Snow/bound

Snow/bound

    That winter, we hardly ever saw the moon. Snowfall after snowfall blurred our windowpanes to white, and the ceiling of the great hall, when not snowing itself, swirled with dark clouds that moved with the slow undulation of deep water. During mealtime, though, I could see him looking up at the ceiling-sky anyway, eyes cast over with the dullness of worry, a line forming in the middle of his forehead that made him look so much older, a furrow of skin that I wanted to smooth out with my fingers as I joked and cajoled him into laughter. (Too rare, that sound, the soft lupine bark of his laughter.) Even though I knew he could feel it without having to see it, feel the irrevocable waxing of the moon, he could never stop scanning the sky, as bound to its phases as an ocean is, tidal. We joked through our meals, but, in the times just before his transformation, the laughter never reached his eyes, and the deep line never left his brow.

    It was too soon for us to join him, of course. Although James was already shifting back and forth with ease, sometimes nubs of antlers remained on his forehead for hours afterwards, and Peter was still growing tails in all too many unorthodox locations. The shift was coming more easily to me, but then I had more motivation, because Remus had begun to share it with me - not all of it, but the aftermath, either guessing that I knew, or not caring, needing to find comfort in a friend for once, and not in a hospital bed, isolated. In earlier years, he would always go straight to Madame Pomfrey upon his return, but since the snowfalls had begun he had started to come back to our room first. In those silvered early mornings when he came to me, haggard, his body marked with interlacing scratch lines and bite-bruises, I had no words to give him, no easy joke to make him smile. Silent, I would simply lift up the heavy blankets until he had crawled in next to me, and in my arms he shivered with something beyond cold, beyond exhaustion. As I held his gaunt body to mine, the snow on his clothes melted from the warmth of our bodies pressed together, and I could feel the deep indentations in his flesh where his own teeth had savaged him, the fresh scars warm to the touch.

    We lay together in silence, restful, until it was dangerously close to the first bell, and he would slip away from me. In the cold, exposed, the dampness of the bedclothes made me shiver, but the sudden absence of his body made me shiver more. Whatever warmth or comfort was mine to give I gave gladly, freely, but I had not until then felt the particular desolation of an emptied bed, the frustration of not being able to protect someone I loved with wit or fist. As I lay in bed, I shifted my hands to paws, feeling the bristle of hair pushing through skin, the elongation of fingers into claws. Soon, Remus. Soon.

    At breakfast, even after these winter nights of transformation, it was always the same round of laughter and jokes, but the weariness, like age, marked his face with, and, when our eyes met in a moment of quiet, there was an understanding there, an acceptance. If we never spoke of it, it was only because there was no need. We were as connected to each other as he was to the cold oscillations of the distant moon, and I only hoped our bond would one day be the stronger of the two.