Remus blinked and looked at the werewolf regrouping in front of him. The silver ball he held in his hand was cool and solid to the touch, and he remembered something his father had told him once, as they'd gazed out from Remus's window at the full moon illuminating the clearing he now stood in. Ignoring the wave of pain and stiffness that emanated from his shoulder at the motion, he pulled his arm back and threw the ball as hard as he could at the werewolf.
It missed by a margin that seemed impossibly small, and shattered against the large tree behind the wolf with a sound like heartbreak.
His only option as the wolf lunged at Remus was to dive to the ground, and he felt the heat and power soar over him by inches, the sound of its claws once again clattering against the boulder. Another shot of pain ripped through his shoulder as he rolled over and scrambled to his feet, moving backwards as well as he could towards the tree with the silver still dripping down it, the bark causing it to make odd patterns. His eyes locked on the wolf, he failed to notice the heavy tree root inches from his foot.
Remus tripped, his arms flailing in a losing battle against gravity.
His bruised right shoulder, already aching from his three-foot drop off the rock, slammed into the tree, and he could feel the heavy bark digging into his skin. It hurt a lot, more then anything had ever hurt him before, and the silver burned, deep inside the cuts now, and he couldn't move, was suddenly weighed down by exhaustion and pain and the thought of what came next. Back pressed against the tree, legs shaking, he waited.
The werewolf turned, fixed thick, green-brown eyes on him, let its lips curl back over its teeth, and Remus could have sworn it was smiling, but he thought it was probably an illusion created by the fact that the pain was causing his vision to swim. And then the wolf's mouth was open and it was leaping, and Remus screwed his eyes shut against the huge jaw full of dripping, terrifying teeth.
His feet lost their grip on the mucky blood and silver and dirt beneath his feet, and he fell, his shoulder and neck scraping across the bark, and suddenly, the werewolf has smashed into the tree above him. Remus can't tell the difference between the werewolf's blood and his own, and even with the full moon, it's really too dark to differentiate between blood and silver.
Crawling away from the tree, every moment causing a nauseating pain to rip through his shoulder and neck, he collapsed near the boulder that mere minutes ago he'd been sitting on, and turned back to look at the wolf. It let out a pitiful sound caught somewhere between a whine and a howl, and turned to face Remus.
The right side of its face, neck and right shoulder were covered in the silver, and Remus could hear it burning against the skin. Its snout was contorted at a terrible angle, and although its right foreleg seemed to have escaped most of the silver, its left had not been so fortunate, and hung useless, unmoving.
A door banged open behind him, and the clearing was suddenly filled with the calm yellow light of a lantern. John Lupin stood framed in the doorway, lantern held high above his head to illuminate his injured son and the werewolf.
"Remus, what are you doing out-!" he said, but his shout was cut off when he noticed the silver covered werewolf slumped at the edge of the circle of light. For a moment, he was stunned silent, and then a shout tore from his throat.
"FENRIR GREYBACK, GET AWAY FROM MY SON!" John rushed forward, not realizing until he was much closer just how badly both his son and the wolf were injured, and his blue eyes went wide as he looked at Remus, the blood staining his ripped shirt. As he reached his son, the first glimpse of the sun peeked over the horizon, and Greyback froze where he was, the change suddenly beginning to take hold.
Remus watched in horrified fascination as the wolf in front of him writhed painfully, until all that remained was a fairly small, dirty man, wearing a torn shirt and brown pants that barely reached his knees. His left arm hung, mangled, useless at his side as his front leg had in wolf form, and his face was horribly scarred, thin veins of sizzling silver still clinging to it.
Panting with pain, Greyback swiped a hand across his face angrily, and glared death at Remus as he spoke to John, "He'll pay, Lupin. You'll both pay," and then he was gone. As Greyback disappeared, Remus lost the battle with his churning stomach, and vomited, tears streaming down his face.
His father pulled him into his arms and Remus sobbed against the comfortable warmth of his father's t-shirt, tears of pain and fear and confusion and exhaustion. How long they stayed there, Remus was unsure, but his father didn't move until Remus's tears subsided, and then gently leaned back to meet his son's eyes.
"Did he bite you? Remus, is that what happened to your shoulder?" asked John, unable to keep the fear out of his eyes.
"N-no," said Remus, fighting back tears still. "I tripped, and hit my shoulder on the tree," he continued, pointing to the tree, the blood and silver shining in the early morning sun.
"Oh, thank God," said John, then carefully peeled the bloodstained parts of Remus's shirt away from his shoulder, "Let's have a look at this then. See if we need to take you to Mungo's."
But as John Lupin studied his son's shoulder, he could see no fresh cuts, only a thick patch of scar tissue that covered his right shoulder and extended several inches up his neck. The blood surrounding the wound was still warm and wet, only slightly tacky, but there was no open wound to speak of. Only the thick scar tissue, dark pink against Remus's pale skin.
Before he could do more than puzzle over the miraculously healed wound, a voice called out, "John! Rosey! What's going on?" and their neighbor, a Daily Prophet reporter named Horton Quick, stepped out onto his front porch, wand held tightly in his hand.
"Remus was attacked," said John, and added as an afterthought, "by a werewolf."
"Was he… bitten?" asked Quick, noticeably recoiling.
"No," said John, as he continued to stare at the huge scar that now covered his son's shoulder, "He's fine."
"Really?" asked the reporter, his curiosity peaked, "That's excellent. How'd he manage that?" he continued after a pause, reaching over to the small table next to him, standing his quill on the point as John scooped his small son up carefully and moved towards his neighbor's house.
Remus told the story in broken sentences, exhaustion and the lingering pain keeping him from even the basic coherency of a normal six-year-old. He clung desperately to his mother, who'd come out of the house a few minutes into the story. John and Rosey had had a rapid, intense discussion for a minute before Rosey came over to inspect her son's shoulder as he talked.
Soon though, the broken sentences became nothing more than yes or no answers, but by that time, Quick was almost bouncing up and down where he stood. As John once again scooped his son up to his chest, Horton Quick closed his door, grabbed his cloak and apparated on the spot. If he hurried, it was possible that he could get his story into the morning addition of the Prophet. He thought they might make an exception, even if the papers arrived late this morning.
John went to check on the twins, Samuel and Lawrence, who had turned two just a few days before, while his mother took Remus to clean the blood off of him before he went back to bed. Running a warm washcloth over his shoulder and neck as he sat unmoving on the edge of the bathtub, bare feet sitting in a few inches of water to wash the dirt off, she marveled at the impressive expanse of scar tissue that now covered it.
"Remus?" she asked, and he looked up at her, eyes wide amber pools staring deeply into the swirling patterns of dirt around his feet. "Does it hurt, honey, when I touch… it?" she continued, not sure what to call the scar, so newly formed, yet clearly so much a part of his skin now.
He shook his head, long hair falling into his eyes, and he ran one wet hand through his fringe, pushing it out of his amber eyes as his mother finished washing the last of the blood and dirt away. Remus was clearly exhausted, and she helped him into a shirt and scooped him up, the boy feeling weightless in her arms tonight, so light despite his tallness, and Rosey tucked him deep inside the blankets on his bed, being careful of his shoulder. But Remus seemed not to really notice it, except to roll onto his left side and burrow deeper into the blankets. Rosey took one last look at her eldest and put out the light.
Cuddling deeper into his blankets, Remus Lupin knew nothing of what lay ahead of him, knew only the warmness of his bed and the deep feeling of sleepiness that was overcoming him. He didn't know that in a few hours, he and his new scar would become a symbol of courage and hope for a wizarding world that desperately need such symbols, that for months, and even years afterward, his name would be spoken with reverence and awe, and that he would never quite be able to fully escape the fame that would forever follow the new mark splashed on his shoulder, inching up onto his neck slightly. That this was only a small taste of the adventures that awaited him.
As he drifted off, giving up in the battle against sleep, Remus Lupin didn't know any of this.
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"Merlin's beard!"
His father's voice broke through Remus's sleepy haze, and the six-year-old sat up, rubbing at his eyes, shielding them from the mid-morning light spilling into the room. Climbing out of his bed, he padded through the hallway and down the stairs into the kitchen. His parents were both staring at the front page of The Daily Prophet, but whatever they found so interesting was blocked from Remus's view by their backs.
"'S goin' on?" Remus asked, speech still clouded by sleep. His parents turned away from the paper to look at him as one, or both, of the twins began fussing upstairs. Rosey and John exchanged a glance before she moved toward the stairs and he turned so that Remus could climb up onto his lap.
Remus couldn't read very well yet, but the picture was clear enough. There he stood, clinging to his mother, amber eyes wide, bloody, ripped shirt framing his shoulder for all to see. And there it was, the deep pink scar, covering his shoulder almost completely and climbing up his neck several inches, so that even now, with a clean, whole shirt, you could still see part of it.
Remus's hand unconsciously strayed to his shoulder as he asked his dad, "What does it say?" and his father pulled him closer as he began to read.
"'Boy Defeats Infamous Werewolf'. That's the headline," said John, and Remus traced the thick black letters with the fingers of his right hand, feeling the slight stiffness there, the scar seemingly old, but the injury new.
In dark times such as these, it is often hard to find even the smallest spark of hope. But early this morning, before the sun had even peeked over the horizon, one such spark ignited in a most spectacular fashion.
Remus Lupin, who turned six this past March, was wandering the woods behind his home in a bout of insomnia when out of the trees emerged none other than Fenrir Greyback himself.
Greyback is a werewolf best known for biting very young children, and then stealing them away from their parents to be raised in his "care", attempting to turn them to his views of the world. Greyback is suspected of having strong connections to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
After avoiding several attacks by the beast, young Remus used his only defense besides his own wits and reflexes, a ball full of molten silver he had found while exploring his family's attic earlier in the day. But his throw missed by only a small margin, and smashed into a large tree behind the werewolf. As he scrambled away from yet another attack, his foot caught on a heavy tree root and his right shoulder, already bruised from a former avoidance, smashed into the tree.
Remus was stuck, overcome by exhaustion and pain, as the bark had sliced deep into his shoulder and the silver had seeped into the cuts. All seemed lost as the werewolf prepared for another attack, but at the last second, Remus slipped in the mud at his feet and successfully dodged the attack.
The beast smashed into the tree, and as Remus stumbled away, he turned back to look at the injured werewolf. Greyback was badly burned by the silver and crushed by the impact, and by the time John Lupin emerged from the house, his son had already won the fight. And as the sun rose and the beast once again became a man, John Lupin hugged his injured son to his chest.
Greyback, his left arm mangled, the right side of his face and right shoulder badly burned and scarred, vowed revenge before he disappeared into the forest. John Lupin cradled his son to him for a moment, before beginning to examine the injured right shoulder.
But the shoulder, despite the fact that the torn shirt surrounding it was stained with wet blood, was not injured. Where the wounds should be, instead there was a thick, pink scar, covering his entire right shoulder, and several inches of the right side of his neck. The injury was minutes old, but the scar looked as though it had always been a part of Remus.
And it may very well have been. For his scar is a clear and physical expression of the bravery that one boy can show. By defeating this monster, by demonstrating this nearly unimaginable amount of courage, Remus Lupin has become more than an ordinary six-year-old boy.
He, and his scar, has become a symbol for hope, for courage, for light, in a time when the wizarding world needs these things above all else. Let us raise a toast to Remus Lupin, and may we all someday follow his example!
Remus looked up at his father with wide amber eyes, and John pulled his son close, arms wrapped tightly around him, fingers straying unconsciously toward the new mark on his shoulder.
"What happens now?" asked Remus, against the comforting smell and warmth of his father's shirt.
"I don't know, Remus, I really don't," John said, and then ran out of words, and pulled the boy against him again for a moment, "Why don't you go back up to bed, rest a little while before your mum gets you for lunch. You still look so tired."
Remus just looked up at him with those amber eyes again, and he scooped his son up, something that was getting harder as he got taller, and stood. Carefully climbing the stairs, he reached Remus's room and slowly moved to his bed.
As he watched his son drift off once again, John Lupin knew something about what those words, that picture meant for his son, for Remus's future. But not even he could have guessed what adventures awaited Remus.
And as for Remus himself, he was blissfully unaware of even the slightest hint of what awaited him.
Remus Lupin and The Centaur Ashes by discosuperfli
Chapter Notes: And so the adventure truly begins. I'm still just playing in JKR's sandbox. Please forgive any glaring Americanisms, and feel free to make suggestions on those.