Author's Note: Hope you're having a lovely time so far. I know I am. Sorry for all the interludes with other characters, given that I promised a Remus story... There's just so much to tell...
CHAPTER FOUR
Godless
Severus tried to ignore the avid snores emanating from the boy two beds over and the incoherent mumbling coming from the one next to him. He did sometimes halfheartedly wonder if he should go to the nurse and broach the subject of insomnia.
But he hated talking to other people about himself.
And surely it was purely psychological--psychosomatic. Wasn't everything, at some level? So his mind raced, endlessly, fervidly, a frightened hamster on an oiled wheel, when he tried to lay down to sleep. That didn't mean he needed medication. He didn't trust the stuff anyway.
Maybe he'd do some private research, when he had some time. If he ever had some time.
As the odious harmony of his roommates' infernal slumbering serenaded him where he lay wide-eyed and wakeful, staring moodily at the canopy of his bed, Severus's mind wandered.
Some people's minds--or, at least, so he surmised, not having any concrete proof one way or the other--meandered placidly from subject to subject, pausing to examine some interesting ideas more closely, glossing over others, turning a proverbial nose up at the truly boring matters and strolling past them indifferently. And if that was the connotation of a wandering mind, then Severus's didn't wander at all. It ran marathons.
There was an urgency to the rushing, and his brain plumbed every item in its reach to an exhausting depth--but never exhausting enough to send him drifting pleasantly to sleep. No, there was a paradoxical aspect to it: his mind was indefatigably capable of exhausting itself.
God.
Except that Severus didn't believe in God. Or, rather, he was frustrated with the fact that he couldn't be sure whether he should believe in God or not, and he had vindictively decided that if some great, supreme, overarching deity did exist, He was one mean son of a bitch.
Severus's mind was, at that particular moment, linking his agnosticism with last summer and scurrying over the rickety bridge thus created.
"Jesus Christ," his father had said, vehemently. But then, his father said everything vehemently.
"Tobias--"
"See, that's the first problem with you people. You're godless. You're a lot of blaspheming, sorcerous morons who think you can go around spending that ridiculous money of yours like there's no tomorrow--"
Severus attempted to brush his teeth louder. The house was very small, which put the bathroom very close to his parents' bedroom. Since the 11:30 PM argument was a nightly feature, consistent within a margin of twenty minutes on either side, Severus had devised a few different strategies for drowning out the voices.
None of them worked.
"Tobias, please--"
"No, Eileen. Would you shut your fat mouth for two minutes and listen? That--boy--of yours--"
"He's your son, too, Tobias, in case you'd forgotten." The venom in her voice was almost visible in the air as a roiling cloud of a noxious green. Once a Slytherin, always a Slytherin.
"Oh, like Hell he is. Seen him lately, Eileen? Seen him lurking around the house like an axe murderer?"
"You've lost your mind--"
"Seen him hunched over those molding books? I told him to go outside and expose himself to the sun for once in his life, and you know what he told me? Go on, ask what he told me."
Eileen Prince Snape's voice was scathingly caustic. "What did he tell you?"
"He told me he was busy. In a tone like I'd intruded on some sacred ritual. Christ Almighty, do you people think that's acceptable or something?"
Severus's mother was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet and tired. Severus's only ally had given up on him, like she always did. "He's not perfect," Eileen conceded wearily.
"You're damn right he's not," Tobias Snape snorted. "That's what you people do to a kid. Rip his soul to pieces. You lot are going straight to Hell."
"Don't be vulgar--"
"Vulgar? You know what's vulgar, Eileen? Seeing your son for just a few months in summer is vulgar. Having him come back with his head crammed full of magical bullshit is vulgar." Tobias's wife started to interrupt, and he raised his voice dangerously close to a shout to talk over her. "You know what's vulgar, Eileen Prince? Trying to have a relationship with your son and getting nothing but spite and sarcasm is vulgar."
Eileen's temper flared like a bonfire roaring into life. "Well, maybe if you didn't tell him to buck up and be active and call him stupid and--what was it you said today?--sullen, he wouldn't have a perfectly good reason to hate you."
"Hate me? Does the snippy little bastard presume to--"
"How dare you talk about your own son that way?"
"Oh, spare me, woman. You act like he's some sort of saint. Here's news for you--that couldn't be farther from the truth if you tried. Your little bookworm's got a nasty streak a mile wide. The sooner he's out of my house, the better."
"This from the man who deplores the yearly absence of his son?"
"Don't talk to me like that--"
"Don't you talk to me like--"
Severus closed his eyes for a full ten seconds. He opened them again. Sullen, he thought, almost absently. The words were like a sheet of heated metal that his mind was reflexively too smart to touch. Presumptuous. Godless.
He went into his bedroom, closed the door securely, and attended his single vanity--his phonograph.
He lay down on his bed and folded his long-fingered hands on his chest as the needle slid through the groove and the exquisite notes of the second movement of the Ninth Symphony reached his waiting ears. Beethoven had been entirely deaf by the time he'd written it, but not even that could quell the man's genius. Severus knew magnificence when he saw it--or, rather, heard it. He closed his eyes again and listened only to the swelling grandeur of the audible brilliance.
In the dorm at Hogwarts, Severus tried to imagine that the rustlings and mutterings of his obligatory comrades were a musical oeuvre of comparable magnificence.
It was impossible. Moreover, even the attempt was an act of unforgivable idiocy. No, they would not go away.
He tried to listen to the sound of his own breathing, to calm himself by focusing on its gentle consistency. But that, naturally, was even worse.
He hated the sound of his breathing. It reminded him that he was alive when everyone around him would have preferred him to be dead. It was one more way in which he disappointed them. He might have decided to hold his breath symbolically, pretending he could die that way, but that if he had indulged in the puerile gesture, when his oxygen ran out, he would have lapsed into unconsciousness, and his body would have recommenced breathing automatically.
His physical form was uncooperative that way. It aimed to ensure the continuation of its own existence, which wasn't quite so high on Severus's list of priorities.
Pointless. Just like everything else.
When he did sleep, as eventually happened after hours of reviewing his life, reconsidering his homework, and despising his neighbors, sometimes he dreamed of killing himself. He would take one of the small, sharp, shining razors they used to chop materials in Potions, and with it, he would trace his way up the thin blue veins that stood out so eerily against the paler-than-illness skin of his wrists. And then, willingly, obligingly, eagerly, the blood would flow free--gushing, coursing, frothing; running out in rivers and oceans and universes; sluicing forth, loosed from its confines at last, liberated from its duties to preserve the sullen, presumptuous, godless soul it had reluctantly nurtured for almost seventeen long years. And Severus sat, then, in his dream; he sat back and closed his eyes and waited, and he felt more at peace than he had ever felt before.
Waking up was always a tremendous disappointment.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Remus wasn't quite sure what to make of James's uneasiness and Sirius's ineffaceable thin smile. He wasn't too inclined to mull over it, given that the more he tried to think, the more his head ached like an anvil at the mercy of an overzealous blacksmith. It was always like this on full moon days. It made homework a terrible chore--well, more of a terrible chore than usual.
The blithe gold of afternoon had faded into the smooth pastels of sunset, the clouds painted in sweeping strokes of orange and violet. Remus winced as he stood, his knees protesting the way he'd been sitting on the floor, and the others looked up.
"Ready to go?" Sirius inquired cheerfully. "Very good. No time like the present."
"Sirius--" James began.
"Off we go, Remus," Sirius sang happily, throwing an arm around his friend's shoulders and ignoring James's attempted protest. Grinning, Peter pushed the portrait hole open for them and stepped back like a porter, bowing them out.
"Sirius, I really don't think--"
"James, my boy, I don't give a flying fuck what you think," Sirius replied pleasantly.
James was on his feet now, fists clenched. "Listen, you arrogant bastard--"
"James?" a new voice interjected tentatively. Lazily, Sirius turned. Remus didn't hesitate to follow suit as best as he could, looking around Sirius's arm.
It was Lily.
Hesitantly she smiled. "If you're not busy, James, we could get working on that plan I was telling you about in class today..."
A few seconds passed, tightrope taut, with James glancing back and forth between Sirius's eyebrows, raised mockingly high on his aristocratic forehead, and Lily's endlessly innocent face, which betrayed her bewilderment transparently. Then he looked pointedly to her and announced, slowly and clearly, "Yes, Lily. I'd love to help you."
Sirius slammed the portrait on James's great show of sitting down and looking at the parchment Lily had set down on the table. Calmly he disregarded the lecture that sailed after him as the Fat Lady began reprimanding him roundly for his carelessness. The unshakeable smile on his face was an odd one--cold and slightly bitter.
"He'll come around," Sirius decided.
"Come around to what?" Remus dared.
"No need to fret your pretty little head about that," the other boy answered, ruffling Remus's hair with gusto. "All's well that ends well, I say. Shakespeare agrees with me, mind you, and that's all that matters." There was an unusual earnestness and an unwonted quickness to his long stride, and Remus had to take a step and a half for each of his. Whatever Sirius had said, desperate worries flooded into Remus's mind, twirling through it, mummifying his constitution as they danced around it, making a maypole out of his confidence.
At least that was familiar territory.
They were running late today. He'd been slow to finish his work, slow to drag himself to his feet, slow to succumb to his weakness once again, and the business with James had only delayed them more. Barely had Remus emerged from the tunnel into the Shack, barely had he had time to reflect through the throbbing of his head how hollow it seemed without James, when the moonlight streamed through the window, and it began.
He was drowning; he was dying; he was being burned, buried, crucified. How could anything hurt so much without killing?
Remus Lupin pulled his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them tightly as the skin bubbled and burst into fur, as the joints cracked, as the smell of the dust and decay slammed into his suddenly heightened senses, and screamed.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
James tried to listen. He really did. But he couldn't.
"...that sounded about right..."
He'd seen the note Sirius had slipped onto Severus's desk. He'd read it when it had first been written, and he had laughed--laughed because he thought it was a fine joke.
And only as a joke was it remotely acceptable.
"...you and Remus could take that bit..."
"If you're so intent on sticking that freakishly large nose of yours into Remus's business," the note had read, "why don't you follow him tonight and press the knot on the Willow with a stick? (And if you can't find one of those, the aforementioned nose would certainly suffice.)"
He'd signed it lavishly, grandly--Sirius Black, embellishments dripping from it like blood.
"...beginning to doubt you're even listening..."
They could get caught. They could get exposed. They could get expelled. Severus could get bitten or even die. Or he could go around telling his friends that Remus Lupin was a werewolf, and, in some ways, that would be worse.
Every year, minutes before the train was to leave, James's mother would give him a great, huge hug, and, every year, she would whisper something in his ear as she did--some tidbit, some small piece of advice. When he was younger, it had been intended to make him smile: "Always have an extra pair of socks" in his first year, before he had any friends, and "Chew with your mouth closed if there are girls around" in his second. This year, her breath had tickled his ear something awful as she'd remarked almost airily, "If you doubt even for a moment that it's right, then it probably isn't."
He planted his hands flat on the table and pushed himself to his feet. Lily's beautiful eyes narrowed, and her beautiful voice trailed off, partly uncertainly, partly indignantly.
"I'm very sorry," he said, and he meant it, "but I have to go."
Without waiting for an answer, he ran.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The rat scuttles around somewhere. The rat is inconsequential.
The dog pants happily, tongue lolling out of its mouth. He barks once, as if there is something he wishes to convey.
There is no time to puzzle out his meaning. The wolf plunges into the dimness of the earthen tunnel, the acrid scents left by its denizens clear and distinct. It isn't them he seeks. The other end of the tunnel opens, and a boy peers in, laced in the smells of his interest, his excitement, and a tantalizing hint of fear.
He murmurs something, and the tip of his wand nourishes a steady white light.
With a growl that begins deep in the cavern of his chest, a growl that builds like a thunderstorm, the wolf surges forward.
A strangled cry works its way free of the boy's throat, his face bloodlessly pale in the light of the wand, and he scrambles away, dislodging dirt that tumbles down like rain.
Then he is jerked backwards, and then he is gone, and there is only the silken moon lingering low in the darkening sky.
The wolf bounds after his disappeared prey, but the tunnel whisks shut before him. He hesitates, lifting one front paw and then the other indecisively. He can hear them, he can smell them, these boys, but he cannot reach them.
"You - wh - Potter!"
"Get out - run, you bloody idiot!"
The wolf raises a paw and claws at the wooden barrier. He gnaws at it with his teeth.
"You planned this! You planned for this to happen!"
"Will you just go?"
"I'm going to kill you, James Potter." There is a ring of chilling certainty to the words. "I am going to watch you die."
"Yes, that's very nice; now, will you go?"
Footfalls depart. The wolf whines and scratches harder at the wall between him and the escaping boy.
He is so very hungry.