Chapter Text
Lyall Lupin
As Lyall looked into the face of the half-man before him, he felt nothing but contempt. Well, contempt and a bit of vindictive joy. He had been chasing Johnathan Davids and his gang down for the past eleven months, and had finally caught him. Jonathan was wearing a brownish-grey suit, stained with dry blood around the collar but otherwise pristine. He was smiling as if to mock Lyall, but nothing could shake his confidence. If there was anything that disgusted Lyall Lupin, it was werewolves. They terrorized towns, they ruined lives, and, and this was, in Lyall’s opinion, the worst part, they knew how it felt to be turned, and they still did it to others.
Johnathan was still smiling at him. Creepily, insanely, and confidently. This must be the way he smiled at his victims- as if he was their master. Lyall shook his head. No. Johnathan was his, not the other way around.
“The accused has been charged—“
In one swift movement, Davids threw off the chains that bound him to the chair like they were string. He bounded towards Lyall, still with that smile, but now Lyall knew exactly what his face looked like when he looked at a victim. It wasn’t ownership, it was lust. Lyall sat, petrified, as Johnathan clawed at him, but he wasn’t himself anymore. Now he was Hope, and it was Remus in Johnathan’s suit. Hope, that is to say, Lyall, smiled softly and her head rolled back. She turned back into Lyall, who was at once filled with the most excruciating pain he had ever felt, and he looked at Lupin before him, panting and afraid, and it was confusing, because there was no blood on him now, and Hope was still alive next to him, and then the courtroom faded into his and Hope’s bedroom, and the sun was barely streaming through the windows, and then he opened his eyes.
Lyall stared blankly at the wall of their flat. Hope was coming out of the kitchen with the eggs that she had made, and Remus sat next to him, looking beautiful as ever. Their beautiful boy. He was giggling at a cartoon in the paper, and Hope was looking at him with wide eyes brimming with love, and Lyall was staring at the wall because he couldn’t rid his head of that damn dream. It was strange, because he hadn’t been chasing Johnathan Davids for eleven months, or even one month. The squad picked him up just a week ago and he was due for questioning that very day. But the real strange thing was that he wasn’t a werewolf. He was just a muggle, some poor guy they saved from a gang of werewolves holding him hostage.
“Honey?” Hope tapped him on the shoulder. “Breakfast.” She smiled. Her smile was so cute. Her nose scrunched up and her eyes crinkled, and it made him fall in love with her again every time she glanced at him, but not now. Now her playful smile just reminded him of her soft, knowing expression as she passed away. Dreams weren’t supposed to be like that. So… real. He almost never remembered his dreams once he woke up.
“Right. Yes. Thanks.” He looked at the eggs.
“You gonna tell me what it is?”
“I had a dream.” Lyall hesitated, this moment felt significant, he supposed, but of course there was no reason for that.
“Oh! Like a future thingy! I always hoped you’d turn out like that.” Hope was a muggle, and though she had been with Lyall for a long time, some aspects of magic still confused her slightly. It was adorable.
“No, nothing like that. I can’t… ‘see,’ that’s only some of us. But it was strange, it was a dream about this muggle we brought in a few days ago, and in my dream he was this mass murdering werewolf and he attacked me and you, and then Remus…”
“He attacked Remus?” Hope looked confused.
“No, no, nothing like that.” Lyall didn’t want to explain it right now.
“I don’t quite get it. If you can’t have, like, premonitions, then why are you worried about this? I mean, it’s either just a dream or it isn’t. It sounds like you were just thinking about this guy, and you had a nightmare.” Hope bopped his nose. “What kind of an example would we be setting for little Reamy if nightmares became an excuse not to eat your eggs?”
“Mom! Ew! Don’t call me that.” Remus glared at Hope and she winked at him.
“Hope. He’s six.” Lyall said. “You can’t call him Reamy anymore. At six I get to choose the name and I choose Reamykins.”
“Crowley. No.” Hope pretended to consider it. “Well, I suppose I did agree. I guess there’s really no other option…” she glanced coyly at Remus. “Reamykins.”
Remus giggled. “Noo! Moomy!”
Lyall smiled and the dream was put out of his head by how big his heart swelled. He would never admit it to any of his ministry friends, but he had his heart broken every morning. He and Hope were trying to work out a way for him to stay home. The Ministry was so… much. It drained him. But right now she wasn’t making enough for him to leave, so they both went to work every morning, and Lyall stared at the number for the therapist in his calendar. He didn’t want other ministry officials to think he had gone soft, and that number had been in the book for months.
But that isn’t to say he hated his job. All the stuff his sleeping brain said- it was true. There was nothing Lyall hated more than werewolves.
“Ministry of Magic!” Lyall shouted into the flames.
“Bye, Honey. Say bye to Daddy!”
“Bye Daddy!”
Hope’s smile shot out of view as the cool marble floor of the ministry appeared under him and he stepped gracefully out of the fireplace. A smile on his face, he strode towards the elevator.
He pressed the button for floor three and calmly pulled a newspaper from his bag and placed it atop his head. “Finalmente.” The newspaper was secured. The ministry workers had tried everything. Hats, umbrella spells, cages for the owls (the man who suggested that was fired later for insubordination, but Lyall and his friends still suspect that Ms. Blanc was still angry about the cage that fell on her partner)- none of it had kept the owl droppings of their heads as well as the papers, so they all started wearing them. They became quite the fashion in elevators, especially at before lunch hour. That's when the Arour office sent all of their memos, and thus when owls outnumbered humans three to one.
The elevator shot backwards, to the left, and then up at a jaw dropping pace. “Level three,” said a cool, female voice.
With a flick of his wand, the newspaper crumbled up and floated deftly towards a rubbish bin just outside the elevator. Lyall stepped out of the lift and, with a nod to his partner in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, April, he walked towards the courtroom. It was a routine day, but Lyall felt his heart rate quicken at the thought of seeing the man from his dream, even if that man was just a muggle.
As he walked through the doors into the sparsely populated courtroom, Lyall’s breath caught. There was Davids, looking bewildered, sitting in front of the rest of the committee members. None of this was anything frightening, but the thing giving Lyall pause wasn’t any of that. It was the brownish- grey suit that Johnathan wore.
As Lyall regulated his breath and took a seat, he barely noticed the others' greetings. He just stared at the suit. At least from this angle he could see that there was no blood on the collar, but he could swear that it was exactly the one from his dream. It couldn’t be a coincidence. But it also couldn’t be anything else- he wasn’t a seer. He took a year of divination at Hogwarts and dropped out. All of the bollox with crystal balls and things was all show, and there was no history of what famous seers so pretentiously called “the gift” in his family.
Now, another man might have left it at that. But the thing about Lyall was that he wasn’t quite as adult as other adults. It was what made Hope love him so much, and what made Remus know that he had the perfect dad. Lupin had an overactive imagination, probably from his love of Sherlock Holmes novels. He always trusted his gut. And he was impulsive. This impulsivity would get him everything he got in life, and it would lose him everything he lost. So when he saw that suit, he accepted that once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. He may not be a seer, but he had a dream predicting this man’s outfit. And regardless of what it meant about his wife and son (he hoped it meant nothing), Lyall thought it was a premonition. And that meant that Davids was a werewolf.
It is important to note that he was right. If he was wrong, this would be the story of the son of a slightly disgruntled and bored government official, and not a story of the son of a seer who lived his life in regret of these next few moments.
“As this is an informal investigation, we would like to ask you a few questions about the incident in question and then you will proceed to the MLE for a wipe.” Ms. Blanc said.
For his part, Davids looked convincingly bewildered by that. “MLE? What’s an MLE? And what do you mean a wipe?”
Lyall scoffed.
April shot him a questioning glance. “What’s going on?”
“Look, I know this is crazy, but you have to trust me on something,” Lyall whispered. “Johnathan Davids isn’t a muggle. He’s a werewolf. I don’t know if he’s a wizard, but he’s definitely lying about not being one of that gang.”
“Come off it.” April looked askance at Johnathan. “How could you possibly know that? And that's not even- that's not the point. He’s clear. He has a story! They picked him up- one of our MLE Muggle Relations guys checked with a neighbor and they saw it happen.”
“I don’t know how or why he faked that, but he did. Trust me. I… I saw it. In a dream.”
“Oh my god. No. I’m not doing this. You had a dream, you have an aunt who had ‘the gift’ or some shit,” Note that April actually used air quotes when she said ‘the gift.’ “And you think that you can see the future? Nuh-uh.”
This was the one thing about April. She was a good partner, but she was judgy, and they were on a bit of a timeline here. Flipping her long, intricate braids in a way that was a bit childish, in Lyall’s opinion, she turned away.
“April!” He hissed. She turned back. “First of all, I don’t have an aunt with ‘the gift.’” He used air quotes too. Sometimes it was helpful to get on the same page with people before getting them to drop all logic and blindly agree with a completely irrational theory. “But I saw his suit. Exactly!”
This did not wow April at all. “You’re serious? This man could be sent to jail if I back you up and you’re basing this on a suit from a dream? A common suit from a dream, a suit that my husband owns?”
“April, you gotta… come on, April.” But she had already turned away.
A sense of panic was rising in Lyall, but luckily his conversation hadn’t lasted long, and he could listen to the story Davids had concocted.
“I was at home with my wife, and she was cooking dinner. We, uh, we don’t have very much money, and I had to go out behind our house to look for some herbs and maybe a- a rabbit.” He was stuttering. Lyall’s resolve began to shake, but he was reminded of the twisted grin on his face in the dream. He was also reminded of his son’s cute baby-face plastered onto Johnathan Davids. He wouldn’t think about what that meant except that this man was a werewolf, and premonitions aren’t perfect, so maybe it symbolized that this man turned kids. Lyall rolled his eyes. He wouldn’t be fooled. The stuttering was that of a conniving monster, not a frightened man. “That’s when I was picked up. They were hunched, deformed, and they had blood all over their claws and mouths as they ran at me. It was mental. The biggest of them, they must have been the leader- they grinned and grabbed me. I screamed, and my wife came running out of our house, and— they—.”
“It’s alright to take a moment, sir.” Ms. Blanc said in a comforting, warm voice. She rarely used that. He was getting to her.
“They killed her! They took her and they ate her and I was crying for them to stop, but they didn’t, they laughed.” Here Johnathan actually broke down crying, and Lyall couldn’t hold it together any longer.
“Bull.” He said, smiling. He had just realized something. Johnathan Davids had stretch marks on his wrists and hands. This kind of information could easily be leveraged in court for temporary detainment, and the full moon was only two days away! Those marks had to be a sign of lycanthropeism.
“Excuse me?” Ms. Blanc said. Her voice was decidedly not warm, now. This was her warning voice. You needed to shut the hell up when she said anything in this voice.
“I call bull. This man is a werewolf. He has stretch marks on his hands and his story is full of holes. Why didn’t they eat him? How did he get free? And there was no missing persons report filed for your so called wife-“
“That is enough! I would thank you to leave the courtroom.”
“No, you don’t understand. He is a werewolf. Just- detain him for two days. That’s all.” Lyall said.
“No!” Ms. Blanc looked livid. “you do not speak like this to a victim. You clearly have a personal grievance with this man, but-“
This moment was the one that would replay in Lyall’s mind. The moment when all of his anger with the job, and his confusion about being a seer and his hatred of werewolves and possibly most of all, his frustration with being ahead of everyone else, all came together and burst out of him.
“This monster! This monster killed some poor man and his wife and he needs to be locked up! Don’t you see? He killed the wife, he was part of the pack, he ate the husband, and he’s taking his identity like the cowering bastard he is. Don’t you dare- don’t you dare cry!” He turned to a dumbfounded Ms. Blanc. “When you see his tears, know that they are the tears of a soulless, evil devil, deserving nothing but death.”
The courtroom was silent, and for a moment Lyall thought he might have convinced them, but alas, no.
“Out.”
At her command, two security agents appeared to take Lyall’s arms.
April glared at Lyall. It didn’t reflect well on her that her partner (and friend) would shout at a widowed victim. It was also just frustrating.
Johnathan blinked through his tears. “My wife was the love of my life, and I would never hurt her.” He turned back to the chairwoman, but for a split second before that, he caught Lyall’s eye and smiled that smile from Lyall’s dream. Cold, prideful, triumphant, evil. And in an instant it was gone, and he was back to a simpering survivor. Lyall hated him.
“I am so sorry you had to hear that.” Ms. Blanc said, back to her warm voice. “Rest assured he will be dealt with.”
“I should hope so.”
“Now, I would like to ask about why you think they let you go.”
“Yes, of course…”