Oh! You silly thing
You've really gone and done it now
Oh! You silly thing
You really gone and done it now
Sunday 25th March 1979
Remus was going mad.
That was the only explanation.
Time passed slowly, each second eeked out over weeks - and then hours whooshed by all at once, like missiles, knocking the breath out of him.
They brought him meals, and that was the only way he could measure out his days. No one spoke to him; perhaps they had been warned not to. Perhaps it was part of his proving himself. They looked, though. They stared.
The pack returned every night to sleep - sometimes Livia, Gaius and Castor were there. Other times not. Never Greyback, though sometimes Remus thought he could smell him - but that might have been the madness. After two days in the dark he didn’t trust his senses.
After a week, he trusted nothing.
He was never quite comfortable, always restless and exhausted; pacing until his feet were bruised. He slept little and often; caught between fitful bursts of unconsciousness and insomnia. And he had terrible dreams. Every bad memory squirmed its way up to surface of his mind. Mostly St Edmund’s, but also that summer after fifth year, when he’d been at his loneliest, and hated Sirius.
He grew paranoid, convinced that it was the others - they were controlling his mind, somehow; forcing him to see things he didn’t want to see; things that weren’t there.
Sometimes he dreamed Sirius was dead. Then, when that had wrung all the terror out of him, he dreamed of each of of his friends dying, one by one. Their ghosts visited him, weeping or raging. When he woke up, he never felt like they’d quite gone.
Other times Remus wondered if in fact he was dead, and this was some extremely specifically designed hell.
By the end of the first week, he had lost all sense of shame. He wept, he howled, he keened. He laughed maniacally, or else curled up in the corner and whispered to himself. He tried to have conversations in his head, but it didn’t work the same way as before. Grant’s calming voice transformed into Livia, Sirius into Castor, and Remus was left with no escape at all.
In moments of lucidity, he tried to summon more magic, but it was very hard, and he was so weak.
Sometimes he thought he could do it. One of the others might perform a spell (always wandless; none of them ever did magic the wizard way) to summon something, or illuminate the room - and Remus felt that old stirring of power. But it never lasted long enough.
Finally, Remus’s parents appeared to him - in his head, but also in the cell. Hope was crying - she was still sick, even in death, her face gaunt and haggard. She wore a white shroud, and there was earth in her fair hair - even though Remus knew she’d been cremated.
Lyall was the worst, though; maybe because Remus had no solid basis for him, beyond a few candid photographs. The Lyall his feverish imagination dreamt up was heartlessly cruel, with a plummy, upper-class accent and cold blue eyes.
“Let that animal destroy my wand, did you?” The spindly ghost whispered in his ear, “I should have put you out of your misery, all those years ago.”
While the other ghosts shamed him, made him feel small and sorry, Lyall had only ever made Remus angry. He raved like a madman at his father, and flung himself at the walls of his cage.
