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Statistics say that most child werewolves die before their fifteenth birthday.
Remus has lived his whole life knowing this fact, except on the days that the other creature in his skin, the one that he nicknamed Romulus until Sirius and James and Peter tied them all together with the name Moony, took over.
The statistics go on to say that over half of these—nearly eighty percent—are suicides.
It’s cold inside Remus’ head, except when it’s not.
He had never expected to live his life this way, not when he was very little and his father didn’t know better than to taunt werewolves and call them scum, but he’d been four-not-quite-five when the window shattered and Greyback, in all his feral glory, had come prowling in, eyes too far back from his snout and claws jagged and perfect killing machines. To this day, Remus doesn’t know if Greyback truly meant to be as cruel as he was, by making Remus into a mockery of his father, or whether he’d intended to give him the mercy of killing him.
Remus wishes he had died.
It isn’t that Remus is suicidal—he isn’t. He is far too old for his age, achingly tall and far too skinny, scars painting a map across his skin of the other him, in the other place under his skin. Remus wishes for some other way to explain werewolves other than magic, because he doesn’t know where the other bones and fur and flesh and muscle came from.
He’d say he missed feeling whole, but he had dealt with this for almost as long as he could walk.
It’s the coldest in Remus’ head after coming back from being not-quite-Remus, what Sirius and James and Peter call Moony, but that doesn’t quite fit. Remus is Moony. Not-quite-Remus isn’t. Romulus would have to do.
The thing about being a werewolf is that they’re not one person. It’s not a matter of ‘accepting’ his wolf—he can’t. It’s like something else lives in his skin with him, and it doesn’t fit.
Remus is abnormally tall for his age.
They tell him this a lot. Six foot three and still growing! they exclaim. Remus wants to scream every time. It’s not him that’s tall, it’s his body stretching and trying to make space for Romulus.
Naming it feels too personal, in a way, but Remus supposes that he has to call it something. It lives just to the left of him, except it’s just to the left but inside his skin, he may as well have the courtesy to use its name.
Except Remus has a bite mark on his shoulder-neck-collarbone and it throbs, sometimes, angry and hot and it’s definitely more Romulus than anything else.
Remus is not a werewolf. He is a carrier for a parasite that used the moon phase to seep its extra body parts into him, to change and shift and remake him until he wakes up, cold and bleeding, on the hard wooden boards of the Shrieking Shack.
Remus is fifteen years old, and he’s already grown up.
The rest of his friends are silly and ridiculous and kind, with the touch of cruelty only a teenager can have, but Remus is quiet and calm and always in control. It happens when you aren’t even safe in your own skin.
It’s cold in Remus’ head, except when it’s not, and that’s when it’s Romulus’ head instead. Taking back that control leaves him with the kind of cold that a sudden absence of heat leaves you with, the kind that crawls into his bones and stays there.
Remus is always cold.
They may tease him for his propensity for ugly jumpers and mugs of teas and pieces of chocolate, but if he can’t manufacture his own warmth or happiness, store bought is damn well going to be enough.
Remus is fifteen and he is going to die.
Teachers are always proud of him for being so quiet, so calm, so manageable, but in reality, he’s already old and tired. He’s running scared from wolves and statistics and he’s okay with hurting himself as long as he doesn’t hurt anyone else; he wishes he was more like Sirius, able to kick the walls and scream and break things and perform acts of rebellion, until Sirius hits sixteen and turns his focus onto James’ romantic rival and he’s too cruel and he knows that the Black family is torture with a thinly disguised veil of smiles and flares and the screams as they touch an artefact they shouldn’t have and now they’re dead, but Remus is tired and cold and he can’t quite bring it in himself to care.
Remus had gone to the library to find the most painless ways to die; the muggle one, of course, they didn’t look closely there. It was a small rundown place in the Welsh countryside, why would they?
He already knew spells like Diffindo, so he didn’t need blades, but he tucked a bottle of sleeping pills into his back pocket and kept them with him since. He doesn’t plan to use them, of course, but it never hurts to be careful.
Remus doesn’t want to die. That’s an important distinction to make, he supposes. It’s just that living life with another being under your skin is so tiring, and he’d do anything to kill Romulus and finally be rid of him for good.
A small part of him wonders if carrying the weight of Romulus’ corpse, Romulus’ life, is worth it, but he also knows that he’d likely die alongside the wolf he so despises.
The thing about being in control is that it doesn’t stop him being angry.
Remus is always angry. Angry at Romulus, for existing, angry at fate, for cursing him, angry at Greyback, for clamping his jaws onto a child and biting down, angry at his father, for calling him soulless and dooming him to this fate, angry at his mother, for pulling a wolf off of him that cold, cold night.
Some days he wonders if he should run from Sirius and James and Peter, run from Hogwarts, away from everything good and let the woods reclaim him. He couldn’t hurt anyone then, and he’d be in that twenty percent of child werewolves that died by an accident rather than a suicide.
Sirius finds the pills, of course, and he doesn’t know quite how they work but he gets the gist.
“Moony,” he says, serious and calm and words too sharp. “If you kill yourself, I won’t come to your funeral.”
“Don’t joke,” Remus replies, even though he knows he’s not. Could never be, not about this, because whilst Remus isn’t safe in his skin at least he’s welcome at home. “What would you do instead?”
“Push Regulus in the Black Lake, perhaps. It’d be like losing both arms instead of one, but at least it’s equal, right?”
They don’t have that conversation again.
Remus has known the phases of the moon, exactly how full it’ll be, all his life. He knows the feeling of when the not right grows too intense, and he has to lie down and screw his eyes shut and cry.
Sirius leaves him a cigarette, James leaves him chocolate, and Peter leaves him a cold flannel.
They are all thoughtful in their own way, and Remus uses them all gratefully. They never mention the tears, or the way his eyes turn amber sometimes, because Romulus is steadily growing stronger by the day.
Remus is growing up—grown up, too grown up—but so is Romulus, and what match is he against a wolf?
Statistics are not always right, but Remus is considering making sure that these ones are.
--
Remus lives to see his sixteenth birthday. This may be a mistake, but it’s a mistake he has made with pride.
Until The Incident occurs.
Sirius had whispered into Snape’s ear not quite Remus’ secret, not quite Romulus, but that he should go to the Shrieking Shack if he wanted to see why Remus was so secretive.
Remus knows he’s secretive, knows he’s suspicious. But there is someone else living under his skin—something that won’t let go, not now, not ever. It doesn’t matter to him what they think of him
(Except it matters so much. He wants to be liked more than anything else in the world, but Snape’s opinion doesn’t matter to him. Not when he has Sirius and James and Peter.
Except he doesn’t have Sirius. Not anymore.)
Snape had crashed through the door and into the Shack, right into Romulus’ claws. Romulus wasn’t Remus; he didn’t show mercy.
Snape is lucky to be alive.
Romulus is fire and fury, glistening amber eyes like hot coals, spitting and cracking. Romulus is the flames in a fireplace seconds before a building blows, vengeance and evil and cruelty.
Remus is a hollowed out shell, the icy winds of the Arctic filling in the flames that die with Romulus. He’s a cold chill on an already cold day, the frost making the grass crunch underfoot.
Romulus is fire and flames and fury. Remus is the cage of ice designed to hold him in.
Fire melts ice, though. It’s only a matter of time.
Dumbledore had yelled at Snape, threatened to expel him for protecting everyone. Remus knows that he is a threat, that he shouldn’t be around children.
You’re a child, Remus, Dumbledore had said to him, once. You deserve the same protection they deserve.
I’m old, Remus hadn’t said. There’s a monster inside of me and it’s stretching the bars of its cage until it’ll break free.
Remus isn’t talking to Sirius. Sirius has tried to apologise, begged to apologise, sent him gifts and flowers and chocolate. It’s too late, though. Far too late.
Statistics say that forty percent of teenage werewolves are put down after they kill someone by mistake.
Put down like a dog, like a wolf, like Romulus.
There is something ugly about that. Put down. Remus is a liability, a threat, a problem. He is an issue that has yet to be solved. He nearly killed someone the other day, there’s only one solution. We’ll have to put him down. He’s a risk to the children.
His parents are proud of him for making friends despite his condition. Condition, like Romulus is a rash and not another being. Proud of him for making friends across species.
Remus isn’t human. Snape is. The solution seems simple.
Kill Remus. Protect the children.
But the solution isn’t simple, he knows that. Killing Remus doesn’t fix the issue of werewolves; someone would have to kill Greyback for that. Someone would have to round up every secret werewolf and every child werewolf as well as the adult ones and line them up one by one and Avada Kedavra them until they died.
Then again, no child werewolf is a child. Remus hadn’t been a child since the first time Romulus had burst free. He’d experienced too much pain for that. Maybe it’d be easier to kill them, then, knowing that they want to be dead anyway.
It’s funny how he finds kill less ugly than put down.
Would you have to Avada Kedavra a werewolf twice to kill it?
Remus enters the Gryffindor common room and he doesn’t look at Sirius. He doesn’t look at Sirius, but Sirius is reading a book simply titled Child Werewolves, and the page declares that the statistics are wrong because forty percent of child werewolf deaths are murders.
That doesn’t negate the suicides. It doesn’t negate the fact that Remus has stood in front of a mirror, blade in his hand, and wonder how hard the mess would be for his mother to clear up. Hope Lupin had been nothing but wonderful to him; Remus knows he is a burden. He is glad she has tried so hard for him, too, he just wishes she hadn’t had to.
James misses Sirius, Remus knows that much. They are friends, best friends, brothers. And yet James won’t forgive Sirius, because it is not James’ prerogative to forgive, it is not a sin committed against James. It is against Remus.
James looks at him out the corner of his eye, something desperate, something sad.
Remus is guilty of more than he can say. He doesn’t need to be guilty of this, too.
He forgives Sirius.
Something about it feels inevitable—Remus was always going to forgive Sirius, not for himself, but for James. The Incident becomes The Prank and Remus doesn’t make eye contact with Snape in the halls, thinks of his dreams where he is far too familiar with the size and shape of Snape’s intestines and the way they look when uncovered.
They never quite fit the way they did before. Remus is still bitter, even if he hides it, Sirius walks on eggshells around him and makes up for this with more extravagant gestures as he flings himself across James. James tries to fill the gap, Sirius tries to salvage things, and Remus doesn’t want to ruin anything.
It pushes Peter out. What’s one more morsel of guilt?
He thinks of Sirius’ proclamation, that night, running his finger over the rim of the bottle. Would he still do it now? Would be it worth risking everything he’d just gotten back?
It’s not Remus is suicidal—he isn’t. He just doesn’t want to be a burden, doesn’t want to feel the yawning chasm between him and the people he cared for. He is a danger. He is the carrier of a plague he calls Romulus; he is selfish and he is risking children’s lives.
He still doesn’t know where the fur and flesh and muscle and bone comes from for Romulus. He half wonders, idly, if all that’s inside him is a mass of tangled Romulus, wolf parts for the monster that wears human skin, except he knows that’s bullshit because Madame Pomfrey has had to patch him up enough times to notice if his innards didn’t mimic that of a human’s.
He turns seventeen, then eighteen. James gets the love of his life to kiss him once, then twice, then they’re dating and Sirius looks left out. He comes back to Remus, because before The Prank Remus had always been waiting for him to come back and complain. His fatal flaw, he considers, is that he has to be liked. He needs it, desperately.
“Why are you here, Sirius?” he asks, eventually. “We both know it’s not because you enjoy my company.”
Sirius protests. Vocally. “—And when have I ever done anything to make you feel unwanted?”
“Stop pretending we’re normal,” Remus says. “We haven’t been normal. Not since then.”
“I’ve been trying.” His voice is too quiet, too serious for Remus’ liking. “I want to fix things.”
Remus wants to laugh. Remus does laugh. “You’re kidding, Sirius. We’re about to leave school and enter a war, and we both know we’ll sign up for it. There’s not much of a Marauders anymore, but by god, what’s left of it is still just as fucking stupid and reckless as we were when we started.”
Sirius looks wounded and he almost feels bad. “You’re going to fight, then?”
“I’m too much of an asset not to,” he replies, and the words are heavy on his chest. “The werewolves will join You-Know-Who and Dumbledore will need a spy.”
“Then I guess I’m coming too.”
“Regulus is fighting, isn’t he.” It’s not really a question. The Black family already have branded their children with the Dark Mark.
Sirius’ eyes find his unerringly. “I won’t fail you.”
“I know.” That’s not what I meant.
They don’t speak alone again, even as they leave Hogwarts for good. Always as a group, like the Marauders exist anymore.
Remus would hesitate to call Sirius a psychopath, but he would call him reckless. He’s changed everything, except for the things that are as sure as the sun rising.
They finish Hogwarts. Remus moves into a small flat with a crate instead of a dinner table and starts his first job. He loses it within a week, his eyes flashing amber at his manager, warning I am a threat.
He goes home. The moon rises.
Romulus groans in his bones, stretches and awakens, and turns his claws on the sharp stone of the walls, then on himself. There is no Prongs, no Padfoot, and no Wormtail.
This, at least, is familiar.
The coldness takes a breath, and Remus wakes up as himself again, bleeding sharply and freezing cold.