Changed in a Moment
Their mother shrieked and ran over, sobbing hysterically to see her son awake and, hopefully, well. She pulled him into a hug and told him that he didn’t have to tell anyone what happened, his sister would.
“But she doesn’t know,” Remus argued, his voice muffled from his mother’s hug. When she finally released him, she got up and sat down on a spare chair. She nodded for Remus to talk. “Okay, so we were walking in the forest trying to get home from the store and a werewolf had been following us for a long time. It found us and chased us and, well... it bit me.”
His mother’s eyes widened, as well as Rachael’s. She had only known of the werewolf’s presence, not that it had bitten Remus. She leaned back in her seat and sighed. She could have stopped this, but she didn’t. Remus continued unraveling the tale, even though he had said everything that needed to be said. A werewolf had bit him and that was all there was to it. He said that (after his mother had asked him angrily why his sister hadn’t helped him) Rachael had run into a tree yelling for him to run.
Mrs. Lupin shot a cold glare at Rachael, who had become highly occupied with the full-length mirror across the room from her. She had only just noticed it and saw that her reflection showed that she had two large black eyes; her nose was crooked and covered in dried blood. She must have run into the tree hard.
“Rachael Michelle Lupin!” her mother shrieked.
Rachael jumped in fright and turned quickly to look at her, which she suddenly realised she shouldn’t have done. Her mother’s eyes were bulging at an unnatural bulge, they were red with flames. Her skin was flushed with fury, hands on her hips, hunched over. She stalked over to her daughter, bent down so that she was level and glared Rachael in the eye.
She tried to defend herself. “But, Mum,” she whimpered, cowering under her mother’s rage.
“Y-y-you l-let y-your brother get bitten by a werewolf!” she yelled, spraying her daughter with spit.
“But I-”
“But you what? You were too clumsy... too foolish... too... too... you let your brother get bitten. Do you know what you’ve done to him?” Rachael didn’t move. “Do you?”
Rachael slowly nodded, close to crying. Why was her mother yelling at her like this? It wasn’t like she had meant for it to happen. She didn’t even want to go into the forest, it was Remus’s idea. He had suggested it, not her. And here was her mother, yelling at her as though the entire thing was her fault.
So let’s backtrack a bit, their mother loved Rachael, but she had always loved Remus more. Rachael was her dad’s favourite and, speaking of him, where did he get to?
The door to the room opened and in walked a sandy-haired, tall, lean, green-eyed man, Mr. Gregory Lupin. He adjusted the glasses framing his eyes, went over to his wife, pecked her on the cheek, and turned to the other man in the room.
“Sorry, Dr. Griemer,” he said politely. “I would’ve been up here sooner but they make a lot of forms to fill out here.” He gave a short laugh, trying to lighten the atmosphere. He looked around the room and saw his wife still glaring menacingly at his daughter and Remus sitting in the hospital bed. He didn’t seem to know what to do.
“Greg,” Mrs. Lupin said quietly. He looked over and she gestured for him to follow her. Mr. Lupin accompanied her over to a corner of the room and Dr. Griemer excused himself from the room.
Rachael moved her chair over towards her brother. He had lain back on his bed with his eyes shut. The hair covering his forehead had been brushed back and revealed his bandage, covering the spot where the wolf had bitten him. She couldn’t help but wonder if her mother had been right, that she could have done something, but didn’t. Maybe she had been too clumsy and too foolish.
Wait, she thought. No, I told Remus to run; I kept looking back for him telling him to run.
Yes, you did, said a little voice in the back of her head. But was it good enough?
She hadn’t thought of that.
Of course it was.
If you were a real sister you would’ve run back and gotten him.
But he told me to run.
And you listened? Wow, you’re thicker than I thought.
No I’m not!
Rachael you are... “Rachael... Rachael.”
She snapped back to reality and saw her dad kneeling next to her. He looked at her with pity, sadness and worry. What was going on? She looked and saw that her mother was eyeing the back of her dad’s head with an expectant look. What had she planned? Her dad took a long, hard sigh as though he were about to do something that he didn’t want to do which, in her case, he was.
“I didn’t want to do this,” he said quietly, his voice cracking. “But I had to... well... I was forced to.”
Rachael sat in her small room at the top of the Lupin household, lying back on her soft bed, looking at the ceiling, trying to forget, though it was near impossible to. How could it be that a person’s life could be so normal, so uneventful, so calm, and then in a split second, in the blink of an eye, it changes right before you and there’s nothing you can do about it. It didn’t make sense to her, nothing did anymore. The whole world was just too confusing for her and she never wanted to face any of these problems again, but she had to. She was forced to. They were making her, well, technically, only one was. The other was thrown into it.
Rachael sat up and wiped her eyes clean, wincing from the pain of her swollen eyes. The Healer, Griemer, had fixed her broken nose and cleaned up the blood for her, but he never got the chance to cure her black eyes. Her mother had dragged him away and made him pay attention to Remus. She looked around at her small, dimly lit room. When she and Remus were six they had broken the light fixture on the ceiling, making the light shine only faintly. Her room was cramped with her bed, a dresser, a full-length mirror on the wall, a large bookshelf and a toy box in the corner under the single window, which let in the barest amount of light. She stood up and walked over to her toy box, kneeling down beside it.
She flipped the rusted, golden latches and lifted the box slowly. She pushed aside old dolls, little toy cars, a few odds and ends of toys she and her brother had broken in the past few years (she and her brother had a terrible habit of breaking things). She found at the bottom a small stuffed wolf. It was black with yellow piercing eyes, but with a friendly smile. There no fangs baring any spit in the corners of its mouth. This was a friendly wolf. Why couldn’t the wolf they encountered in the forest be like this one? Then, she wouldn’t be in the situation she was in and Remus wouldn’t be locked in his room at this very moment, waiting, nervous, fearing the worst.
“Rachael, get down here!” Mrs. Lupin’s voice shrieked, bouncing off the walls of the room.
Rachael placed the wolf back in the box, and went downstairs to face her mother, dreading every step she took that brought her closer to the downstairs. She got down and saw her mum and dad sitting at the kitchen table. Her father was holding a copy of The Daily Prophet and her mother held a mug of coffee.
“Sit,” Mrs. Lupin instructed, her lips barely moving and yet her voice projecting throughout the entire room.
Rachael did as she was told, afraid to do otherwise. “What’d I do?” she asked immediately, not even bothering to ask what they wanted or if she had done anything. She knew she had, she just didn’t know what.
“It’s not what you did,” her mother said. Rachael’s eyes brightened in surprise. “It’s what I want you to do. In a few minutes Remus will be facing his transformation, and I want you to sit there and listen! I want you to tell me how horrible it was. I want you to tell me that it was terrible to listen to, that it made Remus miserable! Then you’ll understand why you’re getting the punishment you’re getting!” Rachael sat there and didn’t move. “Go!”
Rachael stood up very slowly, but ran up the steps and stopped in the middle of the hallway, in front of Remus’s door. She shrunk down against the door and leaned her head back to let it rest against the doorknob. She didn’t want to hear it. She knew it would be the worst thing she ever heard in her life and the worst pain Remus ever felt in his life. Oh how she wished this had never happened. She hoped with every ounce in her body that she would wake up in her bed and find out that this had all been some crazy dream. She and Remus had never been in that forest and had never woken up in St. Mungo’s Wizard Hospital.
She sat there for ten minutes before she heard it - a low, painful gurgling sound coming from her brother’s room. Remus moaned in pain.
Remus had been standing by the window of his room, leaning against the sill, looking out at the sky, waiting for the full moon to come, waiting for the worst. He was nervous. He had never been so nervous in his life, not even when the village bully had threatened his humanity by dangling him off the docks down at the seaport. That was the time he thought he had the worst scare in his life. But he was wrong, this was.
He walked over to the door, thinking about getting something quick to eat, but quickly dismissed the thought; he knew it wouldn’t stay in his stomach anyway. He crossed back to the window and saw it, the full moon, golden, shining, and casting a beautiful glow in the night sky. How could something so beautiful cause him so much pain? He hadn’t had time to broad on that because then it hit. A pain like a knife pierced through his stomach. He moaned in agony, a low gurgling sound emitting from him. He lurched forward on all fours. Sweat beading on his forehead, breathing fast and heavily, crying out, he tried to stay focused. His room was dissolving around him. Pain surged through his arms and legs and fingers and toes. His head felt as though it might split in two. His mind was reeling, the pain was too much. He cried out, hoping someone might come and help him, but he knew that would never happen.
He gave one last, long, heartfelt cry and all went black.
Rachael sat frozen at the doorway, listening to the sounds and cries of pain coming from behind her. Words couldn’t describe how scared she felt. She just knew she never wanted to hear anything like that again, for the rest of her life and beyond that. All was quiet in Remus’s room, not a sound, nothing. But wait, she heard something. It was a low growling, exactly like the one she heard in the forest. It happened… he was a werewolf.
She could hear the claws of his paws tapping on the wooden floor as the growling persisted. She heard the wolf coming closer to the door and then there was scratching on the door, whining. She turned around and tried to peek through the keyhole, but she couldn’t see anything.
She heard footsteps coming up the stairs and leaned forward to see who it was.
“Come on.” It was her dad. He stopped in front of her and knelt down. “T-there’s no point listening. You should just go to bed. Remember… tomorrow.” He broke off, tears filling his eyes. He turned away for a moment then looked back at his daughter, trying to control himself. “Just - just go to bed.”