Remus Lupin and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Chapter 36: What's In a Name

It took...awhile before actual thoughts started to connect, like pieces from a child's train set slowly relinking itself. He was sitting in his office armchair, staring sightlessly across the room at his desk. He wasn't exactly sure how long it had been since he had returned and mechanically prodded the boggart, glowing belligerently, from trunk to cupboard, and sat down. It had all felt distinctly distant, as if he had been mentally sitting in this armchair the whole time, watching his body stoically going through the motions of what was needed. The fire popped and he looked at it. He must have started that at some point. His hands flexed and he looked at them instead. They were no longer numb, and he could see the deep, purple-red grooves from where he had unknowingly balled his fists, digging in his nails. The pain from them and his bitten arm was like a dull ache on the outside of a glove; not quite present.

Nothing in him wanted to touch the memory of the morning. It felt strangely packaged up, as if it were a self contained quarantine he could look at from the outside, even talk about in vague terms. Almost as if it was a horror story told to him by someone else. He looked at the trash bin next to his desk, where his wolf contaminated sheets and clothes had been stuffed.

The idea that there was something in him that came out and left tangible evidence of its presence behind made him want to dig through his chest and tear it out, like some invasive tumor. The knowledge that those mad eyes were in him, now, in his blood, written in every cell of his body, tainting and contaminating everything he decided to become a part of made him want to just start running and never stop. Not in an emotional way, which was almost more frightening. It wasn't disgust, it wasn't fear or hatred or shame. It was clinical. Passionless. Logical. He wanted to remove himself.

In that moment, it made sense. He had wondered, the first time he encountered a boggart visiting James' house why his was the moon and not a werewolf. Now, in this daze, he knew that the only wolf he had ever seen was in his past, in his nightmares. That fear belonged to the boy whose normal life had ended that night--his human life ripped from him. After that night, he had never seen another wolf, because he was a wolf.

And he was no longer scared of being hurt. Every month, each bone in his body was broken, every sinew shredded and reconnected. This pain he knew. Anyone who had ever looked at him and known every failing and loved him still was dead. This pain he knew. Nearly every moment of the past 12 years had been spent in weary isolation. This pain he knew.

But this thing that answered the moon did not just hurt him. This thing would murder and eat children, children like Thora. Like Harry. This thing broke free and used his body to try to escape captivity and destroy as many bodies and dreams and families and human lives as it could. And then it would sleep and give him the broken shards of these memories to hold until it ripped free the next month and it would never ever go away.

This thing that was as inseparable from him as his own flesh and mind lived in the deepest fears of children and in his own body. And he was lying if he said that he wasn't that thing. He felt it, moving in his depths with his temper, with his own darkness. It would push up beneath his thoughts, still seeking that escape as the moon thinned him until the wolf was just under his skin, staring out of his eyes with that hunger. Without him actively submerging it every moment, it would gladly swallow him as well.

He could lie all he wanted. He could pretend all he wanted. It didn't change what he was.

It wasn't the monster he feared, because the monster was himself. He could hate it, but it wasn't him that had to face it. It was everyone around him. They would look into that murderer's gaze, the way Thora had looked into her attacker's, the way he had looked into his. The way he would never have to look into his own.