A/N: Much gratitude at this juncture must be extended to SnorkackCatcher of the Mugglenet forum for spotting a big screaming plot parallel that your humble author had successfully managed to completely overlook. That has not prevented me from seizing upon it and weaving it into the very depths of this chapter. Much thanks for the brilliant observation! :)
41: A Quiet Word.
The room was small and dark.
Hewn smoothly from the solid stone of bedrock, the grey walls gleamed slickly with a hint of creeping slime, windowless by virtue of sheer depth and lit only by a pair of guttering torches placed loosely in the brackets to his right. A broad, heavy lattice of bars ran the length of the small cell immediately to his left, cutting the chamber dramatically into two. On the floor two yards ahead, a pottery bowl lay shattered in many pieces at the foot of the vertical uprights, dried drips of gruel solidifying nastily against the metal.
Beyond the bars, the shadows reigned. The faint outline of a battered and broken plank bed hung in splintered tatters from its chains against the back wall. Scratches and dark bloody smears graffitied the walls. The black paint of the bars was chipped and cracked by apparent repeated assaults.
Ferals, it seemed, did not react well to confinement.
In the furthest corner, the darkness pooled. A motionless figure bathed in its depths.
Behind Remus, the door clicked closed once more. Instinctively he glanced over his shoulder at the mass of heavy metal and sturdy locks that stood between him and departure. A cold chill ran its fingers the length of his spine.
No going back.
His scar itched painfully. He forced himself to relax.
He turned back to the cell. Two golden eyes gleamed in the darkness.
“Well, well, well,” a voice drawled softly, slipping free of the shadows in a languorous roll. “Look who it is. Little cousin Remus has come to play.”
Relax. Breathe. Don’t show fear.
Slowly, carefully Remus stepped deeper into the cell, his feet moving across the stone, accompanied by only the sound of his slow, echoing footsteps. His eyes sought to pierce the darkness in which Kane lay enshrouded, but the feral had chosen his spot well “ the shadows allowed for only a faint outline and hints of movement around the gaze of gold. Fighting against the fluttering war of butterflies in his stomach and the slow, alarming surge of familiar symptoms that marked the proximity of his maker, Remus halted about halfway down, a yard or so back from the bars and turned to meet the gleaming gaze with steely resolution.
“Why did you ask me here?” he said softly, his words dancing from the stone walls. “What do you want?”
A claw tipped hand flexed in the shadows. There was a flash of fanged smile.
“I didn’t think you’d come, you know.” There was an almost conversational note to Kane’s lazy declaration. “Your father wouldn’t have. But then, he’s more of a coward than you.”
Remus steeled his jaw against the casual insult to his father. He would not rise. If he had wanted to trade barbs, he would have stayed at Hogwarts and gone to see Severus Snape. All he wanted was for Kane to get to the point and allow him to leave.
“What do you want?” he repeated coldly.
Kane’s low chuckle reverberated from the walls. “Perhaps I simply wanted a last moment with my favourite cousin,” he declared, his voice a swell of mordant sarcasm. “Perhaps I want to repent my dreadful sins to him and apologise with all my heart for ruining his life.”
Remus set his face in stone at the mockery, his gaze unwavering.
“What do you want?” he asked yet again.
This time Kane laughed outright. “My, my, dear cousin. Don’t we have a one track mind?”
Cousin again. Remus bit back a sigh. Tonks and Moody had been right; it was obvious that Kane was well aware of the possibility that someone else was eavesdropping on their words. The feral was playing for an audience.
“If you are repeatedly mentioning our blood relationship in the hope of getting me in trouble with the Aurors,” Remus stated softly. “Our listener already knows. So I suggest you stop wasting both of our time, and tell me why you asked me here. Unless of course, your intent was simply to get me arrested.”
The golden orbs blinked. Another soft laugh shivered from the darkness.
“Braver when there’s bars between us, aren’t you?” he whispered mockingly. “Braver when you know I’m not going to finish what I started on your throat…” The clawed hand flexed once more. “Or your side.” Teeth snapped in the shadows. “Braver when you think you’re in control.”
Remus bridled slightly but held his burning stare. “I am in control.”
“Really?” There was a taunting upturn to the feral’s tone. “It didn’t seem that way the last time we met. No fully human mind could have put up a fight like that, little cousin. You were slipping. You could taste the blood of those children in the air; I could see it in your eyes. You were one step away from turning around and taking your first taste of human fle…”
“But I didn’t.” Remus cut sharply across his words, slicing away any further vindictive descriptions; he hesitated a moment, fighting down memories of bloodlust, of raw instinct, of the cold desire to kill. Willpower forced the chilling recollections away. He’d held it off. That was what mattered.
“I was injured,” he retorted abruptly. “I was ill. My potion that month had been weaker than usual. But I didn’t turn. So you can’t say that I…”
“You would have.” It was Kane’s turn to interrupt, an easy drawl that laid itself over whatever words had lingered on the lips of Remus and smothered them utterly. “Three times now I’ve seen you get so close fulfilling yourself, to allowing your true self to emerge, and I’m willing to bet that those three times aren’t the only times it’s happened. You’re not as self-righteously human as you pretend to be, little Lupin, and both of us know it. You’ve been on the verge for as long as I’ve known you and all you’ve ever needed is the right kind of push to step across the line…”
“So that’s it?” Suddenly the truth was sharpening into focus, the reality that had driven Kane’s request “ a desire for one last chance to fulfil the original intent on the life-changing night in the woods. Remus shook his head disbelievingly as he stared the shadowy figure enshrouded in the darkness of his cell. “That’s why you dragged me all the way down here? To have one last go at turning me?” He could not suppress the incredulous little laugh that slipped from his lips. “Good luck.”
The wolfish eyes gleaming in the darkness narrowed sharply. “I didn’t drag you anywhere,” Kane drawled softly; whilst his lazy tone did not falter, an abrupt and oddly confident edge was running the length of his words. “You didn’t have to come. It was your choice, not mine. And we both know that you’re not the gloating type. No.” Yellow eyes glowed suddenly, filled with the relish of a challenge. “You came because you wanted to. Because deep down inside, you’re intrigued by me, by what I am and the freedom and truth that you secretly yearn for embodied here before you. Consciously or not, you want to be me. And that’s why you’re here.”
Shivers raced the length of his spine; Remus drew a sharp breath.
“That’s not true,” he said softly, but the vibration that had reached his voice defied the words.
“Isn’t it?” The taunting tone redoubled; Kane had not missed the shakiness. “Tell me you didn’t savour every taste of my world. Tell me it doesn’t intrigue you.”
Intrigue… Did it intrigue him? Did he not wonder how it would feel if that whisper of power that haunted the edges of his consciousness were to surge to the fore once and for all? Did he not…
No. Don’t think like that. That’s what he wants.
Remus hardened his voice determinedly. “It doesn’t intrigue me,” he retorted, the trembled abruptly squashed. “It makes me feel sick.”
“Liar.” The word echoed back and forth against the stone walls mockingly. “You want to be like me. You came here because you want my help to fulfil that.”
Remus could feel control of the conversation slipping from his grasp “ he fought to reign in his confused emotions.
Don’t let him get to you. He can’t change who you are just with words unless you let him.
“So you want to help me?” The younger werewolf fought to maintain a level tone of voice, but considering his inner turmoil, he succeeded admirably. “I find that a little hard to believe.”
“Remus, Remus, Remus.” Kane’s head was shaking softly in the darkness, a smeared movement washed over with shades of grey and black. “I’ve always wanted to help you, don’t you see? I offered you liberation from weakness and bad genes when you were three years old. I’m not sure quite why or how you managed to reject that but I suspect daddy dearest may just have interfered.” His eyes glinted. “I gave you a gift that night, the gift my poor Hel gave me, and you lost the opportunity to embrace it. All I want to do is give you one last chance to learn to enjoy it properly. Before it’s too late…”
Really… A bitter laugh slipped from Remus’ lips “This is what you want with me, isn’t it?” he said, his voice sharpening suddenly as his stubbornness kicked in. “Even now. You want me to be your replacement. A parting shot to the world.”
“You see things in such simple terms.” Kane’s words bounced gently back and forth through the musty air of the cell, intense and vaguely curious as he shifted his shadowed position to a crouch. “How can you be so naïve? You cling so desperately to this feeble mockery of humanity, this sham façade that you are in some way like them, striving for their acceptance and fawning over weak, pathetic beings who would reject you without a second thought. Why? Why do you struggle so to be one of them? You could be stronger, better, more powerful than they could ever dream of, but what do you do? You allow the potential of your body and your mind to waste away with sickness and ill health in a battle you cannot and should not try to win. And you know deep inside that you’re wrong.”
Remus said nothing. He couldn’t. Kane’s astonishing tirade had left him speechless.
Encouraged by his silence, Kane’s smile spread.
“You’ve tasted what you could be.” The feral’s voice low and sharp. “You’ve felt the glory of the wolf run through your veins. And yet you fight it. You fight it because you hear your parents’ voices whispering poison in your ears. They foisted their hatred of our kind on you, their weak beliefs and their need for their child to be exactly what they wanted, and what did it get you? A sickly body and a lost soul, ill, weak, shunned and alone. You allowed yourself to be moulded by them, trapped and caged inside your own existence, denying yourself what you really need, what really are. But now you want more.”
Slowly, lazily, the shadowed limbs uncurled, the clawed hands stretched and the body flexed down its length as Abraham Kane drew himself casually upright. For a moment longer he lingered in the concealing shadows before stepping forward softly into the flickering ball of light to stare intensely at his cousin. He smiled.
“Go on,” he whispered, his lip curling. “Try and deny it.”
But Remus still could not speak. But this time it was not Kane’s words that silenced him. It was the sight of him.
For the creature before him was not the wild and powerful figure that had slammed him against a Hogsmeade wall or flung him across The Howling.
Abraham Kane was a wreck.
He should have realised of course, by the state of the walls, that self-inflicted damage had been done, and that the shattered bowl implied that Kane was perhaps rather less than keen on his prison rations. And of course he had been severely wounded by the impact of Neville’s chandelier, wounds that whether though fear, his own refusal or just plain negligence had clearly not been treated by his wardens. But yet, still, Remus had not expected the wasted, damaged figure stood before him. A fortnight of little, if any food had left his stubbled cheeks hollowed and his tanned skin pale, his frame far leaner and more gaunt that Remus remembered from their past encounters. He had been clothed in rough robes by his captors, although these were now ragged, bloodied and torn, exposing patches of raw, scratched skin, trickles of dried blood, the deep purples and sickly yellows of bruises old and new, and deep, agonising cuts turned the vile shade that strongly implied an infection. Though his gaze was strong and his movements fluid, it was obvious that Abraham Kane was holding himself together by nothing more than the sheer force of his own will.
And this was what Kane expected him to aspire to?
A surge of shocked conviction ran through him, erasing the shakiness and odd feelings that the feral’s immediate presence caused. Kane’s words echoed within his mind, insidious mockery, taunting him, insulting him and his family and yet strangely pleading all the same. And it was lies. Kane did not know him. He did not see the thoughts that moved through his mind. And yet he claimed to stand there and predict the desires of his cousin better than Remus could himself?
No.
Perhaps he would never be accepted by the community at large. Perhaps those still fully human would never understand the struggle he had fought through all his life simply to have what they took for granted, simply to be allowed the right to live as the species he was born. But he would be damned if he was going to stop fighting. He had been born a human being and he was determined to die one.
He did not want to be feral. He had too much to lose.
“What did it get me?” His voice was a whisper but it seemed to carry throughout the cell with a kind of determined strength that instantly wiped the smirk from Abraham Kane’s lips. “That’s an interesting question. What did I get from the unwavering love and care that my parents have given me all my life? What did I get from trying to stay human? There are times, perhaps, in the past, when I wouldn’t have been able to tell you.” He gently shook his head. “But this…This isn’t one of them.”
He took a single step towards the bars and the hagged figure trapped behind them, wrapping himself in the protective comfort of everything good that he had ever known. Flashes of his parents filled his mind, his mother’s warm, soft embrace, his father’s crooked smile, the four Marauders plotting mischief in their dormitory, James and Lily beaming as they took their wedding vows, a young Sirius laughing as he mounted his flying motorcycle, the determination on Harry’s face as he handed over the petition and the joy as his Patronus glowed, the smiles of his students, Tonks’ wicked grin as she bade him good night from her broomstick, the awe of the Weasley twins, the banter with his friends in the Order and Dumbledore’s twinkling eyes as he informed him categorically that no resignation would be accepted. And all that, he could have lost. All that Kane wanted him to sacrifice.
How could he have ever doubted?
“Being human.” The words echoed with quiet conviction. “It got me a family I love and memories I treasure. It got me good friends, true friends, both those of my childhood now lost and those of my adulthood gained. It got me a position of trust in one of the finest wizarding schools in the world and students who respect me enough to fight to keep me as their teacher. And yes, my health could be better and there are times when I am shunned and rejected because of what I am. But I have people I can turn to for comfort, to have fun, to make me feel as though my life is worth something, as though some good comes of my being around. What did trying to be human get me? It got me a life.”
Kane was staring at him, a furious glow lighting his golden eyes but Remus simply smiled, a soft expression lined with utter steel.
“I don’t regret having that life,” he said quietly. “But I can’t help but wonder if you regret that you did not.” The smile dropped away as more bitter memories surged, recollections of moon-washed woods, overwhelming pain and hundreds of nights filled with purest agony caused solely by the creature imprisoned before him.
He shook his head. “But what has being a feral got you, Abel?” He ignored the angry snap at the mention of Kane’s hated birth name. “What do you have to offer that can trump the life I have?” His eyes hardened. “A battered body, a lonely prison cell and a soul so ruined it’ll surprise me if the Dementor doesn’t choke on it. Not much of an incentive.”
A low growl slipped through the portcullis of Kane’s clenched teeth. “Are you pitying me?” he snarled furiously. “You dare…”
“You made me an offer.” Once again Remus cut off the feral’s words, his voice cool and determined, but bristling with an echoing menace that embodied the wellspring of anger and fury that swelled within him when he remembered the anguish the feral had caused in his family. “I’m considering it. I’m weighing my options, balancing the aspects of my life against the prospects of yours. And I see a chance to be locked away in the bowels of the earth, awaiting the day that my soul will be sucked from my body, in the knowledge that the only person even remotely interested in coming to see me is the one whose life I have repeatedly tried to ruin.” He met the golden eyes of Kane with sudden fierceness. “Forgive me if I feel no choice but to decline.”
“Declining is not a choice!” Kane’s voice was almost a hiss, the self-assured ease lost to furious frustration in an instant “ the sudden clenching of his fists drove the claws of his own fingertips deep into his palms as he hunched into a defensive crouch. “The wolf is waiting; you cannot refuse it forever! Someday, someday it will find you, it will claim you and then you will wish you had not wasted so much precious time! It will happen! It is inevitable! It is stronger than you will ever be!”
Remus watched his rage impassively through the bars, watched the drip of fresh blood as it trickled from the battered feral’s hands and splattered to the ground. Staring at the werewolf’s impotent anger, his helpless, captive rage, his mind flickered through the catalogue of the feral’s crimes, of the lives he had stolen, the distress he had mustered, the tribulations he had wrought. An odd kind of emotion swelled within him; it was not the cold fury of his father’s revelations, the burning rage of The Howling or the strange dread of Hogwarts. Anger was a part of it, but it did not rule the sensation. Disdain crawled within it, but it did not sneer. Regret from the mistakes made in his family’s past “ oh that whispered in the corners of his mind but did not raise its voice. Resentment and a shadowed hint of satisfaction at seeing the killer of his mother brought so low gave a sickly edge to the feeling. Sorrow lingered, sadness for the lost and for the wasted time, the wasted lives that this vendetta had wrought. Shame and pity danced together for a story completed in this foul cell with so much lost and so little to be gained. And an odd kind of curiosity touched its edges, whispering frantically why….
It was a nameless blend of emotion, but its potency was shocking.
But Remus knew that Kane could not feel it. So much passing, so much death and destruction but he had learned nothing from it. He truly was lost to the wolf.
Or was he?
Remus had come here for closure, to resolve a long and painful chapter in his life. That was his purpose, not some sick and twisted desire to follow in his maker’s footsteps as Kane had wished him to believe. He had wanted this business put finally and irrevocably behind him.
And yet…
And yet, there was something about the feral that fascinated him. In that sense, Kane had struck a nerve.
For almost all his life, Remus had shared his mind and body with his werewolf half. Once a month, and occasionally, he was forced to admit, at other times, he had fought within himself a battle “ a battle for the rights over his own body, his own mind, his own sense of identity and being. And much as he disliked his vicious other half, he would be lying if he said it did not intrigue him too. To understand the drive of the wolf was an illusive and impossible prize.
But here was a being that was the wolf, a wolf that could speak its mind. It was the closest that Remus would ever come to talking with that hidden part of himself.
He had no desire to be like Kane. But a part of him desperately wanted to understand him. Just how much of what he saw before him was wolf? What was left of that long ago boy, if anything at all? Where did the maliciousness comes from “ mindless wolfish anger or the sting of human bitterness, an angry child’s sense of betrayal? Was the vindictive cruelty, the grim playfulness, a trait born of a human or animal mind?
And it had always been there, that almost desperate drive to turn him, that powerful desire to make Remus as he was. Even now, locked away in lonely prison cell, he still tried one last time to draw the younger wolf into his world. But why?
“Wolf got your tongue?” Kane’s sharp and mocking voice cut unpleasantly into the silence. Remus grimaced. Understanding Kane didn’t mean he had to like him.
“Why are you so desperate to turn me?” The words escaped, quiet but crystal clear, the question asked almost before the brain had quite fathomed it. “Why do you need me to be like you so much? Are you that anxious for revenge? Do you want me to continue your legacy somehow?” His sudden surge of curiosity took control of his words, hardening his voice as he moved into dangerous territory. “Or do you simply feel the need to have someone around who actually wants your company? Do you miss having someone, however foully, that you can relate to?” He met the feral’s eyes as they flared in fury at the implication and knew at once that it was his turn to strike a nerve. Now it was time to strike the rest.
“Are you lonely, Abel?” The question echoed poignantly. “Is some part of that lost and rejected little boy of forty years ago still struggling to get out?”
Kane’s roar of fury shook the very bedrock beyond the walls, the bars shuddering in frantic shock as he slammed against them, bloody hands reaching and grasping through the bars as claws slashed the air, guided by eyes that gleamed with blazing anger. Remus stumbled back, surprised and slightly awed by the vehemence of Kane’s reaction as he stared as the raging feral that helplessly fought with his cage.
Definite nerve strike, I think.
“You have no right!” The words lashed bitterly against the air, cutting raw strips from it by the sheer weight of furious emotion. “No right to question me! Your family destroyed me, ruined my life twice over! Before I was even born, they turned on me and rejected me out of hand! Your father’s cowardice left me to rot! And then, insult to injury, your father’s hand took the one person who gave me acceptance, who showed me the true way! All I have ever done is repay their favours in kind! They owe me! You owe me! Owe me for…”
“A life and a lifetime!” The sudden anger that overwhelmed Remus flooded through his interruption, a parade of battered and broken lives over such a pointless mantra weaving tangled before his minds eye as he sliced the raging words away with the potency of a knife blade. “Of course! The great debt of your tragic life!”
Shaking his head, Remus turned away. Burning fury was racing the length of his body and Remus knew all too well how dangerous such rage could prove. In an effort to channel it, he turned sharply on his heel, striding the length of the cell and back as he forced the energy of his anger into exercise.
But it could not stem his words, words that flared too strong to deny the urge to say them, parallels that yearned to be drawn. “Well, I know all about lives and lifetimes “ you taught me well,” he proclaimed coldly. “You say I owe you because my family rejected you, because of the lifetime you lost and life that was taken.” Sharply, he wheeled on the cage once more, and the werewolf trapped within it. “Well, what of the life and the lifetime you owe me? A life for a life “ my mother. A lifetime for a lifetime “ myself. So don’t you dare try and take the moral high ground with me because you haven’t a leg to stand on.”
The feral growled. “It is not the same…”
“Really?” Remus laughed humourlessly. “You are the great believer in justice, are you not? Well, if that is truly how you wish to weigh and measure this whole sorry business, then I would say that any debt that I or my father may have remotely owed you was cancelled the day you pushed my mother out that window.”
Kane was breathing raggedly, his eyes ablaze as he tore strips of paint from the bars with his claws. “It cannot compare…”
“Can’t it?” The feral’s indignant self-pity was starting to grate deeply on Remus’ nerves. “So you had a hard life, a difficult childhood. And for this you decide to devote your life to ruining as many other lives as you can? For the distant wrongs of the past, you justify your crimes in the present!”
Abruptly, he was still, his pacing sharply stopped. Lowering his voice to a bare murmur, he stared intensely at the feral. “Well let me tell you about another little boy. A boy who from the age of three endured searing agonies once a month, who was kept away from other people, other children, for fear of what they might do if they knew the truth of what he was. A little boy who grew to watch almost all that he held dear in the world ripped away from him by a vindictive madman and his cronies and a stranger obsessed with vengeance for crimes he never even knew. A stranger who then did his level best to destroy his life even more than he had done already.” He paused, allowing the silence to frame his words with soft poignancy. “And I haven’t gone on a killing spree yet.”
“More’s the pity!” Kane snapped his teeth at the air. “Perhaps you would do well to remember that the family that so spoiled you rejected me!”
“You were offered a family!” Remus retorted sharply. “But you abandoned your foster parents before you’d even given them a chance! Instead you turned to a monster for salvation.”
Claws against iron screeched painfully as Kane roared his fury. “I had no choice! Your father left me no choice!”
“You had every choice!” Remus lashed back. “You could have been yourself but you couldn’t stand to face it. Even youth cannot excuse such a shocking lapse of judgement.”
“Hel made me strong!”
Remus gave a disdainful laugh. “She made a werewolf strong. What you once were, what you could have been, she utterly destroyed. All that remains is the wolf fuelled remnants of the bitterness and the pain.”
Kane’s lip was curling as a growl slipped through his gritted teeth. “There were all weak,” he snarled, his voice low. “My father, your father, my mother, your mother. Why would I want to be like them? They ruined you, your parents. Filling your mind with their weak, sickly ideals…”
“Weak, sickly ideals that you seem remarkably bitter to have been denied,” Remus retorted coolly. “You reject them so vehemently but yet their loss is the basis of your revenge.” His smile was utterly devoid of humour. “Welcome to the wonderfully human world of hypocrisy.”
Kane drew slowly back from the bars, but his golden eyes were now burning cold. “They’ll never accept you,” he repeated softly. “All those pathetic, frightened humans out there and their snivelling children in your classrooms. They’ve seen the truth of what you are. They’ll watch you now. Why do you yearn for their rejection?”
“The same reason you do.” Remus met the gaze without flinching. “Only I handle it differently. Unlike you, I have no intention of proving the prejudice right.”
The fire ignited once more behind Kane’s eyes. “I don’t need them. I don’t need anyone.”
“So why did you ally yourself with Voldemort?” It was oddly refreshing that Kane did not so much as flinch at the use of the dreaded name. “I know you cared nothing for his cause. You could have carried on killing quite happily without him.”
Kane chuckled softly, his grin a bearing of teeth. “It was a way back into my darling homeland,” he drawled with a smirk. “And it was something to do. Kill one child. Not much of a challenge, but it sounded like fun.”
“To kill a child you didn’t even know.” Kane simply laughed at Remus’ quiet statement. “To kill all those children. Even the children of your new allies. Surely you knew that would anger them.”
Kane gave a dismissive snort. “I didn’t need their interference. I told them from the start I owed them no allegiance “ to warn them would have been to spoil my fun. Why should I care for their weakly little whelps? Meat is meat.”
Remus fought back a surge of disgust. “It must be a little galling that it was weakly little whelps who then thwarted you.”
“It must be a little galling that they saved you,” Kane shot back at once. “The mighty werewolf wizard Lupin rescued by a gaggle of school children. And lucky for you.” His eyes glinted. “In a straight, fair fight, wolf against wolf, you wouldn’t have stood a chance. You had to be bailed out by your pet brats.”
Remus paused. A slow, dawning realisation edged its way across his mind, sparking a flash of clarity that flung away the Kane woven cobwebs and presented the truth of their situations before him with a startling clearness.
He saw Kane.
He saw himself.
And he understood.
Quietly, he smiled.
“I think you’ve missed the point,” he said softly.
Kane stared, golden eyes blinking. “I’ve missed the point?” he exclaimed incredulously. “What is there is to miss, Lupin? I sliced your belly open. If that brat child hadn’t interfered, I would have ripped out your throat with my teeth and swallowed it. I beat you.”
“And yet I stand free and you languish behind bars.” Remus’ quiet smile seemed to agitate the feral far more than his earlier anger. “A rather strange victory, I think.” His expression hardened. “Or perhaps not a victory at all.”
Kane gave a snort. “See how you struggle to justify yourself. You lost the fight. Face it.”
Remus gave an easy shrug. “I’ve faced it. I lost the fight. But I don’t much care. Because I seem to have won the war.”
Kane’s indrawn breath scraped a growl across his teeth. “You did nothing! That child…”
“That young man acted as he did because he remembered a flippant remark I made in a lesson before I even remembered your part in my life.” Remus drew himself up, drinking in the sudden confidence of his realisation before the battered, waning form of Abraham Kane. “Because if you believe that this all came down to some scrappy dogfight, werewolf against werewolf then I say again “ you’ve missed the point. The difference between victory and defeat, between me standing here and you locked in there “ it didn’t come down who had the stronger claws or the faster teeth. It was a joke I made in class. It was knowledge I taught as a teacher to a student in my “as you would have it “ wasted life as a professor. They didn’t waste time attacking you with magic because I taught them not to. And in a moment of human silliness, a moment I had forgotten but that one student clearly didn’t, I unknowingly planted the inspiration that brought you down. In my feeble mockery of humanity, I gave a class full of students the knowledge to stop an apparently all-powerful feral and the desire to risk their lives for mine. And all because I just didn’t give in.”
He met Kane’s eyes but this time it was his gaze that gleamed, not with gold, but with determination. “Unlike you.”
“What?” Kane’s harsh exhalation was barely more than rippled breath.
“You heard.” Uncaring of the danger, Remus stepped closer to the bars yet again. “You claim that the wolf is strength, that without it you can only be weak. And physically, that is undeniable. But mentally…” He shook his head. “Mentally, to willingly submit to the wolf, to give up the fight for your own mind, your own being to a vicious monster who knows and cares nothing for you or your humanity… To me that is the ultimate weakness. You can crow and strut all you want, Kane, you can hurl empty words and threats from your dark corner behind bars. But it doesn’t change the fact that I defeated you and I did it without ever stooping down to your level. You are here now because for the thirty years since you tried to strip it from me, I have held on to my humanity.” He stared coldly through the bars. “And perhaps by turning feral, I could have won that fight. Perhaps I could have even killed you. But it would have meant nothing to me, if there even was a me left to feel. Because if I’d have allowed myself to give a mere inch to my wolf, it would have meant that you had triumphed.”
“You’re a coward.” Kane’s words hissed like acid against stone, a low voiced flood of words that shimmered with undefined emotion. “Hiding behind your excuses, terrified to face your wolf and the truth of your existence!” He gave a disdainful snarl. “I hate cowards.”
Slowly, gently, Remus once more stepped back from the bars. He stared at the damaged wreck crouched and caged before him, his words, words that had once cut so deep, that were now the last desperate flailings of a condemned feral that flicked over his skin without wounding. The unnamed emotion that had ruled his thoughts throughout his attacks surged its way into his words.
This was the end. And whether he could accept it or not, it was Kane’s turn to understand.
“I’m not the coward, not in this at least.” Remus softly shook his head, his eyes filled brimful with ambiguous feelings of anger, sadness and pity. “I’ve been fighting a battle all my life, a battle within myself. And yes I’ve lost a couple of brief skirmishes over the years, but never in a way that matters. But you…” He sighed. “You lost your war before it even started. You opened the gates and let the enemy inside. You gave up, Abel. You threw your humanity away on a moment’s whim because you were too afraid to live your life yourself, to be yourself. And that’s why you asked me here today. Because you need me.”
Harsh breaths tore at the air as Kane sank deeper into his defensive crouch, half-kneeling in the wreckage of his own fruitless temper, his hands blood-stained, his robes tattered to ribbons and his yellow eyes strangely dull.
“I need no one,” he breathed in a furious whisper.
“Yes, you do.” Remus could feel the deathly shift in atmosphere as he finally and irrevocably took control of the conversation and he pulled that sense around him, a cloak of strength to breath well-deserved words that were nonetheless harsher than he was usually wont to utter. “Me and my family, the great wrong done to your human self “ why do you care about the feelings of a weak, confused child that you claim you put long behind you? I know why. Because in hating us, bitter, tainted hate, human hate, not the pure indiscriminate rage of a full moon werewolf, you could cling to the only tiny corner of humanity you had left. Without us, you have nothing left to be human about. And you didn’t want to be the only one who lost.”
Kane’s low, deep-throated growling hummed through the air, a terrible, primal sound that whispered bad memories against the back of Remus’ mind. He forced them determinedly away. He could not allow himself to weaken now. These were words that had yearned for airing for over thirty years and he was the only one left who would truly be able to say them before the chance was lost to the touch of the Dementor’s Kiss.
“I understand now,” he continued, his voice laced with steel. “I know why you have been so desperate to turn me, to make me like you. It was because you knew. You knew, deep down, that I was still fighting against what you had long ago submitted to. You hid behind the wolf in the same way that your father hid behind alcohol and a noose. And you couldn’t stand to be like him could you? You couldn’t stand to be the one who’d given in, just as he had. And more.” He breathed in deeply, tasting the musty mould of the cell, the stale scent of sweat and blood and the stench of animal fury. “You didn’t want to be the only one who’d lost that fight any more. So you kidnapped a child that were sure would never have the strength to defy it. For someone else to fall victim would prove once and for all that it wasn’t a weakness in you.”
Kane’s stance has reverted to wolfish instinct, tensed limbs that dug, muscles wrenched tight, into the floor, teeth gleaming and bared and clawed fingers flexing. His low growls continued to reverberate against his visitor’s utter lack of intimidation.
For Remus simply stared.
“You couldn’t stand to be the coward,” he said softly. “Because you hate cowards “ don’t you?”
“NO!!!!”
This time Remus did not even flinch as Kane hurtled furiously into the bars, regarding the claws that slashed inches from his face with a quietly determined conviction.
“Your family ruined my life!!! Yours!!!” Spittle and blood flew repulsively from the feral’s lips, his own sharp canines tearing into the inside of his mouth as he bellowed out his fury. “I am powerful, I am strong! I am feared by all! You are nothing next to me!!!”
“I don’t want your kind of strength.” Remus’ words, though quieter, nonetheless hurled the raging feral into silence. Kane abruptly slumped against the bars, clawed hands grasping at the uprights in a mixture of frustration and the need for support as his battered body disproved his claims of physical prowess. His face, battered and damaged, stared breathless and resentful at the composed figure who stood unarmed and infuriatingly out of his reach. His golden eyes had faded to a dull, exhausted yellow.
And Remus met those eyes. His jaw was set, his shoulders tense but firm as he embraced the final sweep of his confused jumble of conflicting feelings and launched his final salvo at his clearly sinking foe.
“You asked earlier if I pitied you. Well, I do. I pity what gave up that night that you willingly placed your arm into a werewolf’s mouth. I pity the life you never had and the person you could have been. But I’m not afraid of you.”
“Then you’re a fool,” Kane gasped out.
Remus let a small, bitter laugh slip free. “I’m not. I have no reason to fear you, not now.”
“You’re brave behind bars…”
“Bars have nothing to do with it.” Remus bored into the golden eyes. “Because I understand you now. And I feel sorry for you. But you abandoned all hope of redemption a long time ago, Abel, and now you are to pay for that. And in a week’s time, you are the one who will be nothing.”
“All fear me…”
“Dementors don’t. And when the Dementor has passed, the shell with the strength of your body will be all that is left to you.”
Kane was shaking with impotent rage. “They will never forget me! You will never forget!”
Remus regarded him slowly. “Now there you may be right. But not perhaps in the way that you might wish.”
He paused a moment. Paused to stare one last time at the battered, broken form of the feral that had impacted so much upon his life. Paused to drink in this final image, an image of exhaustion, of injury, of pointless anger and lost chances encapsulated within a creature that had taken his childhood, his health and his mother but had failed to steal away the truth of who he was. Abraham Kane, Abel Isaacs; whichever name was chosen, this fallen cousin, this ravaged wreck, had shaped and formed the aspects of his life and the person those aspects had wrought him into.
Golden eyes regarded him with resentful hatred. He faced their glare and spoke his final words.
“My life is your legacy, Abel Isaacs. So congratulations. I wouldn’t be the man I am today if not for you.”
And then he turned and walked away.
And Kane screamed.
Screamed and roared and howled in fury. Remus could hear the devastation of his ferocious fury, the pure essence of the werewolf rage that would turn upon the self in its mindless destruction. He could hear the ripping of cloth, the screeching of claws against metal and stone and the dull tearing swipe of slashed skin; he could hear Kane as he raged and bellowed, screaming his desperate phrases, his hatred of the Lupins, the ruining of his life, Hel, his strength, his power and a life for a lifetime.
But Remus did not turn.
He reached the door and knocked.
The lock clicked rapidly. Kingsley’s face appeared instantly around the edge, his eyes wide as he stared with a kind of awe at the departing form of his fellow Order member before glancing over Remus’ shoulder to take in the awesome spectacle that was the ball of howling rage embodied in the feral Kane.
But Remus did not turn.
Sweeping past the Auror, he moved with straight-backed dignity into the corridor beyond. Kane’s cries echoed and crashed against the walls, haunting his steps as he walked.
But Remus did not turn.
“Kingsley,” he said softly. “Close the door.”
There was a thud. A click. The cries were cut sharply into nothingness.
And all was silent.
And Remus did not turn.
Staring straight ahead, he moved wordlessly towards the door that would lead back outside and left Abraham Kane behind him.
And he did not look back.
A/N:: This is also the longest chapter thus far of the fic (although the next and final one has now outstripped it, though with somewhat less difficulty in the writing) and one that gave me the most trouble, even over chapter 19. Although I had the themes well outlined in my head and knew where I wanted the chapter to end up, I had a great deal of difficulty articulating exactly what Remus was supposed to be feeling during the course of this chapter. I experimented from a Remus of total calm to total anger, to confusion, to fear, to boldness but nothing seemed to sit quite right. In the end I settled upon this strange variation of a cocktail of emotions that I hope very much works all right. It was always my intention, from the beginning of that writing of this fic, that Remus’ decisive defeat of Kane would come in this chapter, that his moment would not be a triumph in a physical fight (which was Kane’s domain) but a psychological and emotional victory. I really hope I have managed to convey that in the manner I wanted whilst at the same time not making Remus either too gloating or too weak. It was a difficult balance to strike and it is up to you all to decide if I have succeeded. :)