Irony

He had quite liked wolves, once.

As a founding member in the early 1960s of the English half of the Lycanthropy Cure Research Unit (URTL, or Unité des Loups-garous, on the other side of the Channel), he had begged to be a member of the team that studied wolves - regular, ordinary, Muggle-world wolves - for evidence of how their natural characteristics might help in developing new treatments for lycanthropes. The team working on what twenty years later would turn out to be Wolfsbane Potion was the high-profile segment of the Unit, developing something that sounded acceptable to nearly all wizards: a potion that could make a transformed werewolf retain his mind and act more or less rationally. Except for those few wizards who would prefer to see all werewolves killed immediately or sent off to a preserve, like the dragons, most could see the utility in simply making them less dangerous.

Gerry Lupin's team was the one no one ever heard about. His team worked under a man known to much of the British wizarding world as Potty L'Argonne, although his students called him simply Potiphar. His brightest (and possibly his only) British former pupil headed up the team located in a remote and magically disguised part of the Hebrides, where they kept a transplanted pack of wild wolves and observed them day and night. Their goal, backed up by L'Argonne's team near Rouen, was to identify what their teacher called la magie du loup and tie it to the magic that controlled humans. The French team's aim was to take apart the human-to-wolf magical transformation and use this information to weave a new spell that would cancel it. Most of the wizards and witches in the world, who had grown up knowing for a dead certainty that there was no spell that could undo the bite of the werewolf, would have thought them insane and possibly dangerous. Most of the werewolves would have thought worse.

The team in Rouens drew from a pool of volunteers in those days, lycanthropes from the Continent who didn't mind being observed in their monthly transformations for what they thought was another part of the potion project. The volunteers transformed in individual cages while researchers cast webs of silent spells that attempted to chart every piece of the transformation, from the shred of magic that made eyes turn to yellow to the shred that made claws burst from the digits. From these scraps of information, gathered slowly and imperfectly over long years, they hoped to weave their reversal spell.

Gerry never knew exactly what had gone wrong. The most he ever heard was that one of the team there, a man called Chretien, had taken "initiative" and attempted to cast a partial magical reversal spell on a werewolf named Werner during his transformation. Instead of preventing his eyes from yellowing, the spell blinded the werewolf entirely, blotting out both his eyes and turning them to unseeing black discs. Its effects did not wear off when Werner became human again in the morning.

Gerry did not know what Werner had been told about the cause of his blindness, but whatever it was, it seemed he did not believe that it couldn't be blamed on his keepers. The following month, almost none of the regular volunteers arrived to be observed. Werner had gotten to them somehow.

The month after that, only three volunteers arrived, but owls delivered forty-seven threats in eight languages against the research team and its facility. Most were variations on the theme of "we will tear out their eyes and see how they like it." The team from Scotland were summoned to help defend the facility, but it was too late. When morning dawned the night after the full moon in Rouens, most of the researchers there were dead and the others, including L'Argonne, were missing.

When he heard the news, Gerry went out to the protected observation point that they used to watch the wolf pack in its den. Whether it was the devilry of the full moon he never knew, but he found that morning a tragic sight. There had been a new struggle for dominance over the pack during the night, and the winner - a lean, straggly wolf they had named Morag amongst themselves - had killed her former rival and all the rival's young cubs. Gerry managed at first not to be sick, but then he saw that Morag had - accidentally, most likely - killed one of her own cubs as well and left it abandoned in a pile with the other dead.

No one knew what had happened to Werner or the other European werewolves he had influenced, but somehow the incident was reported as a single scandalous example of wizards testing unsafe spells on confined werewolves, and not as a part of an ongoing project with a facility in Britain. Since there were no werewolves and no outsiders invited to Gerry's facility, they were not terribly worried about being found. Not until some of the wolves somehow got free, and the Muggle newspapers began carrying suspicious mentions of locals and holidaymakers being attacked by wolves in the Hebrides. Wolves that were once or twice over the months joined by a particularly fearsome wolf that at least one Muggle survivor claimed had appeared to be blind.

This news was troublesome for many reasons, not the least of which was that their wolves - the ordinary wolves - appeared to be attacking without provocation and without hunger. Although Gerry was not deceived about the dark and wild side of the wolf's nature, he knew that they were not monsters and did not often behave this way. In fact, images of wolves could be found throughout the Lupin home, and the library contained references to them in legend and lore as well as Muggle tomes on their biology and behavior. Gerry had even named his son after the ancient child rescued and suckled by a she-wolf - not the proud one, the fratricide who founded Rome, but his doomed brother. Remus.

Gerry would later spend long hours pondering the fact that he had named his child after the boy saved by the wolf and killed by the man.

He did meet the wizard called Fenrir Fourruredegris - Gerry had wondered often whether the name might be a nom du guerre - once before the fateful night. The man claimed to have been told the location of the facility by one of the missing French researchers from the URTL before his death. Afterwards, Gerry considered with a detached sort of horror that this was very likely to be true, in a way. Fourruredegris said little to him during his brief visit to the wolf observation area, but on his way out he had whispered intently, "Pleine lune ce soir, Gerard Lupin." Full moon tonight.

Gerry never learned how the wolf got inside the wards he had reinforced that very afternoon, or how, in the alternative, he managed to lure seven-year-old Remus out of the house and away from the wards. Gerry didn't sleep that night, but the sound of the wolf's howl woke him from even his exhausted reverie beside the front door. He grabbed his wand from his pocket before even leaving the house, although he would not need it.

Remus was not screaming or crying, but lying limp and pale on the ground while the wolf gnawed almost teasingly on his shoulder. The wound was already deep and the top of Remus's white nightshirt was soaked with blood. When the wolf saw Gerry, it threw back its head and howled. Then it rose almost onto its hind legs, tossed the boy at his father, and ran off silently into the woods.

Remus didn't wake for almost an hour, which was probably a mercy from his point of view. Gerry lied through his teeth and told the hospital that a wolf from the ordinary pack had attacked his son - time enough to deal with the Registry and all that other horror if Remus lived. When he lived.

Gerry Lupin never set eyes on Fourruredegris again in person, but it wasn't long before the man had attracted followers and his photograph had made the Daily Prophet. He was called Greyback now, but Gerry had no doubts about his identity.

In the end, he wondered whether the boy's name might have made a target of him - his first name even more than his last. Foolish Lupin's boy, named to honor the monster within, made to carry his name like a scar throughout the rest of his life. Remus didn't seem to mind that part of it, really. Certainly he had enough other things to worry about. But every time Gerry saw the wretched scar that covered his son's shoulder, the place where the skin would never return to its original color and boy-smooth texture, he heard that evil voice whispering in his ear. Pleine lune ce soir, Gerry.