Marauders - Always - Part One

Bitten

Remus wished he hadn't taken the Wolfsbane potion. He would have rathered to have forgotten it all. But he knew he hadn't really had a choice but to take it. If he hadn't, he would have lost himself, would have lost his own heart and his own mind and been forfeited to the instincts of the werewolf. Too risky, he'd told himself, as he'd accepted the small violet vial from Sirius's hand earlier that night. The werewolf's instincts would have had him fighting Spencer's newly turned wolf - violently - and the new wolf would have no hope against the more experienced one... So Remus would have to remember in order to preserve his mind, to protect Spencer from himself.

Oh the irony.

And so he knelt there beside Spencer Stewart, sobbing apologies even as the transformation took over his body, the change cracking its way up his spine as the tail sprouted and his snout elongated, growing out of his face as the jaw reconstructed itself and the rows of fur sprouted from him with a sound like a rushing wind over a field of high grass.

Spencer lay on the grass of the magically-created forrest habitat, dying without the support of the machines the muggle hospital had managed to maintain him with for the days since the poisoning had occurred. As Remus's wolfish senses came through, he could smell the fear in the air, emanating from Spencer in waves. It turned his stomach how much like blood and raw meat Spencer smelled. Remus could sense the pumping of his blood, smell the aconite still running its course through Spencer's veins as his heart struggled to pump, the muscle fighting an inevitable loss as it thumped in his chest sporadic and too fast, manic, missing beats.

He stared up at Remus, shock and awe clear, even as his body trembled and seized with the efforts of his breathing, which rasped and rattled with glottal choking, desperate

Once, Spencer had asked about the scars and Remus had jokingly answered that he was a werewolf.

Remus wondered if Spencer was thinking of that moment now, realizing that his friend hadn't been joking.

And now, the werewolf was pinning him down, stepping on his already weakened chest with a heavy paw.

The muscle and sinew and bone of the wolf were strong, whatever they did to Remus himself at the full moon. The wolf was powerful. With the wolfsbane, Remus felt less like a shadow tagging along with the wolf, which was usually how his consciousness felt - even on good moon nights with Sirius and the lads. But the wolfsbane allowed him to be in the forefront, to restrict the control the wolf had, and act fully in charge of himself.

So he couldn't blame the wolf for what he was about to do, couldn't tell himself that it wasn't himself, Remus, that was about to bite Spencer Stewart. It was. It was all Remus. The wolf was - well, it was a bit as though the wolf was imperiused by Remus's consciousness, wasn't it? The wolf's body acting on Remus's command.

It was the wolf's jaw that was clamping around Spencer's shoulder. But Remus that was doing it.

The wolf's teeth that broke the flesh. But Remus that was ignoring the screams as Spencer's voice broke out in the moonlit forrest around them, echoing off distant, invisible walls and the enchanted ceiling.

It was the wolf's venom which poured into the wound, mixed with Spencer's blood, and coursed through his veins. But it was Remus's intention that stopped the human heart within Spencer's chest - and Remus who, for that one moment of cold when the last of the uninfected blood pumped through Spencer's heart and the heart was still, stopped as it was transforming, was tempted to kill and eat.

For a horrid, gutting ten seconds, Remus understood Fenrir Greyback so completely that over a decade later he would have moments of being able to taste the blood in his mouth so clearly that he would spit and immediately set to brushing his teeth, scrubbing away the phantom copper flavor that had risen up.