Chapter Five: Meet the Pack
"Who the hell are you?"
Remus spun around in the dark, holding his wand out directly in front of him, the beam of light from his lumos spell showing a young man, dirty and unkempt, so thin he looked like a skeleton, a dangerous sneer on his face.
Lowering his wand somewhat, Remus realized that this must be one of the werewolves he was supposed to … liaise with. "I'm Remus Lupin. Who are you?"
"Don't ask any damn questions, dirtbag – I'm getting Barbicon." Then the boy – man? – raised his head back and gave a spine-tingling howl, for all the world as though he were a full wolf.
Any doubts Remus might have had about the boy's lycanthropic nature disappeared.
"You stay here, goddamn you. Are you one of those ministry bastards?" He was eying Remus's wand with envy, fear, and a wary respect, staying back and on the balls of his toes, as if he expected Remus to start throwing curses at any minute. It made Remus wonder sickeningly what kind of experience the young werewolf had had with "ministry bastards".
"I'm not from the ministry, no," Remus said cautiously. "Who's Barbicon?"
The other man spat derisively in the dust. "No damn questions until Barbicon's through with you. I should kill you myself now before you go running to the ministry."
Then, suddenly, he went rigid – "Wait a goddamn second, what the hell are you doing down here? How did you know how to find us?"
Then suddenly three men – were they all men? – came bursting down through one of the tunnels, apparently answering the first werewolf's signal howl.
The first, a tall and muscled man – also thin, Remus noted – had a look of hard anger mingled with fear on his features, and he did not stop running when he approached Remus. Before he could react, the man had slammed Remus into the ground, his greater weight and height driving him hard into the dirt. Trying to roll out from under the larger werewolf, Remus let loose a silent and mostly harmless hex, sending painful sparks towards his assailant. With a grunt, the man freed Remus partially, and with a great effort Remus got to his feet, wand outstretched to ward the others off.
"Goddamnit, Barbicon!" a woman shouted, her voice hoarse. "If he's got a wand – "
Slowly, Remus lowered his wand entirely, and then said, "I don't want to fight. I swear by Merlin, I don't intend to run to the ministry about you."
The big man who had charged Remus – Barbicon – looked wary, perhaps even terrified, but it was clear he wasn't done fighting if it was necessary. "Who the hell are you? What are you doing here – hell, how did you know we'd BE here?"
Still gripping his wand firmly, Remus said, "My name is Remus Lupin – "
"Remus Lupin! You're that bastard as got up the werewolf scare with that Umbridge bitch, aren't you, the one who was at Hogwarts?" His questioner had hung back with the hoarse-voiced woman, and as Remus peered through the gloom, barely illuminated by his reignited lumos, he saw that it was a skinny man, perhaps in his twenties, who wouldn't stop jiggling his hand.
Swallowing hard, Remus said, "Yes. I am the aforementioned bastard."
"I should kill you right now, you little bastard. Do you know how hard it was for the rest of us after those Ministry pricks passed the Full Disclosure amendment? Barbicon, can I kill him?" The man was deadly serious.
"Hold your peace, Fletcher," Barbicon said, shifting his weight slightly, his huge shoulders partially blocking Remus's view of the others. "I want to hear this one out. So you're a werewolf?
"Bitten when I was four."
"And you survived?" Barbicon was incredulous.
"My parents loved me. My mother did research for Damocles Belby. She died when I was fifteen…"
"Enough of this," Orestes growled, his voice losing some of its menace with an adolescent oscillation in pitch. "I still wanna know how the fuck he knew we'd be here."
"Good question. Lupin – how did you know?"
"Since 1994, I've been living as a muggle. Including taking the Tube. I don't know if you know, but the Down Street platform is visible from the train." He was making it all up as he went, lying through his teeth – the truth, obviously, would not suffice. "Anyway. Muggles, they saw something moving on the platform, thought it was ghosts of all things – they can be perceptive, more than we give them credit. I thought it might be dementors. They're breeding. I hate dementors."
"You came down here hunting dementors?" Barbicon's voice was utterly skeptical.
"Kieran and Kevin Pepper, 9 and 7 respectively, are living shells as of last Thursday. I used to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts, the year they were stationed at Hogwarts. I don't – like – dementors." That was the trick to telling a lie: keep as much truth as possible in it. The more true it was, the more you felt it, the easier it was. That was why he'd been able to tell James and Sirius and Peter his mother was sick all those years – because she had been.
"So you just came down here to see if you could find any dementors, all on your own? Just happened to come to Down Street, where we just happen to be, and you just so happen to be a werewolf? Like hell I believe you." Barbicon spat on the floor, leaving Remus at a loss for words.
"How do we know you're not going to go run to the Ministry? You're a tame werewolf, aren't you?" It was Orestes again, spitting out the word tame as the vilest epithet he knew.
"I hate the Ministry." And he did; hated that he was disenfranchised, that he was legally bereft of rights, that he was so heavily regulated simply for what he was that he was chained as tightly as any dog – tame, in Orestes' words, and he did nothing about it because it would be too hard, would be imprudent.
In the dim light from Remus's wand, he could see Barbicon's eyes narrow. "You work for Greyback, don't you? He sent you here. I told that sonofabitch to keep away from my bloody pack –"
"Fenrir Greyback stole any chance of a normal life I ever had when I was all of four. I do not follow him, or any of his – crowd."
Remus stared at Barbicon. The tension in the air could be cut with a knife; Barbicon's werewolves were tense and ready to spring forward, and though they kept an eye on his wand, their fear of discovery seemed to be outweighing their fear of any curses Remus might send. As Remus realized, he was about to be very dead in perhaps a minute or two if he did not act decisively, so he stooped, keeping his eyes fixed on the werewolves in front of him, and placed his wand down on the dusty floor of the Down Street Station subway.
Everything went dark as his lumos was extinguished.
Suddenly, the first young man, Orestes, charged him again. This time Remus was ready, and darted backwards out of the way as his ears guided him – but the other man was younger, faster, and more used to the dark, disused station – Remus was sprawled on his back again, Orestes's hands at his throat.
"Orestes!"
At Barbicon's barked command, Remus felt the pressure lessen, and then he was free from the young werewolf's death grip. With a groan – he was getting older – he picked himself up the floor again.
And light flickered back into existence, Barbicon Briggs brandishing Remus Lupin's battered old phoenix-feather wand. "I haven't held one of these in twenty years," he said in wonderment and delight.
Remus stared at the pack. They stared at him.
"Let me stay. I came down here hunting dementors because – five days ago I lost the third flat I've kept this year, and I have no money. I've run out of wolfsbane potion, I have no job, or at least, what I have amounts to little more than wizards using me in the war. I have nothing but the clothes on my back and the – well, not even my wand anymore. I don't know who or what you are, but whatever you are you're better than – than starving or joining Greyback's filth. I have so little I was willing to risk losing my soul just to – to do something, instead of having it done to me!" He was impassioned. Remus had been a consummate actor once, both muggle and wizarding plays, and it was easy to slip into another character, to wear its skin as if it were his; after all, this pretend Lupin was very much like himself. So much so he was in danger of believing his own fabrications.
Remus could see Barbicon was about to refuse his supplications, and prepared himself to die in this dusty relic of a train station, until the hoarse-voiced woman spoke up again.
"Barbicon, don't kill him. If you trust me at all – give him until the thirtieth. If I'm wrong, I swear, I'll kill him myself, but if it weren't for charity before – Odette and Petar…"
"Alright, Martha," Barbicon breathed with a sigh.
Orestes looked murderous, but a single glare from the larger man stifled any protest a-borning.
"You. Lupin. Come with us."
The pack – that was what they were – knew the long-abandoned tunnels of the Down Street station so well they did not need the flickering wand light in Barbicon's hand, but Remus was glad for it – there was something truly eerie in the half-stripped tile walls, the disused shafts, and the drafts of air from the trains below; without the light he would have felt utterly vulnerable. As it was, he still could not believe he had not died at the foot of the spiral stair.
And then, suddenly, Remus was assaulted by what seemed like blinding light – Barbicon had halted at the end of one of the tunnels that ran through the labyrinthine station, where a rough camp had been assembled. The first thing that hit him was the stench. Then he took it in visually – blankets filthy enough to be called rags, food, junk, personal possessions that were as good as junk, and fire – magical fire – glowing inside metal trash barrels. Remus was overcome by the sense of permanent impermanence he always felt around the homeless – which, now, he was.
A frail old man was lying in a corner near one of the fires, and Remus could see that he was cold. Though July was hot and humid above, the abandoned subways retained only sickly dampness; it was chilly here.
"Petar. This is Lupin. He is safe. New, but safe. He is safe, Petar."
And, as Martha comforted the old man, Remus saw that Petar was afraid, too – and he felt hot shame for having caused such fear.
"I am Remus Lupin, and I'm not – I – I'm safe," he finished somewhat lamely. 'I'm not going to hurt you' seemed ludicrous, given exactly how dead he would be if he even tried.
"You – you… safe?" The old man's accent was nearly impenetrable, but an odd vacancy in his eyes made Remus suspect it was more than age and unfamiliarity with English that caused Martha to speak so slowly.
"You're safe, Petar Radulescu," Barbicon said. "He has no wand."
The old man relaxed slightly, though his eyes remained fixed on Remus.
The nervous man Barbicon had called Fletcher, after scanning the blankets, exclaimed, "Where's the Frog?"
Remus couldn't understand what he meant by frog, though Barbicon responded, "I sent her out for food. We don't have enough until the thirtieth."
"You shouldn't send her out," Orestes said angrily. "She's not practical – always brings back perishables."
"She was going stir-crazy, you know how Odette can be," the hoarse-voiced woman, Martha, said.
As the four wizards and the witch talked amongst themselves, Remus could feel the tension drifting away – all involved in the standoff had been terrified, himself included, and now that Remus had been rendered a non-threat, all of that tension was dissolving in minor bickering.
When the pack had finished rowing over Odette, whoever she might be, Barbicon turned to Remus, his face hard and cautious. "We sleep, eat, live here. You're not to leave this part of the station unless someone's with you, until I say otherwise. As you're new, you'll have cooking and latrine duty, again until I say otherwise. You listen to me, you listen to Orestes. Martha's your nanny for the time being, since she volunteered. You kip in the corner. Everyone's responsible for keeping the fires going. We get rats down here all the time, so watch yourself, they're not afraid to take a bloody bite out of you. Oh, and Lupin? You make one false move, and I'll kill you. I won't let you harm these people. You might be sleeping here, but you're not pack until I say you are."
With that, he turned and walked away, calling out to Orestes, "You've got guard duty for another hour. Jitters – you're after Orestes."
The witch, Martha, pulled out a cigarette. To Remus's utter shock, its end began to smolder apparently all of its own. "How did you do that?"
"The cigarette?" she asked, exhaling pungently. "Barbicon taught us. We can't do much, but it's the same principle as wordless magic. Wandless, we're damned limited, but we've all learned how to conjure fire to some degree, since we need it so badly, and Orestes has gotten pretty good and summoning things. Small things, and not very far, but it's useful when we need supplies. Necessity is the mother of invention and so forth, I'll teach you later if you survive the thirtieth."
The thirtieth. The next full moon. In three days' time.
Everything was so overwhelming: he'd lost his wand, was trapped in a tunnel of fairly hostile werewolves who could conjure fire out of thin air, and –
"Barbicon mentioned latrines? Begging your pardon, but…"
"Second tunnel on your left. No, on second thought, I'll show you."