Chapter Text
James and Lily and Peter are dead, and Remus’s ex-boyfriend is in Azkaban, and it’s just another Monday at the Ministry, where he’s looking for job openings in the unemployment office. Without James around to pay his way anymore, Remus has moved back into his parents’ house—but things with Mum are strained, and he suspects he might get tossed out on his own soon and would like to be prepared if and when that happens.
“Welcome to the Ministry of Magic. Please state your name and business,” says the cool female voice in the telephone box.
He gives it, but as the metal chute spits out his badge, a clear voice calls from behind him, “Hold the lift.”
Remus opens the door of the telephone box with one hand while grabbing his visitor’s badge in the other. He recognizes the man, but with mistakes; his voice sounds too low, his face too lined, compared to when they would have known each other at school.
“Thanks,” says Damocles Belby. He doesn’t dial the phone, and the lift clatters and takes off without spewing out another badge.
“You forgot your, uh…”
“I didn’t forget,” says Damocles, grinning. “I just don’t see the point. I’m in here at least once a week—the staff at the patent office all learned my name a long time ago.”
“Patent office?”
“Potions. I freelance in my off hours.”
That’s right—Damocles always had a reputation for being good at Potions. He was three years ahead of Remus at Hogwarts and ran a few study sessions for younger Gryffindors in June of Remus’s second year, when Damocles would have been a sixth year and wouldn’t have had to worry about studying for his own O.W.L.s or N.E.W.T.s. Remus doesn’t remember the content of those sessions very clearly, but he does remember being fascinated with the curve of Damocles’s jaw and the way his eyes glinted in the firelight.
It’s not like anything was going to happen: they were four years apart, which was a big deal when they were at Hogwarts, anyway. Of course, now that they’re both in their twenties, it’s not such a big deal anymore.
“Potions, huh? What are you working on developing right now?”
“Dunno yet. I hit sort of a block after this last one.” Damocles nods at the badge Remus has pinned to his chest that pegs him as being on his way to the unemployment office. “You’re out of work? Weren’t you always at the top of your class at Hogwarts? I would’ve thought you’d have gotten a cushy Ministry job straight out of school.”
Remus knows how to play this game—how to dodge the point and deflect it until Damocles’s suspicions are safely locked inside his mind and out of the conversation, where they can’t do any damage to Remus’s reputation. “You remember me from Hogwarts?” he says easily, shifting his weight back onto his heels as he leans against the wall of the lift.
“Cute, nerdy boy with friends who got him landed in detention at least once a month? Of course I remember you.”
The corners of Remus’s lips turn up. “You thought I was cute?”
“In a little-kid way,” says Damocles offhand, “at least back then. You’ve grown up, Lupe.”
He smiles, but not really in a flirtatious way—his eyes are kind. Good. Remus is in no condition to flirt with anybody.
And he knows how to play this game, but James and Lily and Peter are dead, and Remus’s ex-boyfriend is in Azkaban, and if one more person lets Remus down—
“I can’t find work because I’m a werewolf,” he says. Damocles’s face falls. “So, you know, you don’t need to bother to get to know me. That would be a dealbreaker, right?”
Damocles opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again. “No,” he says, “that’s not a dealbreaker for me,” and it’s Remus’s turn to gulp like a fish.
xx
When they part ways, Remus is expecting that to be the end of it. It’s not like Damocles asks him out or gives Remus his address or anything. He doesn’t dwell on the loss: it’s nice to have a conversation with a near-stranger who doesn’t hate him for being a werewolf, even if it’s just in passing, even if all Remus’s friends are dead or murderers.
But then, two days later, he gets an owl.
Damocles’s handwriting is so messy that Remus can hardly make out the time and place where he’s proposing that they meet. It takes him an hour of consideration before he dashes off a yes and sends it along with the haughty horned owl that Damocles’s letter arrived with. He almost says no, but what’s it going to hurt to get dinner at the Leaky Cauldron with somebody who doesn’t hate him? It doesn’t mean Remus has to trust him. It doesn’t even mean Remus has to befriend him.
The pub is dark and crowded when Remus Apparates there on Friday evening around six. Damocles has grabbed them a table in the far corner, and Remus edges past bodies and chairs to get there. He’s not sure how to greet him—shaking hands seems too formal, but it’s not like they know each other well enough to hug—but Damocles solves that problem for him by standing and clapping Remus on the shoulder. “You made it!”
“I made it.”
“I’m glad. Honestly, I was expecting you to turn me down.”
“Yeah?” says Remus, feeling vaguely guilty.
“If you didn’t want me to run for the hills, you wouldn’t have told me within about twenty seconds of reconnecting that you’re a werewolf, would you?”
Remus isn’t sure what to say to this, so he just shrugs and says, “Well, here I am.”
“Here you are,” Damocles repeats.
Lest this go too far without Remus’s intentions on the table, he figures he should probably set the record straight. “Look, I should warn you now—I don’t know what you want from me, but even though I’m gay, I’m in no position to be starting anything with anybody anytime soon. The last bloke I dated just murdered three of my best friends and a street full of Muggles, and…”
“I heard about that,” Damocles says when Remus doesn’t finish his thought. It’s unnecessary: you’d have to live under a rock not to have heard about little Harry Potter ending the war. Or be a Muggle. “I’m sorry. I knew you were close to all of them, but I didn’t realize you and Black were together like that.”
He shrugs again. “We got together a month after we left Hogwarts. Broke up a few months ago, but looking back, that was probably because he’d joined the Death Eaters and didn’t want me finding out about it.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re living—where these days?” asks Damocles. “Had you been rooming with Black before you two split?”
“Yeah. I moved in with Peter afterward, and James was covering my rent since I didn’t have a job, but with no roommate and no sugar daddy—” Damocles grins in spite of himself “—I had to move back home this month.”
“Your parents wouldn’t pay your rent after?”
“They thought I was being ‘fiscally irresponsible.’” Remus rolls his eyes. “Anyway, I don’t think my mum thinks I’m worth the monthly charge, if I were to stay in a flat. She’s—never taken the whole ‘werewolf’ thing very well,” he adds, lowering his voice.
“Was it recent? Getting bitten, I mean? Is it okay for me to ask that?”
“Yeah, it’s okay—and no, it wasn’t recent. I was five. I, um, don’t really remember what it was like before I was… what I am now.”
“But—it’s not like you asked for it. How could she blame you when you…?”
Remus flashes him a half smile. “She’s a Muggle. She didn’t even know about magic when she married my dad—she certainly didn’t realize she was signing up to have a werewolf for a kid.”
“And you’re just—stuck living with her and your dad?”
“For now. I feel like I’m just waiting for her to kick me out the next time we fight, but I think my dad still has some sway over that decision—so far, anyway. He feels guilty.” He doesn’t go into the full story—about how the werewolf who bit Remus had a grudge against Dad.
Damocles looks he’s fighting with himself before he spills, “Look, I know we don’t really know each other, but—if they throw you out and you need a stable place to stay until you’re able to get work…”
It takes Remus a second to register what Damocles is offering. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but are you sure you want to offer that? I mean, we’re not even friends—no offense—and I come with a lot of baggage. Plus, on full moons, you’re going to have to—help chain me up and stuff—and I can’t guarantee how soon I’d get a job and be able to move out. For all either of us knows, I’m going to be unemployed for the rest of my life.”
Damocles bites his lip. “We may not be friends now, but who says we can’t be? Besides, hopefully you’ll get a job in plenty of time to get a place of your own, assuming it doesn’t work out with your parents, and—in the meantime, we can get to know each other. I’d—I’d like to see you again, Remus. I, um… I like you.”
The polite thing would be to tell Damocles that Remus likes him, too, but he doesn’t do that. The smart thing would be to run, but he doesn’t do that, either.
xx
Damocles gives his address to Remus, but Remus isn’t planning on ever using it. He barely knows the bloke, after all, and Mum wouldn’t really kick him out before Remus had a way to pay his own rent.
That’s what he thinks, anyway, until the next full moon rolls around.
It’s his second full moon since all his friends died, which means it’s his second time facing it alone since Sirius, Peter, and James became Animagi for him. After graduation, they no longer had a big forest devoid of humans to roam around in, but they all used to transform together inside Sirius and Remus’s flat so that Remus had some animal company and didn’t need to lock himself up. After dumping Remus, Sirius stopped coming, but Remus still had James and Peter to keep him company—keep his mind a little more human.
Since moving back in with Mum and Dad, though, Remus is back inside a cage on every full moon, and it’s torture. When he’s the wolf without any Animagi to hold onto—the thing is, he can sort of remember who he is when he’s the wolf, but the part of him that takes over doesn’t care. That part—the wolf part—just wants blood.
Most full moons, Mum shuts herself up in her bedroom and doesn’t come out for anything, and that suits Remus and the wolf just fine. Each month, as he secures Remus in the basement, Dad’s face is kind, and he levitates food into the wolf’s cage before the moon comes out, then cleans Remus up with an array of Healing charms in the morning. Throughout the night, the wolf is usually alone. It knows there are humans right upstairs—it can smell them—and it drives itself into a frenzy circling its cage trying to find a way out so it can reach them. When it can’t, it scratches at itself for want of something to latch onto—something to destroy.
Tonight, however, Dad’s out of town on a business trip, which means it’s up to Mum to make sure that Remus is safeguarded before dusk. Things have been strained, to say the least, since Remus moved back home: Mum had gotten comfortable with the last few years of putting Remus’s transformations out of her mind, and she’s obviously not happy about being responsible for them—for him—again. All throughout dinner, she stabs at her bangers and mash like she’s trying to attack it, and she startles and drops her fork every time Remus tries to speak to her.
Finally, around seven, they can’t put it off any longer. “We should, um…” says Remus. He pushes his potatoes around his plate; he knows he’ll regret it if he doesn’t eat something, but his stomach is tied in too many knots for him to feel like he can get any food down right now. “We should go and—get me ready.”
Mum doesn’t respond right away. Her movements are jerky as she pushes out her chair, stands, and picks up her plate and glass to carry them to the sink. “I’ll need your help,” she says, sounding almost timid in stark contrast to her body language. “You’ll need to lock yourself in and pass me your wand when you’re done. If you can—if you can just try this time not to scratch so much—”
“You know I can’t do that,” Remus mumbles. “It doesn’t work that way. When I’m it, I’m not me.”
She’s hunched over the sink where she doesn’t have to look him in the face. Her shoulders are high and stiff. “But you are still you. You’ve said before that you know who you are during your transformations. If you know what you would want if you were human—if you’re still in there—”
“We’ve been over this. It’s complicated.”
“Then un-complicate it. Make me understand, because I—we can’t keep doing this, Remus. I can’t keep watching you tear your whole life apart, and for what? Because you can’t get your impulses under control?”
“It’s not—I’m a monster, Mum. Don’t you understand that I would give anything to be able to control myself as the wolf? Don’t you believe me when I say that if there were something I could do to make myself keep my mind—?”
“But your headmaster said that you’ve had significantly fewer injuries ever since your last couple of years at school. You said you’ve been doing better. I thought you were making progress—I thought you were learning to get a handle on your disease—but last month? It was like you’d made no progress at all, Remus. The way you raged down there… the way you looked in the morning…”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit. Remus never even considered how his friends joining him as Animagi during his transformations would impact his mother’s expectations for how full moons would go if he ever had to return to this house. It’s not like he can give away their secret—but failing that, he’s got no excuse to give her.
“I don’t know, Mum,” he says finally. “I guess I backslid. I can’t explain it.”
“Well, try. Try to do better—keep your mind. It’s not like you black out while you’re under, so why—?”
“I don’t know why! I didn’t ask for any of this. I’m just—I’m doing the best I can. Just because my best isn’t good enough for you doesn’t mean it isn’t my best.”
At long last, she turns around. Her face is somber and pale. “You think I asked for this? You think I wanted a wizard for a husband or a bloody werewolf for a son? I didn’t—I don’t—I’m not—”
“What? You’re not my mum? You don’t love me?” Remus feels like his whole body is going numb; dead air is rushing in his ears.
“Of course I love you, Remus. This wouldn’t be so hard if I didn’t love you. But I’m not cut out… this isn’t… it’s not working. I just—I don’t think I can be around this any longer.”
“But—what are you saying? Where am I supposed to go?”
“I don’t know,” says Mum heavily, “but you can’t stay here. I just… I can’t do it. Maybe, if you’re out there and you have to control it, you’ll—”
The rushing air gets louder. “You’re kidding, right? You’re not seriously suggesting that I go out on the streets tonight so I can infect—”
“You wouldn’t be at risk of infecting anybody if you would just—”
“Mum, you can’t do this. I can’t do this. I—”
“Just go, Remus.”
She turns away. He’s dumbstruck for a moment, but when he eventually picks up his wand and makes for the basement, she’s right in front of him in a flash. “I mean it. I—we’re not doing this anymore. You have to go.”
But Remus has nowhere to go. His friends are all dead, and the person he loves more than anyone in this world is the one responsible.
“I…”
And then he remembers the crumpled-up piece of parchment with Damocles’s address that’s sitting in the drawer of his nightstand.
xx
Damocles, thank the gods, is home when Remus Flooes to his flat. He’s reading the Evening Prophet on the sofa when Remus stumbles into his living room; he jumps a little, puts down his paper, and says, “Remus? What…?”
“I’m really, really, really sorry about this,” says Remus with a dark, strangled laugh, “but my mum just kicked me out, and it’s a full moon tonight. If you were serious about your offer, you’re going to have to lock me up, and you’re going to have to do it fast. We only have about—” he checks his watch “—a quarter of an hour before I transform.”
“I—yeah. Yeah, I was serious. What do you need me to do?”
“Cages work the best,” says Remus dully. “If I try to put myself in chains, they don’t hold me anymore the second I change shape. If you can just—point me to a place where I can conjure one up, I’ll pass you my wand through the bars after, and you can hold onto it for me until morning.”
“Uh—yeah. Yes. How much space do you need?”
“Enough room to stretch my limbs would be nice, if you can manage it.”
“Okay. I’ve got a spare room—I can Vanish the furniture for you.”
Damocles’s spare bedroom is small and sparsely decorated; it’ll be more than enough space for Remus to conjure a cage to contain him for the night. After he does so and kicks out his wand for Damocles to catch, he’s expecting Damocles to take off, so it surprises Remus when Damocles instead pockets Remus’s wand and crouches down against the far wall. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting with you. You’ve still got a few minutes left as yourself, right? If it were me, I don’t think I’d much enjoy the anticipation all on my own.”
Remus tamps down the surge of affection he feels at Damocles’s words. “But—why? I still don’t get it. Why are you doing any of this for me?”
Damocles flashes him a faint smile. “Because I don’t like seeing people suffer—and maybe a little bit because I have a thing for taking in strays. My ex-boyfriend says I trust people too easily. It’s probably the one thing he ever said to me that I could trust to be true.”
Remus tries to grin, but with his anxiety about the full moon mounting, it’s hard. “So you are gay.”
“You picked up on that, did you?”
“Hard not to when one of the first things you said to me in that lift was that I was cute.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to be flirting,” says Damocles warmly.
“I thought you were supposed to bail when I told you I’m a werewolf. Most people would.”
“Well, maybe I’m not most people.”
He tries to laugh, but at that exact moment, the transformation starts. “You should go,” Remus grunts. “It’s starting. I’m—”
He has to look away when he wrenches his neck, but when he looks back, Damocles is still eyeing him with an unreadable expression on his face. “I can stay for a little while,” he says quietly.
“You’re mental. I’m not me when I’m like this. I’m—”
“You’re always you,” he insists. “There’s always someone in your head, even if this part of you won’t be the one in control, right? If I’m going to live with you, I want to—to understand.”
“Damocles—”
The wolf takes over, then, and the wolf doesn’t care whether Damocles is a flirtation or a friend or entirely too kind for Remus’s own good: all it wants is Damocles’s flesh in its teeth. It wants to sink in its claws until the too-sweet, too-loyal boy bleeds under them. Remus Lupin is a distant dream who will never understand what the wolf needs—who will always deny it what it wants (no, needs; no, craves)—who relegates the wolf for all but one night of each month to the cobwebbed corner where it doesn’t get to feed or kill or stretch its legs, where it can only watch and rage as the boy in control of their body goes around the world with his tail between his legs, as if he owes that to anybody, as if he hasn’t got a primal part that he’s repressing.
But tonight—tonight, it’s the wolf’s turn. Tonight, Remus Lupin shuts the fuck up, and the wolf doesn’t have to hear his thoughts—doesn’t even have to watch him cling to his control. It’s the wolf’s turn to be in control, and the wolf wants blood.
And for once—for once—there’s blood to be had. Sure, the sweet-loyal is on the other side of these bars, but he’s right here with such a long, fleshy neck for it to dig into, and he isn’t even walking away. The moron is crouched on the ground without even a wand in his hand, saying Remus’s name over and over, imploring Remus to listen, to breathe—as if he doesn’t know that Remus isn’t home right now.
The wolf has fully come into its body, now, and it stretches its hind legs and lunges, but the bars of the cage are unforgiving, too close together to make room for the wolf to break free. It can smell the sweet-loyal’s blood, can even see it rising in his cheeks, and the sweet-loyal is so close so tempting so tasty—so sickening—so undeserving—
It wants to devour him. It wants to demolish him. It wants to rip the flesh in strips away from his bones and ground them up when they’re all that’s left of him.
But the goddamn cage is still in the way, and the wolf cannot reach him. It howls. It caws. It slots its limbs between the bars as if it can escape them, but it cannot escape them—Remus Lupin has foiled it again, after bringing it so close to the thing it wants but can never, ever have.
The sweet-loyal doesn’t last much longer than that, and if Remus Lupin won’t give the wolf its due prey, the wolf will take what it can get. If it takes enough, maybe the impression it leaves behind for Remus Lupin to find tomorrow will be enough punishment to give him what he deserves.
Or not. No amount of punishment will ever be enough to repay the wolf for what it suffers in Remus Lupin’s body day in and day out—for its detainment—for its imprisonment, but if it rips itself apart, Remus Lupin will the the one to pay in the morning, and that has to be close enough, because it’s all the wolf has.
It turns its claws on itself and sneers.
xx
He’s been himself again for about an hour before Damocles comes back in the spare room. Damocles is carrying a tray full of breakfast, but when he lays eyes on Remus, he drops it. Flapjacks go flying everywhere; he sloshes orange juice all over his front.
“Remus? Remus! Why didn’t you shout for me when you transformed back? How long have you been like this?”
“Long enough,” says Remus with a faint grin that quickly morphs into a wince. “I didn’t want to wake you. I’m used to it, seriously.” He’s less used to it these days than he used to be, but for multiple reasons, Damocles doesn’t need to know this.
Damocles’s hands are shaking as he fumbles in his pocket for Remus’s wand. “Thanks,” says Remus as Damocles passes it to him. “Can you take the bars down yourself, though? I feel a little woozy. I’m always up all night when I’m the wolf, but it, uh—it hurt too much to fall asleep when I changed back.”
Damocles gets his hand on his own wand and points it at the metal bars. “Evanesco,” he mutters. “Tell me how to clean you up. Tell me how to… how I…”
“Just use Episkey anywhere you see blood or bruising, and that should do the trick. But first, can you, um—can you help me onto a bed or the couch or something? The floor isn’t really doing me any favors.”
It only takes a moment for Damocles to reconjure the Vanished bed and half-carry Remus into it. Once Remus is settled, Damocles perches on the edge of it and runs a string of Episkeys down Remus’s body with his wand, using his free hand to tenderly stroke Remus’s forehead. It’s nice. Nobody’s done that for him since Sirius, and it feels good to feel cared for, even if Damocles’s hand is all wrong—too small, too sweaty, too cold.
“You weren’t kidding when you said you’re not yourself. You never told me that you were going to do this to yourself.”
“Yeah, well,” says Remus awkwardly. “It’s like there’s two of me sharing a body, sort of. It’s like—when I’m the wolf, the part of me that’s me can hear what it’s thinking, but when I’m me, I can’t hear the wolf anymore. I think it’s the same for Moony—it can hear me when I’m in control, but it can’t on full moons.”
“Moony?”
Remus smiles. “It’s stupid. My friends used to call me that after they found out what I am.”
“That’s not stupid. Nothing about any of this is stupid. Is that any better? Do you think you can get any sleep like this, or do I need to take you to St. Mungo’s?”
He can’t help but laugh at that. “I’m fine, seriously. I’m going to be sore all morning, but you got the brunt of it. Thanks.”
“Remus…”
“Yeah?”
When they look at each other, Damocles is blushing. “I—I have to be getting to work, but I’ll come back as soon as I can, all right? You’re going to get through this. I’m going to get you through this.”
And whatever they are, they’re moving way too fast—Remus knows it, and Damocles would be an idiot not to know it, too—but all Remus’s friends are dead or murderers, and he’s had enough of being alone.
He nods.