white-hot flash as it dug in deeper, twisted its claws—it angled its jaw, positioned itself to bite the arm it had pinioned—I saw its green eyes—his green eyes—I closed my own—
"RIDDIKULUS!" Remus shouted. The boggart-wolf turned away from me, snorting curiously, before clothing appeared spontaneously on his body—a bonnet, a cotton nightgown. Grandmother's clothing. Like in the fairytale.
Remus forced a harsh laugh that sounded like someone else's, then flicked his wand. The boggart again assumed that shapeless gray form as it flew back into the trunk, offering one last rattle before going still.
He crossed the room in three urgent strides just in time to catch me as my knees gave out. My breath was still coming hard and fast, forced out from my lungs in quick bursts as if by some external force. Like a fist pressing my chest. I felt sick. He felt warm and solid against me, and I melted instinctively into him. Neither of us spoke for a moment, caught in a limbo of shock and confusion, and then the dam broke. The humiliation of my helplessness, of what he had seen. And then the guilt of knowing what the boggart's second shift would mean to him.
"It was me," he said, as if he'd read my thoughts. He buried his face deep into my neck, my hair, his voice so thick that I could barely understand his next words.
"It was me," he repeated. He began to sob. "It had my eyes."
The idea that my uncle was bitten by Greyback—the same wolf who attacked Remus—began to obsess me. I spent more and more of my free time combing through our old files on his victims—the ones alive; the ones who died; the ones he attacked as a human, when the moon was not full.
I dragged a giant pinboard up from the basement, spread a map of the continent across it and begin to chart his movements over time, a different color pin for each new year. I was working my way slowly back to the year of Orpheus' death, excited to know the truth but also afraid. I became so caught up in the project that I began to neglect other things, like prepping for the Wizengamot assembly. More than once, someone showed up for an interview I'd forgotten about, to the point that Margaret had to hold one instead of me. The two of them left the room a mere half-hour later looking thoroughly unsettled. The man, a lean wizard in his late 40s, cast Margaret a last nervous glance before hurrying out of the office. She, in turn, stalked over to me and my map with a great, drawn-out sigh as she observed my handiwork.
"You can't keep doing this to me," she said, crossing her arms. The many silver bracelets on her wrists jingled and chimed as she moved.
I flushed, fighting my instinct to cover the board from her view. I was—technically—misusing our resources and maybe violating privacy as well, and I'd banked on Margaret not paying close attention to my actions. We were, strictly speaking, allowed to go the forest and identify new wolves who had not yet registered with the Ministry. We were allowed to interview them and record basic identifying information. But compiling data in this way to track any one werewolf—even Greyback—was out of line. I knew this. It was not my department's job to find him; such an assignment belonged to the aurors, not the person who'd sworn to help his kind. I was meant to offer support and little beyond that.
And yet, I needed to know who did it. I needed to know if Greyback was the one who had pushed my mother to commit her crime.
Margaret looked from the map to my face suspiciously—certainly not for the first time. I knew she sensed that something was amiss; I'd gone very quiet these last few weeks, working furiously, barely surfacing to say good morning and goodnight as she arrived and departed each day. Maybe it spoke to the growth of our begrudging camaraderie, the way she bit her lip and returned to her desk without another word. Or maybe she was just too lazy to do anything beyond that.
I told myself that if I worked hard enough, if I pulled enough files and pushed enough pins and copied the names of enough victims off decrepit little scraps of parchment, I would forget that I had not seen Remus in more than a month. I would finally stop wondering where he was sleeping at night, whether he was warm enough against the frigid February air, if he had enough to eat. If he was happy.
A statistic I'd memorized my first week on the job never fully left my mind: 62% of werewolves are homeless. I imagined him in London's soup kitchens, huddled in abandoned buildings in the country, warming his hands on the edge of dying fires. I thought desperately, guiltily, over and over, of the question I'd asked him during our last conversation: Have you ever killed anyone, Remus? Are you the reason anyone's dead? What that would've done to him, my trust in him, from his perspective, seemingly destroyed. I could see that now, his belief in a person he'd thought would always trust him. And so he ran. And so he disappeared. Maybe he was doing something for the Order, sure, or maybe he was just gone. Decided it was too much responsibility resting on his shoulders, decided he didn't want to be the spokesperson for an entire species and left it all behind after the night it became too much.
I tried not to think of him, often. But the truth is that even as I tracked Greyback's path across the continent I would have given all of that knowledge up in a heartbeat, just to know where Remus was on one of those nights.
Attempt #21
4 c powdered aconite,
1/2 c essence of dittany
1 c diced root of asphodel, stewed separately (see other notebook)
3 valerian sprigs
1/4 c cracked moonseed
1/4 c lavender buds
2 tsp essence of wormwood
1 tbsp liquid moondew
1 bezoar
1 silver nugget, pebble-sized
Notes: I have to keep trying.