Author's Note: Effing college. Not only does it sap my time and energy, it kills my creativity. Higher education is for LOSERS.

A note on nosebleeds: Wikipedia tells us that one should tilt the head forward in order to avoid choking on one's own fluids. When I was seven and jumped into the pool to get a life preserver ring (and subsequently slammed my nose into it), I tilted my head back and… didn't die. Meh. Your call. Just lookin' out for your safety. Because I care about you.

Sorry for the long note. Just one more thing, I promise: I definitely didn't intend for this chapter to end with what it does. It decided it wanted to be written. Stupid autonomous stories.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Promising

Remus squirmed a bit. It was awkward, having Lily Evans holding your head tightly between her two warm hands, refusing to let you move.

"Stay still," she ordered for the umpteenth time.

Resignedly Remus obeyed. He attempted to ignore the not unpleasant pressure she was putting on his temples by focusing on the tissue—or, rather, wad of tissues—that he was pressing to his nose.

"You know what this reminds me of?" Sirius inquired absently.

James was scrubbing at his dripping hair with a towel. He paused to glance over. "What?"

"Sorting."

Remus might have snorted some combination of amusement, agreement, and dry laughter if his nasal passages hadn't been otherwise occupied. Peter arranged another blanket around his shoulders. The pile of them resting there was beginning to become somewhat heavy. Perhaps he could have told Peter so, had he not been busy assiduously tilting his head back in order to avoid incurring Lily's wrath.

James grinned ruefully and took up with the towel again. "We were pretty young and stupid back then, weren't we?"

"Now you're just stupid," Lily remarked airily.

As if he hadn't seen that rejoinder coming from a mile or two away, James laughed appreciatively. Remus suspected that the reaction had little to do with what was said, revolving instead around who had said it.

Peter plopped down on the couch and sighed, probably thinking along the same lines.

Sirius took the opportunity to shake his head vigorously in a manner that was distinctly canine, spraying water in all directions. After blinking away the ensuing vertigo, he looked over his companions. "I vote we all go down to Hogsmeade and get hammered," he announced.

"Brilliant," Lily commented acridly. "What shall we do after that? Rob a bank?"

Calmly, Sirius itched behind his ear. "I was thinking blow up an elementary school," he answered.

Very slowly, Lily raised an eyebrow. "You're sick," she said.

"Thank you," Sirius replied equably. "You're not so bad yourself."

Remus couldn't help the gleeful little smile that alighted on his face. There was nothing in the world quite like good banter.

"Glad to hear it," came Lily's retort. "I wouldn't want to commit cold-blooded murder next to someone who didn't like me."

Sirius shrugged. "It's not too bad. You just poison 'em afterward so they can't testify against you in court."

"Sounds like you've got this all planned out."

"You have to think about these things when you're a criminal mastermind."

As Lily opened her mouth to spout off an eloquent riposte, Remus took advantage of the distraction to slip out of her grasp and start for the stairs.

"I think I'm cured," he declared. "Goodnight, everyone."

"'Night, Remus," came the reply, in perfect unison, in the single breath before the repartee recommenced.

"Mastermind? I daresay you flatter yourself, Sirius Black."

"You seem to dare to say a lot, Lily Evans. Perhaps if you did less talking and more looking, you'd notice just how startlingly intelligent I really am."

"Perhaps if you didn't have that blimp of an ego obscuring your vision—"

Remus closed the door behind him and smiled.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Peter joined him in the dorm not long later, covering a tremendous yawn with one hand. "You all right, Remus?" was what he asked.

From his perch on the bed, swathed in blankets, curled up with his worn copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, Remus nodded. "Thanks," he added, because it was something he thought he should say.

Peter sat down on one of the trunks, looked at him keenly, and rubbed his nose. "No," he said. "I mean, are you really all right. Like, are you happy?"

Dumbly Remus stared at him for a few seconds. "I—I guess," he decided slowly.

Peter smiled the most innocent of all his smiles. "That's not very convincing," he noted.

Remus looked at the book in his hands. He looked at the three other beds in the room. He looked at the damp cloak draped over a chair to dry. And he looked at Peter Pettigrew, sitting there waiting for an answer. That keenness that most people didn't expect from Peter was in his eyes, but he wasn't going to judge. None of them did. None of them would.

"Yeah," Remus said. "Yeah, I am."

Smiling again, Peter nodded once. Assuming that the interview was over, Remus returned to the words on the page, seeking the place he'd left off.

"Why'd you go running off in the rain?" Peter asked then.

Remus looked up. He could answer truthfully. Severus hadn't exactly done anything to earn his confidences. But somehow telling another person's secrets, even if that person had been ready to kill him, just seemed… wrong.

There was enough wrong in the world as it was, without him contributing to it.

"Just… everything," Remus invented. It sounded lame, even to him, but Peter nodded again and let it rest. Peter was good about stuff like that.

"Never read those," Peter remarked, indicating the book in Remus's hands with another inclination of his head. "Are they any good?"

Remus smiled. "Put it this way," he offered. "I live in a world where spells and magic and all that are real, and I'm reading a fantasy story anyway."

Peter grinned. "Sounds promising," he commented.

Promising. That was a nice word. A good word. A comforting word. Remus savored it in his mind as he drifted to sleep that night. There was always a lovely, reassuring, promising portion of time between the moment the pledge was made and the moment it got broken.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The first day of first grade had been the worst day in Remus Lupin's six years of life. On that day, and, in fact, within the first five minutes of the bell ringing, a boy named Ed had made it his sacred mission to ensure that Remus knew exactly what hell would be like if it included sing-along time and cut-and-paste.

Their teacher was one of those young women who was unerringly kind to all children—a virtue, to be certain, but one that was irretrievably linked to a considerable fault. Her innocuous sweetness also made the woman incapable of enforcing discipline.

Kids have a sixth sense for these sorts of things, and Ed's was honed to an edge like that of a battle axe.

He convinced a third of the class to call Remus "Wee Mouse," deliberately dripped paint on Remus's drawing of a tree, ridiculed Remus's haircut, dumped out his book-bag, and stomped on his toe while they were lining up.

And that was all before recess.

By some miracle of God, Remus survived the rest of the day and managed to get home. He endured all the way through the afternoon until dinner before the weight of the school day finally crushed him. It was that completely predictable, completely mundane, completely inevitable question that schoolchildren know so well that tipped the scales.

"How was your day, sweetheart?" his mother asked.

Remus poked at his peas. One slipped from under the tines of his fork and rolled halfway across the plate. He wished he could escape so easily.

"Really bad," he said.

Both his parents paused and looked at him, his father in the middle of raising a forkful of mashed potatoes to his mouth. It was almost comical, seeing them frozen there, staring at him, with eyes and mouths wide—like something out of a cartoon.

Then the tableau shifted, and it wasn't funny anymore.

"What was so bad about it, hon?" his mother prompted worriedly.

The words spilled out in a mad rush, trampling each other in their stampeding search for freedom. "Well, there was this boy called Ed, and he was really mean to me, and he did all this stuff, and he ruined my picture, and he called me names, and everybody laughed, and—"

"Remus, you've got to stand up to people like that," his father said.

Remus stared at him in disbelief, his food forgotten.

John Lupin glanced at his wife. When he found her looking pointedly at her plate, he went on slowly. "It's just that—I know it's hard sometimes, but you can't just let people like that walk all over you. If you convince them that their teasing doesn't hurt you—whether or not it's true—then they tend to give up on teasing you. You can do that; I know you can. And if you want him to leave you alone, you'll have to."

Despite his best efforts to hold them back, Remus felt tears welling in his eyes—tears of hurt, of shame, of abandonment. Where were the apologies and consolations? Where were the declarations of unconditional love? Where were the promises—the promises to fix everything? He came to his parents on the worst day in the history of the world, and they told him to stand up to a boy that hell would have spat back out for fear of getting indigestion? They couldn't! It wasn't right! Who were these people, these people who called themselves his parents, to talk to him that way? To find him at fault when he'd been victimized? Where was the justice? Where was the love?

Choking on the sob that bubbled up in his throat, Remus shoved his chair back from the table, jumped down, and darted out the back door before his parents could even rise from their seats.

Indiscriminately, battling to breathe, blinded by tears, Remus ran, his feet pounding over wet leaves that gave way like dead bodies, his new sneakers splattered in mud. It was cold and damp in the woods that bordered the yard of the Lupin household, but still he ran. He'd run forever. He'd never come back. Then they'd be sorry they hadn't loved him more.

The light faded, and the rosy gold of twilight gave way to the murky blue-black of full-fledged night. Remus's thin chest heaved, and his muscles screamed, but he didn't stop. He wouldn't stop. He'd never stop.

It was shortly after he'd made this firm decision that one of his bespattered sneakers caught on an arching tree root, yanking his foot out from beneath him and slamming his body to the ground.

The dank air among the trees took the biting chill out of the autumn wind that hounded you elsewhere, but even here, by September enough leaves had toasted to reddish-brown and fallen to coat the ground with a generous carpet. It was upon this carpet that Remus lay, and into it that he sobbed hopelessly. He was tired, and his twisted ankle throbbed, and he couldn't run anymore, and they'd find him by morning and drag him home and not love him and send him back to school with Ed—

Over his weak, desolate, sniffling sobs Remus heard something else. It sounded like breathing—the breathing of something very large and very hungry.

Fear surged through his veins with every beat of his fluttering heart. He lay very still and very quiet, his trembling hands clutching uselessly at the slimy leaves below, and probed the near-darkness with horrified eyes.

For it wasn't quite dark—there was yet the fickle, shivering white light of the broad full moon.

That light faded as the moon slipped behind a black cloud. In the dimness that was left, Remus heard the breathing change, and then a tall black figure materialized from the trees to stand before him.

Merciless eyes glinted yellow as they met his. Lips drew back to reveal pointed teeth set in something like a smile.

"Hello, Remus," Fenrir Greyback said.

The great, round moon burst free from its constraints, and the man started to become something else entirely right before Remus's saucer-sized eyes.

He scrambled to his feet and ran.

This was different than the running he'd done before. Some stationary piece of his whirling mind recognized that as Remus tore pell-mell through the trees, ducking the ghastly silhouetted branches, leaping over ditches and roots when he could see them and tumbling into and over them when he couldn't. When he fell, he dragged himself to his feet and ran again. This was different, because abject terror was a far more powerful motivator than childish resentment.

From behind there came a loud and resonating howl. It wasn't very far away.

Thorns and brambles reached for his arms, his legs, his face, and gained purchase, leaving stinging red gashes to mark their triumph. Remus knew that a few little cuts were the least of his worries.

On and on, through the leaves, around the trees, avoiding the nets of intertwined branches and the bushes with their spiky, scrabbling fingers; once splashing through a creek, suddenly drenched in water almost as bitterly cold as his dread; utterly unaware of where he was, where he had been, where he should go; and always, always, with the sound of the labored panting not too far behind.

Closer it came, ever closer. He ran and stumbled and stumbled and ran, his heart trying to force its way out of his ribcage, his mind reeling, knowing nothing but that he had to run, had to keep running, had to get away, had to get home—

There was a snarl from very nearby, and then an unimaginable weight rammed into him, throwing him to soggy leaves that did little to cushion his fall. The blow knocked the wind from his lungs and the last of the comprehension from his head. His fingers closed uselessly around empty air and then uncoiled. Mud and leaves were in his face, suffocating him; he couldn't breathe; and then—and then there was a horror and a stark incredulity as sharp, thick fangs buried themselves in the flesh of his shoulder.

For a moment he could do nothing. And then Fenrir Greyback shook him, and the motion unearthed from within Remus's defeated body a scream to end all screams. He writhed and bucked and kicked and flailed, and the massive wolf growled low and released him. Remus crawled, scrambled, scuttled, dove, but the teeth found him again, digging deeper yet, disappearing into his side. It was only then that he felt the first wound, only then that he felt the hot blood starting to cake on his cold skin, and he screamed again, louder and longer and more desperately still, and stared at the inhuman cruelty in the yellow eyes.

That was all he remembered.

When he had come back to consciousness, he had heard things first—heard a woman crying, and a man murmuring, and what sounded like a curtain being drawn. Then, slowly, he'd opened his eyes, and when he winced at the bright light that burned them, all the pain hit him at once.

He'd gasped aloud, and then his mother had been at his side, squeezing his hand, stroking his hair, tears chasing each other down her face. The tears scared him—he was awake, he was okay, the nightmare was over; why was she crying…?

When Remus looked to his father to ask why his mother was so sad, his voice failed him. If John Lupin's face was anything to judge by, an entire decade had passed. He tried to smile at his son, but his eyes were wretched and helpless and glimmering with tears.

So many tears; so many tears that day and those that followed; and Remus didn't understand. He tried to, tried to take in the things they told him, tried to understand what it would mean, but he didn't. He couldn't.

When a month had passed, and the glowing full moon rose again, he understood well enough.