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Things go wrong in the dark of the night, out of perception, out of control. Even in the myths Night was the mother of Fate and Doom. When all you can see is the dark reflected over the earth and nothing else except that-so essentially, you're blind, like how wolves are when they're born.
Remus hears ridiculous things about werewolves. Red nails, hair under the tongue, about the wolf fearing the cross, the lycanthropus flower, but really, it has nothing to do with any of that. It's about scenting human blood everywhere, when all the sapience is bled out of you and all you can hear is the roaring of terror, the shrieks of panic. And perhaps it's about loneliness too.
But most of all, it's about something that's never going away-he's sure the menstrual cycle is a feel of what lycanthropy is, even though it eventually ends and is never as painful-not like how colds do anyway, but he manages, and after some ten, twenty years, life's all the same.
Remus is amused when James asks him how he keeps down the "wolf." Because it's not like he has two sides or anything, Remus knows. He'll go insane if he had two things inside of him trying to outwill one another, for God's sake, but he guesses that it's easier to assume that there is still something vitally human deep inside him and that it is independent from the animalistic. It's not. He's the same person when he transforms as when the moon is in eclipse, the only difference is the complete vigilance and allure of a human's blood.
Give anyone extreme bloodthirst and he can be a werewolf too.
(But it seems people don't like to think this way-that, you know, human nature alone is enough to fuel a monster-they like the sugarcoated version, with magic and wolf and predator and all.)
Sometimes it isn't as easy, like when he dreams-shifts. ("Concentration Orange," Muggles call it, when all senses and dreams are lupine and sharp and deadly.)
Jung said that most people have had dreams about being chased, but Remus has dreams about chasing. Where he's an enormous canine, wild-limbed and brutish-eyed, whose paws crush snow and branch and bones, fangs wearing down on whatever was before him-skin, fur, hide. Blood flows through the holes in the flesh, surges from the snapped neck, delicious around the teeth, the tongue.
And then he laughs, naked as he is after a full moon, he laughs.
When he wakes up, he feels things-skin, fur, hide, whatever-in his stomach churn and he'd just vomit everything he'd eaten the night before out. Peter is the other early riser in the dorm room and he thinks it's because Remus can't hold the cellulose, but no, not really. It's because he can't stand the thought of eating a human in a human shape-a sort of sick aftertaste of the bloodthirst of a transformation.
It isn't so easy when he eats either, because sometimes the house-elves will accidentally forget to give him stainless steel instead of silverware, and there are black scars on the tips of his index fingers where he touched the knife and fork. When this happens, Remus'd just go on without dinner, but if he's desperate enough, he'll just ask Sirius or James or Peter to sneak back something.
After the first full moon with the Marauders by his side, Sirius says that the wolf is a white one. The coat was sleek as silk, though, Sirius commented dreamily, and the extra glint around his eyes made Remus fancy.
(You know what they say about the white she-wolf-that once to have existed with the true, pink eyes of an albino who guarded the temple of Hermes of the Hellenes-she's a ghost, they say, a ghost of the wrathful Gaea, a daughter of Night.)
But he doesn't want to ask if his own eyes are red under the harvest moon-not only because neither stag nor rat nor dog can see red-since he knows that these kinds of things are better left alone and secret.
But there are things you can't ever forget, not even if you were dying, like the way fangs look when you first see one close, really up close, or how a mouth tastes when you first kiss one, or how it feels when life is at the bottom of its orbit and your best friend had just betrayed your secret.
Yet Remus figures that he has to let it go someday, since he'll never have friends like this, and whatever things he has with Sirius he'll just have to deal with them-and his heart will know, he was betrayed-and it isn't fair to James or Peter anyway.
If it ended there, things would've been much simpler, but by spring, things becomes messy.
It is untouchably hot, for one-to a degree where chocolate melts away at only the touch of a finger-even the birds are too hot to sing, and all plant matters seem to wilt along with the human spirit. Fingers, even writs have a salty, clammy smell that makes Remus wash his hands often.
They'd go to this Hogwarts Lake-after the exams and all-and would stay there all through the afternoon until the sun was way down in the midst of the coarse grass. They splash and laugh there and forget the pretentious masks they wear, because it is just hot and no one cares much anymore, and perhaps deeper inside, they miss the feeling of being younger and freer. And it is that too, isn't it, that they are no longer boys, but something in-between that language often fail to name.
Remus has never completely forgiven Sirius for the unpleasant incident, though. Of course, it isn't like he is intentionally trying to hold a grudge, but he finds that a breach is eternally set between them that makes words die in his throat when he sees Sirius. Still, he is sure that Sirius, too, feels awkward in his presence and avoids his gaze whenever possible. It isn't as if Remus liked the way things are going-even without Peter and James tackily trying to glue things back together-but their conversations now go on like a tug-of-war of will that makes Remus weary.
But when James and Peter are out on detention, there is nothing to do except for eyes to stare across the room when hands were pretending to do Astronomy homework.
"This isn't working out," Remus suddenly gets up, quill and well and papers in hand, "I'm going to the library."
Sirius doesn't respond quiet yet, but once Remus hand goes for the doorknob-as he had sensed earlier-Sirius' voice, unsteady, wavering, says, "Wait.I have something to tell you."
He's always figured something is on with Sirius.
"Can't it wait? I have to finish-"
"No, when you come back, Prongs and Wormtail'll be back."
Oh, so it is something he cannot say in front of others. Which is rather suspicious, unless-unless it is what he thinks it is-
But Sirius' throat seems to be stuck or glued or forced closed and Remus can smell the panic ascending in his blood-a scent he is used to, a cigarette kind of smell that spread in a nose. His gaze lands outside, the wind shimmers across the field and starlight grazes the treetop-nightingales. He sighs. Remus doesn't like how this was going, because you know, he has an essay to finish and there is very little chance that it will finish up by itself. "Look, normally I'd love to do this, but I really have to finish my homework and I can't do it with you staring at me."
"No, wait, Remus," Sirius tries. Pause. Tremble. "I like you."
Remus stops dead and tried not to look back. Because oh Merlin, what is he supposed to say? He clears his throat, silently, and hopes that Sirius had not noticed. "I like you too, Pads, but I don't have time right now."
And slowly, a firm hand comes down on his shoulders and Remus has to turn around, and when he does he finds a mouth full of heat, nose full of scent and eyes full of youth and laugh and everything dreams are made out of.
(No, they're not made of sweets, but things much harder and hotter and utterly insatiable.)
The hand on the hip suggest something sexier than sex itself-more implicative than any other act a hand can do. Remus wants to smile when Sirius does that, because his brain will outrace time and he's thinking about what will happen next, how things will go in the end. It's fun to do that, Remus thinks as he pushes Sirius down onto the bed-plaits? he isn't sure-half-closed eyes and hormones in his blood surging through rationality. Remus senses and laughs, a reserved, knowing chuckle; his hands are undoing the buttons-one of them is silver, and Remus winces when he touches it-on Sirius' shirt and pants and collar.
But lust is an angry note, a choking note. And that is the note his ears heard when their clothes came off loose and useless. A sense is unleashed, right then and there that would have been enough to keep Remus alive forever, enough to change someone's world and force him to say No, you don't exist. You don't exist because you don't know this feeling.
Remus presses his nose into the furrow of Sirius' neck, and takes a fervent scent in, soaring on it he dreams of being taken off the crag by the wind down to some land made of whorls and waves-the sort of thoughts that occupy a child forever, until he grows up and stops dreaming. (But Remus knows that even grown-ups dream of these things, deep in their own conscience, thinking of absurdity and vanity and innocence.) But this is real, the splashes of will, the strengths of shoulder, the anger of the sounds.
Hands are the draftsmen of the mind and they do things the brain tells them to do, but sometimes, when the mind is rendered ineffective, and hands are on psychotic automatism, they play to their own accords, touching and marking and stroking and everything that makes Sirius moan with that feral sound at the back of his tongue.
And mouths are too, if you think about it-but don't, just let it brush you away clean-like when Sirius' mouth lands on Remus' cock and his world ignites into oblivion, far on the edge of it, coming-coming-roaring sounds made by the wind or throat or lake-then the warm shout-the fume in the eyes-the howling-the moon-the howling.
Muggles say that the werewolf howls because he can't suffer the moonlight. But really, he only howls because it's what he does.
But one thing Remus remembers not to do, even when they fuck, is to use his teeth-not even because his canines are so much sharper-because you never know what the exchange of blood can do to someone, especially if lycanthropy is involved.
When Remus teaches Defense Against the Dark Arts in Hogwarts, he usually avoids going near the lake-or seeing it at all, really, and he convinces Dumbledore to give him an office that has no window that looks towards the south. But once or twice he'd go back there, why, he doesn't really know-or care.
Things are quiet now and the sun sinks deep into the splashless shore, reflected dimly as dashes of color on the lake's broken surface. It is a soothing feeling to just stand there, though, with the wind breezing by, water cool and soft at his feet, thinking.
It seems that the grass is still dewy with the faded morning and forebodings are lurking right out of his eyes. The nostalgia of feelings is coming down now with the Night, Doom and Fate, like a cloak of melancholy, flying up to meet the sky.
Yet he knows why, of course he does, and he laughs quietly to himself. Things are better kept secret.
Sorrow, on wing through the world for ever,
Here and there for awhile would borrow
Rest, if rest might haply deliver
Sorrow.
Hearts that strain at her chain would sever
The link where yesterday frets to-morrow:
All things pass in the world, but never
Sorrow.
One thought lies close in her heart gnawn thorough
With pain, a weed in a dried-up river,
A rust-red share in an empty furrow.
Sorrow by Algernon Charles Swinburne