Werewolf-centric, future S/R fic I'd started in 2006
I found a number of fics I'd started back in 2006 but never finished. They were probably all going to be long and that's problematic when I'm not sure if I'm going to finish them or not. But I like the concept of both of them so I might still.
I didn't want to lose them if anything ever happened to my computer so I'm posting them here.
Unnamed fic, future S/R
by Ais
Tuesday 7/25/06
Started 11:13 pm
In the middle of rereading Half-Blood Prince
10/14 note: I think this was set post-Hogwarts but before James and Lily die
* * *
A gust of wind whipped Remus Lupin’s cloak around his ankles, so strong and fierce that he could not help fancying it traveling half the world over, gaining momentum, until it passed him. He held his cloak together tightly, letting the wind press around him, surges and ebbs that rocked him slightly as he leaned against the pressure. For a moment, he could feel himself tipping, even imagined what it would feel like to tumble down the mountain and crash to a painful, if not fatal, landing, but just as he considered this, the wind died away as suddenly as it had appeared.
He remained tensed for a moment, eyes squinted shut and expression wary, but the elements remained calm and he slowly started walking again. The world seemed hushed and quiet around him, between the sudden gusts of wind and the occasional idle threat of a thunderstorm, but Remus did not mind. It was almost calming, in a way. He was the only one on Earth, the only one alive, the only one who knew what it felt to be walking right there, right then.
Soon, he would be back in civilization, of a sort. Remus could not help a dark smile at the thought, for it really was anything but civilization he headed toward. So, soon, he would be among... others, again, and would be unable to just walk, just exist, by himself. He would have to walk with certain body language, be so perfectly someone else that if would be as though he had taken Polyjuice Potion for his personality.
It was a difficult job, and it was certainly taking a toll on his body. Remus sent his stress to his neck, and his hair. There was more grey than ever, now, and he could not help thinking bemusedly that he would have no brown left by the time he was forty. But such things as outward appearance had never been all that important to Remus, who only cared about the shabbiness of his clothing when he was attempting to get a new job.
He kept everything he owned in good condition, and knew that he had managed to stretch the lifespan of his belongings far longer than anyone else would have been able to, but he knew better than to judge by what a person saw. He was not his grey hair and his grey hair was not him. Just as he was not the wolf, and the wolf was not him.
Unless he needed it to be.
The latest incline crested with little to no warning, and he found himself standing at the top of a sprawling forest, stretched beneath him like a textured canvas of the gods. The sun was setting, a deep red-orange rivaled only by the fading pastels of the sky. The skyline was littered with mountains and valleys, peaks and dips that told a story of erosion and centuries, and the everlasting strength of the Earth. The wind rippled again, a building pressure as if the mountains themselves were drawing breath, and a deepening exhale that rumpled the branches until the forest was alive with movement and Remus was breathless from walking and wonder.
He stared, just for a few moments, wanting the memory to stay. Even if this should all go awry, even if he should die here, he still had been present for such a sight.
It would be worth it.
It would have to be, because he would have to start anew, moving to a new group, in a new location, and if he didn’t have even these small moments of peace, than all his failure would drag him down as heavy clothing in the middle of the sea.
One step, another, his feet moved without his mind’s consent and he found himself clutching the cloak for more reason than to protect against the wind. His gaze dropped to the ground, watching for pitfalls and obstacles, while the green of the Earth slowly returned to his surroundings. Grass and flowers and bushes that started small until they grew, rivaled the undergrowth rivaled the trees rivaled the mountains. Distant calls of birds and the chattering of small animals, dappled shadows stretched long and languid in the setting of the sun, and Remus felt almost unnerved by how right it all seemed.
It was not the wolf, for that would be a simple excuse, something he could blame on genetics or at least the consequences of a childhood mistake.
Instead, it was the sense of thrill and inclusion, of being animal and man at once, alone in nature but surrounded by equals. The trees, the flora, the fauna - they were all him and he was all them. He felt connected in a way he only ever had on moonlit nights in the company of animals who were his friends who were his protectors and keepers. Stag and dog and rat, and together they raced through the trees, four boys defying fate.
He could not remember those times clearly, of course. They were when the full moon was high and he was in the ebbing of his consciousness. It was the occasional flash of remembrance and the way he felt the next morning, shivering and aching and terrified and resigned, but within it all was a sense of elation and relief.
One more full moon, one more that he lived through, one more that he could wake in the light of dawn and not feel regret for. It was the sense of other bodies in the room, or knowing smiles and jokes with three others who knew what he was, knew even more than he who had never seen the wolf with his own eyes, and still accepted him.
That was the sense of this forest, serene and accepting and alive with life, and if Remus’ feet had been paying heed to his mind, they would have stumbled when his thoughts froze just for a few moments, unable or unwilling to pass that memory by.
But it was one foot, the next, sliding steps down the slope of a mountain forest and the constant rise and fall of the land. It was dodging low branches and pulling through bushes and finding paths over small rivers darting this way and that like giggling, playful children.
Night was well under way by the time he reached the bottom and found himself abruptly free of the forest. The sky was immense above him, even with the mountains and leaves framing it to an acceptable scale, and he briefly wondered how small he would feel if he had been on flat plains. It would have been overwhelming, but beautiful.
This far from any city, he could see into space as clearly as if no atmosphere existed at all. The moon was waxing - just two days until the full moon - and so detailed that he fancied he could see a shadow of the craters littering its surface. The Milky Way was a gathering streak of white, and every constellation he could think of was bright and clear above him. He was the Earth and space at once, ever-present and all-inclusive, everything he could think of and more.
He was staring so intensely at the sky that he did not notice the presence until it was nearly upon him. Remus started to look down just as a voice spoke, harsh from disuse but cold from inhumanity, from the gathered shadows of the forest.
“Who are you?”
A simple enough question, and one that Remus of course had an answer for, but after experiencing a feeling of such overwhelming inclusion in the universe he found it difficult to come back to his tiny half-human body in his fragile well-worn clothes.
“Intruder, who are you?”
The voice was colder, angrier, and he knew this was his last chance to speak before attacked.
“John,” Remus said calmly, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the depths of the shadows so he could at least see the form of the other.
“John,” and there was a sneer as if a lip were lifted in a taunt, “you do not belong here.”
“I am one of you,” Remus said, still calmly, fingers remaining clasped at the top of his cloak.
A beat of silence, a shifting of the figure into view, and Remus found to his mild surprise that he had been speaking to a woman, not a man. Her voice was low and gravelly, in the androgynous grey area between a typical man and woman’s pitch, and her body was so packed with lithe muscle that it was obvious even beneath her clothing. Her lip was lifted, teeth filed to points even in human form, and when she looked him up and down it was clear she felt what she saw was beneath her.
“You are not one of us.” Such scorn and revulsion was placed into the words that for a moment, Remus felt utterly bemused. Not accepted by humans because he was a werewolf, yet even the werewolves said he did not belong. Who was he, then, but something caught in-between? The fly suffocating between planes of glass, or the scraps of paper that were neither notes nor story, but an aborted effort dropped before it could mature.
He reached for his cloak, not bothering to keep his hands slow or always visible, for what did a wolf care of what he reached for? She was quick and powerful and even if he held a gun with silver bullets, she would be ripping out his throat to the blessed spray of hot blood before he even pulled the trigger. He could see the thought in her eyes, but he only dropped his own gaze to better push the cloak back over his shoulders and pull his jumper up to reveal the ravaged skin beneath.
A large, wicked scar stretched its way across his torso, a mark that was substantial as a child but that grew with him so that now it seemed only a monster could possibly have had such a set of teeth. Crisscrossed around his body were gouges from wolf nails, some that never scarred his skin but he could still feel beneath, like phantom wounds along his bones.
Her gaze, sparking golden in the light of the moon, dropped to linger on the bite mark, though her expression remained unreadable. After a good three breaths Remus dropped his jumper back down and pulled his cloak forward to fall around him again. It rippled in the wind, though the trees blocked most of the momentum.
She looked distinctly unimpressed when her eyes rose to meet his, and it was with a taunt that she said, “Those were not the wounds of battles.”
“They were,” Remus said, little to no inflection in his voice, simply a statement of fact.
“Battles of the mind have no place here.” She lifted her lip in a disgusted sneer. “You are nothing but a filthy dog masquerading as a human, far too weak for our camp... You want to be human, don’t you? I can see it in your cowering eyes.”
When Remus did not answer immediately, she drew herself to her full height and looked down at him from the slight incline she stood on. Hers was the haughty beauty of the wolf, an otherworldly presence that had nothing to do with physical appearance and everything to do with aura. “You are not welcome here.”
Remus was silent a moment, watching her with a calm, unreadable expression while she watched him closely for signs of flight. When he spoke, his tone was polite and unperturbed. “I wish to request shelter for the night, as a favor to a traveler-“
She growled suddenly, eyes narrowed and teeth bared, voice quivering with anger and indignation. “You think us sniveling dogs who wag their tails and beg for a scrap of attention? Who open their home to any who pass, too grateful for the visit to care of dignity?”
“I mean no insult,” Remus said, still as composed despite the ire so evident that he half-expected to see bristled fur erupt from her skin. “I am here to discuss-“
“There will be no discussions!” Her voice was the bark of command, her eyes glinting almost entirely golden now in the eerie half-shadowed light of the moon. She drew back into the woods, the forest gently covering her in its embrace. “Leave now, or be killed. It has not been long since I tasted warm blood, but I will make an exception for you.” Her voice lilted just slightly at the end, seductive and cruel and full of hidden laughter.
He had hoped that he could infiltrate the camp immediately, find a small place to sleep for a tense but somewhat comfortable night, and have more time to convince them before the full moon. It was not likely that his mission would have gone so smoothly, but still, he had hoped....
“I will return tomorrow.”
There was only the glint of sharp teeth and golden eyes as she murmured, “It is your corpse and our feast, little human.”
Even watching her, he could not see exactly when she left; just that she was there one moment and gone the next, without even the slightest hint of movement in between. He stared for a few deep breaths, waiting, tense and ready, in case she returned with reinforcements or any other appeared to taunt him.
But after counting to one hundred, he found that he was still alone, though his heart had slowed to a languid pace. He did not think his heart raced even once when she was there, or that he showed any sign of fear, but it was perhaps beating a little faster than he would have cared for and his eyes were probably a little wide. He was not particularly afraid of her or the danger, but, like all living creatures, he recognized a threat to his life when there was one and he, of course, preferred to avoid it.
Sighing, Remus pulled his cloak closed against the newest gust of wind, nearly pushing him into a stumble at the suddenness, and turned to follow the edges of the forest until he could get further from the clan’s territory. They probably claimed everything within the valley itself, but he could at least move away from the direction of the camp itself in hopes of appeasing the woman a little.
His steps were steady but slow, and somewhere within he yearned deeply and abruptly for warm tea and a book, a comfortable chair and a crackling fire, three laughing friends and soft carpet beneath his bare feet.
Remus closed his eyes, the movement sudden and rather foolish given the debris littering the ground and his unfamiliar surroundings. In the stillness beneath his eyelids, he could clearly see the grinning faces, and the steam rising from a nice large mug of Earl Grey.
He had not expected to think of anything from home while out here, but he supposed it was inevitable. Let him long for times best forgotten all he wished; all that was important rested behind him, in the words he would use to woo the werewolves and the glint of gold off cold, inhuman eyes.
What did it matter if there were those who saw him not as Dark Creature to loathe or the sniveling dog of humanity, but as simply Remus John Lupin? They were not here and he was not there, and all their laughing faces beneath his eyelids could do was taunt and distract him from a far more important task.
Remus opened his eyes, focused so intensely it was almost painful on the pebbles scattering beneath his feet and the texture of the trees that slowly surrounded him when he headed into the forest. This was the night he would sleep, before the morning he would wake, before the day he would approach the werewolves once more. This was tonight, and tonight was all that mattered.
This was his universe, not the stars or moon or even the Earth, but this. This mission, this night, this life.
Just this.
I didn't want to lose them if anything ever happened to my computer so I'm posting them here.
Unnamed fic, future S/R
by Ais
Tuesday 7/25/06
Started 11:13 pm
In the middle of rereading Half-Blood Prince
10/14 note: I think this was set post-Hogwarts but before James and Lily die
* * *
A gust of wind whipped Remus Lupin’s cloak around his ankles, so strong and fierce that he could not help fancying it traveling half the world over, gaining momentum, until it passed him. He held his cloak together tightly, letting the wind press around him, surges and ebbs that rocked him slightly as he leaned against the pressure. For a moment, he could feel himself tipping, even imagined what it would feel like to tumble down the mountain and crash to a painful, if not fatal, landing, but just as he considered this, the wind died away as suddenly as it had appeared.
He remained tensed for a moment, eyes squinted shut and expression wary, but the elements remained calm and he slowly started walking again. The world seemed hushed and quiet around him, between the sudden gusts of wind and the occasional idle threat of a thunderstorm, but Remus did not mind. It was almost calming, in a way. He was the only one on Earth, the only one alive, the only one who knew what it felt to be walking right there, right then.
Soon, he would be back in civilization, of a sort. Remus could not help a dark smile at the thought, for it really was anything but civilization he headed toward. So, soon, he would be among... others, again, and would be unable to just walk, just exist, by himself. He would have to walk with certain body language, be so perfectly someone else that if would be as though he had taken Polyjuice Potion for his personality.
It was a difficult job, and it was certainly taking a toll on his body. Remus sent his stress to his neck, and his hair. There was more grey than ever, now, and he could not help thinking bemusedly that he would have no brown left by the time he was forty. But such things as outward appearance had never been all that important to Remus, who only cared about the shabbiness of his clothing when he was attempting to get a new job.
He kept everything he owned in good condition, and knew that he had managed to stretch the lifespan of his belongings far longer than anyone else would have been able to, but he knew better than to judge by what a person saw. He was not his grey hair and his grey hair was not him. Just as he was not the wolf, and the wolf was not him.
Unless he needed it to be.
The latest incline crested with little to no warning, and he found himself standing at the top of a sprawling forest, stretched beneath him like a textured canvas of the gods. The sun was setting, a deep red-orange rivaled only by the fading pastels of the sky. The skyline was littered with mountains and valleys, peaks and dips that told a story of erosion and centuries, and the everlasting strength of the Earth. The wind rippled again, a building pressure as if the mountains themselves were drawing breath, and a deepening exhale that rumpled the branches until the forest was alive with movement and Remus was breathless from walking and wonder.
He stared, just for a few moments, wanting the memory to stay. Even if this should all go awry, even if he should die here, he still had been present for such a sight.
It would be worth it.
It would have to be, because he would have to start anew, moving to a new group, in a new location, and if he didn’t have even these small moments of peace, than all his failure would drag him down as heavy clothing in the middle of the sea.
One step, another, his feet moved without his mind’s consent and he found himself clutching the cloak for more reason than to protect against the wind. His gaze dropped to the ground, watching for pitfalls and obstacles, while the green of the Earth slowly returned to his surroundings. Grass and flowers and bushes that started small until they grew, rivaled the undergrowth rivaled the trees rivaled the mountains. Distant calls of birds and the chattering of small animals, dappled shadows stretched long and languid in the setting of the sun, and Remus felt almost unnerved by how right it all seemed.
It was not the wolf, for that would be a simple excuse, something he could blame on genetics or at least the consequences of a childhood mistake.
Instead, it was the sense of thrill and inclusion, of being animal and man at once, alone in nature but surrounded by equals. The trees, the flora, the fauna - they were all him and he was all them. He felt connected in a way he only ever had on moonlit nights in the company of animals who were his friends who were his protectors and keepers. Stag and dog and rat, and together they raced through the trees, four boys defying fate.
He could not remember those times clearly, of course. They were when the full moon was high and he was in the ebbing of his consciousness. It was the occasional flash of remembrance and the way he felt the next morning, shivering and aching and terrified and resigned, but within it all was a sense of elation and relief.
One more full moon, one more that he lived through, one more that he could wake in the light of dawn and not feel regret for. It was the sense of other bodies in the room, or knowing smiles and jokes with three others who knew what he was, knew even more than he who had never seen the wolf with his own eyes, and still accepted him.
That was the sense of this forest, serene and accepting and alive with life, and if Remus’ feet had been paying heed to his mind, they would have stumbled when his thoughts froze just for a few moments, unable or unwilling to pass that memory by.
But it was one foot, the next, sliding steps down the slope of a mountain forest and the constant rise and fall of the land. It was dodging low branches and pulling through bushes and finding paths over small rivers darting this way and that like giggling, playful children.
Night was well under way by the time he reached the bottom and found himself abruptly free of the forest. The sky was immense above him, even with the mountains and leaves framing it to an acceptable scale, and he briefly wondered how small he would feel if he had been on flat plains. It would have been overwhelming, but beautiful.
This far from any city, he could see into space as clearly as if no atmosphere existed at all. The moon was waxing - just two days until the full moon - and so detailed that he fancied he could see a shadow of the craters littering its surface. The Milky Way was a gathering streak of white, and every constellation he could think of was bright and clear above him. He was the Earth and space at once, ever-present and all-inclusive, everything he could think of and more.
He was staring so intensely at the sky that he did not notice the presence until it was nearly upon him. Remus started to look down just as a voice spoke, harsh from disuse but cold from inhumanity, from the gathered shadows of the forest.
“Who are you?”
A simple enough question, and one that Remus of course had an answer for, but after experiencing a feeling of such overwhelming inclusion in the universe he found it difficult to come back to his tiny half-human body in his fragile well-worn clothes.
“Intruder, who are you?”
The voice was colder, angrier, and he knew this was his last chance to speak before attacked.
“John,” Remus said calmly, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the depths of the shadows so he could at least see the form of the other.
“John,” and there was a sneer as if a lip were lifted in a taunt, “you do not belong here.”
“I am one of you,” Remus said, still calmly, fingers remaining clasped at the top of his cloak.
A beat of silence, a shifting of the figure into view, and Remus found to his mild surprise that he had been speaking to a woman, not a man. Her voice was low and gravelly, in the androgynous grey area between a typical man and woman’s pitch, and her body was so packed with lithe muscle that it was obvious even beneath her clothing. Her lip was lifted, teeth filed to points even in human form, and when she looked him up and down it was clear she felt what she saw was beneath her.
“You are not one of us.” Such scorn and revulsion was placed into the words that for a moment, Remus felt utterly bemused. Not accepted by humans because he was a werewolf, yet even the werewolves said he did not belong. Who was he, then, but something caught in-between? The fly suffocating between planes of glass, or the scraps of paper that were neither notes nor story, but an aborted effort dropped before it could mature.
He reached for his cloak, not bothering to keep his hands slow or always visible, for what did a wolf care of what he reached for? She was quick and powerful and even if he held a gun with silver bullets, she would be ripping out his throat to the blessed spray of hot blood before he even pulled the trigger. He could see the thought in her eyes, but he only dropped his own gaze to better push the cloak back over his shoulders and pull his jumper up to reveal the ravaged skin beneath.
A large, wicked scar stretched its way across his torso, a mark that was substantial as a child but that grew with him so that now it seemed only a monster could possibly have had such a set of teeth. Crisscrossed around his body were gouges from wolf nails, some that never scarred his skin but he could still feel beneath, like phantom wounds along his bones.
Her gaze, sparking golden in the light of the moon, dropped to linger on the bite mark, though her expression remained unreadable. After a good three breaths Remus dropped his jumper back down and pulled his cloak forward to fall around him again. It rippled in the wind, though the trees blocked most of the momentum.
She looked distinctly unimpressed when her eyes rose to meet his, and it was with a taunt that she said, “Those were not the wounds of battles.”
“They were,” Remus said, little to no inflection in his voice, simply a statement of fact.
“Battles of the mind have no place here.” She lifted her lip in a disgusted sneer. “You are nothing but a filthy dog masquerading as a human, far too weak for our camp... You want to be human, don’t you? I can see it in your cowering eyes.”
When Remus did not answer immediately, she drew herself to her full height and looked down at him from the slight incline she stood on. Hers was the haughty beauty of the wolf, an otherworldly presence that had nothing to do with physical appearance and everything to do with aura. “You are not welcome here.”
Remus was silent a moment, watching her with a calm, unreadable expression while she watched him closely for signs of flight. When he spoke, his tone was polite and unperturbed. “I wish to request shelter for the night, as a favor to a traveler-“
She growled suddenly, eyes narrowed and teeth bared, voice quivering with anger and indignation. “You think us sniveling dogs who wag their tails and beg for a scrap of attention? Who open their home to any who pass, too grateful for the visit to care of dignity?”
“I mean no insult,” Remus said, still as composed despite the ire so evident that he half-expected to see bristled fur erupt from her skin. “I am here to discuss-“
“There will be no discussions!” Her voice was the bark of command, her eyes glinting almost entirely golden now in the eerie half-shadowed light of the moon. She drew back into the woods, the forest gently covering her in its embrace. “Leave now, or be killed. It has not been long since I tasted warm blood, but I will make an exception for you.” Her voice lilted just slightly at the end, seductive and cruel and full of hidden laughter.
He had hoped that he could infiltrate the camp immediately, find a small place to sleep for a tense but somewhat comfortable night, and have more time to convince them before the full moon. It was not likely that his mission would have gone so smoothly, but still, he had hoped....
“I will return tomorrow.”
There was only the glint of sharp teeth and golden eyes as she murmured, “It is your corpse and our feast, little human.”
Even watching her, he could not see exactly when she left; just that she was there one moment and gone the next, without even the slightest hint of movement in between. He stared for a few deep breaths, waiting, tense and ready, in case she returned with reinforcements or any other appeared to taunt him.
But after counting to one hundred, he found that he was still alone, though his heart had slowed to a languid pace. He did not think his heart raced even once when she was there, or that he showed any sign of fear, but it was perhaps beating a little faster than he would have cared for and his eyes were probably a little wide. He was not particularly afraid of her or the danger, but, like all living creatures, he recognized a threat to his life when there was one and he, of course, preferred to avoid it.
Sighing, Remus pulled his cloak closed against the newest gust of wind, nearly pushing him into a stumble at the suddenness, and turned to follow the edges of the forest until he could get further from the clan’s territory. They probably claimed everything within the valley itself, but he could at least move away from the direction of the camp itself in hopes of appeasing the woman a little.
His steps were steady but slow, and somewhere within he yearned deeply and abruptly for warm tea and a book, a comfortable chair and a crackling fire, three laughing friends and soft carpet beneath his bare feet.
Remus closed his eyes, the movement sudden and rather foolish given the debris littering the ground and his unfamiliar surroundings. In the stillness beneath his eyelids, he could clearly see the grinning faces, and the steam rising from a nice large mug of Earl Grey.
He had not expected to think of anything from home while out here, but he supposed it was inevitable. Let him long for times best forgotten all he wished; all that was important rested behind him, in the words he would use to woo the werewolves and the glint of gold off cold, inhuman eyes.
What did it matter if there were those who saw him not as Dark Creature to loathe or the sniveling dog of humanity, but as simply Remus John Lupin? They were not here and he was not there, and all their laughing faces beneath his eyelids could do was taunt and distract him from a far more important task.
Remus opened his eyes, focused so intensely it was almost painful on the pebbles scattering beneath his feet and the texture of the trees that slowly surrounded him when he headed into the forest. This was the night he would sleep, before the morning he would wake, before the day he would approach the werewolves once more. This was tonight, and tonight was all that mattered.
This was his universe, not the stars or moon or even the Earth, but this. This mission, this night, this life.
Just this.