Chapter 74: The Prisoners

Remus didn't spend his first afternoon in prison awash in guilt and shame and the pain of losing Teddy all over again that came with speaking his son's name.

He also didn't spend his first afternoon in prison savoring the memory of Dora's mouth pressed against his as her fingers twined in his hair.

He didn't even spend his first afternoon in prison contemplating all possible escape routes, threats, and defenses.

He spent his first afternoon asleep.

He spent most of his second day asleep, too, and then most of his third.

If there was a tiny silver lining to imprisonment, it was that he could sleep as much as he liked when he felt tired instead of pushing himself to teach a full day of classes lest his students notice the pattern of his absences.

He woke up on the fourth day hungry and bored. He knew that during the years that Azkaban had been guarded by dementors, most prisoners had eventually stopped eating. He wondered how much the small reforms instituted by Sirius had changed that. The grayish porridge that appeared magically in his cell was not, by any stretch of the imagination, remotely appetizing. He had been near starvation more than once in his life, though, and he never gave any consideration to doing anything but eating it. He set the empty bowl and spoon down near the bars at the front of his cell with a clatter.

Everything in Azkaban was stone or metal. The slightest sound carried and echoed and attracted attention.

Azkaban was a dangerous place. He didn't want to attract attention.

He realized what he'd done far too late.

"Remus." The voice was a high-pitched whine and seemed far too close. He did a stupid spin about his cell; he was, of course, alone. Cautiously, he approached the front of the cell. He could sense the spells on the bars and wasn't fool enough to touch them, but he did look into the corridor as well as he could. He saw no one. There was a cell across from him, he remembered that from when they'd brought him it, but it was set at an angle and he could see nothing of who might be inside.

"Here, Remus." The soft, shrill voice again. He knew it now; he couldn't deny it. "Back left corner of your cell."

He saw the crack in the stones. It was enough to allow for an almost-private conversation with his nearest neighbor.

It was not, thankfully, enough to allow a rat to escape.

He ignored Peter and went back to sleep.

As his second week of incarceration began, Remus set a routine for himself. He needed to keep his mind and his body strong if he hoped to survive the next full moon, which was a scant three weeks away.

He began by walking laps of his cell. He memorized every bar, every stone, every crack in every wall. There wasn't much to look at once he'd done that, so he imagined walking from one end of the Hogwarts castle to the other. He saw each of the 142 staircases in his mind— the wide ones, the narrow ones, the ones with vanishing steps, the ones that led somewhere different on a Friday. How far had he walked on a normal day at Hogwarts, even when he'd gone only from his office to the Great Hall to his classroom and back again? It hadn't seemed like very much at the time. Now, in the confines of his cell, it seemed that each day of his previous life had been an epic journey.

"Don't pace so, Remus," came Peter's voice. "You'll be out in a few months. You don't need to worry."

After that, Remus made a point of walking more loudly than was strictly natural.

Peter Pettigrew, speaking to him as if they were fourteen years old and stealing food from the kitchens to sate an odd pre-transformation craving that had struck Remus in the middle of the night?

Peter Pettigrew, acting as if he could comfort Remus? As if he had a right to do such a thing, even if he happened to be capable of it?

Peter Pettigrew had a lot of nerve. But then, he always had. It took a certain amount of nerve to befriend (pretend to befriend) a werewolf. It certainly took a certain amount of nerve to turn your friends (pretended friends) over to Voldemort and then frame someone else by cutting off your own finger. It took a certain amount of nerve to nurse Voldemort back to health and brew the potion he needed to resurrect himself— not that Peter was going to be doing that again.

When he was done walking, Remus switched over to press-ups, even though he had never much enjoyed them. He practiced, too, the stretches he had learned as a child trying to mitigate the lycanthropic damage to his aching, growing, constantly ripping muscles.

His mind needed maintenance, too, if he was going to emerge from prison ready to support Harry. So he tuned out Peter's pathetic overtures of friendship. He tuned out Antonin Dolohov's shouts about wolves and Greyback. He tuned out Bellatrix Lestrange's shrieked threats even when she mentioned Dora by name.

(Those were the three prisoners who seemed to have been invigorated by Remus' presence. The Crouches and the Lestrange brothers and Rookwood and Mulciber were all quiet.)

He didn't let himself hear them. Instead, he practiced his Patronus memories.

He saw Dora, eyes bright and wand drawn. "Run away with me," she'd said, breathless in the way only a young woman in love could be. "We'll both go."

And when he'd refused— told her how very much she was needed where she was— she'd understood his duty and her own, but she'd silenced him with a kiss. Her lips had been soft and damp against his; he could still feel the way her fingers had stroked his hair, filthy though it had grown over the passing days.

"I love you," she'd said. "Hold onto that."

He tried to cast a Patronus without a wand, and was almost surprised when it didn't work, so powerfully joyful was the memory.

He switched over to his last memory of Teddy. He'd been making smoke circles with his wand for Teddy's amusement. Teddy was still too young to grab for the circles, too young even to follow their movements with his half-focused eyes. But when Remus tinted the smoke so it was turquoise, Teddy's hair suddenly flashed turquoise as well. Chuckling, Remus tinted the smoke pink, then golden, then a deep blue-purple. Teddy kept pace enthusiastically.

Dora entered the nursery, drawn by Remus' laughter.

"Enjoy it now," she teased, a smile lighting her beautiful face. "Metamorphmagi are nothing but trouble. Ask me how I know."

"I'm looking forward to every bit of it," Remus returned easily. "I hoped he would look like you, and now he can look like all of the yous."

He'd stolen the idea of entertaining a baby with colored circles of smoke from James, of course. James had often done it for Harry, and now Remus remembered what it had been like to tutor James' beautiful son when they'd both made it to Hogwarts. He remembered Harry's rapt attention as Remus told him stories of his parents and entreated him to finish his chocolate. To Remus' surprise, the tutoring sessions had remained even after Sirius resumed his place in Harry's life; Remus and Harry both enjoyed them. The sessions had been a bit different each year— now incorporating Cedric, now used as preparation for tracking Horcruxes— but they hadn't vanished like Remus had thought they might.

Using the memory of teaching someone else the Patronus Charm to cast one's own Patronus was rather circular. He wondered whether that had been done before, whether it had an effect on the Patronus itself.

He searched for another memory to sink into and settled on Sirius appearing in his room before the full moon. People who knew Sirius only by reputation thought that he was loud and flashy, and there was no question that he could be those things. People who knew Sirius only by reputation never realized that he was capable, too, of absolute quiet devotion. He pictured Sirius trying to make him laugh in the last moments before the moon rose.

"They didn't serve fish and chips here when we were in school. It was considered too Muggle."

"I suppose we've made some progress since that time."

"Or they cleaned out the Black Lake and they had to do something with what they found. You have to send word the minute they serve calamari in the Great Hall. I have a score to settle with the Giant Squid."

Remus laughed aloud, startling himself, and decided that he had done enough practice for the day.

He resumed sharpening his mind by quietly reciting the current Hogwarts students by House and year.

The third week that passed without seeing or touching or speaking to anyone was more difficult. He tried to keep to his carefully-devised routines but found them useless.

He thought about how much he resented his placement on a corridor full of Death Eaters. Everyone on this floor of Azkaban seemed to have been a Death Eater with the exception of Barty Crouch— and he had harbored a Death Eater for over a decade.

He heard Bellatrix howl about Dora—my sister brought that unnatural child into the world, but I shall remove her, her blood shall cleanse the family name— and wondered whether Dora was safe.

He wondered, too, whether Dora missed him. Perhaps Dora had taken this time to reconsider what it would mean to have a husband who would put her in more danger than she already faced every day. Perhaps Dora was beginning to realize what it meant to have a truly unemployable husband; after Remus' public arrest, he would never work again.

He wondered whether the students had adjusted to their new teachers, both intelligent men if not always to Remus' liking.

Above all, he wondered how he would survive a transformation with no medical care.

"It'll be the full moon next week, Remus," Peter said in the next cell. "Aren't you nervous?"

Remus wasn't so desperate that he was about to share his feelings with Peter.

He reminded himself that he'd been alone for much longer than three weeks in his life. Hadn't he gone years without friends and family, not wanting to burden his father, not daring to approach young Harry?

(But even then there had been the occasional smile from a stranger, the occasional shared laugh when a child in a shop delighted in a new toy, the moment of mutual exasperation with a temporary colleague. Now all the small things had gone along with the big things.)

Sirius managed this in much worse circumstances, Remus reminded himself. There were so many people less lucky than Remus was and he had to remember that.

"You should be grateful, Remus," said Peter. "A transformation in here is going to be bad, but better than out there where someone might try to kill you."

Reminding oneself to be grateful was one thing. Having someone else tell you to be grateful was another thing altogether, and it was infuriating.

"Sod off, Peter," said Remus.

Peter burst into peals of squeaky laughter. "Congratulations!" he said. "Twenty-five days! That's a record."

Remus didn't ask what kind of a record it was. He was too busy inwardly cursing himself for acknowledging Peter's existence. Peter had had a trial, and that was all the acknowledgement the man would ever need again.

"You know it was a game we used to play at school," Peter continued, as if he and Remus were chatting over tea. "James and Sirius and I used to take turns saying the most ridiculous things we could think of until one of us made you laugh when you got into one of those quiet moods. I can't see you smiling, so I'll have to use talking as proof that I've won."

"I should think that bringing about Lily and James' deaths and framing Sirius for it would be enough games won for a lifetime, Peter," he responded against his better judgment.

"I never wanted to do that!" Peter's objection was shrill and predictable. First-years explaining that they hadn't meant to cheat off one another's homework showed more creativity. "And it ended in You-Know-Who's downfall, so you should hardly be angry about it after all these years."

"Are Lily and James not still dead?" Remus inquired politely.

"Lily and James chose to make themselves a target. James especially. You-Know-Who didn't want to kill a pureblood from an old family. And as for Sirius, he could have broken out of Azkaban any time he wanted to. He decided not to do it for twelve years because he knew that he was guilty."

Remus remembered that he had been ignoring Peter for a reason. He said nothing and waited for Peter to quiet again.

Unfortunately, Peter chose to fill the silence. "Sirius didn't trust you, you know. James wanted to trust all of his friends. Sirius above everyone, but you and me, too. Sirius told him not to trust you. You know how Sirius was."

Remus resisted the temptation to tell Peter to keep Sirius' name out of his mouth.

Remus reminded himself that this was exactly how Peter had sewn discord between them in 1980.

"Sirius never liked me," Peter continued. "He thought I was annoying."

Sirius wasn't alone in that.

"You, Remus, I didn't appreciate how strong you were. You were always going to make it through the war. I wasn't like you."

Remus certainly hoped not.

He resumed ignoring Peter.

He listened, though, when Bellatrix Lestrange called out to one of the hit wizards who patrolled the corridors.

"The moon is nearly full," she said. "Are you going to give the werewolf a potion to make him safe?"

The hit wizard's laughter echoed off the hard stone walls. "Of course not. If we did that, they'd all get themselves arrested on purpose, wouldn't they? That potion is dead expensive. If the Ministry has room in its budget for that, I'd want a raise first!"

"Won't you be frightened?" Her voice held a sickly-sweet solicitousness that Remus knew was an act, and a poor one at that. "Werewolves are notoriously difficult to kill if they get loose."

The hit wizard laughed again. "We won't be patrolling that night. It's you lot who need to be scared. That's why they put the wolf in with the Death Eaters in the first place. No one on this floor was ever going to go home anyway."

Three days later, the full moon rose.

Some cultures called the February full moon the Snow Moon; others called it the Hunger Moon. Still others named it the Storm Moon, and Remus thought, as he lost his mind, that this last name might be the best.

Remus awoke the morning after the full moon (was it still morning?) to the tangy scent of his own blood. The walls were smeared with it. The stone floor, too, was spattered with red. His thin mattress was soaked and stained; what small comfort it had offered was much less now that it was stiff and rough and smelling of iron.

His tired brain sought the questions he always asked at times like these, questions he had been spared by Wolfsbane Potion and by Sirius.

Did I hurt anyone?

Only himself. His cell had been locked from the outside; it had not been opened for a month, let alone last night. The walls were worse for wear, but they had held fast.

How bad are my injuries?

He'd lost enough blood that a blood-replenishing potion would have been a help but was not a necessity.

There were tender bruises on his face. The wolf must have banged its head against the bars in an attempt to escape. He didn't think he felt the telltale signs of a concussion.

A test of his neck revealed a full range of movement. Thankfully. A spinal injury here would have been the end of him. His back, too, was sore but undamaged.

His left arm was broken in at least two places.

His legs and his right arm were littered with claw marks and puncture wounds. He would have yet more scars, but he would heal.

Do I need professional treatment?

The broken arm was the worst of it. Skele-grow would have been lovely; the wand of a skilled healer more lovely still. If he had had sheets on his mattress, he might have made a splint. His only choice now would be to rip a strip from what remained of his robes hope to keep his arm as still as possible.

Can I afford professional treatment?

Irrelevant.

How suspicious do I look?

Irrelevant.

What do I remember about last night?

He remembered the fear before the change. He'd wondered whether this would be the last time.

He felt an echo of maddening blood lust. There were humans just outside the cell and he'd been unable to reach them.

He remembered screaming. Screaming and shouting and shattering metal.

He couldn't have been responsible for that, could he have?

He had only one source of information at his disposal, and that source of information was unreliable indeed. But it was is only chance. He crawled to the wall he shared with Peter. "Peter?" he asked.

"Moony!" Peter sounded relieved and delighted. Remus didn't have the breath to spare to insist that Peter was not permitted to call him that. "Some of your blood came through the wall! I didn't know whether you'd made it. I asked the hit wizards and they said they didn't care."

"They'd move my body if I was dead," Remus pointed out.

"Not today they wouldn't," said Peter with the eagerness of a man who had gossip to share.

"And why is that?" Remus' head pounded all the harder.

"Because Bellatrix Lestrange broke out last night."

To be continued.

Author's Note: Best wishes to you during as we navigate this particularly strange world. I hope you're healthy and safe. I would say I hope this chapter was a distraction for you, but Remus is doing the social isolation thing at the moment so it may have been a bit on the nose. (I swear the events of this chapter have been in the outline since long before I ever heard the words "COVID-19.") As always, no pressure to review; you've got enough pressure elsewhere. If you do choose to review, be kind; I've got enough pressure elsewhere.

Recommendation:

The Last One by Louey06. It is story ID number 10062012 on this site.

Summary: Tonks comes home to find Remus grieving over the news of Peter's death. The two of them talk and go into more depth on Remus's feelings and past.

I enjoy a ficlet in which characters just get to talk and breathe for a minute. This is one of those.