6 Teeth and Claws
They decided to stage the escape on the morning of the seventh day, which was almost exactly in between two full moons, and though this wasn’t the time Remus was usually his strongest, it was the time when he was the most healthy and energetic. They decided to leave everything beside their robes at Azkaban, even their shoes. All they would take with them was the wand they hoped to get when Remus would overwhelm the aide.
During the sixth day, Snape tried legilimency on the aide, to find out more about him and possible escape routes. Their suspicion that the man was mute proved true, and as Snape relegated to Remus, he was ‘barely more than a squib and a drop-out from Hogwarts, too’. In Snape’s mind, this made him something close to a simpleton.
“What do you think? Will he come inside and bring me to the infirmary?” Remus asked. Snape pursed his lips.
“He would be thick enough to buy the bluff “ but I have doubts concerning his care for prisoners. Maybe he’ll leave you lying there until he comes to fetch the dirt in the evening,” Snape answered with a malicious undertone. Remus chuckled. He had found a perfect way to tolerate Snape : take all his snark and sarcasm as some kind of very black humour, and you could actually laugh about it “ most of the time, when it didn’t get too personal.
But there was also something else, that made it easier to live with the man. For with each day spent in their cell, Snape lost some of his coldness and remoteness. He didn’t lose his arrogance, or his aggressiveness, but he seemed to become more human. Able to actually be in a somewhat lighter mood, if only for seconds at a time. Able to talk about other things than hate and old grudges and the contempt he held for the rest of the world.
Once, he talked with actual enthusiasm about a potions project he had been working on, and another time they had a very sensible and enlightening conversation (it lasted about five sentences) about teaching. Actually, Remus found out, there were some students that Snape hated less than others, and some things he liked to teach them. Snape seemed to like being appreciated, but by setting far too high standard, he was more often than not disappointed by his students.
But there were some topics that Snape would never talk about : his work as a spy, his family and his reasons for being on their side. And as these things seemed to be the core of the puzzle that Snape still presented, it was hard for Remus to understand him. It was hard bring the pieces of this man together to a fitting picture, one that made sense and wasn’t too far-fetched. How did the petty, narrow-minded teacher fit together with the intelligent, witty man he could be? How did the furtive boy immersed in the Dark Arts fit together with the spy who risked his life for Dumbledore? How could a skilled legilimens be so terribly insensitive? How could he be so passionate about revenge and so furious and spiteful “ but never show any other emotion at all? How could a man see so many things in his life and still remain so superficial and childish most of the time?
On the evening of the sixth day, they ate as much as possible of the gluey substance they got from the aide, and then prepared to sleep as much as they could.
“We will take the route through the east part of the prison, and then over the graveyard, down the cliffs. From there we will swim in a south-west direction and hopefully reach the shore, where we can port-key from. But we’ll only have one wand, so we should stay together. Where will we port-key to?”
“Hogwarts, Grimmauld Place or any of the order quarters are out of question. As is any of my property,” replied Snape. “There is the Eyrie, but we don’t know who might by there.”
The Eyrie was one of Dumbledore’s properties, located in the Welsh mountainside, a small medieval castle being barely more than a spindly tower. Snape had been there before, and knew the pass words, but he wasn’t sure who else might know them.
“Do we have anybody who might help us?”
“Well, I do,” Snape said darkly, “But those people wouldn’t help you.”
“People who are not the enemy, Severus.”
“Aberforth Dumbledore,” he suggested. Remus frowned.
“Can we trust him?”
“Oh, he certainly won’t be deceived by Black’s charms, but whether he will be in the mood to help us is another question. He can be quite whimsical and even Dumbledore calls him mad.”
“Let’s go to the Eyrie first, and if somebody is there, we’ll try the Hog’s Head,” Remus decided, and bedded his head on his arm. A tiny slither of moonlight grazed the opposite wall, and Snape stood out as a stark shadow against it. Mentally, he bid his farewells to the people he loved, living and dead alike. And they took him by his hands, with their small, persuasive dream-fingers, caressing his soul, whispering to him about memories ... and while he glided in and out of sleep, he realised ... it’s all about the past ...
The morning came with a dizzy, unwilling twilight, as if the day knew a dozen places where it would rather be. They both sat up almost simultaneously, staring straight into each other’s face. Neither said a word. Remus forced his breath to become even. He forced his mind to focus, willed his reason to submit ...
He thought of the smell of earth, of old wood, of dust, of torn tapestries. The smell of barred rooms and destroyed furniture. The smell of animal.
He thought of the feeling of soft moss under soft pads. He thought of the feeling of splintering woods under sharp claws. The feeling of mud, of rain, of twigs grazing fur...
... thought of the sound of breaking bones, the sound of breathing beasts, the sound of paws on wood, of howling and whining, of barking and huffing, growling and fighting ...
Yellow eyes and grey fur ... silver light and ashen dust .. white teeth and claws ... crimson ... crimson red ...
And Snape tried to watch coldly as he shivered and stiffened and his breath became faster, as if his mind was running away too quickly, as he raised his head to an imaginary sky, baring his teeth, his human eyes rolling back into his head, the whites showing and then with a sound of violence, he tore down and sunk his teeth into his own flesh. A sound that didn’t belong there, a cracking crunch, and feeding noises of a terrible beast.
Remus plunged head first onto the ground, his jaws tight around his arm, tearing and ripping, and savouring his own blood. He rolled around in agony, groaned, hit the wall with his struggling feet, and then suddenly he couldn’t take it anymore and ripped his face away from the wounds he had inflicted upon himself.
The cell was unfocused, coloured crimson in front of his eyes, and Snape was hovering in and out of his view “ a look of utter fascination on his face. Remus could feel sticky saliva and blood on his face and there was something revolting in his mouth ... he spat it out, coughing ... and at one time, his head hit the floor again, and he cloud see something small and red and a piece of white bone sticking out ... and then the ceiling fell through him and the world went painfully blank.
He was out cold during most of what happened then. At some point, the aide came, noticed one of the prisoners lying in a foetal position on the ground, pale and covered in his own blood, one of his hands still bleeding slightly. He put a restraining charm on the other prisoner, opened the cell, examined the man and found him unconscious.
He used a lifting charm to get the body out of the cell, intending to bring him to the infirmary, closed the door again and undid the restraining charm on the second man. Snape did nothing to indicate that anything was wrong, and the aide went away together with the floating and unconscious Remus Lupin. Slowly Snape left the place he had been restrained to the wall and picked up the small, bloody finger. He examined it with the look of a scientist and then put it into a small pocket inside his robes.
But by the time the aide had come “ about twenty minutes after Remus had started mutilating himself “ the healing process of the werewolf had already started. A werewolf has to endure a painful, bone-breaking and skin-ripping transformation each month, and heals by far more quickly than any normal man or wizard. So Remus woke up again before the man had reached the infirmary. They were going down a long corridor with no cells on the sides and few light.
The floating charm caused a strong disorientation and nausea that was already there from biting off his own finger got by far worse. But he had to act. By pure will-force he rolled around, touching the ground and giving himself a push. He dodged into an upright position, right behind the oblivious aide. But the man had senses something, and turned around, staring into the wild, blood-coated face of a man just about to knock him out. His face distorted into a toothless grimace of fear and he shrank back from Remus “ but too slow. In that moment, he didn’t think about how he never had purposely, physically hurt a man before, he didn’t consider, didn’t hesitate. In that moment, he was all in the here, all in the now, all but himself. He was not Remus, he was not the wolf, he was not any kind of being -
Remus, now with ground under his feet, grabbed the man’s shoulder and head, and with harsh force flung the man against the wall. His chest deflated and he sagged down in a heap of clothes. Remus paused for breath “ and reason. His existence had to gain a human quality once more. Now he had to go all the way back from wild madness, and to forget the searing pain of his severed finger. Once he was mostly under control, he checked the man’s pulse. Still there. So he wasn’t a murderer yet.
He searched for the wand and found it “ a short beech-wood stick. He weighed it in his hands, and upon second thought, he bound and gagged the man with a spell. It worked after the third time, though not really perfectly, as the ropes were of a strangely purplish colour they weren’t supposed to be.
He turned away, looking around for orientation. Grey stone, few light, a corridor. Nothing he recognised. He knew a lot about the outside of Azkaban, but the inside was a riddle to him. How would he find Snape? He tentatively sniffed the air, walking back from where they had come. He came to a slippery staircase and followed his instincts, he chose to go upwards.
Here, he finally got some kind of trace. A werewolf in human form wasn’t nearly as good at sniffing out smells, not as good as, say, a simple dog, or even a wolf. Most of it was probably a figment of imagination, but he followed it anyway. And then, finally, he came to the corridor where their cell was located. Other prisoners in other cells stared at him, in uncomprehending awe, but too intimidated by the wild man with the blood all over his body, they kept quiet. He reached their cell, pointing the wand at the door.
“Finite Incantatem. Alohomora!” Snape was standing there, by the wall, a blank look on his face. without a word, he moved out of the cell, and wordlessly they ran down the corridor together, this time in the other direction “ the direction that would hopefully lead them to the graveyard.
They jolted down stairs, finally reached a door. Again, it sprang open to a simple spell. Behind it, freedom send a grey smile towards them. They were looking at a sloping acre, a field of grey sand and little sharp stones, no tombs, no green, no signs of the corpses underneath the skull-coloured surface. The only flowers were some reeking slips of seaweed. It smelled faintly of ashes and salt.
The graveyard was a wide, open field with no cover, and it took a lot of courage to just step out onto it, but once they did, they just ran, stumbling down the slope until they reached the wet, tang-covered cliff. A jumble of rocks and a steep descent, shrouded in ice-cold fog. Already, Azkaban was vanishing behind them.
“Shoes,” Remus gasped. The quickly threw their shoes off the cliff and into the roiling sea, where they disappeared under layers of white foam. Remus wiped at his face, where the blood started to dry. They breathlessly headed down to the sea, now barefoot, and the stones and sand cut at their heels. It was too cold and too wet and all but hopeless. All his spirit had left Remus. He almost turned around and walked back to Azkaban when the sea finally licked at his feet with frosty waves.
“Direction?” Snape asked. Remus bit his lip to keep from faltering. He focused on the one thing that gave him strength : the image of Sirius Black, when he first saw him after the prison. Alive only by pure will-force, living only for revenge and loyalty.
“This way,” Remus said and pointed out at the sea. Right. This way. And after a terribly, tiny moment of hesitation, they both plunged into the water. The first few moments of struggling and gasping were too much a shock to be properly processed. They went by in a rush of adrenaline. When he finally realised that he was swimming in the Northern Sea, away from Azkaban, to either die in the cold, cold water or make it to freedom, they were completely alone, engulfed by mute, thick fog. Remus only saw green waves and white air and Snape, working through the water a few feet ahead of him. And he focused his eyes on that spot of skin and black, and nothing else, and just battled, battled with the sea, and the water dragging him down and the cold suffocating him and his limbs protesting and his finger hurting like it was ripped off again and again.
And at some point during that time, his mind revolved only around that pain, he lived through the pain, let it be his heartbeat, his soul, and it became more than just physical pain, it became something subtle and meaningful, the theme his life was centred around.
But his life was leaving him, was slipping out of his cold body, this corpse that had become unfit for life, and out into the sea it pulled him down like heavy lead. Again and again the water closed above his head, rushed into his ears and nose, and then again he came back to the chill air, once more seeing Snape. Yet, his energy was fading and so was his will. He longed for the deep dark sea, he longed for closing his eyes and floating ...