Remorse

Chapter Five: Apart

When Remus came to, it was morning. He was lying alone on the forest floor, feeling sick and guilty for reasons that he couldn’t place at first, covered by the tattered fragments of his robes. He must have ripped them to shreds during the transformation. Or perhaps one of the others had...

One of the others... He remembered scattered scenes from yesterday evening: the taste of Pinewine, the swollen moon, the stranger’s crushed throat between his teeth. He shut his eyes against the daylight.

So it had come; the day that been lying in wait for him for twenty years, ever since James Potter had followed Severus Snape into the tunnel beneath the Whomping Willow – or perhaps for thirty, ever since he had been bitten. James had put it off, but it was his destiny. He had been a killer all along.

“You all right, mate? Brilliant night, wasn’t it?” said a voice with an accent that reminded him of Craddock’s.

Remus opened his eyes again. The speaker was one of the other werewolves he’d seen at the Lyconference: a boy perhaps a year older than Harry, filthy, skinny, ragged, and absurdly chipper. He must be one of the children Fenrir had torn from their homes and raised as his own – perhaps even the son of the family Smithfield had bragged about destroying.

“Yes.” He tried to sit up, and found that it made the nausea worse. “Just – not feeling very well this morning, that’s all.”

The boy nodded sympathetically. “You don’t wanna eat too much when you’re transformed. No matter how good it seems at the time. You’ll figure that out after another moon or two.”

Another moon? Oh, dear God. He wasn’t going to be around for another moon. He was going straight back to Dumbledore, to tell him that he had failed... And oh hell, he hadn’t actually eaten, had he? He thought he remembered recoiling from the taste of blood and fleeing into the woods, but he couldn’t be sure.

“You want some help gettin’ home, mate? I can point you the way, if’n it’s your first time out in the forest.”

“Yes. Yes, thank you.” He accepted the boy’s outstretched hand and struggled to his feet. “What’s your name? I’m John.”

“Folks mostly calls me ‘Ripper,’” said the boy with evident pride. “Course I got a wizarding name, but I don’t use it. I hate wizards, don’t you? Least there’s one less of ‘em now.” He spoke with no more emotion than if he were discussing the weather.

“Do you hate all wizards?” Remus asked, mostly to distract himself.

“Yeah. Durr.”

“How many of them do you know?”

“Loads! Well ... do ones that are dead count?”

“Only if you talked to them before they died.”

“What would I want to talk to them about?” said Ripper scornfully. He stopped short and gave Remus a suspicious look. “Are you one of them Ministry werewolves? You talk like one.”

Remus knew by now that it was no use trying to deny that he had once lived as a wizard. Everything about him – his clothes, his speech, the way he carried himself – gave it away. “I was. I got sick and tired of the way they were treating us.”

“The more fool you for puttin’ up with it,” said Ripper without rancor. “Gimme your wand, I’m not sure where we are.”

“I’ll do it,” said Remus, who was not about to surrender his wand. “Point me.” The wand directed them downhill, across a shallow stream, which they forded. “Do you know how to do magic?” he asked. He was sure Ripper had not been to Hogwarts.

“Some. The older ones that went to school before they were bitten, they teach us what they know.”

“Does Fenrir know about it?”

“Oh sure, he uses it himself. He makes out it’s special werewolf magic, but Phil says it ain’t no different from what he remembers his mum and dad using.”

This was remarkable news, considering how much Fenrir claimed to detest wizardkind, and Remus realized how far off the mark some of his core assumptions about the Lyceum had been. “If you do magic, doesn’t that make you a wizard?” he couldn’t resist asking.

Ripper snorted. “You don’t know much, do you? Try tellin’ that to the wizards and see what kind of answer you get.”

“I have tried. That’s why I’m here.”

“But you’re not happy about it.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“If you eat people,” said Ripper in a near-perfect imitation of Remus’ voice, “don’t that make you a werewolf?”

Remus had welcomed the boy’s conversation because it had provided a brief distraction from the night’s events, but now the enormity of what had happened came crashing down around him. He couldn’t go back to Dumbledore and tell him about this. What had he been dreaming of? Magic couldn’t bring back the dead, and the most powerful wizard in Britain could not give him absolution for taking another man’s life.

Why not? said a bitter, mocking voice at the back of his head. He gave it to Snape, didn’t he?

He remembered the Potions Master walking on the battlements at night, silent as a ghost and nearly as grim. No. No, he hadn’t.

“That’s your place, innit?” said Ripper, pointing to the shack which stood straight ahead of them. “I gotta go an’ see if I can nick some food. I’m starving. ‘Less you got some inside.” He looked hopefully at Remus, who shook his head. Ripper turned and ran through the undergrowth, almost as fast as a startled rabbit.

Alone and shaking, Remus pushed open the door and hid himself in the darkness of the house.

 

                                                            *          *          *

“Good night, sir,” said Harry regretfully. He was obviously consumed with curiosity about how the Headmaster had received his injury, but Albus had thought it best not to tell him. If he had learned nothing else in his hundred-odd years as a teacher – and sometimes, when he watched young Draco, he wondered if he had learned anything – he did know that one did students no favors by handing down knowledge from on high. Harry would have to discover for himself what a Horcrux was, and what it cost to find and destroy one. There would be time enough for him to hear the thrilling tale of the Peverell ring when he had an equally thrilling one of his own to swap for it.

If Albus lived to see it, of course.

Phineas Nigellus’ acerbic voice cut into his thoughts. “If I were you, I should have taken House points from Gryffindor for asking personal questions. Students never tried that more than once with me.”

Albus poured himself a generous measure of oak-matured mead with his good hand and settled into his favorite armchair. He had little enough time for pleasure these days, but a few creature comforts would take his mind off the war, as would a wrangle with his predecessor. “Weren’t you saying just the other day, Phineas, that you felt students nowadays lacked intellectual spark? I should have thought you would be the last man to discourage a healthy amount of curiosity.”

“Curiosity is a fine quality if it is intellectual. Children asking one impertinent question after another so they won’t be sent to bed is another matter. Having raised five of my own, I am under no illusions about the guilelessness of innocent minds.”

“What on earth possessed you to have five children, Phineas? I was under the impression that you detested them.”

“I had the future of the family to consider,” said Phineas piously. “Besides, I don’t mind children. It’s the adolescents I can’t abide. Speaking of the future of the family – you’ve not heard from young Lupin lately?”

“No.” Albus set his glass of mead down on the table and tried to conceal how worried he was. It was nearly midnight and the moon had risen, now four days past the full; its chilly silver light touched the treetops of the Forbidden Forest. There had been no messages from Remus for nearly a week, although he had previously sent several detailed reports about his recruitment and initiation into the Lyceum. He tried to reassure himself that there had, at least, been no reports of deaths or disappearances this month in the papers, but he knew that meant nothing. The Death Eaters were experts at hiding bodies.

It took a moment for Phineas’ unexpected change of subject to register. “What have my reports from Remus got to do with your family?”

“If you were a portrait at Twelve Grimmauld Place, you’d know,” replied Phineas enigmatically.

 

                                                            *          *          *

Celia Lupin was trying to distract herself by writing an article comparing Scrimgeour’s policies concerning suspected Death Eaters to those of Bartemius Crouch in the last war. It was, unquestionably, important and timely work, but her mind wasn’t on it. Now and again her eyes drifted toward the moon, a pale waning crescent in the noonday sky, and she found her mind wandering for minutes at a time. She came to herself abruptly when she discovered that she had snapped her quill in half against the desktop, spattering the parchment with ink.

“Linus, could you be a dear and fetch me another one? They’re in the drawer of my other desk – no, the left-hand one.”

“I didn’t know you knitted,” said Linus. She turned and saw that he was holding a fresh quill in one hand and a half-finished scarf, child-sized, in the other. The scarf was blue with bronze stripes.

“I haven’t in ages. I hardly ever have time for it any more.” She took the mass of yarn from him and stroked it absently. “I had almost forgotten about that scarf. I started it the summer before Remus left for Hogwarts – it was meant to be a Christmas present.”

“What went wrong with it?”

“Nothing. I started again with red and gold yarn. It was finished by Christmas.”

“Oh. Were you very surprised?”

“I thought he would have done well in Ravenclaw – but no, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Not looking back on it. He was always a brave child – so much that it frightened me sometimes. It still does.”

Celia twined a bit of fringe around her finger, thinking of Remus and Greyback and the lonely wild places where the werewolves were said to gather.

“What I should have asked,” said Linus, “is – were you disappointed?”

After a moment, she shook her head. “You take your children as they are. Not as you might have imagined them to be.”

“But I imagine it would have been easier for you. We Ravenclaws don’t go in for heroics much.”

“No,” she said shortly, sweeping the wool into a drawer once again, “but heaven knows we’ve got faults of our own. Perhaps that’s one of them.”

“Do you think I should have volunteered to go?” Linus asked. He had never told Celia about the last conversation he and Remus had had before her son had left. Now, after nearly a month with no word from Remus, he regretted that he had not pressed harder.

“Dear God, no.” The vehemence in her own voice surprised her. “I can’t lose both of you.”

 

                                                            *          *          *

Dear Remus,

Tonks chewed on the end of her quill and frowned. The trouble with reckless and undesired confessions of love were that they complicated everything that came afterward, even something as simple as the salutation of a letter.

However, she couldn’t think of any good alternatives. A name without a greeting sounded too cold, and “Wotcher” or “Hey there” was obviously not appropriate to the circumstances.

What’s going on? It’s been a month since anyone in the Order has heard from you. Molly’s frantic, and the rest of us aren’t much better. Drop us a line when you get a chance and let us know you’re OK, will you?

She read it over and winced. The false breeziness of the last sentence sounded all wrong, but it was extraordinarily hard to write a letter that sounded right when you weren’t sure whether your addressee was alive or dead.

If he was dead, writing to him obviously wouldn’t do any good, and if he was alive, she still wasn’t sure it would do any good. Particularly because it came from her.

She crumpled up the letter and threw it across the room into the wastepaper basket, where it joined half a dozen of its fellows.

 

                                                            *          *          *

Remus was learning the ways of the Lyceum. There were unspoken hierarchies as well as the official ones: Greyback’s inner circle consisted of old-timers who had been with him from the beginning and the children he had reared himself – who ranged in age from their mid-teens to around forty, and were recognizable by their manner of speech, a blend of the local Forbidden Forest accent and an odd lilt of their own. Werewolves who had joined the Lyceum as adults seldom became officers unless they made it into the punishment squad; they were larger and stronger than those whose growth had been stunted by childhood lycanthropy, and Fenrir selected his Lupercalians purely for size and brutality. Women were not only barred from most officer positions, but were nearly invisible. Of course, it was possible that not many adult female werewolves were attracted by the Lyceum’s Pinewine-soaked camaraderie and promises of revenge, but Remus wondered what had happened to young girls who had been bitten. Of the two teenagers who had been present at his initiation, he saw the boy from time to time, but his sister seemed to have vanished.

Remus saw at once that he had no hope of joining Fenrir’s officers, or even befriending any of them. Despite his best efforts to blend in, most of the adult werewolves held themselves aloof from him – apart from the occasional surprise visit that Remus suspected was an attempt to spy on him. They offered food on occasion, more often Pinewine, but no confidences. Perhaps they thought he was putting on airs by trying to stay polite and reasonably clean, or perhaps his revulsion for the first night’s work had been all too evident. He heard Peter Stubbe mumbling toothlessly about “young lads what think their shit don’t stink like the rest of us,” and Ferdinand watched him silently but all too closely at their gatherings.

He thought, at first, that he saw a few potential allies – the young chain-smoker who had been initiated alongside him, and Phil Craddock, who did not seem to be one of Greyback’s favorites and was clearly no friend of Voldemort – but his guarded suggestions that reason might serve them better than revenge uncovered a deep vein of bitterness.

“You mean well, Roper,” Craddock explained, “but it’s plain to see you ain’t been a werewolf for long. Me, I got bit when I was eight and I’ve been living with this for thirty-two years. Let me tell you how it is for people like us.”

Remus opened his mouth to retort that he had been bitten at six, remembered just in time that he was supposed to be somebody else, and decided not to say anything at all.

“My parents were like you for the first year or two, idealistic. Thought they could hide the fact that I’d been bitten and keep me off the Registry. Would’ve died from infection if they hadn’t realized in time they were out of their depth. And they were singing a different tune once they found out how much it would cost them to keep me. Don’t kid yourself. Greyback always gets his own in the end.”

“Your parents abandoned you to Greyback after that?” Remus asked in horror. He knew, of course, that parents did abandon lycanthropic children, but he had always imagined that they did it swiftly and unthinkingly, probably before the child’s first full moon as a werewolf.

“They didn’t have a choice. Ever tried finding a landlord willing to let you stay past the first full moon? Not so easy, is it? And in those days there was no Wolfsbane, just a bunch of quack cures that my parents kept trying out; I almost died from some of ‘em. After a couple of years, they were completely skint and homeless. And Greyback turned up again and offered to take me off their hands. Represented himself as the headmaster of a school for werewolves. Yeah. Some education I got at his hands.”

“Do you hate him?”

“It ain’t no use loving or hating him. He just is, and what are you going to do about it? Force of nature.... Have some Pinewine. No good thinking about it.”

Remus could get nothing more out of Phil, but he had not lost his gift for befriending teenagers, and Ripper and the other young werewolves proved to be useful sources of information. Most of them had yet to learn discretion, and they were both flattered by being treated as experts and amused by his cluelessness about the dynamics of the Lyceum.

“Ferdinand seems like a very intelligent man,” Remus commented to Ripper one day. The Lupus Minor had not improved on further acquaintance, but he had a keen, shrewd look in his eyes, and he was quicker of speech than Greyback. In Remus’ estimation, Ferdinand was the more dangerous of the two.

“Should be,” said Ripper casually. “Went to university, dinnee?”

Technically speaking, there were no wizarding universities in Britain. Merlin College was located in the heart of Oxford but had made a great production of severing itself from the Muggle university after the Statute of Secrecy had been passed, and the Inn of the Wizengamot stubbornly insisted that it was an inn, despite the fact that it offered no lodging to travelers and most of its students had no intention of becoming Advocates. Both institutions, however, were indistinguishable from universities in practice, and Muggle-borns occasionally referred to them as such. Remus wondered idly which of them had spawned Ferdinand.

“He helps Fenrir with writin’ an’ that,” Ripper added.

“Why isn’t he in charge instead of Fenrir?” Remus asked.

Ripper sniggered. “‘Cos he ain’t magic. Can’t even levitate a feather.”

This explained a great deal, Remus realized. No wonder Fenrir was unwilling to swear off magic when it was the one advantage he had over his chief lieutenant.

“Does Fenrir know how to Apparate?” he asked on a hunch, remembering that Dumbledore had wondered how Greyback was getting around the country.

“Wha’?”

“Disappear in one place and appear in another.”

“Yeah. An’ some o’ the other older ones know. Old Stubbe tried to teach the whole Lyceum how, way back before I was born, but there were accidents an’ some people died, so Fenrir says it ain’t safe for us to learn it any more.” For a moment, Ripper’s bravado wavered and he looked much younger. “Wish I could Apparate away from here.”

Remus sat down on a fallen log and motioned for Ripper to take the place beside him. The boy did so warily, as though unused to invitations of any sort. “Where did you live before you were bitten?” Remus asked.

“Don’t remember. I was really little.”

“Your parents?”

“Don’t remember them either. I think they’re dead. Anyways, they’d be wizards, wouldn’t they? Who needs ‘em?”

“Where would you like to go if you could get away?”

Ripper shrugged. “I dunno. A shop or something.”

“A shop?”

“I been in shops sometimes before they kicked me out. It’s warm there. And there’s lots of food.”

That was true. It was what they all craved – a warm place with food. As the nights grew longer and colder, Remus felt more and more often that it was all he wanted. To hell with ideals – they didn’t keep you warm at night. To hell with fighting for justice and persuading the others that joining Voldemort was not the answer – anything that got you a bite to eat was the answer, and when Ripper brought him a tin of tuna fish he didn’t ask where the boy had stolen it from. To hell with remorse for the man he’d killed. The first frost numbed more than his aching fingers, and he found that he didn’t care any more.

He had come to infiltrate and, if possible, convert his fellow werewolves. He was beginning to wonder if they were converting him.