Remorse

Chapter Eight: Being Lycanthropic

Before he returned to the werewolves after Christmas, Remus accompanied Bill, Arthur, and Molly to Hogwarts, where the Order was about to hold its first full meeting in six months. Dumbledore’s office was too small to hold them all, so they sat around one of the tables in the empty Great Hall, beneath a ceiling that mirrored the blank whiteness of the snow clouds outside.

He had not seen Dumbledore in some months, and he was shocked by the change in the great wizard’s appearance: he was visibly older and frailer, and stooped so that he looked smaller as well. He was still favoring his withered hand, which did not seem to have healed at all.

Tonks dropped into a chair on the opposite side of the table. She, too, was looking fragile: paler and more subdued than he remembered. Her eyes met his and widened visibly. He knew he must look dreadful – hollow-cheeked, unkempt – and he was suddenly glad that she hadn’t been around for Christmas; he didn’t think he could bear much pity from that quarter. They both looked away, and he felt his cheeks grow hot with shame.

He looked in the other direction, and found that was worse: Severus Snape’s coal-black eyes were staring at him. He had obviously noticed what had just passed between his two colleagues, although Remus devoutly hoped that he didn’t understand what it meant.

Kingsley and Hestia arrived, and the meeting came to order.

Arthur reported that Rufus Scrimgeour had come to call on Christmas Day and had been putting pressure on Harry. At this news Tonks and Kingsley exchanged a significant look, and Tonks muttered, “Well, that’s nothing new.”

“And how does Harry conduct himself under pressure?” Dumbledore asked.

“He handled it well. I was proud of him,” said Arthur; but there was a faint frown line behind his glasses, which Remus understood to mean that he was far prouder of Harry than Percy.

Kingsley gave a detailed report of his experiences with the Muggle Prime Minister, who had gone rather paranoid and kept asking Kingsley whether he thought “He Who Has No Name” was behind every road accident or power failure in the country. Kingsley accordingly found himself walking a fine line between reassuring the Prime Minister and trying not to lull him into a false sense of security.

Bill gave an even longer report about anti-wizard sentiment among the goblins and the steps that should be taken to combat it – specifically, persuading the Wizengamot to repeal the law against allowing goblins to carry wands. As very few of them had connections on the Wizengamot and Scrimgeour’s policies seemed to be going in the opposite direction, this course of action did not seem overly practical.

“How’s Grawp coming along, Rubeus?” Dumbledore asked when Bill had finished speaking.

“Oh, he’s grand. Loves the new home yeh foun’ for him, an’ he’s learnin’ lots of new words. I told him all about the war, an’ he’s on our side. ‘Hagger,’ he says the other day, ‘Dummy grea’ man.’ I hope yeh don’t min’ if he calls yeh ‘Dummy’ fer the present – he’s only learnin’.”

“I have been called far worse things for worse reasons,” said Dumbledore, his eyes twinkling with something of his old mirth. “And, Remus? How are you getting on among the werewolves?”

“I don’t know,” Remus said honestly. “I’ve reported back to you what I could learn of Fenrir’s habits: he gets around by Apparation, and has evidently been in close contact with Lord Voldemort over the last few months – close enough for Voldemort to offer him one of his own former followers as prey. But I can’t say much about his plans for the future. Apart from some of the younger ones, the other werewolves don’t really trust me as yet.” He was almost sure that they never would trust him, but because Snape’s eyes were fixed on him, he tried to sound more confident than he felt. “I have been trying to befriend some of the adults who are higher up in the organization, and at the same time persuade them that taking revenge on the handful of normal wizards who might be most inclined to help them is not in their best interests, but –”

“An elementary mistake,” Snape interrupted. “One can be a spy or a propagandist, but not both. You might be interested to know that young Theodore Nott made the same mistake when he told Dumbledore he was no longer in agreement with his housemates. We did not take him up on his offer, but at sixteen idealism is excusable. At thirty-seven, well... All I care to say on that point is that it’s fortunate that Greyback is even more of an intellectual lightweight than you seem to be.”

Remus resisted a perverse and ridiculous impulse to say that Greyback was headmaster of his own school and he hadn’t noticed that Snape was anything of the sort, just to see the look on his former colleague’s face. However, he was sure nothing good would come of it.

Dumbledore turned back to Remus without overtly acknowledging this outburst. “You are having better luck as a spy, then?”

“Yes. Somewhat. I’ve found out a good deal about the organization and how it works.”

“Then I think it better that you concentrate your efforts in that direction.”

“All right,” said Remus, although inwardly he felt an unexpected pang of despair. He had been counting on the prospect of turning even one of the Lyceans against Voldemort, and offering the ones who did turn sanctuary and a better life. That had been how he justified his actions to himself. Now it all seemed terribly empty and hollow, and he felt as if he could no longer justify the events of his first full moon with the Lyceum at all.

After the meeting broke up, he found himself standing next to Tonks. “We all missed you at Christmas,” he said.

She shrugged, but her cheeks had gone faintly pink. “Work. You know how it is. The rest of us have missed hearing from you, too,” she added pointedly.

“It’s different with me. I’m meant to be undercover.” And then, because darkness was falling and because he wanted to delay the moment when he returned to the Forest, he offered, “Are you staying in Hogsmeade? Would you like me to walk you home?”

“I’m an Auror, Remus. I can look after myself.”

“I know. But it’s more cheerful with two.”

Perhaps she guessed how hungry he was for companionship, because she gave in at once. They walked out of the castle gates and turned toward Hogsmeade, and he tried not to look at the dark mass that was the Forbidden Forest.

“You’re shivering,” she said.

“It isn’t anything.”

“I got you something for Christmas, but I left it in my room at the Hog’s Head.”

“I can’t possibly – I mean, that was very kind of you, but I haven’t got anything to give you in return –” He was aware that this was not, strictly speaking, true, but because it wasn’t true, it made accepting a gift from Tonks a considerably more delicate matter than accepting one from the Weasleys.

“I don’t expect anything in return.”

“You’re sure?” He gave her a searching look, and she didn’t blush at all this time.

She nodded.

“All right.”

They talked about her job as they walked into town. Dawlish was having reservations about her performance; she was having reservations about everything. There wasn’t much he could say to make things better, but she seemed relieved just to have someone to listen, and by the time they reached the Hog’s Head they seemed to have regained something of the comfortable friendship that he remembered from last year.

The inn looked the same as it always did: almost indistinguishable from the Sign of the Bones in London, but Remus knew that it was run by Professor Dumbledore’s brother and was probably one of the most secure places in England. “Wotcher, Ab,” called Tonks, and got only a grunt in response. “My room’s upstairs,” she said, picking up one of the candle stubs from the tables to light the way and wrinkling her nose. “It’s nicer there. Less goatful, if that’s a word.”

She sounded almost like the lighthearted young girl he remembered, and he realized all at once how badly he missed that girl.

She’d bought him a cashmere scarf with a pattern of brown and rust-colored diamonds. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. “It’s too nice. How am I going to explain this to the other werewolves?”

“You could say you stole it, couldn’t you?”

“You’re right, I could.” Belatedly, he remembered his manners. “Thank you. I could use something to keep me warm.”

“Isn’t there anything at all I can do to help you?” She was standing much too close, and there was a plaintive note in her voice. He felt as if she had crossed a line that she had implicitly promised not to cross when she said she didn’t expect anything in return, and it troubled him.

“Only what you’ve been doing. Keep your eye out for any moles at the Ministry, and look after yourself.”

“That isn’t enough.” She took him by the shoulders. “Look at yourself – you’re killing yourself slowly. I could bring you food – Wolfsbane –”

“No, you couldn’t. Not without great risk to yourself. I can’t accept it.”

“Damn it, we’re all taking risks! D’you think I need to be protected and put on a pedestal? You’re out there risking your life every day!”

“Yes, and I would be risking a hell of a lot more if you tried to help me!” he snapped. “They’ll kill me if they see me talking to an Auror, did you think about that?”

It was obvious that she hadn’t thought about it, from the look on her face. He had given her a taste of the fear he lived with every day, and almost immediately he felt contrite about it. “Look,” he said quietly. “I wish things were different. But the most damnable thing about this illness is the way it alienates you from people.”

“You don’t have to let it.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have a choice. It isn’t going to change. Ever.”

“I think you’re letting it rule your life more than you need to.”

“And I think you are very young – and idealistic, and a bit innocent – and I don’t want you to lose that innocence, and I won’t have you exposed to – to everything.”

“Don’t. Bloody. Patronize. Me,” she flashed. He muttered a few apologies and said goodbye, as he was sure things weren’t going to get any better if he stayed. He realized afterward, as he trudged into the Forbidden Forest, that he had forgotten the scarf, but he couldn’t very well go back for it now.

 

                                                            *          *          *

Ever since Remus had left on his mission, Linus and Celia had been reading every word they could find about Fenrir Greyback and his Lyceum, from scholarly articles to decades-old newspaper clippings. They were old Ravenclaws, and learning was how they coped; it seemed better to both of them to understand what Remus was up against than to wait and wonder.

Linus felt as if he were very nearly an expert on Greyback, but still his curiosity gave him no peace on one point. Even now, a year after he had been bitten, he didn’t know what it was like to be in the grip of a transformation with no control. And without that knowledge, he felt he couldn’t possibly understand what motivated a man like Greyback. Was there joy in it? Rage? Terror?

He formulated a plan – feeling slightly guilty all the while, as he didn’t intend to tell Celia what he was going to do. The law said that werewolves had to take the potion in front of a witness for a week before the full moon, but the mediwizards who doled out the Wolfsbane potion at St. Mungo’s were an inattentive lot. He would simply wait until they were looking the other way and Transfigure the potion into something else – Ogden’s Old Single Malt, for example, would be a great improvement – before he drank it.

He would tell the Healers on the eve of the full moon that he had forgotten a dose, or been sick afterwards, and ask to spend the night in one of the hospital’s werewolf containment cells. He’d been there once before, the first full moon after he’d been bitten, and he knew they were perfectly secure.

Linus went over this plan several times in his head and decided that it sounded perfectly reasonable. What could go wrong?

 

                                                            *          *          *

Though Remus had learned a great deal about the organization and mindset of the Lyceum, Fenrir Greyback’s future plans remained a closed book to him. None of Fenrir’s inner circle were talking, and if a new recruit asked too many questions he would draw attention to himself. In January, however, he struck gold. The Lyceum had been having one of its interminable rallies; apparently they were celebrating one of Fenrir’s liaisons with Lord Voldemort, although Greyback was coy about what had actually taken place at this meeting. But afterward, as the Pinewine was being passed around and tuneless songs howled, he pulled Remus aside in person.

“Roper, is it? You wizard-born?”

“Yes.”

“He has a list of families he wants us to call on come full moon. Relatives of wizards what have been fighting against him. I told him fair enough, but only ones with young kids, so there’s something in it for me. And who do you think is at the top of that list?”

Remus shook his head. “I can’t imagine.”

“Some Muggle family in Manchester. Name of Roper. Any kin to you?”

“None that I know of,” said Remus truthfully. But he didn’t like the coincidence at all. “I am a pureblood,” he added as an afterthought.

Fenrir spat on the ground at his feet. “That’s how much your pure blood is worth now that you’ve been bitten. And don’t you forget it, boy.”

 

                                                            *          *          *

Of course it had to be a coincidence. He had a few cousins in France, on the Lupin side, but he knew of no living relatives in England other than his mother. And there weren’t any children in his family. There never had been, except for him; there had only been his parents, and Gran Caroline who was a Muggle, and Uncle Prospero, who wasn’t really an uncle but rather his grandmother’s ... partner, he supposed people would say nowadays.

He stopped short. His grandmother had been married once, presumably to another Muggle. Had there been any other children of that marriage? If there were, he had never met them, but he rather thought his mother had mentioned a brother once or twice.

What an absurd position, he thought – not being sure whether one’s own mother had any siblings. He would have cursed her reticence, but he knew all too well that he had inherited it.

He also knew that Salazar Slytherin’s last heir was far better at genealogy than he was.

The more he thought about what this might mean, the less he liked it. But in any case, he had a name, a city, and a rough outline of Voldemort’s plans for the Lyceum, which was a great deal more information than he had ever managed to acquire before. It crossed his mind that this might be a trap, designed to test his loyalty; he dared not arrange to have fully armed Order members meet the pack. He could, however, send a discreet message to Dumbledore to find the Roper family in question. There couldn’t be too many possibilities – Muggles with young children and wizarding relatives who might plausibly be on Voldemort’s hit list were rare enough. With luck, Dumbledore would be able to persuade them to move quietly out of their home and into one of the Ministry shelters for Muggles before the full moon.

 

                                                            *          *          *

The moon is far away. He can’t see it, trapped as he is behind padded walls, but the savage beat of his blood tells him it’s there. He hungers to run free.

He hurls himself against the walls again and again, trying to break them down; they hurl him back until his shoulders are bruised and his chest burning from the strain.

A black bundle sits brooding in the corner. It smells strong, like prey. He is hungry. He begins to rip and chew at it.

Don’t do that, says a small, distant voice at the back of his mind, and for a moment he hangs back.

He sinks his teeth into the bundle again. It’s not real prey, only empty robes. Feeling cheated, he snarls and rips them to shreds.

The smell of prey is on his paws, his body. The moon calls to him again and he cannot go to her. It makes him angry. He bites his own paws and snaps at the pain.

Easy, take it easy. Sleep, says the voice, but the smell of blood from his paws maddens him. He needs to attack, and there is nothing to attack but himself. He tears at his own flesh, but even the taste of blood does not satisfy him.

 

                                                            *          *          *

The Floo call from St. Mungo’s woke Celia just after dawn.

Her first, heart-stopping, thought was that something had happened to Remus, but when the mediwitch asked her whether she was acquainted with a man named Linus Berowne, she found that was scarcely better. She threw on some robes and Disapparated to the hospital in such a hurry that she left two fingernails behind.

Werewolves were kept in special high-security rooms in the basement of the hospital on full-moon nights. Celia hadn’t been there in many years, but she remembered the way as if it were yesterday. She had come here that first full moon, when they had not been sure if Remus’ small body would be able to bear the stress of the transformation; she remembered rushing down this same corridor, clutching a stuffed toy and trying to prepare her mind for the unthinkable.

Linus was huddled in a corner of one of the secure cubicles used to isolate transforming werewolves. His breathing was shallow, and there was a great pool of blood around him. Scraps of cloth littered the room.

A janitor stood outside the room with his mop and a bucket of Mrs. Skower’s All-Purpose Magical Mess Remover. He was arguing with one of the Healers. “I don’t care what you say, I ain’t going in there. That’s contaminated blood, that is.”

“Sheer ignorance,” the Healer remonstrated. “Lycanthropy is spread only by biting.” But he didn’t seem inclined to do the washing up himself.

“I’ll take care of it,” said Celia sharply. “I’ve cleaned up after transformations before, and I’ve never grown fur and a tail yet. Give me a clean towel and some warm water, please.”

Linus opened his eyes when she began to wash his wounds. “It was ... an experiment,” he explained between shallow gasps for breath. Every word seems to cost him. “Don’t think ... I’ll be trying ... it again.”

“You did this to yourself on purpose?”

“Shh. Don’t let ... the Healers hear. I wanted ... to know...”

After she had cleaned up the blood, Celia’s heart rate slowed. Linus had given himself some nasty flesh wounds, but the mediwitch who found him had already healed them and he didn’t appear to be in immediate danger.

“He won’t be able to Apparate on his own for a couple of weeks,” the Healer said. “Can you manage Side-Along Apparation, or should the staff send both of you home by Floo Powder?”

“Floo Powder, I think,” said Celia. The fingers with missing nails were beginning to throb. She didn’t bother to explain that they didn’t live together, as Linus looked as if he would need care for some time.

The Healer sent them home with a restorative and a Blood-Replenishing Potion, and Linus began to breathe more easily almost as soon as he had swallowed them. And suddenly Celia was furious. She and René had done this for Remus for so many years, when they would gladly have taken his suffering on themselves or done anything to ease it – but in those days there had been no remedy. And Linus, who had never known what it was to watch your own child bleed and tremble and struggle not to cry as you mended torn skin and muscle, had chosen so cavalierly to experiment on himself. For what? For curiosity.

“What possessed you?” Celia demanded. “What if you had torn yourself to shreds and died before anybody could get in to help you?”

“I did it the safest way I knew how – but I had to know what it was really like. Being a werewolf, I mean.”

“You know what being a werewolf is really like! You’ve been one for a year! Do you think that wanting to bite and kill things is what it’s about? It’s about being human, for God’s sake, and – and fighting to keep hold of that humanity. It is if you’re a decent person, anyway. Besides, what you did is against the law – did you stop to think about that?”

Linus, unwisely, pointed out that Celia had advocated disobeying discriminatory and unjust laws, specifically Dolores Umbridge’s revisions to the Werewolf Code of Conduct, in the Autumn 1994 issue of Magical Ethics Quarterly.

“Very clever of you to have noticed it,” she said acidly. “Damnably clever. You know, this is what I used to hate about other Ravenclaws when I was at school – so much cleverness, so little compassion or common sense.” She looked away, hoping to hide the tears that were threatening to spill down her face, and added, “If all you can think to do is quote Magical Ethics Quarterly at me, I don’t wonder you’re divorced.” She knew she was hitting below the belt, but she didn’t care any more.

Linus didn’t speak for more than a minute. “Celia – I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was going to hurt you like this. I wouldn’t have done it if I had known.”

“No, you didn’t know. You haven’t any idea how lucky you are. A steady supply of Wolfsbane, a job you can work at legally – when so many people are begging and stealing to survive – It makes me sick to think that you could throw it all away on a whim.” She turned to look at him again, and saw that he was sitting on the edge of the bed. “No, don’t get up. You’re not well enough.”

“You don’t want me here.”

“I don’t want you to do any more damage to yourself! How hard is that to understand?”

“I need to go home and feed my cat.”

“I’ll take care of it,” said Celia crossly. “One of us needs to be somewhere else for a while, and it may as well be me.”

 

                                                            *          *          *

Linus woke, some hours later, to find a ball of ginger fur curled up on his chest. Celia was nowhere in sight, but he thought it was a hopeful sign if she had brought Chess over for a visit.

He supposed he ought to seek her out and grovel, but he’d never been good at groveling. Besides, his body ached all over and he was still weak from the loss of blood. He didn’t think he could stand too many more full moons like that, which was probably as well, but if he were single he would almost have thought it was a shame. He thought he remembered moment or two when he had almost been able to hold the tide of rage and pain at bay. Surely there must be something of the man left, even in the grip of the wolf. Why else would werewolves attack themselves, when they would touch no other creature but man? He wondered if he could train himself to keep his mind, if he passed enough full moons without Wolfsbane.

It was a purely academic question, of course; he would never try the experiment again. It had hurt Celia, and he hadn’t meant to hurt her...

He dozed off again, and woke again at the sound of the doorbell. It occurred to him that he didn’t know whether Celia was home to answer it, so he got up, wincing as his robes rubbed against his injuries, and groped his way downstairs.

Celia was standing in the doorway. An elderly man in Muggle clothing stood on the threshold facing her, with a younger man and woman slightly behind him, and two children hanging back at the edge of the garden path. The elder of the two, a boy of about nine, was clutching the little girl’s hand protectively.

“Hello, William,” said Celia, blinking a little. “Er – what a surprise.”

“Your Ministry said that we should go to you,” said the old man stiffly. “We spent the night at one of their shelters, but the place was so full that they were trying to place people with relatives if they could. And so – I’ve come.” He set his jaw and glared at Celia as if defying her to ask him anything more.