Chapter 17: Mostly Medical

"It's survivor's guilt," said Hermione.

-- J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, chapter 5

He kept his rendezvous with Dumbledore at the Hog's Head on the night of December 22nd. He was relieved to hear that Healer Bones had returned.

"The death threat was cancelled?" Remus had asked in the upstairs room, at a quarter to midnight, by the light of a dying fire.

"Remus, you've spent the autumn living with a Death Eater," said Dumbledore quietly.

"He decided to live with it."

Dumbledore nodded, his long white beard bucking gently. "I have great respect for Alfred Bones."

Remus rose to leave but Dumbledore called him back. "One last thing. I've asked Severus to teach Nymphadora how to brew the Wolfsbane Potion from scratch. No—Remus, hear me out. In wartime, things can happen. It's best not to be too dependent on one person. Just in case." In wartime, things can happen.

Now, as he walked through the echoing corridors of St. Mungo's research wing on the morning of December 23rd, Remus passed a sweet-faced girl of sixteen or so, with blonde hair cascading down her shoulders and haunted eyes. It was a familiar face; he had taught this girl three years ago at Hogwarts.

"Hannah?" he said gently. "Hannah, are you okay?"

Hannah looked at him like a stricken deer, mouthed "Merry Christmas, Professor Lupin," and scuttled away. As Remus stared after her, Alfred Bones opened the door of his office.

"Remus?"

"Healer Bones. I know that girl—Hannah Abbott. She looks so unhappy. Do you know if she's ill?"

"Not ill, no, just devastated. She's seeing an Emotional Management Healer. She's been coming twice a week. Her mother was murdered three months ago. Stone dead with no visible injuries; it was clearly Avada Kedavra." Healer Bones paused. "Just like my sister Amelia," he added wryly.

"She was a great loss," said Remus softly.

Alfred Bones inclined his head. "As was Hannah's mother. Sally Abbott. Do you remember her from Hogwarts, Remus? Sally Maeswick, she was then. Muggle-born."

"Coronet braids," said Remus. "Scandinavian blonde."

"The Maeswicks came from the Orkney Islands. A sept of the original Norse earldom. Poor, though."

"She was a Hufflepuff prefect when I arrived," continued Remus. "I remember playing Exploding Snap with her in the infirmary. I was a first-year and she was a sixth-year and she barely knew who I was. She just heard I was sick and thought she ought to come cheer me up. It was my first term and I hadn't many friends."

"That sounds like her. She wasn't a very powerful witch, sadly, but she was an exceptionally decent and kindly person, and absolutely incorruptible. Just what the Death Eaters hate." Alfred Bones paused. "It was in all the papers, Remus. I think that murder even made the Muggle press. Where have you been that you didn't hear about it?"

Remus opened his mouth and shut it again. "I'm not allowed to tell you that. Actually, I shouldn't even tell you that I can't tell you, but to hell with it, I know which side you're on. So, off the record, I will tell you that I can't."

"Oh. My brother Edgar did some work like that. Strangely enough, he came through it unharmed. He was back at the Ministry, working at a desk job, when he was killed. Good luck, and I won't embarrass you by asking more. Sit down. What can I do for you today?"

Remus settled into a shabby, overstuffed armchair. Every bone in his body ached from three months of living on the run, and he felt a great temptation to curl up with his head on the armrest. "I wanted to ask you about something called an underdeveloped melodermal-3 gene."

"Metamorphmagi?" Alfred Bones was clearly surprised. "Well, I seem to recall that you know Nymphadora Tonks. You must have seen the full range of what a Metamorphmagus can do." He chuckled. "Nymphadora was never shy about demonstrating."

"Is it usually considered an illness?"

Alfred Bones shook his head sadly. "It's usually considered a tragedy, a shame, and a scandal. Wizarding families used to abandon infants who were Metamorphmagi. They feared that public knowledge of it would ruin their other children's marriage prospects. That was when the condition was thought to be hereditary, of course. The research that established that it's a spontaneous mutation only came out a decade ago, and it's not universally accepted. To this day, I think many pureblood families would refuse to marry into a family known to include a Metamorphmagus."

"And most Metamorphmagi grow up retarded?"

"Most Metamorphmagi don't grow up at all. Their muscles and skin morph continuously, their brains—although we don't know this for certain—appear to morph too, and they never learn to control the process. The constant, unstructured morphing wears out their muscles, and they die in early childhood. Some Metamorphmagi with exceptionally strong native constitutions make it to their teens, but their brains are too flexible and unstable to control their bodies. They have difficulty walking, they have difficulty talking, they can't hold a quill or a wand, and their bodies eventually wear out."

Remus thought suddenly of a sickly green, troll-like baby writhing uncontrollably, being made to dance the Charleston in mid-air.

"So Tonks is an exception," he said faintly.

"Nymphadora Tonks is a living marvel, as I think I told you once before. I gather you didn't understand then what I meant?"

Remus shook his head ruefully. "I had no idea this power was so rare. Haven't there been any other Metamorphmagi like her?"

"There've been a few. I could count those from the last three centuries on my fingers." Alfred Bones looked at his fingers. "Maybe on one hand." He opened a liquor cabinet behind his desk and took out a couple of glasses. "You look like you need a drink, Remus. Brandy?"

Remus took the brandy and cupped it in his hands, sitting up in the armchair. "Are Metamorphmagi like Tonks healthy? Do they have normal life spans?"

"As far as we know. It took centuries to establish that high-functioning Metamorphmagi exist. And then there was a lot of speculation that, if they did exist, they were psychologically unstable. I know of two who were probably suicides, one who drank himself to death, and of course Ali Azkabi—"

Ali Azkabi was an early Romantic poet whom Remus had admired as a teenager. "Ali Azkabi was a Metamorphmagus?"

"Yes. Yes, you see, most wizards don't know that. Azkabi was born in Tunis in the 1750s, when there was still a great deal of skepticism about whether high-functioning Metamorphmagi existed. His parents sent him to Hogwarts, thinking that he might thrive in a more liberal atmosphere, but even in Britain, many people were convinced he was a fraud, a normal wizard who had mastered some hitherto unknown appearance charms and used them to pretend he had a medical condition he didn't have. He was a brilliant boy who wanted to become an Auror, but his dubious reputation for honesty nixed that. He bought a small country estate with family gold and devoted himself to poetry and philosophy instead."

"And then he became addicted to Felix Felicis, didn't he?"

"Yes. After his wife died. She and his parents and Dilys Derwent at Hogwarts were just about the only ones who believed he was actually a Metamorphmagus. Once they were all dead, he couldn't handle living any more."

Remus bit his lip and thought about werewolf suicides. The good thing about being a werewolf, he mused ironically, was that other people were only too ready to believe the worst of you. They might hate you, they might fear you, they might cast out of society, but they didn't claim you were hallucinating about your condition.

"I'm skeptical about the psychological instability hypothesis myself," continued Alfred Bones. "In the case of Ali Azkabi, for example, the psychological instability seems to have been created entirely by social conditions."

"Are the Metamorphmagi living today doing better?"

"There are, to my knowledge, only six Metamorphmagi alive today. Four of them are children who will die long before they reach Nymphadora's age. Aside from her, the other high-functioning Metamorphmagus is an Alsatian witch named Elfrida Ellenbogen. She's 119, rather frail and, frankly, getting to be a bit odd in the head, but she's lived a long and full life. Her parents refused to treat her as a curiosity, sent her to a wizarding academy—Beauxbatons, I think it was—and made every effort to give her a normal childhood. It worked. She grew up strong, did original research in Potions, and had two children and five grandchildren, all normal. In fact, she recently had a great-great-grandchild. It was research on Elfrida Ellenbogen's descendants that helped establish that the mutation in the melodermal-3 gene isn't hereditary."

Alfred Bones set his brandy glass down on his desk and surveyed Remus. "Do you want to know more?"

"I want to know everything you can possibly explain in lay terms."

"That isn't much, unfortunately; we're just getting started. Dilys Derwent did some research on high-functioning Metamorphmagi in the final years of her life, after she retired from Hogwarts. In those days there were hardly any documented cases, and she ended up working largely from folklore, stories about witches and wizards who might—given the powers that were attributed to them—have been high-functioning Metamorphmagi. Not many people took Derwent's work seriously and it never got published, but everything we've learned since then confirms her initial conclusions."

Alfred Bones started ticking points off on his fingers. "High-functioning Metamorphmagi are almost indistinguishable from other Metamorphmagi in infancy. They don't morph as continuously or as radically, though, and they start to control their morphing around age two. They tend to be exceptionally bright. When the morphing doesn't destroy the brain, it strengthens it—something about the neural connections. A Muggle Healer might be able to explain it to you; they know more about neuroscience than we do. High-functioning Metamorphmagi tend to be highly creative, and they tend to be risk-takers. Those who live to adolescence generally become fascinated by their morphing abilities and experiment a great deal. Nymphadora Tonks, as I'm sure you heard, was a good example of that. They usually stabilize and stop morphing excessively post-adolescence."

"And?"

"And that's it. Most of the high-functioning Metamorphmagi of the last two hundred years have made significant contributions in their fields, and I'm expecting great things of Nymphadora. If Elfrida Ellenbogen is a good example, then the only real risks after adolescence arise from the sense of isolation and rejection that some Metamorphmagi seem to feel."