Elemental Force

Chapter 14:
The Mark of the Werewolf

I believe in doing things backwards.
Take heed. Start doing things in reverse.
~Neil Finn


Remus was made a werewolf through a bite, not born as one, though he remembered very little of the time when he wasn\'t one. He felt the bite again, as he had when he was a young boy, but something about it was different this time. His confused and pain-addled mind couldn\'t pinpoint what it was.

He had been a boy, happy as any other child with a loving family. He had an older brother who died about six weeks after having also been bitten by the werewolf. Remus, on the other hand, had survived, but only barely.

Both boys had been playing in the forest one late afternoon near the evening time. They had play wands and were practicing dueling as small boys are wont to do.

\"I\'ve got you!\" Remus remembered yelling to his brother and then running deeper into the forest after that so he would give him chase.

He ran laughing into the forest without thinking that during their play twilight had come. The moon was bright, and he could see very well.

At first he heard the laughter of his brother following him, and then it was silent. Suddenly, a horrible scream rent the silence of the forest. Remus recognized the voice right away, and he was frozen in fear.

\"REMUS!\" the boy had yelled and repeated again until his voice was strangled.

Not knowing what to do, he ran away as fast as he could. The twigs of the trees slapped him in the face as he ran, mocking his fear. He kept running as everything around him was beating him and holding him back. His own little boy body stumbled and fell, and he could not move. As he\'d fallen, his foot had gotten caught in some of the tree roots. He cried and cried for his brother and for his pain.

The werewolf found him there, easy game for him to consume. The blood of the other Lupin was already dripping from his maw, and the werewolf was ready for the blood and flesh of another. The werewolf found his leg and bit down hard on the thick calf muscle while Remus tried in vain to fight him. Eventually, the little boy passed out from the trauma, and the werewolf left him after having become bored with the tiny human.

The little boy wasn\'t even sure he had a concept of being alive after that except that his parents found him the next day. When he started to speak, he asked for his brother. \"Shh! We\'ve got you,\" his father had said, trying to hide the sound of worry in his voice.

When he looked over to his mother, he saw her cradling the other boy\'s broken body in her arms. He looked unreal and horribly pale, but he was there. Remus slipped back into sleep as he and his brother were carried home.

The month after that first full moon was full of visits to healers, potions masters, curse breakers, and any other person that could be of help to the two Lupins. Their parents tried to find help in many ways and always seeking it as discreetly as possible. It was to no avail because when the full moon came, both had become werewolves.

The pain had been horrible. The boy didn\'t know what to do and didn\'t know why it was happening to him. It hadn\'t been a comfort to know that his brother was also going through the same physical change. The misery he felt was intense, fearful and incredibly isolating. Both parents didn\'t come near their boys because they simply did not know what to do. Somehow, to the relief of all, both boys had returned to their human likeness after the night was over.

The older brother got progressively sicker from the first full moon change. The boy had received the worse of the damage from the initial bite and had never come close to anything resembling a recovery. The transformation had been too much for him, and he slipped deeper and deeper into illness. About two weeks after the full moon, he died beside Remus, who had been hugging his brother close to him for mutual comfort.

The event was hushed, and all evidence of his existence was expediently removed. His brother\'s name was never spoken again in the Lupin household, an unnamed hurt that Remus carried with him for a very long time. He missed him, and the child that Remus was could not express the anger at having to forget his brother as if he had never existed.

Eventually the memories of his brother passed from him along with his memories of what it was to be a human being all the days of the month, even on the ones with a full moon.

His parents never had other children, and it was because of Remus. He interrupted them arguing one time and heard his mother say to his father, \"What if he bites the baby?\" The boy turned and fled from his parents until he was found hiding under the bed hours later by his father.

These sensations he was feeling weren\'t quite right enough to be a perfect memory of his bite. He had been bitten in his leg. If he was flashing back to that time, why was it that his shoulder was hurting right now? The pain he felt was more intense than the cruelest memory because they had faded. It didn\'t make any sense at all to the animal mind or to Lupin\'s human mind that was sublimated far beneath it.

~*~

\"Have they woken up yet?\" Jonathan asked as he walked briskly into his playroom.

He had his men move the girl and the werewolf inside after the pair had been captured. Both were wrapped in restraining chains. They were being guarded, but so far nothing had happened.

\"Nothing yet, just small movements,\" one man said as he bowed his head before leaving.

Frank came in to take his place and talk to other wizard. \"What will you do with him now that you have him?\"

\"I\'m still deciding my opinions. The imagination is the only limit,\" he replied with a smile.

Frank nodded, and looked at the sleeping pair. They had been under for more than twelve hours without being subjected to sleeping potions or lethargy spells. When he thought he would lose his senses to boredom, the figures on the floor began to slowly move as they neared consciousness.

\"Oh, this is interesting. Look how he holds her close to him,\" Moss pointed out as Remus wrapped his body tighter around Ginny\'s. \"Quite the possessive gesture. It\'s nice to see that he still has some of the instincts of a man.\"

\"Not all men want to lie with that girl,\" Frank said with distaste. He\'d seen her plenty in the last two weeks, and he wasn\'t personally interested in her whatsoever.

Speaking to someone else, Jonathan ordered, \"Get her out of here. When he wakes up, I want to speak to the werewolf alone.\"

Ginny\'s limp body was pulled from Lupin\'s embrace. Her mind was muddled in a complete stupor. She fought against the pull and opened her heavy-lidded eyes to see Remus on the floor. He opened his eyes and instinctively reached out to her, but soon her awareness of him faded into black. She was thrown unceremoniously back into her cell.

After she had been removed, Jonathan and Frank waited for Remus to wake up. He\'d fallen out of wakefulness after Ginny was yanked from him. He\'d seen her brown eyes and knew with satisfaction that she was the one he was meant to find. Then she was gone, and it had only been a waking dream.

In another moment, Lupin\'s eyes awoke again to see blurry images. A man with black hair was standing over him, but his face was hidden. As he came into stronger focus, Remus noticed that he was handsome in a way that reminded him of someone special.

\"Sirius?\" he said, probing the haze.

\"No,\" Moss said simply as he bent down closer to Remus. He rubbed his gloved fingers over the werewolf\'s temple. Then Moss slapped his face to get wakeful attention.

\"You had a hard night last night. I am sure you\'re exhausted from running through the forest. You also have a nasty silver arrow wound. I aimed it myself, and I think I did a rather nice job,\" Jonathan began in his friendly, familiar-seeming prattle.

Remus blinked incoherently at him and then looked over his left shoulder where he was impaled. He realized that this man who had captured him when he was a werewolf had wanted him to see the full extent of damage that had been done. He wanted Remus to know he had been the one to hurt him. As a power play, it was an effective one.

\"And now it\'s time to get it out,\" his captor said with a soft smile.

Jonathan snapped his fingers, and Frank approached with a molten hot fire poker.

\"What are you doing?\" Remus asked dryly as he eyed the implement.

\"Cauterizing your wound the old-fashioned Muggle way, of course.\" He took the poker from Frank and then blew it, making the orange tip of it light up. Satisfied, Moss threw a strap of leather to the man working with him. \"Bind him, Frank.\"

Frank took the leather strap with pleasure and tied it around Lupin\'s mouth, shoving it between his teeth. While Remus might have under different instances refused to be gagged, he knew what was coming. It was almost a kindness to give him something to bite.

\"Break the arrow,\" Moss instructed to Frank after the first task had been complete.

The minion first put both hands on the shaft, and then he broke it deftly. Remus was struggling against them both in pain as the arrow was next forced the rest of the way out of his chest. He bit down hard on the leather as waves of pain took over his body. It was nothing to the sensation of the poker being pressed to the arrow\'s entrance point in Lupin\'s back. He had no frame of reference for it except that it was worse than Cruciatus, and he had seen Ginny endure this same torture from several people when she had first been taken.

\"I don\'t think that was hot enough,\" Moss assessed. \"It cooled while we were getting the arrow out of you. I\'m so sorry for my mistake, but I\'ll remedy that on the other side.\"

He gave the poker again to Frank to reheat. This time when it came at him in all its molten glory, Remus could see the danger. He realized that had been Jonathan\'s tactic all along.

\"Good boy!\" he announced happily as he took the leather piece out of his mouth. \"You took that quite well. I have such high hopes for us getting to know each other. Now it\'s time for the fun to start.\"

Moss tossed a bottle of oil to Frank who deftly caught it. He walked with enthusiasm behind Remus to start applying it to his back.

Remus did not ask Jonathan this time what he was doing. Sometimes it was better not to know. Instead, he tried to keep his eyes on Frank.

\"I\'ve never met a werewolf before, but I have had other guests visit me,\" he shared. \"I know that we get better results from people with soft skin, but that might not apply to you since you are a werewolf. I am told your kind have fast healing properties. I shall endeavor to find out if it is indeed true.\"

At the end of his speech, he looked pleased with himself. During the whole time Jonathan spoke, Frank was busy rubbing the oil into Lupin\'s naked back. While the man had a professional veneer, he seemed to be deriving enough personal pleasure out of it to make Moss question him.

\"Frank?\"

\"Yes, Mr. Moss?\"

\"Is there,\" he sharply emphasized the first two words as he spoke, \"something I should know?\"

\"No, sir.\" Frank had a definite look of guilt on his face.

\"Good. It\'s time to get your hands off the werewolf.\" Moss paused impatiently. \"Now!\"

Frank reluctantly withdrew his hands from Remus and moved to stand behind Jonathan. From his position hidden behind Moss, he stared intently at the captured werewolf while Moss continued to speak to Remus.

\"So to welcome you to the family, as it were, I am going to invite you to play. Rather, we\'ll play with you and do anything we want, and you have no choice but to accept.\" He made it sound as if it were a logical course of action.

\"For starters, let me show you what this is. This,\" he brought his torture implement right in front of Lupin\'s eyes, \"is a cat-o-nine tails. These braids are human hair I\'d taken from women and girls I once had the delight of meeting.\" He looked pleased with himself.

\"At the end of these braids, you will notice lead sinkers. It is heavy and they will dig deep into any flesh, even yours, werewolf.\" He looked at Remus ponderingly. \"This could become tedious. Do you have a name?\"

Jonathan tapped his foot impatiently after it became clear that Remus wouldn\'t answer. \"Well? Don\'t keep us in suspense!\"

When Remus continued to be silent, Moss finished in annoyance, \"Fine. It\'s time to torture you anyway. Maybe I\'ll be able to beat it out of you.\"

Jonathan rolled up his shirtsleeves and caressed the braids in the implement. \"Hoist him up,\" he instructed Frank.

Remus had already been bound in chains, so Frank used a pulley to connect another chain to the restraints on his arms and lift him up off the floor. Once in place there, his ankles were secured by shackles and the chains bolted down. He hung in the middle of the room in the shape of a human X, his body vulnerable to any attack Moss might give.

When the preparation was done, Moss began his work with a smile on his face and a song in his heart. Jonathan spoke a children\'s counting rhyme several times as he beat Remus with the cat-o-nine tails.

\"One, two! Buckle my shoe.\"

On the odd numbers, he would up to strike. With every even number he lodged the metal in Lupin\'s back and drug it through the flesh as he spoke the rest of the chant. Moss fell into the rhythmic trance of the simple rhyme while Lupin\'s flesh became broken and bloody.

\"Three, four! Shut the door!\"

Trails of blood dripped from his body and met in a small river on the floor.

\"Five, six! Pick up sticks!\"

Jonathan continued to flog him and sing with an unfailing amount of energy. He stopped later when he decided to change his white shirt, which had become stained from the occasional blood splatter.

\"Lower him,\" Moss instructed Frank.

Remus was lowered directly into the pool of his own blood that had begun to congeal into a stinky, sticky mess.

\"I do believe it\'s time for tea. Have a lovely rest of your afternoon; I will return later.\"

\"You are insane,\" Remus spat from his chained position.

\"I am not insane!\" He looked indignant and pounded his flat palm with his fist for emphasis. \"I am amoral. Get it right, will you? You know, just once I would like to meet someone who was intelligent enough to know the difference. Is that too much to ask?\"

Remus wasn\'t about to argue the point with someone who had him captive, but if a person knew enough to call himself amoral, he probably wasn\'t. He had Ginny, and right now that was more important to Lupin than mind games or arguments about semantics.

~*~

Ginny rolled over on to her right side and whimpered in pain. Automatically she lifted her hand to her shoulder and she touched skin that was raw and tender. Slowly the realization shifted into her consciousness. Remus had bitten her.

She sighed in the darkness at the twists and turns Fate was playing on her life. If she would ever escape this hell, she would become a werewolf just like him. Would her father still love her if she was a werewolf? Would Harry? A tear trickled down her nose and fell into the dirty straw underneath her.

She touched the small golden pendant at her throat, amazed that she still had it because Jonathan had taken away everything else she owned. It had been a father\'s gift to his only little girl. Ginny remembered that as a five year old child she wandered into his Muggle workshop one day. He had been playing with his plugs in fascination. They were interesting to her only because they were important to her daddy. She stayed with Arthur to share his special world with him.

When she turned six years old, her father gave her one of his precious plugs. He Transfigured it into gold and minimized it so she could wear it on a necklace. Though she had birthday festivities with the rest of the family, this was done with special honor from father to daughter in the workshop away from eyes of others who wouldn\'t understand. She wore the necklace from that day forward even when she got older and no longer spent time secreted away with him.

\"…Werewolf,\" she whispered again in anguish.

She cared for Remus because he was a friend, but in none of her dreams of the future did she wish to be a werewolf. She felt selfish and petty for admitting it, even a little guilty because she should be happy to have a friend like Remus. She wondered if this was divine retribution because of wayward thoughts.

A short time later she heard a shuffling of feet as Robert came to her cell with the evening\'s meal offering. It was split pea soup, something that would normally be welcomed on a cold winter night. Instead, Ginny didn\'t even want to try to look at it.

He placed the tray on the floor near her but maintained his safe distance. Instead of leaving quickly he stared at her. \"Are you hurt?\" he finally asked her.

Jonathan had done nothing kind to her, so being hurt was her normal state of things. Ginny realized he meant her shoulder wound from Remus. \"Yes,\" she said with a dry cough.

The butler\'s eyes widened in true surprise. He hadn\'t expected Ginny\'s voice to be restored to her. He pulled out his wand and approached her with caution. She sucked in her breath, fully expecting him to curse her again with Silencio. Instead he muttered a healing charm for her shoulder.

\"I know of Jonathan\'s non-scarification spell, but that does not guarantee the wounds underneath the scars will properly heal. That should help,\" he said with a small nod as he backed away.

Almost of their own volition, Ginny\'s fingers reached for her shoulder. \"Thank you,\" she mouthed to Robert before he left the room with a nod.

When he was gone as quickly as he had come, Ginny\'s thoughts returned to the fact that she might be changing into a werewolf. She took some deep breaths to calm herself, and then she sipped the soup she had been given. While she ate, she tried to think of nothing at all, especially the fact that she was still caged like the beast she would most likely become.

In confirmation of her fears, her stomach roiled against her. What little she had inside her came out of her mouth onto the floor. She coughed as she heaved. Then her skin felt clammy as she started sweating.

Is this how it feels?, she thought to herself as she took comfort on the coldness of the stones underneath the straw. Then she guessed why she could mentally talk to Remus. She was nothing but a beast herself.

She realized as she started to drift away to sleep that she had not tried to talk to him since she woke up. She felt awash in guilt that she had not tried to find out if he was okay. Tentatively she reached out.

At first, she thought she felt nothing, and then she realized she felt a subtle heat. It came from the burning of damaged muscles. He was near her somewhere in the manor, and that was a small bit of comfort.

Rubbing her fingers on the stone in meditation, Ginny thought to the werewolf. She nudged and tried to reach into him. He refused to respond immediately, but it helped her to think about something else besides her self.

At last, he turned his attention to her. //Ginny,// he sent in a wry tone of thought, //we\'re here.//

//Yes, we are,// she answered in a way that could have been laughing at the irony of it all. When he said he\'d come to rescue her, she wanted so much to be home. She wasn\'t even truly sure what day it was any more.

//What has he done to you?// she asked with cautious pauses. She already knew Jonathan\'s brand of play more than she would have liked.

//Oh, the normal,// he answered in an attempt at humor. //He introduced me to the family and showed me the china patterns. I think we\'re dating now.//

His answer was so unexpected that she just went silent. It was enough for the moment to know that he was with her. She could find soon if he had help on the way. Of course, that made her think to what might happen when her old friends found her. She wouldn\'t be the same Ginny they used to know, and not simply because she\'d been tortured. She knew from the depths of her soul that she had been changed and would never be the same.

She hid her thoughts, but the matter ate away at her reserve. Finally, when she was slipping once again into exhaustion, she reached across the gap like a child who calls out to her parents before falling asleep.

//Remus?//

It took him a long time to answer. He was trying to think of anything but his pain, and it was not working. He focused again on the sound of her mental voice as something that was outside himself. He concentrated on her and where she was as if he could remove his spirit from his body and fly to her.

When he got his thoughts to her this time, he could tell that something was wrong. //What is it?// he asked with guarded concern.

He could feel her hesitate, so he was alert when she asked her next question. //What does it feel like to be a werewolf?//

The question shocked him, but not because it was impudent or controversial. When they were boys before the other Marauders learned to be Animagi, Sirius had asked him the exact same question.

//It… hurts. Sometimes I don\'t remember myself in the morning or how I\'ve done the things I\'ve done. I used to hurt myself because there was so much pain, and I always worry about hurting someone else,// he explained as if it was a prepared answer because he had been asked so many times.

Silence filled the span of thought until finally he questioned, //Why did you ask me, Ginny?//

She answered him in a thought that could have been a whisper if it had been spoken. //You bit me.//

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The Neil Finn lyric used for this chapter is from \"Love You \'Til The Day I Die,\" performed by Crowded House on the album Crowded House.