rue (the day I was born)

With rheumy eyes, Lily and James looked up at him, innocent children hooked on his every word. Remus swallowed, “Beings come and go.” Romulus. Nymphadora. The wolves. “But when we love them,” Romulus, Nymphadora, the wolves, “they never really go. They’re always with us, in the way we think, they shaped us to become who we are, our own person.” He looked at Sirius, let Sirius nuzzle into his palm, wiping the saliva on the back of his fur, “Sirius is still here. He’s still here to shower with as much love as we possibly can, he’s here to be our best friend, we can learn from him, speak to him, and maybe mortality is a blessing. Because it makes sure we try to value life. Because we have a limited time to love Sirius with our all, and therefore we must completely soak him in it. Why cry now when we can love him? When we can live with him?”

Lily sniffed, glanced at Romulus’s body. Remus’s tongue fell down his throat, lodged there like a stone. She looked at him intently, “Then live with us, Remus.”

— extract from

There was nothing, and Remus was full of it, Romulus, spitting out, Romulus, he could do nothing else, the word couldn’t be stale, he had to keep saying  Romulus, thinking Romulus, he couldn’t let it grow mouldy in his mouth, he had to keep it alive,  Romulus, Romulus, Romulus. He may have screamed it, sobbed it, but there was only silence, because if Romulus’s voice wasn’t there, then what was the point of Remus hearing anything at all? The walls of his mouth felt hollowed out, dry and cracking, but at least Romulus wasn’t stale, he wasn’t, he wasn’t, and he would never be old, he was younger than Remus.

Oldest always died first.

And Remus wasn’t dead, because Romulus wanted him alive, would always want him alive, Romulus was alive, he was just sleeping, his body was pushing out the poison, and Remus would wait for him, always, the way Romulus would do that for him, forever, and ever and ever, and now never, but he wasn’t dead, so never was never and ever was forever.

Remus could lie, but Romulus was dead.

Romulus was dead. It gnawed at Remus’s stomach, a gaping cavity, where he was thinner than paper, a collapsed empire bathing in its ruins, there was no rush, no overwhelming stampede of cluttered feelings breaking free, there was a singular, sole pit, where nothing happened, a dead battlefield where nothing breathed, nothing moved, everything simply sat still in unthinking contemplation, marinating in the musty smell of death. Disintegrated dust, having reached the final stage of utmost destruction, stuck forever, and ever and ever.

Remus’s stomach was empty, but it was gnawing, stuck, he was hungry and he couldn’t feed it, because even though he kept thinking Romulus, it couldn’t complete him.

…

They would still be there for each other. The memory of Romulus would always be there for Remus in his mind. And Remus would always be there for Romulus, he would always remember Romulus, Romulus was in the way he lived, their influence upon and within each other, even if Romulus was dead, he had been alive, and that was important. That was the important thing. You were alive. Filled with thoughts, and you told me those thoughts, you told Lily and James those thoughts, so now you are alive in us.

— extract from

Remus opened his eyes, face-to-face with a beautiful being — oh, but he couldn’t think beings are pretty, otherwise he’d be a liar! — and Romulus was still holding his wrist.

Remus closed his eyes, opened them to the beautiful being. He could think beings were beautiful. Everyone was beautiful in their own right. Everyone had interesting features, something which stood out, soft cheeks, an upturned nose, a pointed chin, short lashes around small eyes, it all looked pretty because it was different, it was different and should be painted, memorised by brush strokes and dipped in water as they swirled naturally on the canvas that was the universe, so many expressions and eye-catching qualities, capturing the light in the rare shapes of their grins, the glinting of variously crooked teeth, and Remus thought everyone was beautiful. He had to be beautiful too, then. Because his smile was something new and the crinkles around his eyes were unique to his skin alone, everyone else had their own, and maybe it was good he didn’t feel romantic or sexual attraction, because he could see that being attractive didn’t fit a category, being attractive was never conventional, never a forced analytical ritual, being attractive was original. It was what united everyone’s individual faces: the fact that each and every being was beautiful, and the way that they were pretty for themselves.

Yes, the being in front of him was beautiful. The same way everyone was, in their different ways.

— extract from

“It’s okay,” Remus interrupted. “I don’t want romance. Or sex.”

Evan stared at his face, gaze scanning analytically across Remus as if he were a stain on Evan’s best dress, and needed to be carefully removed without causing repercussions. “No wonder,” he sneered. “Is it because no one would want that with you anyway?”

It wasn’t those words. It wasn’t. Maybe it was the food. Something was causing daggers to push into all sides of Remus’s stomach, prodding at the thin skin, making it stretch upwards, hitting his throat, stabbing into it, and the daggers were covered in thick, viscous oil, cemented to the roof of his mouth, tingling, begging to be coughed out, hurled from his body, then when he swallowed, they plunged back into his stomach and cut the feeling out of it, hollowed a hole within the food, bunched it around his organs until his body was swelling, bloated, fattening to make room for the disease-carrying daggers, weighing on his gut and causing his belly to sink, rolling out of him like the bulge of a cliff, prickling, tickling, crawling back up, tapping with tiny feet against his flesh, bugs in his mouth, ugly, dirty bugs, and he needed to throw them out.

— extract from

All in all, Remus was mortified. He wanted to be able to respect whatever love this was, but he couldn’t, but then… Why would he even have to respect the others’ love when they didn’t respect his love? But his love wasn’t love. So of course they didn’t respect it.

Remus was obligated to respect though, because everything else was normal, and he was not. He had to respect his parents, Hope Lupin and Lyall Lupin, the ones who had conceived him, given him to a wolf in order to amuse themselves, or in an attempt to amuse him, but Remus was weird, abnormal, unnatural. Violence didn’t please him. It pleased everyone else, to express themselves in bloody rage; they couldn’t harm each other, it was never permanent on their immortal bodies, to slash and to break and to fight was cathartic, why would anyone feel guilt when they were helping themselves release who they were? When they were channelling their control, unleashing all their strength and power, when they were in the right and everyone else was in the wrong? Remus was raised by wolves, and that made him who he was. Remus was raised by wolves, and that made him a gift. Now he could rule over mortals as they deserved. He could rule over them, with brute force, raw strength, Godly power. He knew how to be in control. He wished he didn’t.

Hope, the Goddess of Craving, his mother, embraced Remus, “Everyone craves power. And I gave it to you. My two sons.”

Lyall, God of anti-Fear, his father, rested his chin on Romulus’s hair, “Fear is what holds beings back. Don’t let fear hold you back from anything, my children. Run after what your heart desires, stand up for what you believe in, destroy fear with the brutal truth, because if you are truthful to yourself, then you will be fearless.”

“When you are truthful to yourself… when you give into what you crave, how can you be afraid?” Hope whispered. “Don’t be ashamed of what you crave.”

“Don’t fear what is inside of you,” Lyall finished, wrapping his family in his arms.

They moved up, leaping until they were crossing entire oceans in one stride, down until they were met with the blazing sight of fire, cocooned away from mortals, hidden in the depths of the sea in an arcane bubble, invisible unless one looked closely, scentless unless one had the senses of a God. For Remus, the smell of weed was pungent. For Remus, the smell of sex was stifling. Immortal beings were draped over each other, faces lit up in flickering gold as they breathed in smoke, they were shining, bright, yet what they were doing was dull, grey, smoggy. It had no effect on them. Immortal beings shone forever. Their skin shimmered, silk rippling across their bodies, smooth, shiny, it was their bodies, they were woven from satin, wrapped around their fingers, power over everything, wrapped in their fingers, by the partings of their rounded lips, sticks of gratifying, pleasuring, satiating drugs, a sensation that everyone wanted. If drugs didn’t kill, then everyone would do them, for the feeling. Remus didn’t need the feeling.

Or maybe he did. If everyone else sought the feeling, then Remus would be left behind, because everyone was his everything, and he wasn’t theirs. They wanted something else, and he wanted them. And when they left, he wouldn’t have them, so he too would need the feeling. Everyone sought the feeling. The feeling of being whole, complete, filled, to the hilt, literally, metaphorically, take your fill.

— extract from

Sometimes, things were so broken that they were unfixable. This was unfixable. In every glance, Remus could smell fear, the memories were everywhere, a palimpsest upon every invisible wall surrounding him, layers upon layers until they were suffocating him, everything he’d done, the actions he’d committed, the screams he’d made, torn out from the lungs of others with wretched claws.

Remus was bad, abuse was bad, and he was perpetuating it. Violence didn’t bring him joy, it brought him a pit in his gut, a void he couldn’t fill no matter what he tried, it forced expectations onto his back, cracked his spine until those who went near him were pricked with the splinters, he couldn’t stop, he couldn’t be better, he didn’t want to change, he didn’t want to be judged for changing, he didn’t want praise. More violence couldn’t satisfy it, more violence only made the yearning grow, more violence made him want to attack himself more than those around him, he couldn’t stop, he wouldn’t stop.

Romulus… we need to leave.

In the dead of night, the twins slunk away, disappeared into the darkness, left the wolves sleeping in the den, battered, bruised bodies, tired snores, Remus left it behind. He left a part of himself behind. It clung to the walls of the den, the home he had grown in, he pulled something out of his chest, rock-heavy, chaining him to the wolves, he walked away from it, dragging his feet, on and on, despite being weighed back. He untangled the ropes of his gut attached to the den, they’d always lead back to his home, but he could walk away, he could keep pulling himself apart, stretch it out, create distance, he could walk away until the red thread connecting him had shrunk into a thin line, the mark of an absent pulse, the moment he’d die. But he wouldn’t die.

Remus was a God.

— extract from

Remus couldn’t accept that, he wouldn’t, he needed to be absolved, redeemed, I have a reason! There’s a reason I’m like this! There’s a reason I do this! If Remus could plunge his hand down his throat and scratch along the sides of it, crackling red fabric tearing apart like sizzling fissures on the surface of the earth, spurting blood, trickling down into his stomach, attached to his veins, looped in a knot, squashed in his gut, if Remus could slash through his whole body until he could find it, the reason, clinging to the inside of his skin and making him want to throw it up, he could scrape it out, digging his nails into the sides of his mouth and clawing it out, uprooting the poison in his teeth, the stain on his tongue, it was there, there was a reason, he could feel it, it made him sick.

— extract from

Remus didn’t like it when the wolves would mate. Or demonstrate the fact that they were his mother and father by preferring each other over everyone else. He didn’t like it when the wolves made hugs into something that a hug was not, when they acted like it was a seduction technique instead of raw comfort. Instead of the base desire that every creature had to be loved like they were wanted, they made it the base desire to have desire, to be desired, to use hugs as a segue way into something more, but why would they need more, when the feeling of relaxing into the limbs around oneself was everything?

The concept wrapped around Remus’s brain and pulled it apart, fraying at the edges as he tried to put it back together in a way that made sense. Everyone desired more. He tried to cram the thought in his brain, put a lid on it, but it fell out, more was too much, more made him feel small, more made him want to curl into himself, stick a claw in and carve it out. Because Remus had everything, and this more was making him lose everything.

It made him turn his face away, he didn’t want to smell it or be near it, he hated the fact that the others did it, he hated the fact that it was normal, he hated the fact that he hated it, because they should be allowed to do what they wanted, but he couldn’t stop thinking about how they were dirty, but they weren’t dirty.

But he couldn’t touch them.

It was dirty, on their body, the ground he walked on, it was muddy, twisted within it, completely sullied, it was normal, normal, normal. He should touch them, hug them, even when they themselves thought hugs were lesser than the main thing. Hugs were Remus’s main thing. Everyone else acted like it was lesser. A mere little hug? Boring. Passionless. Inconsequential.

— extract from

EXTRACT:

Remus fell out of the womb of a wolf, thus dubbed, ‘Remus Lupin.’ From that day on, he could never be unborn. Immortality is a blessing.

Remus’s twin followed immediately after, and he was Romulus. They were gifts from the Gods, the children of Lyall, the Destroyer of Fear, and Hope, the Creator of Craving. Remus was the God of Lycanthropy, and Romulus was the God of Ambition. Romulus’s title made sense — the child of anti-Fear and Craving was bound to fearlessly crave things, expecting everything to happen the way he wanted it to, pushing for his desires until they were fulfilled. Remus’s only made sense for a reason that didn’t make sense. It made sense, because he was born from the womb of a wolf, except why was he born from the womb of a wolf?

Was this a spur of the moment decision made by the impulsive, arbitrary Gods? Was this supposed to mean something? The fact that Remus’s first breath was mingled with fur, tickling his nose, silvery white strands, like delicate wisps of a spider’s web, woven together, Remus, Romulus, and the wolf, curled up to her warm, cushioned chest, with her nuzzling their heads and licking them clean. What did it mean?

That Remus was an animal? He pushed his chubby fingers into the soft stomach of his wolf-mother, curled them around her fur, the contrast of the grey hair stark against his pink skin. The hair atop his own head was of golden curls, like Romulus’s beside him. Their plump cheeks were rosy red, fresh little apples which were already ripe, held in the claws of a wolf, who could be trusted not to bite.

Or could she? She was a wolf, and Remus was a God in human form. They were different.

But he was born to her.

Why?

i am a headless chicken. i am a headless chicken. i am a headless chicken. i am a headless chicken. i am a headless chicken. i am a headless chicken. i am a headless chicken. i am a headless chicken. i am a headless chicken.

but alas, i am an ostrich and my head is in the sand😔

Remus Lupin and James Potter are my fathers which is why they simply must be lovers.

march should be moonchaser month because both their birthdays are in it.

(also, think of the alliteration, march moonchaser month. that’s why may should also be moonchaser month...)

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1st year canon compliant moonchaser:

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2nd year canon compliant moonchaser:

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3rd year canon compliant moonchaser:

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4th year canon compliant moonchaser:

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