waxing crescent moon (i)
waxing crescent moon (i)
🆂🅴🆃 🆈🅾🆄🆁 🅸🅽🆃🅴🅽🆃🅸🅾🅽🆂 🅾🆄🆃 🆃🅾 🆃🅷🅴 🆆🅾🆁🅻🅳
There are sounds, distant, that he later remembers.
“-stitch up that wound, cauterize with the needle, it’s still torn-”
“-have to reinforce the bones-”
“-poor, sallow thing, that beast-”
“-he’s coming up again, increase the potency!”
He remembers, later, but he doesn’t understand for quite a while.
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Her first thought, when her mind surfaces from murky waters, is that it was all a horrifying dream. She can almost convince herself Drew’s nearby, the bed heavy with his weight, or that Aasia is sitting next to her, soft hand petting through her hair. She can almost pretend everything’s okay.
(Actually, no. Her first thought was that the bed was too soft and that the air felt oddly hospital-like, but once her mind helpfully began to fill in some of the gaps of her intense fever dream, she understood why she may have ended up in a hospital. Hallucinations weren’t generally a sign of mental stability, were they?)
She opens her eyes, or tries to, anyway. The light is blinding, intense, and she whimpers in pain. It feels like someone’s stabbing a knife into her eye, and it’s wholly unpleasant. It isn’t helped by the fact that her extremities feel rather…floaty and oddly loose.
It takes her quite a while to scrounge up the courage to slowly open her eyes again, and it takes a few tries and a lot of blinking and tearing up to make out the room from where she’s laying down. Her vision clears slowly, but what she sees alarms her.
Her first thought is to wonder why her friends aren’t in the hospital with her. This isn’t an unfounded concern, considering their behavior that time when she had broken her ankle. But then she realizes she has more immediate concerns.
Her skin is pale, and her fingers are small and lean instead of stocky. She sets her hand back down on the blanket and stares blankly at the ceiling. It matches the bare walls and doesn’t help her dispel the idea that this is a persistent hallucination in the slightest.
And then she picks ‘her’ hand again, and some feeling of familiarity flashes within her. Huh. The little boy’s hands, she marvels. She remembers how they looked, bloodied and torn up, clinging to her shirt. She wonders, distractedly, at the smallness of the hand.
She closes her eyes again, hoping she’d wake up for real soon. When she had her legs again, at least. She rather likes having legs. Almost as much as having fingers.
She dreams of nothing. She dreams of dull, blackened earth, blood, and gleaming teeth.
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She wakes up and knows she is dreaming again. She remembers the woods, the dark forest, and not much else. She remembers a pale boy, his dark eyes, and she has to close her eyes before she begins crying.
Everything is just so confusing, and there’s this dull, distant ache. She doesn’t shift, tries to stay still, because something tells her she’s injured and it will hurt if she rips something.
She’s not in the same room. The lights are dimmed, golden balls encased in glass, and the sight is so odd that she stares at it, dumbfounded, for a while. Another weird, lucid dream, then. She wondered when she’d wake up, but she settled down silently for now. The golden orbs are rather lovely.
She then reacquaints herself with her hands. She’s expecting her dark-skinned digits, scars on the knuckles and wrist. She expects the dot on her left palm from that one time in kindergarten where she got her hand stuck in the swing and got a scar for it.
But they’re still pale, still small, and for the first time in this bizarre experience, a chill travels its way down her spine. She swallows, wincing as it tugs at something, and keeps watching the golden lamps.
She’s dreaming. She’s dreaming of golden lights and dark, shadowy forests and unimaginable pain, and she’s pale and white in this dream, but it’s still a dream. She’s going to tumble back down into the darkness, and when she wakes up for the third time (because third times a charm), she will see one of her friends sitting by her bedside. She will see a doctor, be in a modern hospital bed with the buttons that shift the back up and down, and not this iron wrought bed. Not this place.
She will wake up, and everything will make sense again.
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There are tree branches whacking against the window of her room, the moonlight casting the oddest, eeriest shadows. The branches are gnarled and old in a way that reminds her of something, and she stares at her hands.
Third time. The illusion should’ve broken, and the drugs should’ve been reduced.
She has been quietly shutting up any of her doubts, hoping that it was the drugs in her system that made everything so fucking weird, but-
A small, scared voice pipes up. But what if…
She shuts it down. There is no need for any of that.
But. What if it wasn’t the drugs? What if there were no drugs, and this was all…real?
But what is real? She doesn’t know.
She tries to think, tries to piece together her mind. She was disposing of the garbage after a party. It was almost sunrise, and by all means, she should’ve been out and back to her bed in roughly ten minutes. She’s done this before, and it was almost daylight. The sun should have been rising by the time she was climbing up the stairs.
But there was something out there, and it was too (familiar) alarming for her not to at least call the police. And it hadn’t been a stray dog, or (god forbid) a rapist, but a boy.
The boy was bleeding. The boy had her eyes.
She knew that boy. She’d never met him, never even seen him, but in that split second, it was as if something in her recognized him, knew him. It was like…
It was like seeing her face in the mirror. It was like seeing herself, as discomfiting as the feeling was.
There are things that don’t add up, like the woods and the running and the frantic, panicky feeling that rose up within her. The blood and the beast and the boy, who she pushed…forward.
Something weird is going on. Something odder the average coincidence, something almost creepily serious is happening but she can’t make heads or tails of it.
Her hands. Her wet face. His hands. His wet face.
Something clicks within her, and she lifts up the hands to her face.
Pale. Thin.
Clinging to her. Dirty fingernails.
The way everything jarred out of place, the way she ended up under the bush, the way the- the beast-
Oh.
So it had been real.
(What did that mean?)
She blinks and then watches as the branches cast shadows over her blanketed body. She observes the way the bed seems huge. The way her legs are thin and small underneath the sheet.
“Fuck,” she whispers. And then she says it again, with great feeling.
The boy’s hands. A boy’s hands she was wearing. A boy whose face she was then (by extension) wearing.
“Fuck.”
(Was this what they called an out-of-body experience?)
Panic swells up in her, and then it gets really, really hard to breathe. She has a moment to marvel at how panic attacks were consistent between different…bodies(?) before trying to calm herself down, now that the drugs were wearing off and she could feel the still healing wounds in her abdomen, shoulder, and chest.
She digs her blunt nails into her palms, and it doesn’t help exactly, but it does shock her breathing back into an acceptable range. Her heartbeat is still a bit too fast, and she’s all sweaty and unbelievably exhausted, but she’s okay-er than she was a moment before.
Fuck.
She was…what the fuck had happened? She was living in the city, with a metro system and sewers. But the boy had the same eyes as her, somehow, and then they’d been running from something, a beast or a monster of evil nature. and they’d been in these dark, twisted woods. Woods that didn’t exist in America, ever, especially not in the heart of the city.
Her city. She had been running, and she had felt this great impulse to rescue the boy, and when she couldn’t run any longer, she had...
She had pushed him away, and reality had warped. He had disappeared.
He’d vanished.
Oh god, that was uncomfortably close to the whole ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ shtick, wasn’t it? Had she killed him? She didn’t mean to, of course, but they weren’t getting anywhere, and heaven knows she’d been raised by a mother who was morally flexible. She didn’t mean to vanish him, but that’s what had happened. She’d sent him off to, to the next life? To the beyond? And she had taken his place, taken his body.
(Accidentally.)
She didn’t even know who he was.
And she certainly regretted it, but part of her was so numb to it all because it didn’t make sense! Why was he there, why was she the one to find him, where did the fucking wolf come from, and why…why did the child have her eyes?
And then the the thing, hunting him…it had mauled her. And now she was in the hospital.
Except it was a weird hospital, and her head hurt from trying to piece things together, and it was nighttime, of course, it was, so maybe it was irresponsible, but she decided to rest for a bit longer. It couldn’t make anything worse, after all.
Things would (probably?) make more sense after some time.
(Right?)
(Dimensional travel isn’t possible, right?)
(She didn’t die. Yet.)
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The last time she wakes up (wait, no, that sounds ominous) it’s to her head pounding. She’s no stranger to headaches, but this is something else. This is comparable to Athena's birth, when Hephaestus cleaved Zeus's skull in the world's most fucked up c-section. This is someone cracking her open and digging through her brain, breaking her and twisting the neurons inside.
She’s crying, she realizes, and since she’s still laying down, they stream down the sides of her face, uncomfortably gathering alongside her ears, and she’d do something about it if she wasn’t whimpering in pain.
It hurt so much that her thoughts feel incoherent, like slippery steps on a slope, like seaweed. It hurts like lightening, hurts like fingernails being pulled off, like dental surgery. It hurts so much that it's not even pain anymore, but sheer agony. She's hiccupping, choking on her own tears and breath.
And suddenly the pain vanished, and she could breathe again, so she did, but-
But then the pain came again, this time twofold, and with it, memories of a boy long gone.
And this time, she screams into her pillow, shuddering out little gasps like she really is a child, almost five, pale limbed and loved dearly.
She doesn’t know how to explain it, the familiarity the memories give. They aren’t solid, exactly. They are fluid, telling her who he was, what his favorite things were, the way he felt about his parents (tall and beautiful), the warmth of their affection, the fear of the attack that drove him from his bedroom (so young, but even then, a martyr), the pain, the agony...
She feels full of, of something now, except she also somehow feels unmade. Like the prominent parts of her are Samirah Yaseen, but she’s also someone else.
Her name (the new-old one) swims frustratingly out of reach, but she can hear the soft-hard lullabies of this mother, the flashing lights from this father, and she realizes that she is merging together, her two identities slipping and stitching themselves together. She lived a life as Samirah, but he also lived a (much shorter) life as Remus. The final jewel on the crown is inserted, and the weight is heavy on her head.
Who is he? She was Samirah, brilliant, sad, beloved, responsibility in her bones, but Remus is less solid, for he was just a child.
(And that’s upsetting, the idea that she has his memories and half of his essence, but he isn’t himself, not really, and he was attacked and assaulted and murdered and all that’s left behind is Samirah and Not-Remus-)
She’s got years of memories while he only has a few, but they seep together. She can still tell which ones she’s lived through, but his memories are becoming more and more familiar as she thinks through them like a flower blossoming and her identities latching together like they were two halves of a whole, suddenly complete.
A teacher of hers used to say that eyes were the windows of the soul, so what happens when two people have the exact same eyes across time and space?
Is that why this happened? Because Remus was in trouble and she was there, so they accidentally…did something?
No. Someone else, someone else must’ve had a role in it as well. Because it wasn’t like she was capable of ripping hole within reality or anything like that, because then she’d have opened a thousand rips or tears throughout the years. She was certainly dramatic enough for it!
Someone else had brought her here.
But why (the ever-loving fuck)?
(She tamps down the fury, the rage that shakes in her bones. She can’t afford to get angry or upset, because then she’ll scream and scream and keep screaming until she’s clawed something out, maybe the tender skin at her wrist or her eyes. And this still isn’t her body, it’s Remus’s, and it’s not her’s to hurt.)
She stares at the ceiling, teary-eyed. There were pretty moving hummingbirds, and considering the fact that her memories (his memories) remembered a man (his father) doing something with a slender piece of wood (a wand???)
The hummingbirds merge into dragonflies, and she stares at them in dismay.
Because the picture that she’s piecing together, the picture that her name and the wand and the attack all lead to….
It’s all very unpleasant. The idea that a book series would become real, the idea that something fictional would bleed into a new existence...
(She’s heard of the multiverse theory, of course. Even briefly wondered if books like the Hunger Games or Percy Jackson existed for real in some other- some other dimension. Another world.)
Her synapses are firing too fast for her to stop, even though she wants to slow down, wants to process, but her mind (their’s, always theirs’s from now onwards) was intelligent and lightning-quick when racing forward, bounding towards a very unfortunate conclusion.
She did not like this. She would like to think Not-Remus was the son of a history buff, someone who liked Roman history enough to name their son after the losing brother. She would like to simmer in her denial, seep into it so deep that her willful indifference would alter everything if she just tried hard enough, but...
But the reality of it, sadly, her new reality of it was...
A wand, a wolf, and an unfortunate name. That was a formula she could piece together even with the events that had happened to her. To them.
A hilariously ironic name, she would say, if it weren’t for the situation.
The results were spectacularly dismal, but she had to accept that somehow, she had ended up where she’d never wished to be. That she had interfered in a gruesome attack and paid for it dearly.
Because that was...
Because that would mean she was Remus Lupin. As in the Professor Lupin, Marauder, and all-around professional doormat.
Was her new name really Werewolf McWerewolf?
She wanted a fucking refund.
(She ignored the tears sticky on her skin, the swelling of her face, slightly, the stinging of her eyes. She ignores the hysterical laughter bubbling up out of her chest, the sharp beast in her heart that wonders if slitting her wrists would somehow bring her back home.
It’s good that she numbs herself and focuses on the humorous irony then because then a nurse steps into the room for the first time to check on her. There’s no opportunity to scream, not yet.
But later that night, biting hard into the pillow, she screams until her voice turns raspy and hoarse.)
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It stands to reason that beyond any brief wonder at the circumstances, and the brief uncontrollable laughter that seems to bubble out from between her lips, there is an ocean of horror. A veritable galaxy full of sorrow.
Grief is not new to her, and she has seen many iterations of it. But she’s never faced this particular facet of it, where she has to cope with simply not being herself anymore, where the world that was familiar to her was now out of reach. She thinks dying would’ve been easier, because now she’s mourning her entire world, but she switches between blatantly suicidal and edgy, wary resignation.
She knows grief, she knows its face like a bitter old enemy. She’s buried her mother, clutching her grandmother’s hands almost painfully as they give her up for the next life, burying a woman who (for all accounts) shouldn’t have died at all, except for circumstances' sake. She knows her father’s tight face, dark eyes so broken in the face of tragedy.
(Too broken, perhaps, to look at his children.)
She knows grief, in broken expectations, her sister’s flighty nature, her younger brother’s bitterness, her elder brother’s exhaustion, her father’s distance. She knows how it feels to pretend someone is dead so that they won't hurt you any longer, but this is sharp and painful. Because her sister might’ve been terrible, but she was still her sister, and she’d always hoped to someday make up with her. But now the bridge is broken, the string cut, and she hurts.
She hurts, and she misses everyone. She misses the way Aasia let her curl up next to her on bad days, the way Maya threaded their fingers together when they went shopping. She misses E’s smoothies and Danny’s hugs and Aileen’s obsession with Pusheen. She missed Drew’s hands on her shoulders and Grace’s sharp remarks and cigarette smoke and the missing hurts because she didn’t know she’d lose them all like this. In one fell swoop, they were gone.
She misses her morning classes, the way her apartment looked, her favorite sweater. She misses her chipped teacups, her phone, her favorite green pen. She missed samosas with chai, dosa with chutney, cold kadalpasee deserts when she had the time to boil water and seagrass into something edible.
She missed being herself, and only herself. A girl who voted, who could drive, who paid taxes and bills and had responsibilities. She didn’t want to be a kid again, not like this, not in an unfamiliar place. She felt vulnerable... like the hospital was unsafe, and she wanted nothing more to curl up in someone’s arms and pretend they could protect her. She wanted some bit of familiarity, something at the edge of her vision to remind her of home, but everything was old, new, or antiquated in a way her mind couldn’t fathom.
She wanted to go home, but the distance was impossible. She was welded to her new life, her new body. Her memories were doubled, her sense of self and identity slowly transforming-
(No. Not yet.)
And if her suspicions were correct, this world wasn’t kind either. This was no peaceful reprieve, no alternate world where she (he?) could grow up and become whatever they wanted (again). This was a bloodsoaked, corrupt world abound with abused children and misery. Wars did not end so quickly, and she wondered how much she would come to lose in the battle.
Those first few days, everything passes in a haze of grief and loss, almost catatonia, almost death. Those long first days were painful with heartbreaking torment. She thinks she’ll stop breathing from just how much it aches, wakes up every morning hoping to be in her own bed in her own home.
(She, of course, does not. But she can’t stop herself from expecting it.)
But the breathing becomes a little easier, the bandages are slowly removed, the room becomes a little more familiar to her senses. Not-Remus becomes less of a miasma around her and settles into her like a slumbering beast, slipping into herself so that she closes her eyes and wakes up with more of his gestures. She learns to become, slowly and painfully. His soul is in her breath, his voice in her head.
Those first few days ached and she was certain she’d always carry around the sharp sorrow. She’d been suicidal those first few days, an eerie reminder of her worst depressive phases from before. This familiarity, however, sickened her.
(Should this be the constant that haunts every single life of hers? She doesn’t know. She suspects that there is a lot she will never know, and it burns.)
But they were necessary, because one day, she woke up to the nurse (cheerful, auburn hair and dimpled cheeks) handing her chocolate pudding and opening the windows to the world outside, and everything hurt a little less. Her wails become sobs, become sniffles, and she eventually exhausts herself into silence.
(It still hurts, undeniably, but the pudding tastes lovely, and Nurse Glibwater treats her kindly, so maybe she can just ignore the wand in her hand, the diagnostic spells, the doctor that comes in with a sneer. Maybe she can pretend that she’s going to a perfectly normal college, maybe becoming a normal accountant or baker or something else.
Maybe she doesn't need to go to Hogwarts or fight in the wars. Maybe she could just…be.
She doesn’t think about it. Doesn’t even begin. Just tries to anchor herself. Before she’s Remus Lupin, she has to be Remus. And that’s hard enough.)
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She’s still a pretty odd sight though, she has to admit. A depressed four-year-old, curled up in a ball. The nurses leave her alone, because of her condition, except for, of course, her own Nurse, who has the sense of a dead lemming, so is bruskly cheery regardless. The woman sneaks her treats and makes her wand light up with different colored balls, and slowly, but surely, she can admit to herself that she is slightly attached to the women. She’s attached to her in the way a child needs their favorite blanket, or a student needs a particular pen to pass an exam. She’s the safety net.
The attachment helps, as petty as it is, because now she’s a bit concerned about not disappointing this woman, but it’s also a great help in attaching herself to reality. This reality. She is Samirah but Not-Remus is there too, small mouth mumbling words of thanks.
She doesn’t know how to explain how it feels to be in a different body with the specter of a whole other soul inside. She tries to explain to herself this feeling and finds that she only exhausts herself.
She looks out the window, watching out into the pouring rain and dark greenery. Her eyes catch on her new hands, these small pale ones with lean fingers, and she shoves down the meager discomfort she feels.
She doesn’t dislike her new hands, because they are familiar now. She’s just not certain she likes them either, seeing as they are a dead boy’s hands and she is a living person, for the most part. Her eyes, at least, are the same, and it is equally comforting and nerve-wracking to see those dark eyes in the wrong face.
She feels sewn wrong, and the comparison helps absolutely no one. Like she’s a stuffed bear meant to have two black button eyes but ends up with three. It’s a miserable feeling, entirely. And that’s not even considering what’s going on in her head.
See, she has this body. She has this body and it looks nothing like her own, bony where she was soft, pale where she was dark. She has this body and this body is male, and she’s only ever been used to having a female one.
She. She’s sewn wrong, but-
It’s all in her head. Her head is the issue, her head, not-
She expects to freak out about this. She expects to want to hurt herself, and she does, but it’s not for the expected reasons. It’s never for the expected reasons.
Her complaints are her thin elbows, the way her hair is limp in front of her eyes. Her height, for it, is disorienting to be so short again!
But she goes to the restroom, stares down, and feels…nothing. She is uncomfortable, but that is the excitement of a new body. It is so very different, but it feels the same most of the time, and she’s still a child. She has an adam’s apple, but...
She expects, almost, an identity crisis. She expects dysphoria, from her long conversations with E and educational chats with others. Where is that discomfort? Where is it?
The body moves the same. The steps are the same. The muscles pull the same way, the bones shape the same way, the scars are new but are healing-
Where is the pain? Where is the confusion? She feels like she’s always felt this way, small and thin and clumsy and not- she feels like something has finally settled inside.
There is no gender crisis. There is a scant few tears, more out of frustration in figuring something out than anything else. There is pudding, because it is delicious, and then there’s nothing.
(Because she has always secretly suspected that if she had been born to a male body, she would’ve called herself a he. She knows for most people, gender is a thing that sticks permanently, but she has spent too much time being comfortable in herself to admit that…she doesn’t care. Samirah was female, but Samirah could’ve easily been Salim. Or Sam. Or just male, in any regard. She is so easily discomforted by everything else, the muddle in her head, the grief in her veins, the agony of being-notbeing Remus, but…
He, she, them. It’s all the same because the core of whatever they are is the same. The body is different, the brain is different, but deep down, the same roots make the same shoots.)
She tells herself it doesn’t matter, and then silently begins calling herself a he. Another distinction between lives couldn’t hurt. Remus was male, the body was Remus’s, and the body works fine. The body is now his body, and it does not matter what he calls himself.
It’s convenient, isn’t it? She decides she’s going to call herself “he”, and he almost revels in how nothing changes at all.
(Because at the core of it, at the heart of it, they have the same eyes. The soul is same-notsame, and-
And it doesn’t matter if they don’t care. The world does not stop turning because a once-girl becomes a present boy, and if his clothing choices in the future veer towards neutrality, towards odd bits of femininity and masculinity, well. There’s no one left to ask him about it. There’s no one there who could truly understand, when he’s trecking through Europe in a grim mission to forget everything.)
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He has to build an identity for himself. He has to bend and twist into the preset mold of Remus, but there’s some leeway there.
Remus, because he was so damn young (and it makes her almost breathless how cruel life has been to him already) has less defined personality traits, but there are some.
Remus is kind in a way that most children aren’t, quiet and conscientious to the core.
Samirah has been shaped by her life experiences, of grief and triculturalism, but Remus has remembered Llywelyn ap Gruffuddand Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant, of his father’s Christmas and his mother’s seafood cooking. There’s Eid in her head and Ramadan, but there are also church visits. There are a thousand little things, a thousand cultural aspects he doesn’t have time to explore, so he sticks to what he knows.
His name? Remus John Lupin. In the future, his go-to nickname will probably be some variant of Sam, because he’s just as likely to answer to it.
His location? Someplace in England. He’s not certain, exactly, but Remus wasn’t from the States.
His…his parents? His old ones are…gone. Dead and not. But these new ones…
He doesn’t know. He knows…he knows their names? Lyall and Hope Lupin. He knows their faces, stern and soft. He knows…he knows he will have to face them eventually, and when he does, he will make himself love them the way a son should, and not merely tolerate them the way a…a stranger would. Because he’s Remus, even if he was Samirah, so he has to love the people who love him.
But he has time for that. Time to figure out how to love again, when all his beloved people are like glass shards embedded into his skin. Time to figure out how to love someone when it feels like he can barely breathe.
He cradles the stuffed bear in his hand, the fuzzy texture pleasantly abrading his skin. The moon’s pull has been increasing every day now, and soon he will shift. Tonight, he thinks to himself, is when this new reality finally becomes real in a visceral way. His casual distance, his numbness would vanish tonight, and tomorrow, in its place, would lay a resigned sense of horror.
But he is Remus, and everything else can be put on hold as the third inhabitant of his mind takes over. There has, at the very least, been enough time for him to sort out his headspace enough that he's not in danger of going mad.
Or at least, not as mad as the rest of this damned world.
His bones ache, and his gums itch, and he waits.
He sits in the bed, under grey-washed covers, and pretends he isn't a little boy, scared of the shape of his bones.