12: Rhythms
It began that afternoon.
Remus didn’t say anything. Truth be told, he didn’t exactly know what to say, other than that he felt a little strange, and to begin with at least, it hadn’t really seemed to matter. Teddy had returned from his trip to The Burrow with pinched lips and a vaguely harried look and - although he had insisted he was fine and that, in spite of his worry and his guilt, he was determined not to wallow - Remus recognised enough in his expression to know that there was more than a little obsessing going on behind his son’s eyes. And so, ignoring his own lingering sense that something was off within himself, he had asked Teddy if he minded showing him the changes he’d made to the house.
Both Teddy and Dora had seized the distraction with both hands. Dora, who was waiting for a potion she was brewing to fully mature, was more than glad to throw herself into a tour of her reformed marital home, asking questions about what had become of this or that knickknack or piece of furniture “ to which the answer was generally that it was somewhere in the overcrowded attic “ and either admiring, or jokingly despairing, of her son’s taste. Remus had been content to let her do the talking, following quietly as he made his own observations of the house that had gone from being his childhood home, to his marital home, to the home of his son, and trying to ignore the growing feeling brewing in his bones that something inside himself was not quite right.
But the feeling, it seemed, did not wish to be ignored. He could feel it creeping into his bones as an ache as he followed his wife and son up the creaky staircase, could sense the strange edge of dizziness that seemed to swirl and shimmer gently against the inside of his skull, could almost feel his muscles tensing, found himself shivering more and more with every moment that ticked by. Nausea, slight but distinct, welled within his stomach. By the time they reached the conclusion of the tour, in the still faithfully untidy study that had previously been his father’s and then his, there was no denying that something was simply not right.
He’d blamed adrenalin, or the lack thereof, at first. After all, a mere twenty-odd hours before he’d been fighting for his life in battle, and surely it was no surprise that he’d experience some reaction as the terrifying exhilaration of that faded away. He could still feel every bruise and scratch on his skin from the flying debris of the giant-toppled battlements, and the aches and pains that had come from the disturbing and violent assault of the Portal’s red light upon his body…
The thought of the Portal and of the fate of Penelope Weasley had made him pause. Could that be it? Could he be feeling the belated after-effects of being hurled about like a rag-doll in pure, undiluted time? Could the breaking of the Portal be having some kind of an effect on him from all this way away?
It was possible. More than possible. But at the same time, he couldn’t escape a nagging feeling that something about all this was vaguely familiar, that he had experienced it before. A dim memory tugged at the back of his mind, but try as he might to recall its details, it would not solidify.
Remus shook himself. No. He wasn’t going to allow himself to dwell. Following his wife and son, he stepped into the study, forcing himself to ignore the feeling and smile at the sight of so many of his old books, papers and artefacts still in place upon its shelves. Aside from his son’s collection of history books, this room at least had changed very little; the same bookshelves that lined the walls, the same painting of a Welsh Green roaring rampant over a hilly landscape, even an almost embarrassingly familiar air of clutter with papers, quills, books and paperweights littering the surface of the broad desk made of dark wood …
The desk.
His father’s desk. The desk he had known all his life, used for much of it, but something was different, something was missing, something that had always been there, been there as long as he could remember…
And then it came.
The memory.
Remus felt himself go cold. The shivers, the aches, the dizziness, the nausea, he knew these sensations, he’d had them before, long ago; and though it wasn’t quite the same as the pre-moon aches he knew so well, there was no denying their origin.
This was how he had felt when he had first been bitten. How it had felt to feel his body adjusting, adapting to this new presence, this unfamiliar call, a forced rewriting of his physiology in preparation for the horror to come. He could now dimly recall now sitting in a hospital ward seeing his parents’ tight, anxious faces as they tried to explain what was wrong, to tell him about the nasty man-monster who had attacked his mummy and daddy, dragged him out of the house and then changed into something terrible and chased him, chased him, chased him until there was pain and blood and his daddy shouting and throwing things and lifting him away…
His father had been so pale as he’d drawn a gold-and-silver thing covered in dates and wheels and painted spheres out of his bag, and tried to explain to his bewildered child about the cycles of the moon, and how Remus would now be a man-monster himself when the moon was bright and full. But all Remus had really understood at the time was that he felt so funny and that everything hurt and he felt sick and dizzy and just wanted to go home and hug his mummy and play with his toys and forget about monsters and everything else.
He’d forgotten the moon. In all the chaos of the last day, the one fundamental, undeniable fact of his existence had completely slipped his mind. It hadn’t been until he stared at the desk, and realised that the delicate lunascope his father had brought into hospital that day and had always kept here in the study was gone, that he’d remembered that when battle had been joined he’d been less than two days off a transformation…
But this didn’t feel like a pending transformation. And that couldn’t still be right, surely. What were the odds that the moon-cycle twenty years in the future would turn out to be exactly the same it had been in the past?
Not good, he suspected. And that his body was reacting like this probably didn’t mean anything good either…
Why now? Why was he experiencing the ghost of a sensation that should have been more than thirty years in his past?
He glanced over to where his son was showing Dora his wide-ranging collection of historical tomes. Neither had noticed his preoccupation. Good.
But that didn’t change the fact that he needed some answers. The most urgent of which involved the question of when.
“Teddy.” Remus was rather proud of the calmness of his tone as he stepped over to join them. “Sorry to interrupt but… I was wondering. Do you know when the next full moon is?”
The bewilderment on his son’s face lasted several seconds before the reality behind his question sunk in. He blinked several times and glanced awkwardly at his mother before answering.
“I… I’m sorry dad, but I’ve got no idea,” he admitted with a slight shrug. “Astronomy was never my best subject and it’s not like I’ve ever had to keep track…”
In spite of himself, Remus smiled. He hasn’t had to keep track. Given all the fears he’d had about his baby son, and about how his condition might affect the boy’s life as he grew up, the news that Teddy had no idea when the next full moon was because he’d never had a reason to keep track came as music to his father’s ears.
But it still didn’t help with the more immediate issue.
And that was staying strictly with himself for the time being. He could feel Dora’s eyes boring steadily into his face, but he deliberately ignored her gaze. Both she and Teddy had enough of their own to worry about without a battered old werewolf moaning about feeling uncomfortable, and Remus was determined that whatever his body thought it was playing at, he was not going to let his family know he wasn’t feeling well. There was no point in worrying anyone.
Time for an oblique approach.
“It’s just seeing the study without my dad’s old lunascope in it made me think,” he said with deliberate casualness. “And though the fact that you’ve never needed to have it around is a wonderful thing for me to know, it’s quite important to me to find out what it says. After all, the odds of our two lunar calendars matching up exactly are remote to say the least and it’s fairly important that I know when I’m likely to transform.” He gave a rather grim smile. “It’s not something I particularly want to happen while sitting at the dinner table or in bed with my wife. One forgotten change that endangers those I care about is more than enough for one lifetime.”
Dora’s hand reached out to squeeze his gently, and he smiled at her as Teddy’s forehead wrinkled in thought.
“Was it a gold thing with silver globes on it?” he asked with a frown. “Only, I think I remember it. When Gran first brought me here when I was about six, I found something like that and starting playing with it. Nearly concussed myself with it as it happened.” He grinned slightly. “I remember because Gran gave me the scolding of my life when she caught me. And she took it away and put it in the attic so I wouldn’t break it or myself.” He raised an eyebrow. “It’s probably still up there. Do you want me to go and take a look?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Course not.” Teddy smiled wryly. “Like you said, we can’t have you transforming at the dinner table. Hang on a tick and I’ll go and find it.”
As Teddy hurried out of the study and vanished back up the stairs, Remus felt the warmth of Dora’s presence press against his back. Her grip on his hand tightened as her chin propped itself against his shoulder, her hair gently tickling his cheek.
“What’s wrong?” she asked softly.
Remus managed to repel the rather revealing urge to tense although it was a close run thing. “What makes you think something’s wrong?” he replied calmly.
He heard the soft exhalation of breath as she smiled, felt the curve of her lips against his neck. “I know you, Remus Lupin. You can’t expect me to see you standing there wearing your best wrong-what-could-possibly-be-wrong expression and not get suspicious. It’s more than just a missing lunascope that’s got you thinking.”
He shook his head gently, hearing her laugh quietly as his hair tickled over her face. “It’s nothing.”
“Which means it’s something.” As she abandoned his hand, he felt a pair of slender arms wrap around his waist instead. “Fair’s fair, Remus. I told you how I was feeling.”
He couldn’t resist a smile. “After you tried to jump me.”
Her embrace tightened as she chuckled lightly. “You can’t blame a girl for that. And you can try jumping me if you must, but I will get the truth from you sooner or later. I always do.”
“Admittedly true.”
“Then why not save yourself the bother and tell me now?”
Remus felt himself sigh. “I don’t want to worry you.”
He felt her tense against his back. “I wasn’t worried until you said that. Talk, Lupin.”
“Found it!” Teddy’s cheery intervention as he hurried back down the stairs cut the conversation off cold. The sudden absence of Dora’s warmth against his back was palpable as she stepped away, smiling wanly at her son even as she shot a pointed look in the direction of her husband.
Remus sighed. So much for not worrying anyone.
He turned his attention instead to the very familiar sight of the lunascope grasped in his son’s hands. It was just as he remembered, the silver symbols that designated the time and date, the little silver globes cast with magical shadows that represented the various phases of the moon, the gold lattice that allowed the adjustment to see when a certain moon phase would be and the little golden eyepiece he’d always looked through to see when the next of his horrors would come. There were a few dents and scratches on the base that Remus was certain hadn’t been there before, evidently acquired in the day or so since twenty years ago but otherwise it seemed to be in decent working order. The date upon it was still set to May 12th 1998, the little full moon globe glimmering behind the eyepiece.
“Thank you.” Taking the lunascope from his son’s outstretched hands and waving away his apologies for any damage he might have caused it as a child, Remus settled into the leather chair and set the device down upon the desk. The date in the Portal room had been the 2nd of July, which meant that today was…
Carefully, he set the little silver date to the 3rd of July 2018. A glance at the clock on a shelf nearby told him it had just gone 4pm. He set the time, twisted the knob next to the eyepiece, and waited.
Slowly, gracefully, the twenty-eight little spheres danced their gentle circle, settling at last upon one, the little shadow upon its surface shifting slightly to match the time given, as he peered through the magnifying eyepiece and felt his heart thudding against his chest.
Waning. It was waning. Just waning.
Instead of a full moon lying a mere day ahead, this little device was telling him that the moon had passed him by altogether.
No wonder he felt so strange. His body probably didn’t have a clue what to do with itself. He was physiologically geared up for a change that now wouldn’t “ couldn’t -happen.
A tap against the lattice made his next request. Carefully the globes readjusted themselves until the full moon sphere filled the eyepiece once more. He glanced down at the date.
July 27th 2018. 9:21pm.
Three weeks away. More than three weeks.
Agony, tearing, the wolf scraping inside his mind… In the Portal, he had felt it. Was this why? Had his body been trying to reconcile itself to the call of two completely differing moon phases? Was that why he felt as though he’d been bitten all over again?
“Remus?” Dora’s hand was gentle against his shoulder. He could feel Teddy’s curious eyes.
“Three weeks.” His own voice sounded hoarse and disbelieving in his ears. “The moon. It isn’t for another three weeks. But it should have been tomorrow. My body wants it to be tomorrow…”
Dora’s grip shifted; abruptly, she slid down and deposited herself rather ungracefully on his lap, easing his fingers away from the lunascope as she enfolded them within her hands.
“Is that what’s bothering you?” she asked softly, dark eyes meeting his. “You’ve felt like the moon is coming?”
Remus started to shake his head, but there was also the urge to nod, and what emerged was more of an odd kind of neck wiggle than any real response to her question.
“I couldn’t place what I was feeling until just now,” he admitted quietly. “I thought it was the adrenalin of the battle wearing off, or my wounds. But now… I feel like I did when I was first bitten, Dora. I feel like something’s come along and reset my body clock but physically I haven’t quite caught up yet.”
Her eyes were wide with immediate concern. “Does that mean you’ll still change tomorrow? I mean, if your body still thinks it should…”
“No. That’s impossible.” He shook his head more decisively this time, his nose wrinkling in distaste as he remembered some of the less pleasant reading material about his condition he’d examined over the years. “A werewolf can’t change without moonlight. When the Werewolf Registry was first set up, extensive tests were carried out to prove once and for all whether or not a werewolf could transform at other times of the month. They tried every experiment they could think of “ trying to bait and anger a werewolf into changing, simulating moonlight with illusions, magnifying the strength of moonlight at other times of the month, even Confunding several poor people into believing it was the full moon three days too soon. And yes, they even tried sending someone a day back with a Time-Turner to see if they changed early. Not one of them transformed before the full moon came. Newt Scamander published a paper about it, stating categorically that only the stimulation of a genuine full moon can cause a werewolf to emerge, and I’m certain he was right. Whatever my body happens to believe, it can’t happen without the moonlight.”
Tonks was gazing at him with horror. “They really did all that? That’s one step away from torture!”
Remus nodded. “As I said, there’s a paper. Pictures, diagrams, the works. They called them volunteers, although I strongly suspect that there wasn’t much volunteering about it. I suppose I should be grateful though - at least they disproved the possibility of us growing fangs in the street in broad daylight to the general populace.”
“Bully for them.” Teddy sounded about as impressed as his mother. “But that still doesn’t tell us what’s going to happen to you.”
Remus gently eased his hands out of his wife’s grasp. “Probably nothing,” he stated with a confidence he was sure his wife could tell at once was false. “I imagine I’ll feel a bit under the weather until after tomorrow night and then I’ll be fine. Really.” He glanced from the anxious face of his wife to his son’s concerned one and forced himself to smile. “I’m fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”
* * *
He was wrong.
The evening was indeed, no real problem. Although he felt distinctly unusual, Remus was well enough to assist with dinner, and perfectly able to continue a conversation with his family. After dealing with the more serious decision that Harry and Andromeda should be told as soon as they returned, their talk turned to lighter matters, such as tastes, preferences, likes and dislikes, little things that should have been second nature to know of, learned twenty years late. And although Dora was horrified to learn that Teddy knew only vaguely of the Weird Sisters, preferring the music of two groups called Coven and Merlin’s Beard, she was delighted to find his taste in wild hair colours was very much like her own. That he had been in Ravenclaw surprised them both, though not unpleasantly, and Remus was pleased to discover that his son had indeed received an O for his Defence Against the Dark Arts N.E.W.T. With a grin, Teddy had informed him that Harry would have beaten him repeatedly with his broomstick if he hadn’t.
And as the evening wound on, Remus had managed to forget how odd he was feeling, had managed to ignore the aches and shivers of his body in favour of spending quality time with the two people he loved most. By the time he and Tonks headed up to bed, he was certain that his entire feeling of strangeness would blow over.
The morning emphatically set him straight.
He had woken to find his stomach rolling and the room spinning out of all control. He had just managed to make it to the bathroom before throwing up, but it was a very close run thing.
And as he coughed and spluttered up the last dregs of his stomach contents into the toilet bowl, he felt cool hands upon his back and shoulders, brushing his hair back out of his face and massaging soothing circles against his shoulder blades. Dora’s voice drifted out of the foggy, spinning haze.
“Remus, who have you been sleeping with? Because I can’t have got you pregnant and I know morning sickness when I see it…”
Wiping his lips, and grimacing at the taste of mostly-digested food that filled his mouth and made fighting the urge to retch again twice as difficult, Remus allowed himself a moment to glare at the fuzzy-edged face of his wife.
“Ha. Ha. You’re a riot, Nymphadora,” he drawled hoarsely. “I’d laugh if I wasn’t fighting not to throw the rest of my guts up.”
“Sorry, love.” He felt her hands gently stroking the hairs around the back of his neck. “Just trying to lighten the mood.” He saw her eyes gazing, inexplicably clear in the ever-shifting realm of his vision. “Is this part of your reaction to this… well, ghost moon of yours?”
Remus nodded, trying to shift himself upright once more, but his legs had apparently decided not to co-operate, and in the end it was Dora’s hands that lifted him up to grasp the edge of the sink.
“Yes,” he managed to choke out. Swallowing hard and grimacing in distaste at what he found in doing so, he reached down and switched on the tap to swill his mouth out. “And I don’t think it helps that I wasn’t exactly in a sterling state of health to begin with.”
The water was helping. At the least the horrible fragments of vomit in his mouth were being washed away, although he still found himself fighting nausea as the room lurched and spun with very little consideration for his delicate position.
“Is everything okay?”
Teddy was a blurry blob of turquoise and sky blue in the doorway, but turning his head rapidly quickly proved to be a mistake. A moment later, Remus was back over the toilet bowl and fighting to keep as much of his insides internal as he could.
“Ummm… Not really.” Dora’s voice sounded a million miles away, although the touch of her hands as he threw up violently once more was enough to tell him that she was still close at hand. “Your dad’s having a bit of a reaction to the non-existent full moon. A rather messy reaction, unfortunately.”
“I can see.” Teddy’s voice sounded sympathetic, if rather nauseated, for which Remus could hardly blame him. “Do you want me to nip out to the apothecary and get anything for him?”
He could hear his wife’s voice reeling off some kind of list, but her voice was fading, slipping away and the world was blurring and filling with sparkly lights and that toilet bowl was getting alarmingly close to his face…
With the last remaining drop of his self-control, Remus managed to hurl himself sideways onto the bathroom floor. And then sparkling blackness engulfed him and he knew no more.