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Remus has been a dying man since he was four years old and received this curse.
Sure there were times over his life when he was able to forget. Forget the life sentence hanging over his head, forget the regulations that would rather have him get the axe than treatment.
He grew used to the fact that he’d likely die young.
He surely never expected to make it to his forties but here he is 64 and no sign of his life ever ending.
As a child, he expected to be kneeled before the Ministry itself and the silver axe swung at his neck. As morbid as a thought that was, that was what happened to werewolves who broke the law even if it was just going to school.
As he got older- if seventeen could really be considered older- he thought perhaps he would be another tally in the lives lost in the War. Maybe that way his death could mean something. He never expected the brightest of them all would end up dead instead.
The next dozen years were a blur for him. He spent every full moon fully expecting it to be his last. He drank every bottle, smoked every cigarette, and even admittedly overmedicated in less-than-legal ways. But he still lived.
Perhaps if he wasn´t so much of a coward he would have dealt with it himself, but he made a promise years ago and even to a ghost he couldn’t break it.
So he lived. He lived waiting for death just as he had all his life but it never came. It came for James and Lily, it came for Peter, and it even came for his star.
Sirius…
He wished he allowed himself to love that man again when he had the chance. But he was too caught up in his self-loathing to risk indulging in something as sweet as love again. He had loved once and it only hurt him.
But it didn´t matter. It still hurt like nothing had ever hurt before when he watched Sirius fade away. He tried to reason time and time again, pleading to Death herself why he was the one she spared time and time again.
He fully expected to die beside his friends now here he was, the last man standing, living in a sad house on a sad street in a sad town.
He lived far away enough from any neighbors or farm- he learned better at a previous resident when a farmer awoke to see a cow mutilated. He left soon after that, a marauder in truer words than it meant when they were kids.
He lived alone, just as he had most of his life, but there was a cat. He lived with it more than it lived with him. It could come and go as it pleased as it did own the home before he did. He tried to feed it before but the cat just stared at him blankly. He didn´t try again after that, letting it hunt and catch for its meal just as it probably always had. He supposed it was better that way. He would die eventually and leaving the cat reliant on him would only be dooming them both.
He found it painfully ironic- how most irony is he supposes- that it had to be a cat. He was forced to make dozens of promises that they would never get a cat after Sirius faced the betrayal of James and Lily getting that horrid orange feline. But he supposed it was more like that cat had him rather than him having a cat.
He called it Cat in his head. Once perhaps he may have been clever and came up with a proper name, but it was a cat so what name more fitting than Cat?
Cat disappeared a lot but as if it knew- which it probably did- it was always around for the full moon.
It was a small comfort he allowed himself to indulge.
Even now, Cat was sitting in front of the lit fireplace watching at the flames cast dancing shadows onto the floor. It was a dreadfully warm summer but he found the flames aided his aching joints long ago so he was fit to sweat.
Darkness was slowly filling the small cabin he called a house. The sun was setting and he knew he should get up and head outside less he wanted to destroy everything inside. So he forced himself up, grabbing a cane he´d need for more years than not, and made his way out of the stuffy house.
Cat followed dutifully behind him as he traversed his journey. Upon his arrival to this cabin decades ago he set a circle of wards up around a small clearing just a few miles away. Now he was lucky if he made the walk before collapsing to the ground or having to take multiple breaks.
Somehow he made it with surprisingly little pain, perhaps an offering from Death before she took him tonight. Cat had disappeared before he entered the wards, likely going to spend the night exploring the woods before coming back just as the sun did the next morning.
Looking up he saw the sky still glowed in orange, meaning the sun had yet to fully set and all he could do was wait. In his school days, his friends tried to make up games to distract him from waiting for the inevitable. On nights like these, he found himself playing along with the ghosts in his memory. The cruelest game they made was rating different people in Hogwarts based on their quote “smashabilty”. They had to stop playing when James gave Dumbledore a 100, commenting something rather graphic with his beard.
He knew they did it to comfort him. Being as wild and ridiculous as they could be to keep his mind occupied.
But just as it would today, the moon always rose and with it the monster inside him.
It took Sirius three years to convince him he wasn´t a monster, and even then he compromised with the man and didn’t tell him. There was still a monster but only this time it was inside him rather than himself.
He found the lines blurring once again over the past years.
If Sirius was here he would hold his hand in his, crack the stupidest of jokes just to get him to smile, and press kisses to his scars. There were times when he willed himself to see him. Imagine that Sirius was just in the kitchen making tea though the man had always been deadful at it. Tell himself that while he cooked dinner he had to be sure not to use egg yolks because Sirius was allergic to them. “Just the yolks, Moony, the whites are just fine.” Then he’d crack a joke about other whites he could eat.
He lived a sad and lonely existence. He knew that and accepted it long ago.
The few times a month he’d venture into the nearby town he heard the kids tell stories about him. The scary old man who lived in the woods alone. They’d say he ate little children who ventured too far from home or that he was a serial killer of sorts. Just children’s campfire tales but they followed him nonetheless. He was aware of how it looked. A creaky old man who’d only be seen maybe once or twice a month, living all alone in a strange- supposedly haunted- cabin in the woods.
Perhaps it was haunted, though not by a ghost- not any outside of his head at least- but by him. The oldest werewolf who ever lived, forced to bide his time until he died.
It was a strange thought, knowing that as of now he was the oldest werewolf in history. He was just 64 and though that was unbelievable to him many wizards would live well past 100. Sure he hoped that title would be taken from him soon, that with the changing of laws, the quality of life for this plague would be improved. That perhaps someday soon a four-year-old wouldn’t have to fear an axe that it would only become part of the barbaric history right along with house elves and centaur genocide.
He still got letters from Hermione- from all three of them really- but he liked hers the most. He always knew she would be something and she is. She changed the laws, eradicated the guaranteed death penalty, disbanded the Hunting and Control division, and even changed the rule that every werewolf had to be registered. She is still currently trying to make Wolfsbane available to all for free but has hit many roadblocks with cost and production. But he was sure she’d achieve it someday.
He hoped there would be more information after his time. Very little was known about werewolves other than how to control and defend against them. His own life was an anomaly living to 64, though he felt he aged there decades ago. He long expected the stress of the transformation to be too much on his weak body and to simply kill him by the time he reached his forties. Yet here he was, still feeling the repercussions of his father’s mouth.
It was his plague to bear though, wasn’t it?
Teenage him would have been dramatic and said he deserved the pain somehow. He knew better now. He didn’t deserve it but that didn’t make it stop. Every full moon his bones would twist and break and he just had to accept it until he died.
He looked up at the stars. The sun was setting and the sky was a deep blue clouded by the everlasting grey that covered this town. He liked the stars, hated the moon.
Sirius once pointed them all out to him, he never could see what his love saw but he pretended to see the shapes and stories in them just because it made him smile.
Looking up now he wished he paid more attention. Tried harder.
He unbuttoned his cloak and took off his pants and shoes. He looked up at the sky and asked one thing.
Please let me die tonight. I’m ready, I’ve always been ready.
With his thoughts echoing in his mind, he awaited the pain.
First, his bones would twist and elongate. His teeth would sharpen and his skin would change. Last was always his mind.
He waited for the pain like he did every month, but it never came.
He opened his eyes not having realized he closed them in the first place. Above him was the moon. Illuminated and full yet he was looking right up at it.
He looked at it with his own eyes, in his own skin, with his own mind.
He looked at the moon and the pain did not come. His bones did not crack and his mind stayed his own. He just stood there unbelieving for hours.
The moon was right above his head and he still did not transform. He waited. He waited for the moon to stop its trick just as much as he waited for death but it neither came.
He stayed in his own mind, his own body, and watched the moon until the sun rose. Eventually, he forced himself back home again.
He did the same the next month. He went to the warded clearing wondering perhaps if it was a fluke but once again only watched the moon.
He did that for five months before he wrote the only people he ever wrote anymore.
It was a simple letter and wasn’t enough to convey what he was feeling. There was not enough paper in the world to do that but he wrote it nonetheless. He explained what had happened- not to brag, but to hope that with the information in the right hands, it would be explained, be shared. He told of how he was free from his curse, from his shackles. He explained to the three that they wouldn’t be able to find him in the small cloudy village anymore. That he took Cat and left. He thanked each of them for what they did, and what they continued to do.
Then he left.
He left behind the isolated cabin and the reminder of how he couldn’t let himself close to anyone. He traveled at first. He had lived all around the country but he had yet to travel for travel’s sake. He liked it but Cat hated it. So he settled down again.
It wasn’t a shack in the woods but right in the heart of London. He watched the people below his apartment, as creepy as it sounded. He watched them each running from one place to the next. He would see some of the same people at the same time every day. Regulars coming to get their morning coffee from the shop just down the street, commuters getting to work on time. His favorite was the street performer who just sat on the fountain.
He found out it was called a living statue. He’d venture down to the fountain every once and a while and chat with the man who didn’t chat back. He’d buy him a coffee and hoped it was to his liking, always tossing in more coins than he probably could afford.
He told the man a story. His story.
He knew the man was a muggle, he was aware he sounded like a raving mad old man but he had lived a wild life and the younger man did listen.
He told of four friends, two lovers, war and magic, grief and loss, and of second chances.
After all, that was his story.