Time Flew
Remus is 13 by the time he meets a wizard his age.
By then, he knows they aren’t to be trusted. Any of them.
Even the man who had helped him with his wand turned around and tried to trap Ricky during the full.
He’d been planning on forcing him into a fighting ring.
By 13, Remus knows that he might be a beast, but he isn’t a monster.
Wizards are the true monsters.
They lock up werewolves in cells in the Ministry of Magic. Force them onto registries. Deny them jobs, education, healthcare. Kill them for sport. All while pretending it is the wolves they need protecting from and not the other way around.
Alan brings the pack to Scotland in the winter, to a small village where they rent a couple of rooms to hide from the worst of the winter snowstorms.
They can also make a bit of money working in the logging camps near the base of the mountains.
Stay in the inn and find out what is new in the wizarding and muggle worlds.
Hogsmeade.
It is the first time Remus sees Hogwarts. His father had gone there. He hadn’t talked about it very much, just rare memories with his schoolmates.
Alan tells him not to go near the school, and Remus obeys.
He has no reason to go see something he isn’t allowed to have.
Of course, the students come down from the school on the weekends. Long black robes and scarves from the different houses around their necks.
Remus doesn’t have a set of robes. He’s got a coat that he bought from a rummage sale and a pair of mittens he refuses to wear after Killiam tells him he looks like a little kid in them.
One such weekend, a couple weeks after Christmas, Remus is standing outside the Hog’s Head with a cigarette between his icy fingers. If Alan catches him with it, he’ll cuff his ear and give him a long boring talk. Remus doesn’t care. He hasn’t been a kid in a really long time.
“Aren’t you cold?” A voice cuts through his fog.
Remus had been outside for over an hour. The moon is tomorrow and his body is like a furnace.
He’s wearing his coat, but he doesn’t even have it buttoned up.
The voice belongs to a boy his age. Or at least Remus thinks they are the same age.
The boy is handsome, with sharp features and long black hair. His lips form a perfect cupid’s bow and his eyes are bright.
Remus ignores the feeling low in his stomach.
And ignores the boy.
From the red and gold scarf around his neck, he is a student.
A wizard.
Not to be trusted.
“I’m serious,” the boy says, coming closer. Too close.
Remus stops leaning against the wall and drops his cigarette in the snow, stamping it out with his boot.
“I’m fine.” Remus tries to brush him off.
“Not about the cold. My name is Sirius. Sirius Black.” He introduces himself in that annoying impeccable manner that Casey imitates when they watch the Queen speak on the telly.
Black. Remus knows that name.
The boy's father, or uncle maybe, had recently asked the Wizengamot to require all werewolves to spend the full in a Ministry cell.
He had called them “appropriate accommodations” in his pitch. Alan had crumpled up the article and thrown it in the fire.
“Good for you,” Remus sneers, shouldering past the boy.
“Wait- I didn’t mean to offend you,” Sirius Black says, grabbing Remus’s wrist.
Remus isn’t sure why it makes him stop in his tracks. Probably because no one else has touched him in a very long time. No one that isn’t also a wolf anyways.
“Not offended, just not interested.”
“Well how do you know that? All you know is my name,” Sirius Black defends himself.
“It's enough.”
And then Remus stalks away from the handsome boy with the posh manners and dangerous surname.