Fic - Fragments of a Wolf
Title: Fragments of a Wolf - 1/100
Author: Spaceandcanada
Rating: Overall, R.
Summary: 100 fragments, just 100 memories, telling the story of a wolf.
A/N: This was written as part of the 100_prompt challenge. Although I altered the challenge somewhat, by telling one long story in 100 smaller ones. Slash.
For L - because Remus Lupin is your favourite, and you are mine.
Disease
‘Lycanthropy is a disease.’
This was a stance that Remus Lupin’s mother had maintained for as long as he could remember.
He’d been bitten when he was six years old, and it would always be his greatest regret that he hadn’t run faster.
He remembered the gradual paralysis brought on by sheer terror, the iridescent shine of the full moon, hanging in the sky like a lucky penny, and the scent of rotting meat and death gusting over him in hot breaths.
Most of all he remembered the pain. The blackness of agony, so great in magnitude that he almost couldn’t comprehend it. Almost.
And after, the blissful haze of unconsciousness. Floating in a dream land, anchored only to the world by the blood beating through the bite in his leg, reminding him with every heart beat:
Cursed.
Cursed.
Cursed.
Then, the months that followed.
His mother, crying silently in empty rooms when she thought he wasn’t watching.
The excruciating search for a cure; watching every disappointment, every failure, drain a little more life from his father.
Sensing the change in their attitudes towards him. They still loved their son. But their son didn’t exist anymore. He was somewhere deep, buried beneath the monster.
Except he wasn’t. Not really.
He was still Remus Lupin.
But they made him into the wolf.
His mother seemed to take some comfort from calling lycanthropy a disease, as though he’d merely been careless enough to catch a bad head cold. Perhaps it was the idea that at some point someone, somewhere, would find the right method, the right way of pruning out the diseased part of the rose bush and allowing the flowers to flourish again.
Remus didn’t think it was a disease.
When he transformed, when he spent his nights as a mindless, vicious creature, howling in agony at the moon, he knew it wasn’t. It felt as though every dark thought, every dark nuance of his character, all the very worst parts of what made him who he was had been gathered together and had life breathed into them, just lying dormant until the siren call of the moon.
The wolf was a curse, yes. But not a disease. The wolf was a part of him. And there was no cure for that.
Sometimes, he’d lie awake at night, watching the moon waning or waxing and dream.
Dream of a life where he’d been able to run a little faster.
Dream of a life where people could still see him as more than the werewolf.
And then, on March the 10th 1971, it came true.
A letter arrived in the post, the wax seal bearing a crest with a large letter ‘H’ on it.
He knew what it was, of course. He just couldn’t comprehend what it was doing on his doorstep.
His parents faced a decision. For them, it was agonising. Was there any way that their son, who was shunned by regular society, could have a normal education? What if people found out? What would happen with the transformations? What if a transformation went wrong?
For Remus, it was simple. Here was a man, a man with the reputation of greatness, offering him a life again. The letter contained the promise that no-one would know what he was. Arrangements could be made for him, it said, no-one would get hurt.
And even at the tender age of eleven, Remus trusted Albus Dumbledore.