scared of all the silly things
“It's impossible to protect your kids against disappointment in life.”
I must’ve made an odd sight, I have to admit. A depressed four-year-old wasn’t exactly something you saw every day, and for good reason.
I was solemn, and I cried quietly by myself, both in pain from my injuries and about the events that had happened. The nurses assumed it was over the attack, which they weren’t wrong about, but it was also about the loss of my old life, the way I had died, the guilt I felt, the duties ahead of me.
The crushing burden of living.
If I kept my mouth shut, except to occasionally ask for chocolate pudding, then maybe I could pretend I really was a four-year-old child, albeit one who had faced something terrible.
The nurses didn’t bother me too much, but it wasn’t really malicious the way I’d expected it, me being turned and all that. It was more that they weren’t sure how to talk to me, this odd little child with grief in his eyes and bandages all over.
The nurses in that ward were sworn to secrecy about my condition, but they were morbidly curious. And they were upset, on my behalf. And there was pity, on the fact that my life was ruined.
“So young, to face such a tragedy.” They whispered behind doors, not realising that my new werewolf senses meant I could hear them, even as a very small child. It was fine, I was lamenting my fate as well.
The hospital smelled like itchy green healing magic, blood and other fluids, and of sweat and people. It made my nose twitch something terrible, and it made me irrationally upset that I couldn’t shut out the constant stimulus. My sense were on overdrive, after all.
I’d had headaches- my mother’s side all suffered from them. My grandmother only had to sniff the slightest unpleasant perfume to get a splitting headache, but for my mother, it was overexertion and sound. Mine weren’t migraines, but they could be severe.
But this was something else.
Overstimulation with wolf senses felt like raw rusty nails burning through my skin and temples. When I wasn’t carefully eating, or doing the exercises necessary, I was trying to sleep.
And though it really shouldn’t have helped, the blatant avoidance of people who actually knew Remus grounded me a little. It kept me sane, and I began coming out of my shell. It gave me time away to sort through my memories, my identities, what I planned to do when I got home. It gave me time to honestly cry about my situation and put it a little behind me. I wasn’t feeling great about the life stretching ahead of me, but I was resigned to it.
My parents didn’t visit me, but that wasn’t neglectful of them. Werewolf attacks were always isolated, and my attack was an art in cruelty. They regrew my tendons and bones, had to rebuild parts of my gut. And even then, my survival was so ridiculous that I knew there was some sort of fate/machinations crap involved. So, no visitors, not until I was more than stable.
Werewolves could be born or made, yes, but in general, both were rare. You needed, according to a very old doctor who took the time to check up on my “ferality” two were parents to produce a were child, and those who were turned only really survived if they were older than fifteen, or after puberty.
I was a miracle, and that was largely due to forces I didn’t know pushing me into a life I didn’t want.
Still, there would be lasting effects. You can’t survive an injury like that without some constant drawback. My bones would grow fragile, and if I grew older, then arthritis and osteoporosis were almost certain. Anaemia was also an issue, as was the whole idea that my immune system would be chronically depressed.
They weren’t really supposed to tell me this, but the doctor clearly didn’t care, so I clarified as much as I could. If my parents were as overprotective as the hospital staff made them out to be (and they were right to complain, because my father had threatened to break down the door or something), they might be tempted to keep me away from the more terrible predictions of health, and while I appreciated that in a sense, it also would make things super fucking inconvenient.
Remus Lupin really was destined to die at forty, wasn’t he? The thought made me feel a little relieved, knowing there were less than thirty-six years left for me in this world.
I’m certain that it wasn’t healthy to think like that, but who was going to tell me otherwise?
I had a few favourites in the hospital staff, because if they weren’t going to ostracise me for being a wolf, then charming them would surely be advantageous, if only so that I could come visit them when my health was shitty. I tried to not be demanding or cry too loudly, and would listen quietly if the nurses told me something.
(It helped that I didn’t quite want their attention anyway. I wanted to wallow in peace.)
It worked, somewhat. While no one was bending over to adopt me, the nurses would give me small treats, tell me stories, and make my treatment extra gentle. I was still terribly bored, but the nurses could tell when I was too tired, and no one complained when I inevitably fell asleep to calm voices storytelling.
It wasn’t nice, being at the hospital, but it wasn’t terrible. And not-terrible was pretty good, all things considered.
Inevitably, the day for my release came. I’d been in the hospice for almost a month, and I was to leave because of the full moon.
I was to come back if injured, of course, but most of my external injuries had healed, so while I was sore and struggling with moving, my muscles weren’t shredded meat anymore.
The reason I was nervous on this particular day was that my parents were coming to take me home.
I’ll be honest, emotionally I felt like my heart was being shredded by Greyback himself. I loved my parents, and it felt as if there was no room to love these veritable strangers. But these were Remus’s parents, and they didn’t realize their son had been replaced by an interdimensional traveller, and they deserved to be loved.
They deserved their son, except I wasn’t quite sure I could be that. I was too broken to even consider pretending to love them because something about that made me feel sick in my stomach.
Love was aiming too high, I decided, but respect was something I could do. Maybe even like, though it would take time. I would try though, and trying was always the hardest part.
And I awaited them in my room, a nurse’s voice echoing in the halls. I could scarcely breathe.
“He’s right here, the darling. He’s been such a good patient, not fussy at all.” A female voice murmured something...grateful? In agreement? But three sets of footsteps echoed through the halls.
I wondered about these people. I had the faintest outlines in my head of Hope, of long honey golden hair and softness, of Lyall’s thundering voice and stern grey eyes. Remus was gone but these outlines remained, and it occurred to me I could pretend to have contracted a sudden case of trauma-induced amnesia if things went south.
I waited, hands wringing neat grey sheets between my tiny fingers. I worried about all sorts of things, like maybe they’d look into my eyes and see a young adult instead of a child, or maybe they’d see I was a monster, damaged beyond control. Maybe Remus Lupin’s parents hated him for being a wolf. After all, Lyall Lupin was a loud supporter of Werewolf Regulation, and the same laws he had passed through the Ministry now bound me as well.
The thought brought up a wave of bitterness, but I calmed myself, because four-year-olds don’t debate the finer points of how one’s actions hurt their children, and because my four-year-old body was more prone to crying than I was.
They enter the room.
And something in my head clicks, oddly enough.
A little voice whispers, Mam. Tad. And I shiver, the little boy’s voice whispering in greater and greater intensity. Mam, Tad, Mam, TadMamTadMamTadMam-
Stop, I thought. Please stop.
And then I looked up at them, and then I realise that Remus wasn’t entirely gone, was he?
Because I felt a rush of Remus’s love for them, and then I loved them too.
I can’t even describe it, except maybe as a sort of weaponized love or extreme fondness. I looked at my ‘parents’ and fell in love with them.
Not as in...romantically, because that would be gross as fuck, but as in I felt something slide into my place, my little eye motes clicking as I realize the extent of affection I Remuswe have for them.
This wasn’t just a pair of strangers.
These were my parents. The second pair, but important to me Remusus.
And look, I loved my mother, in my past life, and I adored my father. I love them, present tense, so much that it hurts because I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell in being with them again.
But this? This was something equal to that. Samirah loved Arshia and Rajal, and Remus loved Hope and Lyall, and together we loved both sets. Encompassing, entirely, love-
Hope’s face was an art in heartbreak, her mouth trembling. Her fingers twitched as if she wanted to touch me but was afraid of hurting me. Lyall stood beside her, face stony but eyes full of pain.
“Annwyl?” She whispered, and the boy in my head sang.
Darling.
And to my utter mortification, I burst into tears. Choked up tears, snotty, ugly tears and she rushed forward, holding me tight, pressing my head into her neck. Remus was wailing in my head in rapid, rapid Welsh, maybe, and I was clinging to her.
I couldn’t help it, I was only four years old, physically, and this is my mother from another dimension and she’s cradling me, the same way my mom used to do it and it’s been so long and-
Remus pressed us close to her, and I continue to sob, shoulders shuddering at the force of my tears. I didn’t want-
I didn’t want to love them-
Because they didn’t protect me from the worst event of my life, thus far, and they weren’t there and I knew, I knew it wasn’t their fault but it didn’t stop be for being incredibly upset about it, but I shoved it down into the deeper parts of my heart because they were here now, weren’t they?
My mother balanced me on her hip as she stood up, and I ignored everything, everyone, even Lyall. Hope was keeping me tethered like a kite string and she smelled like sweat and garden soil and typewriter ink and I didn’t want to exist-
The discharge process might’ve stretched out for hours or could’ve taken mere seconds, but I didn’t care and I didn’t know because I spent that time holding onto Hope, sniffling.
To her credit, Hope only pressed me closer, even when we left the hospital by Floo to the Lupin Estate.
A lot of Wizarding Houses, I think, have names. Like the Burrow, Grimmauld Palace. But my mother was a muggle, and I was a baby, so the Lupins kept it simple.
And honestly, I didn’t know what to expect, but we walked into a well-furnished living room, and I had to mentally reassess some things.
So, adult Remus Lupin was impoverished, but the house seemed well decorated, well maintained. A typical middle-class family’s house, no paint peeling, no doors hanging off the frames. Comfortable.
So had the Wolfsbane Potion been the thing to bankrupt Remus, or was the war enough to do that? What had happened to this house? Had the Deatheaters burnt it down? Did the Wizarding World have a concept of insurance?
I snorted internally. The place didn’t even have ambulatory services- expecting insurance was a bit much.
The Remus-in-my-head gushed about things in Welsh, which I could understand after some trouble, but his muscle memory and leftover spatial memory was enough for me to instinctively know where things were. For example, my room was three doors down the hall, to the right.
Lyall gave me an inscrutable look, before going to the other end of the house. The study, came a whisper.
I tugged on Hope’s sleeve, pointing to the hall that housed my room.
“O, i'ch ystafell? Efallai y dylech chi aros yma heddiw…” She trailed off, looking at me. I froze as Remus-in-my-head translated instinctively.
She was saying I should stay with her today. I shook my head, pointing again, and she sighed, carrying me to my room, gently placing me on my bed before pulling up the sheets.
“Gwell i chi fod yn gorffwys, un bach. Mae eich iechyd yn peri pryder.” She gave me a look, and I made a face.
She wanted me to rest? But resting was all I’d done for a month! She kissed me on the forehead and told me to call if I needed anything before heading back to the kitchen.
Part of me didn’t want her to leave, because again, four-year-old, but the adult part of me was slightly miffed at being tucked in. I tried to shift my jelly legs to be more comfortable.
Well. Maybe she was onto something, with the whole resting thing.
I had all the intentions of staying up, and figuring out why the hell Remus was in the back of my head, and I did, for a while. Lupa had said Remus had died, so were his instinctive memories just the bits left behind? I hoped so because it hadn’t ever occurred to me that my parents would be speaking a language other than English.
(I wondered if Lupa had lied to me about Remus to appease me. If she had, and it turned out that the real Remus was in my head the entire time, no power on Earth would stop me from jumping down a flight of stairs and breaking my neck. I was not a thief.)
But I did, sadly, fall asleep, in a bedsheet that smelled a bit stale for disuse. I was woken up when the sun began setting by Lyall, who was taciturn.
He picked me up and walked briskly to the outside, where we walked down into a cellar of sorts. I swallowed because it was dark, and I knew what was coming.
This was the dark hole I’d transform in.
I was placed on the ground in the empty cellar as my father in this life buried four silver coins into four corners. He did a quick spell and I could feel the electric connections from the wards. It stung against my skin, like a slight abrasive, and I knew I couldn’t pass the lines set for me.
Tomorrow, I would have silver induced burns, wouldn't I? I wondered if even baby werewolves mutilated themselves.
“Remus, I will come to get you in the morning. This is only a precaution, and you won't be able to leave the room. Father will come back, okay? It's only for safety.” I nodded, slightly relieved that he spoke in English. Lyall’s eyes softened and he patted my shoulder in an emotionally constipated way. I gave him a sad smile, and he walked out the square and climbed back up the stairs, giving me one last look before climbing out the cellar and shutting the flat doors.
He didn’t tell me what was coming, perhaps not to scare me. But I knew, and it didn’t hurt any less.
I hugged myself, waiting for my bones to melt away.
I closed my eyes.