Fic: As We Are Wont, 9
Lupin:
For you, being poor, have spread your dreams at my feet, have spread your body for my use, have spread your sex for my enjoyment, and I smash you under my feet for if my dreams were broken by me, by those too careless to see me, then I will break your dreams too.
I stay because I must. I stay because I must redeem myself, though by the end of this ordeal I will have committed acts that no one will forgive, and no one will want to forgive, and no one will ever forget. It is a redemption that suits me-- I so enjoy untenable and impossible situations. That is the appeal of potions. You give up everything, you ruin a batch, you deliberately add the poison, to render the medicine effective, to give the remedy power. It is not in perfection that potions are created, but a seething festering blistering combination of accidents. Potions are intuition. They cannot be taught.
Magic is intuition. War is intuition. Blood. Darkness. Does it surprise you that in our history, we have always been fraught with wars, and intrigue, and murder? It is how magic keeps itself alive. For all magic that comes from humans must be perverse, every spell and countercurse has a cost. We are the parasites of this world and it is impossible to live in harmony with it. That was why I joined. There were many reasons why I joined, some of the real and some of them false, none of them true and all of them bitter. I must atone.
You know the feeling. You have been atoning all your life. Denying your nature, suppressing desires and fighting against yourself because you seek to be merely human when you could reach and take power. Take it, and use it, and wield it so effectively. The magic would be paid in the only payment magic accepts-- blood. You would rather spill your own blood that feed on the blood of others to transcend your turner, transcend your keepers and become the moon induced magician of unquenchable power.
Power, Lupin. You deny yourself power. Thief, seducer, you cannot help but keep yourself in trade. I walked the alleys eight years ago and knew I saw your figure, shadowed on the wall. Tell me, Lupin, what are the colors you see? What are the scents you smell? You could never tell the difference between good and evil and that is why you allowed yourself to be led. And your friends, the golden boy of Gryffindor knew this and for it marked you traitor. The only color you recognize is that of rusting blood, and it sets your body on fire.
You speak of books and homes and love, but we are magic, and there is no magic in love. It is something only the muggleborn are capable of. Wizards have forgotten it. What Olympian gods would trifle with love when there is immortality to contend with?
Come to me, and let me consume you. I hold dark desires and dark promises, and we might fulfill them before the night is out, before the war is over, before the blood is spilled and the magic explodes with it. Potter is no better than Ares, and you cannot deny that wanderers grow weary of running away from home.
SS