Tree

Character: Remus Lupin

By: Titania Took- Kat (Gryffindor)

Remus Lupin was completely and utterly, mind-numbingly terrified, and was not particularly enjoying the experience. His palms were coated in sweat, and while he had heard somewhere that this was designed for making it easier to climb trees, it appeared to be having quite a detrimental effect on his own tree-climbing skills. He kept slipping.

He had been climbing this tree ever since he could walk to the end of his garden. It was a large one, closer to the house and separate from the rest of them where the line between garden and forest blurred, yet still too far away. He remembered clearly his father's many warnings not to go near the forest after dark, but they were of no use now. Besides, his tent was in fact a quite a way away from it. It wasn't his fault that a wolf seemed to have smelt the sweets they had brought outside with them, and come into the garden.

Said wolf looked up at him, yellow eyes gleaming. Jimmy, his best friend, who he was meant to be camping out with, was on the branch below, and was struggling to find his next foothold, not being as experienced a climber. He offered his hand, and the boy gladly took it, using it to take his weight until he could get to the next branch, higher up than he would have been able to stretch on his own. Remus offered him a comforting grin, but it was strained, and they both knew it. Fortunately, eight-year old boys are made for danger, although he would have preferred it not to be quite such dangerous danger.

"Aren't dogs supposed to not be able to climb trees? That's why cats go up them to escape. And wolves are just like giant fierce dogs, right?" Jimmy's voice was going a little squeaky with fear by the end.

Remus nodded thoughtfully. He wasn't quite sure how the wolf was following them up the tree either. It was already several metres off the ground, and not all that many below them. All he knew was that they had to get higher up, and fast. There were a few tricky bits soon, that there was no way a wolf could manage. He wrenched his eyes away from those yellow orbs doing their best to paralyse him with fear, and that mouth with the saliva dripping from it, lips curled up in anticipation of what he dared not think about.

Movements practised many times over came to him with ease, and a few minor scrapes later, he had hauled himself two metres further, and now turned back to Jimmy, still below him, and struggling with the last manoeuvre – a complex one that had taken him several days to master, and found his gaze once more unable to be torn from the wolf that was steadily and not all that slowly gaining on them.

"Remus? Help?" His terrified voice choked out as barely a whisper, and there were tears streaming down his face. The older boy crouched down on his branch, and once again offered a hand, now with considerably more blood on it due to all the scratches he had obtained. Jimmy, reached out to take it, but couldn't quite reach. They both stretched out as far as they could, until Remus tumbled from his branch, and fell a metre or two before hitting another branch that didn't snap, bruising his ribs quite a lot in the process.

The wolf was now close enough for him to see with petrifying detail the blood dripping from its jagged fangs. He scrambled up, studiously ignoring the pain, and began to frantically climb. But the stress and fear was stopping his mind from working properly, it seemed, and movements that had before been instinctual – right hand to there, swing, foot onto that branch, weight on the trunk before grabbing the next branch - were now blocked from his memory, and he had to try and work out what to do while under the extreme pressure of painful death, something he did not thrive in.

The wolf managed to sink its fangs into his ankle, but he kicked it in the muzzle, hanging from just his arms, and swung up onto the next branch, leaving it a little way behind, though too little for his liking. The throbbing pain was too much to ignore, and he was unable to stand on his left foot, which made some of the steps somewhat harder. Jimmy was waiting for him, ever the noble friend, but he gestured desperately for him to continue. Remus would be fine on his own, and he was by far the better climber.

He frantically reached for the next branch, and within a few minutes was once more up to his friend's level. They exchanged panicked glances, and continued to climb as fast as they could, which was nowhere near as fast as they would have liked to be going. Remus could only be thankful for all the times he had climbed up the tree with a book in his hand, meaning he was already used to climbing one limb down. He paused to wait for Jimmy, who had frozen, with the wolf nearly upon him.

There was one scream as the wolf leapt at him, and then they were crashing through the branches. Remus could only watch in horror as the beast tore at his best friend's limp body, spilling blood and guts all over the grass, and felt the need to vomit. He tried to climb, but it was new territory for him, higher than he had ever been before, and the branches were thinning. The feeling of pure terror when one eventually snapped underneath him and he began to fall was matched only by the time when he had been struggling to shake the wolf's jaws off of him.

His fall was broken exceedingly painfully on his already well-battered body by what and used to be his favourite branch to sit on, several metres below. He looked around for any sign of the wolf, but it was still at the bottom of the tree. With Jimmy. That thought brought a whole new wave of anger as well as the fear and the pain, but the fear won out, and he tried to clamber upwards once more, until he realised that he had sprained his wrist in the fall, and could go no further. He was literally a sitting duck.

The wolf, that horrible creature, looked up from the remains of his friend, and stared straight at Remus. He didn't really care. His best friend was dead, and all because of his stupid camping trip. Its glowing yellow eyes glared for a moment, and then it stalked off, back into the darkness of the forest.

Once he was sure that it was gone, he slowly slid back down the tree, wincing with each movement, and thankful that it was not hugely far. He sat down by his best friend's mangled body, not that he could move anywhere else, and finally let out the choked sobs that he had been trying to suppress, to convince himself and Jimmy that they were going to be fine. They were anything but fine, and it was all his fault.

And when his parents arrived, and the people from St. Mungo's Hospital, he didn't even notice, until they tried to take Jimmy away from him, and had to give him something that made him sleep to pry away the body. But he did remember how they had been whispering when he woke up - "…broke his neck when he fell…dead before the animal got to him…", and how he had screamed and cried when he realised that it wasn't all a dream, and had had to be sedated once more until he stopped sobbing. And he remembered with perfect clarity the pain and the fear and the terrible sorrow of that night for many years to come.

They did not realise what had really transpired that night until a month after the event, when Remus had to be hexed into submission by his mother after he transformed into a wolf and began rampaging around the house. By the month after that, they had built a dungeon in the cellar, where Remus would go every full moon as soon as night fell, and struggle against his chains until the morning came. Eventually things returned to normal, or as normal as things could be when you had a werewolf child. People forgot about it, until the time came, all except for Remus. He didn't go near another tree for the next three years.