By Djinn Hashiba-Maxwell
The first time Remus Lupin had met a werewolf was the night he became one. He didn't remember much about, only flashes--blood, and screaming, and pain, the kind of pain that is so intense that you can't remember what it was like, you only know that it hurt and you don't want to go through it again.
The second time Remus Lupin had met a werewolf he hadn't really known it. It had been a crowded train station, where he and his mother were waiting for a train out to see his grandmother, and then he'd smelled ... something. He hadn't known what, couldn't place it, but it had been enough to cause him to wander from his mother's side, trying to find the source.
The man found him first, an older man, perhaps in his late twenties. He'd been warm-looking in the way non-threatening adults can be, and when he'd tipped Remus' chin up to take a look at him and Remus had let him, because there was something about the man that smelled ... familiar.
"Hello, pack-brother." The man had said with a laugh, his eyes crinkling in the corners as he smiled down at Remus. "You must be the runt of the litter, you."
Remus hadn't realized until years later what he'd been talking about.
Remus hadn't really met the third--she'd been in Diagon Alley, taking a break from shopping, presumably, to chatter with a flock of boys around her. She was gorgeous--pale, shapely, full lips, long eyelashes, she was the kind of beautiful that made other people hate you and want you at the same time. Remus had inhaled, and he'd smelled her, and he suddenly he knew something about this woman he'd never met that none of the men around her did. The knowledge was frightening in its intimacy, and he hadn't wanted it.
They had exchanged a knowing glance, and she looked up at him through long, pale eyelashes, her expression almost guilty, before turning back to her admirers.
The fourth werewolf Remus had met could have ruined his life.
"You are not a man that sometimes becomes a wolf, pack-brother, you know this better then anyone." He'd said. "You are a wolf that sometimes becomes a man."
He'd been wicked-looking, dark, with wild eyes and sharp teeth--the kind of man that looked as dangerous as he could be, the person you thought of when you thought of why werewolves should be locked up or put down. He'd been incensed and passionate and dark, a darkness so think Remus fancied he could see it swirling around him.
"You know where you belong, pack-brother," the man had said, tongue flickering over his teeth, "and it is not where Ministers collar you like a dog. You are not tame. You know you crave the moon as much as you fear it."
"You are a dark creature, Remus Lupin. There is no need to fear what you are."
Remus hated himself for wanting to be understood in a way only another werewolf could. He hated himself for wanting to hear those words /no need to fear/ so badly, but more than that, he hated the world for forcing him to hear them first from someone who only said them to tempt him.
The fifth werewolf he'd met had been strange, neither dark nor light, and she'd pretended that the fact she knew what he was also meant she knew who he was.
It had been perhaps seven years after the war, not long enough for the pain to have ended, nothing would ever be long enough, but it had faded to a dull ache that he grew accustomed to. He'd breathed in and been assailed by the scent of kin, and he looked over just as she looked up, and as always, there had been that moment of intimate knowledge that Remus despised.
She had gestured to the empty space across from her, and smiled slightly. "Come and join me, pack-brother."
She was thin and willowly, and there was blood under her fingernails, but Remus didn't ask about it. She'd asked his name, and asked about his pack, and she hadn't known what she meant.
"Have you no pack? An orphan?"
A thought had flashed through his mind of dark hair and laughing eyes, of light glinting off thick, round-framed glasses, of a small, round-faced boy who wanted nothing so much as to be accepted.
"I used to have a pack." He told her. "But they're gone now."
It had been after his return to Hogwarts, after seeing the boy that looked so like his father, after finding an old friend and a new enemy. He'd been living alone again, but that was okay, that was better, because it was safer for everyone if he was alone. He was used to being alone, it had almost become his permanent condition.
There was a scratching at his door, an animal of some kind, but when he'd gone to open it, there had been a man standing there, a man who was both achingly familiar and frightening different.
"Sirius ..."
"May I come in?"
The words had come from his tongue before he'd even needed to think about them. "You're always welcome here, pack-brother."
And that, Remus supposed, was the sincerest truth he knew, because when he breathed in Sirius, there was no smell of 'kin', but there was a the smell of him, warm and soft. Because Sirius was not like him and still didn't fear him, and that made him feel like he didn't need to fear himself, and that was the way it always should have been.
They say wolves are pack animals, and though Remus learned to live alone, he is, at heart, the same.