Romulus
February 15th, 1965
Full Moon
Hope Lupin
The frog, unsuspecting, hops along the bank of the small creek a few miles into the woods surrounding the Lupin’s little farm. The two boys fail spectacularly at being quiet as they attempt to sneak up on the creature, playfully shoving one another in attempts to catch it first. Hope sits on a tree stump a few paces away, watching her sons in amusement.
Remus gets to the frog first, snatching it up in one fist, but Romulus’ shout of annoyance startles him, and the frog slips away, hopping quickly with long springs across the bank before jumping into the water.
“Hey!” Remus whines. “I had it, fair and square.”
“No square if you couldn’t keep it,” his brother stumbles over the words, only four years old and missing a front tooth, but Remus understands them nonetheless, and huffs. He begins to stomp back over to their mother, who’s laughing.
“He’s got a point, Cariad,” she tells him, tapping a finger on his nose. “There are plenty of frogs all over the place, enough for both of you to catch, but remember not to hurt them, and to let them go if they struggle.”
“I don’t wanna anymore.” He sits down beside the stump, burring his face in the hem of her dress while Romulus continues to search for more creatures to catch.
“Alright, it’s nearly dark, you lot,” comes Lyalls voice from a few paces away, the rustling of bushes coming with his heavy footsteps. “It will be nightfall by the time we get back to the house, and we shouldn’t be out tonight.”
“No one lives out here for quite a ways, Lyall, it’s perfectly secluded,” Hope tells him, though she stoops down to pick up Remus, who’s fallen asleep against her leg. He squirms and makes a noise of annoyance before setting his head onto her shoulder and drifting back off. She smiles slightly and kisses his hair. Lyall takes hold of Romulus’ hand and pulls him away from the cluster of caterpillars he’d collected, following behind Hope back to the house.
“That’s why it’s the perfect place for creatures to settle in and come out at night,” he responds to Hope. “Especially on a night like tonight.”
He doesn’t need to specify for Hope to know that he means the full moon. He’s always growing paranoid around this time of the month, watching ever more closely over their children and being far more protective of her. She knows he’d prefer to live safely in a more populated area, but she enjoys their quiet little life on her parents’ old farm. And there are plenty of protective ward up around the perimeter to keep them secure.
They’re nearly back within the wards when it happens.
A loud and long howl sounds far too close to them for comfort, and Lyall stops dead in his tracks. “Run,” he says, shoving Romulus’ hand into Hope’s and drawing his wand. Hope doesn’t wait, and does as she’s told, leaving her husband behind on the outskirts of their property in favor of getting her sons to safety.
As soon as they’re within the wards, she puts Remus down and ushers the boys closer to the house, turning back to scream for Lyall. There are flashes of light coming from where he stands, the moon illuminating the ground enough for her to make out the figure barreling towards him, dodging the spells Lyall is flinging at it.
It’s larger than a bear, humanoid though it runs on all fours, and the sounds of its growls are bone chilling.
There’s a moment where Hope thinks Lyall is going to be killed right before her eyes, when the beast lunges, though at the last second it leaps right over him with little effort and continues at a dead sprint right towards her.
No, towards her boys.
She holds her breath for a moment, then turns to grab both of them and run into the house, but she’s too slow. The wolf howls, louder and more powerfully than the last time, and crashes into the wards. There’s a pulse in the air that even she feels, and she knows the magic protecting them has shattered.
She’s knocked to the ground as Lyall shouts in alarm when the beast crashes past her.
It happens in a moment. She hears Romulus screaming, Remus crying, Lyall yelling, the beast snarling, and then it’s over. The wolf has done whatever it’s come for, and retreats back into the woods. She gets up and rushes for her children, finding both of them on the ground, but Remus is bleeding heavily through his shirt, the fabric torn and sticking to his skin with the blood.
“DID IT BITE HIM?” She hears Lyall screaming as he runs to them. “HOPE! DID IT BITE HIM?” He’s panting when he gets to them, dropping to his knees beside Remus and casting Lumos to examine the wound. The imprint of a jaw with razor sharp teeth is red and inflamed, two rows of open would oozing blood on Remus’ side. Lyall yells in rage and grief.
Hope pushes her husband’s hands away from the wound. “can you heal it? Lyall, he’s in pain. Can you heal it?” she asks frantically.
“There’s no cure.” His voice is weak and devastated.
Panic sets in, for a brief moment Hope thinks she’s going to lose her son right here and now, but then she realizes that he means. “No, not the condition. Just the wound. Close the wounds.”
His hands shake as he attempts to do so, but she knows he’s never been the best at healing more than the bumps and scrapes the boys usually get.
“Come on, Cariad, let’s get you inside,” she says gently to Remus, scooping him up in her arms. Lyall follows her with Romulus held tight in his own.
“Ow.” They hear Romulus say. Lyall puts him down quickly to check him all over, finding a gouge in his arm.
“Oh Annwyl,” Hope gasps, still tending to Remus on the couch, a first aid kit now in hand to heal what Lyall couldn’t. “Did it scratch you?”
Romulus shakes his head. “Tried to bite me. It was his tooth.”
Deafening silence falls over them. With a shaking hand, Lyall casts a healing charm on the wound and kneels down to press his forehead to the boy’s hair. Hope goes back to giving Remus some pain meds, before offering them to Romulus as well.
She puts the boys to bed as Lyall replaces the wards around their house, reinforcing them with likely every spell he knows.
“You know what this means, Hope,” Lyall says later as they both lay wide awake in their own bed. “Their lives are over.” He sounds devastated. But Hope isn’t.
“No,” she says with no small amount of determination. “Their lives are just the same as they always were. Except one night a month, and we’ll figure out how to deal with it.” Her tone leaves no room for arguing, which Lyall must realize, as he only sighs before turning over. Hope knows he won’t get a wink of sleep, and neither will she.
She knows the prejudice that the Wizarding world has against werewolves. She’s seen it in her husband’s own eyes when he speaks about his work with magical creatures. To her, her boys only have a condition that she’ll figure out how to manage. On her own if she has to.
The beast that attacked them tonight is the monster. Not because of what they are but because of what they’ve done. But Remus and Romulus are children. They’re her innocent baby boys. They don’t hold the same hatred that adults do for certain things. Romulus proved that tonight, Hope realized, when he referred to the werewolf as ‘he’ and not and ‘it’ as she’d been thinking in her own head.
If she has to burn the world so that her sons will never face the same hatred the rest of their kind does, she’ll do so with her conscience clear. If Lyall treats them any differently now, she’ll burn him with it.
March 17th, 1965
Full Moon
Hope Lupin
The first full moon is likely going to be the worst, Lyall warns her. Remus and Romulus won’t understand what’s happening, despite their attempts to explain lycanthropy to them.
Hope had nearly broken into tears when Romulus had asked if they were monsters now.
“No, Annwyl,” she’d told him. “It’s what you do that makes you who you are. You two are so very brave and kind, my little heroes. This is going to be very hard for both of you, but I know you’ll do so well.”
She leads them down into the cellar, which they’ve emptied out and placed numerous pillows and blankets across the floor in preparation for tonight. Tucking them into bed, though she knows it won’t last, she kisses each of their foreheads, and retreats back outside.
“Are we sure locking them together is safe? They won’t hurt each other?” She asks Lyall.
“They’ll likely recognize each other as pack, so no,” he responds. “Besides, we’ve got nowhere else to separate them. Once they’re older and bigger I’ll have to put magical wards on this cellar, as it is.” He locks the door with a thick and heavy padlock, pulling Hope by her hand inside. “We’ve just got to get through one night every month.”
She can hear they’re screams as they begin to turn, the screams of agony then morphing into something halfway like howls, then into howls altogether. Lyall wouldn’t let her sit outside the cellar door, claiming it would only antagonize them if they could smell her. She refuses to believe that they’d ever hurt her, even if it’s foolish.
At some point, very early into the night, the howls begin to sound pained and scared, but also angry. She wonders what might be happening, but Lyall assures her that they’re probably just scared and still hurting from the transformation. They’re probably growing restless as the hours go by. Eventually, one of them stops whining, and Lyall dismisses it that one of them just fell asleep. Hope knows something is deeply wrong.
As soon as the moon is set and she hears the pained cries of the return transformation, she sets off at a dead sprint to the cellar, dread creeping up on her quickly as she realizes that she only hears one of the boys crying.
Panic is beginning to overtake Lyall as well, she can tell, because he wastes no time in unlocking the cellar and nearly ripping the door off its hinges with the force he uses to fling it open. She doesn’t get a chance to see inside before he’s turning around and pushing her back several paces, pulling her into him and holding her against his chest as a broken sob wracks through his entire body. And she just knows.
Hope’s fingers tremble as she runs them through Remus’ hair, watching the water on the floor of the shower become pigmented with red. Lyall had tended to his wounds as soon as they got him out of the cellar, and sent Hope inside with him to clean him up, while he cleaned up…
She can’t think of it, not with Remus here with her. He hasn’t spoken a word since he was brought back inside. There’s a blank stare frozen on his face, and she realizes with horrible pain that at barely five years old, he understands the gravity of what’s happened. That’s what she’s calling it. Something that happened, not something he did. Even with the loss of her child settling itself deep into her bones, she doesn’t think of her living one as a monster. Fenrir Greyback is to blame for this, for every bit of it.
She hums lightly to him as she washes his and brother’s blood from his body, dressing his wounds and putting him in warm pajamas, carrying him to bed. She can’t look at the other bed across the room. Just a few minutes more she has to stay strong for Remus, then she can fall apart in the solitude of her own room.
“Mam?”
“Hm?” she hums in response, not trusting herself to speak.
He grips the blankets so fiercely that his knuckles are bone white. She gently uncurls his fists, so he doesn’t hurt himself any further.
Remus takes a shuddering breath. “I don’t feel like a hero.”