Anguish - for the School of Prompts challenge at HPFC, K.3: 500 words.
How many different ways can a person feel remorse?
Time, living - it all felt like falling, no true reality to piece together all the fragments.
A month since that horrific night, thirty days to wait for the courts. Not enough time to reconcile his friends with the words: dead, dead, dead, and murderer. Sentenced to Azkaban was the best Sirius could hope for - Remus didn't know if he deserved it. He had his own fantasies about what he could do to Sirius, his friend, his enemy.
Time meant nothing when everyone else was dead, so he spent his days alone. He waited for the decision.
Self-Reproach.
First came hatred, a departure of his good conscience. With every piece of him, he hated Remus Lupin. How could he not have seen the signs? How could he have let his friends down so completely? He replayed moments in his mind to the point that the happiness from each one of them was sucked dry. He analyzed and reread every letter, every note, every clue that might have told him what he had missed. There was nothing. Despite that, he didn't forgive himself.
Such was his suffering. Every moment of every day was full of loathing that was only directed inwardly.
That was bad enough, but it didn't stop there.
Anguish.
The second step in Lupin's self-appointed torture was the pain.
Past the stunned exterior, he was a painting done in red with sharp, pointed jabs. He was the masterpiece that had taken long years to perfect - one that somehow left critics with disappointed frowns on their faces. Every memory forced blood from barely-healed wounds. The first time he heard one of their names after their deaths brought him to breathless tears.
He suffered quietly.
Enigmatic to everyone else, he stewed on the inside. He was still like the centre of a storm, though around him raged a fire that left him exhausted and guilty. More guilt. More pain.
Happiness became nothing more than a myth.
Compassion.
Third, years later, came a sense of compassion. Never satisfaction.
He became a dreamer, thinking up elaborate scenarios to ease his pain and stop the suffering. An explanation - he explored every possible justification. He spent too much time in bed.
Penance.
Remus did his time. His friends had paid with their lives, Black had his sentence, and Remus had to feel it all. He was a sinner with knees bloody from praying for salvation that would never come.
Attrition.
He was a starving man, bereft of sustenance in many ways. He was a beggar, clinging to comfort where he could find it. He was weak and poor, though not physically. Dumbledore's job offer at Hogwarts was accepted with hollowness threatening to eat him from the inside out. Harry looked like James, but Remus did not tell him much, not even close to what he needed to share.
Harry looked like James, and Remus starved himself of all memories the castle and that messy hair brought back.
And then Sirius came back. Not a murderer. And Peter was back. Traitor.
The cycle began anew. Different.
He had a friend back. He was not guilty. Still, the pain never left.
