Let The Moon Fall

Remus Lupin was born on the fringes of the Muggle world and grew up in the peaceful shadow of the Dales. He never met another person from the magical world until he was eight years old.

His father, a Muggle born Wizard, had left Hogwarts as quickly as possible, married the most non-magical girl he could and found himself a career on the fringe of Wizardry, writing plays for the Wizarding Wireless. They were content to stay at home of a night, content for a small and quiet life on the fringes of a rural village.

Where nothing, really, ever happened.

They were quite pleased with their small son, bringing him home from the local midwife's house and naming him Remus because his mother was a student of Greek mythology and naming him Julian for his Grandfather Lupin. They both hoped quietly in their hearts that he'd not inherit magic, that his father's genes would bypass him and go away gently, leaving them with a son they could play football with and dress up for pictures and send off to the tiny village school.

Remus dashed those hopes when he learned at the age of two to send plates of cake and pudding zooming in his direction whenever he wanted.

When he was four his parents came into the sitting room and found that the cat had somehow sprouted horns.

When he was six he caused a nearby farmer's son to sneeze bubbles for three days, all because the unfortunate child refused to share his toys.

Remus got a stern talking to after this incident. He was not to ever do things like this again. In fact, he was forbidden to leave the house unless he was in the company of either Mummy or Dad, except for school. No more oddness or strangeness of any kind. It simply would not do. The neighbors wouldn't know what to think.

Remus moped around the house and accompanied his mother to market and his dad for walks for a month. They all attended the village church together on Sundays. He was under someone's watchful eye all the time. And the years passed sleepily by.

The Church rector came to dinner one Sunday afternoon. Remus suffered through boring talks of crops and weather and what was new on telly. Just as he was about to ask to be excused, the rector mentioned something that kept him in his seat and raptly interested the rest of the meal.

Wolves, said the rector. They'd killed five of McMidgin's sheep, and the hell of it was, they only seemed to come out once a month. Bloody peculiar. And the bite marks were strange as well, they must be hellishly big, the wolves.

Remus watched his father with bright excited eyes, trying to catch his eye, certain they both knew what the trouble was. His father would say it any minute. Werewolves, he'd say knowingly, and nod at the rector. I recommend a silver bullet.

Remus had spent some happy bedtime story hours looking at the pictures of werewolves and vampires in his father's old school texts, and listening to his father tell stories about the Dark creatures. He knew a werewolf as well as anyone.

But his father never said a word, and later lectured Remus when they were alone about the dangers of saying things of that nature, werewolves, vampires, the whole lot, in front of Muggles. They'd think you were daft. Barmy. Have you sent along to the local psychiatric facility, where like as not you'd get a shock treatment first and be asked questions later. Best not to mention it.

For the first time, Remus grew angry at his father, shouting through tears that he was impossibly different from the other boys, and it was entirely his Dad's fault that he would never fit in in the village.

His father turned white, then his entire demeanor drooped, and he sent Remus off straight to bed.

Later, when his father and mother went to his bedroom to apologize and attempt to put things right, they found his bed empty and a knotted white sheet stretching from the window to the ground.

Remus, at the age of eight, had decided to take matters into his own hands. There was a full moon. He'd see the werewolf himself, and prove to the Muggles that such things existed. That he wasn't crazy.

That he was right.

They found him in McMidgen's dooryard, where he'd somehow stumbled down from the high and lonely place the sheep were kept. He was white and utterly still, and the doctor who they'd roused from his bed to come with them gave them no chance, no hope, of recovery. The blood loss was too great, he said.

His father and mother refused to let the concerned doctor and the McMidgens ring the local hospital (or the coroner) or put Remus in bed. Instead they took him to the only place where he had any chance and they had any hope.

He was in St. Mungo's for months, and he wept bitterly for a small boy when he was told what had happened to him and what he was now.

He'd only meant to take a picture, he told his parents. Proof, something he could show the village. Of course, the flash tipped off the werewolf, and Remus was caught, and bitten, the horror of what he'd seen and experienced wiped from his memory. He was left with nothing but the memory of faint dog barking in the distance, and a smell lingering in his nostrils like copper and heat.

Days flowed unceasingly into one another as he lay in his bed, rumpled sullenly in the white sheets, an exhibit for student Mediwizards who'd never had the chance to study a real, live werewolf up close. They murmured sympathy to his parents, stared at him in dumb silence, or asked high-flown scientific questions of their instructors without really looking at him.

One day, a man showed up among the small crowd around his bed, a man with a lined face, twisting a tweed cloth cap nervously in his hands and staring at eight year old Remus. He lingered after the students and their instructors had moved on to the next curiosity, staring at Remus so long that Remus grew grumpy and uncomfortable and asked the man what he wanted, exactly.

"Ah'm sorry, boy," the man rasped in a hoarse Yorkshire voice. "Only, see, I 'ad to come and see if it was me what done yer. I can't remember much o' what goes on, them nights."

"It was YOU?" Remus couldn't say more, his mind a whirl, remembering the nights he'd spent in fear that the werewolf would return and just finish him off. And here he was, no fairytale beast but a rather ordinary looking man.

His parents entered the room then, talking to a somber-looking Mediwizard, and the man was gone and vanished through the curtains at the far end of the ward before Remus could stop him. He never saw the man again.

Remus became a wolf for the first time on his ninth birthday. And woke the next morning to find a crop of grey hairs sprinkling his head.

From then on Remus only lost his temper when the moon was full.