Nox (The Marauders, Wolfstar, Jily)

9: It's Remus' Time Of The Month

It didn't just brush upon his skin but seeped right through into his veins. It's desire beyond measure and understanding - unnatural, inhuman, and fiendishly so: taking pleasure in the fact and going as far as to flaunt it.

It was all of course beyond him, beyond the boy curled up on the floor, chained to the wall, with cuts on his arms; he was far beyond himself at this point, after all. As much as we all were one with ourselves, there was always a separation, and a cut off point between instinct and opinion, between who we were deep down, and who society had modelled us to be - nature and nurture, and a hidden duality within us all.

Such a duality was stronger in Remus Lupin, hidden away inside him, yet then to come out at full force when it could. He hated this part of him, he hated it with everything he knew, because he had been taught as such, and he had been taught just like that, that this part of him was ever consuming, and that he wasn't so much a teenage boy anymore, just the wolf caged up inside of him.

However, as the night grew darker and the moon rose through the sky, there was no hate within him. Just the pounding of his heart: thumping tremendously in his chest and echoing up his spine to sound out through his head, turning his brain to mush and cutting off every thought that dare to step foot within it, because this was not a time for rational and humanity, this was a time for instinct and havoc, this was the moonlight flowing through his veins like blood, this was him out of his own head, head thrown back, eyes blown wide, and soul floating away from his body as everything inside him began to throb and ache with the release of it all.

His body relaxed into it, like an addict starved and decaying without opium flowing their veins. His mind sought to despise and fight it all up until to very last second, but his body lay out gracefully, and welcomed the moon upon him. His mind was what set him apart, and his body anchored him down, for his body yearned to be free, and knew only to seek freedom in the darkest parts of his mind, for it had grown accustomed to such a bitter taste, of inky blackness consuming the soul, the metallic tang of blood on your tongue, and the question as to whether or not it is your own, the heavy feeling on your eyelids as you let them droop, even with the knowledge that you will be a different man, or perhaps not even a man at all, when you come to open them once more.

He was more than what people thought of him, with intentions both good and bad. He was more than unjust stereotypes, he was more than assumptions and confinement, but yet he was so much more than sympathy, so much more than the boy they'd made him out to be, so much more than books, sweaters, and smiles, but the pair of yellow eyes that have you running from the treeline.

He faded out completely as his body began to properly change, as he truly grew into the monster within. For Remus Lupin did quite literally encompass the notion of hidden demons, whether he liked it or not, because you could hate who you were with every fibre of your being, but you could never ever run from it, well you could try, but there was never any getting away, and you could think of that what you wish, because the fact of the matter was that it wasn't going to change.

As the night grew darker, the wolf grew stronger and pulled at the restraints that kept it tied down to the wall of the Shrieking Shack, locked away in the corner of a nearby village, hidden in plain sight, the howling masked as the tormented wails of spirits rumoured to have live longed ago in the building, when it had been more than a shack, in times where Remus wouldn't have lived long enough to be tied up in within it.

It was superstition and fear, the natural fear of the unknown that kept him alive, that kept him as he was, and stopped him from being taken away at the first notion of there ever being anything wrong, it was the innate belief that everything horrific and tormented had to be long dead and simply trapped here, holding on desperately to something for reasons unexplainable, but of course, the reality was quite different - people were more than the ails that plagued them, people were more than the way they looked in the moonlight, more than the creatures that crawled out of them at night.