Disclaimer: Yes, it's another dramatic Remus fic from me. If you don't like it, then don't read it, but hopefully this one is a little less "purple" than certain assholes have deemed my writing to be in the past. Honestly, I write most of my fics, if not all of them, for me and my own pleasure, and it's not really my best writing. This one was borne of a vision I've had for awhile now… Post the death of the Potters, the fall of Voldemort, and the imprisonment of Sirius and supposed death of Pettigrew. Remus is alone on his first full moon since the loss of the Marauders. This is how he copes.
Six Feet
He digs a hole in the earth. He uses his bare hands and a shovel, because this is a punishment and he doesn't deserve the convenience of magic. He starts in the morning, when the sky is still tinged slightly purple and there's a tangible stillness in the air, when the world's eyes are closed so they cannot see him. He works with his back to the quickly rising sun, and when it reaches midday—he can tell only by the sudden and cruel burst of heat on the nape of his neck—he speeds up. The shovel is large and unsteady in his grip, which has become steadily weakened by alcohol and starvation. Sometimes it slips unwillingly from his hands and he falls to the earth unsupported, weak and worthless. But he is not allowed to break, not for water or rest or to soothe his raw and bleeding palms. It's a race against daylight, and the sun is setting even more quickly now. He picks up his broken body and the shovel, his wooden cross, and bears it across the shallow hole that is steadily becoming deeper and darker and closer to hell, digging and digging and not thinking of anything else. Finally, as the sun is touching the horizon and stretching fingertips of rose and violet across the sky, it's done. It's four feet by four feet, nearly perfectly square save for the root of a long dead tree jutting out from the side…and six feet deep. As the fiery ball of daylight sinks lower and out of sight, with his last bit of strength he drags the heavy wooden planks out from under the house where he had stowed them and towards the hole, placing them one by one over its mouth. He leaves a space just large enough for a woman to fit through, or perhaps a tiny, malnourished man if he squeezed. He fastens the planks to the earth with chains, and with a grunt and a gasp he pulls on the cruel, cold metal to make sure that not even God could rip them apart. The night is dark now—the moon is not yet risen—but he doesn't need to see. He knows where he is going. Slowly, blood-stained hands gripping the splintered wood, he lowers himself six feet under the earth, away from the starless, cloudy night and into the coming nightmare. The wood bites and scrapes his skin as he goes down into a newly dug grave where only dead men and monsters lurk. But it's okay; he's both of these. Once inside this tiny, enclosed space, he watches the sky with dull, gray eyes that are older and have seen more than his twenty-three years should have allowed him to. His fingers grasp the dirt walls around him. He can hear the creatures of the night beginning to stir within the earth around him. His ears prick. His breathing quickens. And soon his chest begins to heave with the sudden, unbearable pain that surges through his broken body. Will he be able to survive it this time? Soft, hazel eyes tense and warp into cold yellow daggers, and his nails lacerate into the soft walls around him, dirt creeping beneath them. His feet are suddenly too large for his shoes and they jut out like knives into the earth beneath them. His back arches against the twisting, knotting bones as his skeleton warps and changes. And finally, a scream rips loose, a horrible, ghostly scream that is neither from man nor from beast, but something caught in the balance, something unreal. And through the tiny slit a few feet above him, the full moon rises like a beacon in the night, illuminating all the evilness of the earth with its penetrating light, catching him even in this hole in the earth, this tomb for the dead where he has buried himself alive, for this is what he deserves.
As the transformation tears him apart to his very soul, he has no will left to wonder if he will climb six feet up to salvation in the morning.