There is No Cure for Understanding:Save One Person

[RememberTheScar]

There is No Cure for Understanding: Save One Person - A Lupin fic on Coming to terms with yourself

PROLOGUE

He remembered the day it began. It was the last day he was truly able to appreciate the beauty of the world. After that, it all went wrong. A pair of shining silver teeth, hot breath on his forehead, and he was condemned for life. He was in a cage, a diamond cage, beautiful but harsh, and all around he saw the people outside his cage, but they could not see him, and when he saw their faces turned away he felt the pain of being dead. He sometimes contemplated death, and wondered if it would be better than this life. But he pulled through the madness, and so now, years later, he still stood upon the brink, but always watched for a wind that could push him over the edge.

But once a month he paused as he transformed. As his body changed, so did his thoughts. What he was given to sate his lust for death and destruction was not enough. He was the only sacrifice; his blood was the only blood he could ever find. And always he feared for himself. He was no longer a child – a child was one thing that he could not be, ever since that day on Halloween night.

His life could not be an easy life. He would not allow it to be so. But as he grew and attended school, the cloud that had shadowed his gaze passed on, and he learnt to smile again beside his friends. He never told them that he was still scared. But they helped him. Nothing could ever make him so happy – and no one ever did. Save one person. But as his friends betrayed him, died, and disappeared to another unknown world, his depression returned. And he felt the coldness of claws upon his face.

He was Remus Lupin. When his friends departed no one could ever understand him. And no one ever did. Save one person.

[RememberTheScar]

CHAPTER ONE

The wolves were howling, their teeth shining white, whiter than the snow beneath their paws. Their grey fur glistened with icy teardrops and they were painfully thin; you could count their ribs a hundred metres away. The village people called them the phantoms, their voices the laments of the dead; but they were no mere ghosts. They were the watchers, the waiters, the pouncers, the spirits of flesh and bone. They were strong, they lived as one, and none was better than them – for in their territory, there was no higher authority.

I was forced to watch. I, who was once their leader, was enslaved and tortured. Men, wicked men who had weapons and tools and things I did not understand – they changed me. They made me like them. They cast spells and enchantments on me, and they cared not for my pain, only for the betterment of their race. I was subject to their scrutiny for a month. And I became a man. Yet I was always different from them – for I had been a Wolf, the Wolf, and none governed me. I fought and tried to overpower them – but I never could. Except on one night. The last night of my captivity.

It was the moon. Her bright white light, the purity of perfection, was the only thing that could return me to my true self. And I broke out of the skin of a man, and I became the wolf once more. I howled, and in the distance I heard the echoes of my voice and the replies of my kin. I turned on my captors, and they could do nothing, for they were weak and I was strong. The positions were reversed. They fled, and as I pounced I caught the arm of one man, their leader, and I knew he was the leader because it was he who slept closest to the fire at night, and it was he who had the softest furs. I closed my jaws about his wrist, and he screamed – yet it was no longer the weak cry of a man, it was an animal cry. He became like me. And so the curse of the werewolves began.

When Remus woke it was the middle of the night. The star-spun moon hung overhead, yet she was not yet full. He sat bolt upright, his heart thundering against his chest, his body covered with a sheen of sweat. It had been a long time since he had dreamt that dream.

He lay back against the pillow, sighing. He had grown accustomed to the curse after so many years, but when it invaded his dreams, the private place where his thoughts and ideas could reign free, he wished once again that he were just a normal man. He did not expect sympathy – no, this was one thing he did not want at all – but it was the loneliness that really caused his pain. People could not trust him; they feared him; he could not make friends. Indeed when sometimes he came close to making a friend he told them to turn away, he told himself to turn away. And after that all he ever saw was the backs of their heads, their stooped bodies returning into the mist.

He recalled his childhood. Oh, the games they used to play, when his transformation seemed more like a gift than a curse. The Marauders; Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs; Remus, Peter, Sirius and James – pioneers in the art of troublemaking. But that was gone now. He smiled gently at the thought of the four of them, frolicking around the Hogwarts grounds at night. But then the recent past caught up with him, and the spark that had glimmered so briefly in the corner of his eye was gone.

It was that Halloween night which had divided them first with the loss of one of their number. Oh, who could have thought it would be James. He may have been the leader of the group at times, guiding them on, helping and healing. His love for Lily was strong, strong as the stars. Yet he had powerful enemies. And Voldemort was drawn by his lust for their deaths. The three remaining marauders were divided for the first time. And when Sirius was arrested and Peter reported dead, Remus felt truly alone for the first time since he had arrived at Hogwarts.

Sirius’s escape and return and innocence was welcome. But Peter being alive, being the one who had committed wrong, being the one who had broke the Marauders, inspired him to break the Marauders further, to commit a little evil for the greater good. But he escaped, and Sirius was not freed.

So two of the Marauders remained. Sirius, and Remus. But how soon afterwards was this a thing of the past? Too soon. When Sirius fell through the veil with a look of surprise about his face, suddenly Lupin realised. He was the only one left. How soon would it be, until he faced his end, and the Marauders were really gone? How soon?