All right, all right. I'm not sure what that first symbol is meant to be, but then there's a surprised face, and a car, and... I'm not sure what that next one is either, then a happy face that's upside down, and a - star? Explosion? And then there's exclamation point-question mark-exclamation point-question mark, and an OK symbol, and then another surprised face, and - maybe a mushroom or something, and then some gloves on a string, and the last one is some stars.
You're... surprised by a car, and then you fell over and got confused? But now you're okay, and you're eating a mushroom and wearing mittens, and stargazing?
Had Remus arrived at the Tonks' starter flat merely ten minutes later, Ted would not have been home to help bodily ferry him from the door to the sofa bed in their spare room. It's a modest distance to cover, but if she'd done that first part by herself, magically or otherwise, perhaps the enormity of the task ahead would've sunk in sooner.
It's only Remus, Andromeda recalls saying, with the astonishing overconfidence typical of her bloodline. This was what she needed to say to convince her husband not to be late for his own shift. Ted hadn't wanted to leave her to deal with this crisis on her own.
What problem could Remus possibly have that would be beyond her ability to solve? Her unbothered tone conjured up the image of a plain schoolboy, inconspicuously huddled under the boughs of a tree with his head in a book. So; Ted goes, Andromeda stays, and the misshapen, bloodied form of Remus Lupin presents its own evidence.
Her floor-length, long sleeve paisley dress might give the false impression that she has someplace else to be. It looks a bit much for sitting around at home. All secondhand clothes and costume jewellery for her now, regardless. School robes had once been a welcome reprieve from the state of sartorial readiness required to receive guests.
Ted's departure robbed the room of much of its warmth. Andromeda sometimes feels best understood in his presence, with her aristocratic bearing balanced out by his unassuming joviality. It concerns her less with Remus than most. Right in front of her, Sirius has told his friends not to hold her snobbery against her.
Her grand gesture was one thing. The rest has to be worked at gradually; a slow unweaving of the same tapestry her likeness was burnt from. She retreats into learned poise whenever she feels self-conscious, which is unhelpfully often around Ted's friends and Muggle family. She was mortified to have brought nothing to her marriage except herself. By increments, she's come to understand that her in-laws neither expect nor value the same things she was always told that a husband's family would.
Her long hair ties itself in a bun as she moves to stand over Remus, wand drawn. It is unfair to him that it's her and not the team of fully qualified healers he most likely needs and deserves. She'll only be surer of that once she makes a proper assessment. Already, she sucks a breath through her teeth in sympathy with the first impression.]
Oh, Merlin. What have you gotten yourself into?
[It isn't very professional of her to say, but he's not just anyone, and this is all happening very quickly in her place of safety. It can still form part of the communication by which she'll establish his state of consciousness. Remus isn't expected to answer that in facts and details.
They're not members of the Order. They're just sympathetic civilians whose flat happens to be bursting at the seams with protective enchantments. Andromeda always stays one step ahead of the precautions other people take against dark magic. That's how anyone would be if the person they once loved most, now feared most, vowed to kill them. She wouldn't stake Ted's or her own life on the fact that the threat was made in a moment of anger, shock and profound betrayal, and possibly not meant.
The residence as a whole is fastidiously neat, with only small pockets of concession to mess in Ted's most visited spots. What initially appears to be clutter in nearby cabinets and boxes reveals itself, under any scrutiny, to be necessary potion ingredients.
If she darkened her hair and sneered with enough cold contempt, she could likely infiltrate the Dark Lord's cabal without the use of a Polyjuice Potion. Her favourite cousin, a charming liar, used to claim that he couldn't see any resemblance between her and her elder sister. Later, she'll wonder if it's possible that she willed a Metamorphmagus into existence using only pregnancy hormones and the heartfelt desire to have a wholly new, unrecognisable, unreminiscent face. No child of hers would be eclipsed by the strength of a larger personality.
Infiltration is more the forte of the damaged man in front of her anyway, not that she's to know it.]
[Remus isn't certain how he got here. He's not certain where here is, exactly, until he hears the familiar voice of Ted Tonks as strong arms pick him up from where he has collapsed onto the ground. One day in the future, he will learn more about the psychology of stress and realize that he had probably Apparated to the Tonks residence entirely by reflex, by rote instinct without any input from his conscious brain. This is fortunate, because a moment later, his brain decides to give up on consciousness altogether and he faints away as Ted carries him into the building.
He wakes up again a few minutes later, disoriented, dizzy, and distantly aware that something somewhere in his body feels very wrong. He's - on some kind of soft surface, cushions or a mattress perhaps; he can feel cloth sticking to to his skin, glued there by something wet and viscous. There is light coming from somewhere nearby - he opens his eyes to look for its source, and such a powerful stream of brightness hits his retinae that he instantly flinches back, blinded. That causes a new symphony of pain to erupt across his body, thundering chords of stabbing pain along his ribcage and arpeggios of brutal aches up and down the muscles of his arms and legs and a base beat of deep, sucking pain on the right side of his chest. He gasps and finds that he hasn't pulled in nearly enough air. And now he's starting to panic.]
'Ndruhmdha -
["Andromeda" is what he is trying to say, but it comes out only as a slurred mess of consonant sounds. Honestly he's not even sure how he knows that it's Andromeda standing over him - perhaps he heard her talking, or maybe it's just the smell of her house that is registering somewhere in the back of his mind. But he's not in the best state of mind for deep, thoughtful analysis at the moment, and it will be much clearer to Andromeda than Remus why this is. The gasping, shuddering body currently displayed before her is covered in blood, and underneath the blood it is covered in injuries. Remus has a long, narrow gash across the top of his head, a right arm that lies at a strange and very broken angle, a large section of skin and muscle down his side that has been ripped open so deeply that at least a few centimeters of white rib bone are exposed to the air, and a hole in his chest, three finger-widths below his right collarbone. It is from this last injury that a whistling, sucking sound can be heard with every struggling breath.]
'Msrie'fyedy'nerhhs...
[That phrase should have been, "I'm sorry if I die in your house," but it's impossible to understand at this point.]
[They've volunteered their home as a waystation and field hospital plenty of times before. Her previous patients' needs were always minor, compared to this. She wasn't distracted for long from her more important job of being Dora's mum. This will be a lengthier undertaking. And she's telling herself that's why she's thankful her daughter's nowhere near this.
When Mr. and Mrs. Tonks are working back-to-back, or their schedules are otherwise impossible, they rely on Ted's family. Nymphadora's paternal grandparents are having to do more than their fair share. This will prove bitterly ironic someday when Andromeda becomes a grandmother herself.
Andromeda understands none of what Remus tries to say. His sad attempt to speak is a dim, faraway sound that can't compete for her attention. He surpasses the graphic sights that have caused herself and others to briefly duck out to vomit. She wastes a little of his important and fleeting time on a wide-eyed stare.
It's an obscene test of her order of operations. The bad angle of his right arm is the least important to her. He's lost and is still losing a lot of blood. An impossibly large chunk of his flesh is gone. His ability to breathe and the hole in his chest become her top concerns. The whole grisly spectacle of him—which she now feels completely inadequate for—is going to take a combination of spellwork and potions. She has some of the needed potions already made: Wound-Cleaning, Blood-Replenishing.
What she might never have known, if her life hadn't changed, is that healers aren't using healing magic all the time. It's mostly the intention and the application of the same spells they've all learned. Without adding to his many cuts or slicing him at all physically, the simple Severing Charm bisects the function of his lungs. Breathing only through his left lung prevents his wheezing in and out of the punctured right. He'll get the use of his other lung back only when she's sure it can function. Anapneo keeps him from choking or more likely aspirating on his own blood.
She's an inconstant presence beside him, away and back again with a stinging purple solution to daub around the opening on his chest. The colour smokes and burns off on her wand-tip to reveal new, pink flesh underneath. It's nowhere near enough to outweigh the magnitude of his pain, or to rise above all his body's frenzied signals, yet at the edge of his frayed awareness he may be able to track some of her progress by a pattern of searing heat, blistering cold, and then relief.
She'd be alarmed to see injuries this severe if they were shared and spread across ten bodies. There's a sick absurdity to seeing them all on one, and that one still living, if only barely.
Even if they assume she has no prejudice of her own, which they can't, the gaps in her education reflect the wider stigma. What she knows about treating werewolves was not reiterated and reinforced the way other things were, only mentioned offhand like macabre trivia.
Eventually, she's aware, he'll need a topical application to be sure of the wounds she closes staying closed. She can't remember if it's still powdered silver and dittany for those who've already suffered from the affliction a long time, or if that's only for the first exposure. When she strains her memory for knowledge she simply doesn't have, other memories return to her instead.
A little Bella, always the bravest, trying to coax a little Dromeda out from under her covers of her bed:
"Why should you be frightened? You'll never have to see one. I'll kill it first — outside, so the fleas don't jump to us."
Or a mean-spirited disruption from the back of a Hogwarts classroom:
"Do we really need to know? They're just beasts, aren't they?"
Andromeda finds that she does, in fact, need to know. She's barely struck one item off his long checklist, and she's already anxious and then guilty for feeling anxious. She hopes she's been remembering to talk, saying anything at all to fill the time in what must be long stretches of agony. The exact words of the conversation are lost to her in the widening gap between what she's doing and what she's thinking.]
[After finding himself on Andromeda and Ted's couch, there's not much Remus has to do for himself anymore but exist, moment to moment - but he finds that even this is a struggle. He desperately wants to stop existing, to break out of the torture chamber that his body has become, to float away, free of the confusion and the brightness and the noise and the pain...
But he doesn't want to die. He knows, even in his extremely addled state, that dying is not an option right now. There are - things he needs to do, people he can't disappoint. And there's something - someone? - he needs to save, before he can allow himself to die.
So he waits, patiently, in the impenetrable haze of agony that makes up his entire world right now, for things to improve. At first he's quite sure that he's going to lose the struggle to stay alive anyway, whatever his intentions are, because he can't get enough air into his body - it must have something to do with this terrible band of tension around and inside the middle of his chest, like red-hot wire that burns and constricts him with every attempt to inhale, pushing the air out and away from his starving lungs until he sees black spots collecting at the sides of his vision even behind his closed eyelids and he knows that he won't last much longer...
And then, quite suddenly, the tension evaporates. He gasps in several desperate breaths with a sound that rumbles and vibrates deep within his ribcage, and it causes a fresh wave of agony that almost causes the blackness to swallow him again but he doesn't care because life is so much easier when you can breathe. He can't quite understand how it has happened - the band of tension felt as immovable as a boulder to him - but somehow, he's been given a reprieve. It's still hellish to exist in this body, pain from all directions eating away at his resolve and the new breath he has been given feeling heavy and fizzy and tasting of iron at the back of his throat - but at least he can remain alive in this very moment. Yes, that's better.
Now he just has to keep it up, keep existing from one moment to the next, allow someone - who is it? Andromeda, right, it's Andromeda's voice that he can hear, rising and falling indistinctly in his ears - to fix whatever is broken in him. He can hear his own breathing now, more even and less panicky, even over Andromeda's distant speaking. He knows in an equally distant way that with each breath, with each beat of his heart, he is losing more blood. He knows this because he can feel the way the hole in his chest is leaking even as a gentle hand is pressed to it, like a faulty hosepipe, soaking the skin of his chest and shoulder with what he can only assume from context is blood. Presently the warmth of his blood is joined by another sensation, something smooth and viscous being smeared onto his skin, not in the wound but around it, and where it touches the edges of the wound it sparks and flares with a round constellation of pinpricks that make him flinch more in surprise than pain. He wants to reach out and feel it with his fingertips, but there's no response from his arm when he tries to move it - and then all at once the little twinkles of pain flare up into a single unit, a tiny bomb detonating right against his skin, against the open flesh and muscle of the injury, sublimating the leaking blood and broiling the skin and cauterizing the open wound tract; he makes a sound somewhere between a cry and a groan through his teeth, stifled as quickly as he can. It's not too painful to bear, he reminds himself, he can exist through this - and there, the heat is receding, it will be gone in a moment - and then the heat is plunging away, down into cold as intense as the preceding moment of heat, a blaze of cold, a starburst of frost driving into the heat-scoured tissue and filling it, packing it with mass like liquid water expanding into bulkier, frozen ice crystals, and then sealing it off. The sucking, bleeding hole in his chest closes up, raw and new and only very faintly stinging, hermetically separating his innards from the surrounding air again; the terrible cold dissipates as quickly as it appeared.
He shudders, swallows once. Opens his eyes, just enough to let in a narrow slit of light. He speaks one word at the shadowy shape he can see among the confused shades of light around him, and this time his voice, though still full of gravel and wheezy at the edges, can at least be understood.]
Andromeda?
[He's still not really in the right state of mind to be much help to his savior, but he's at least curious about what she's doing. Is he still dying? Or is she just worried because he looks the way he always looks after a full moon?]
Spot on, Remus, [she sounds pleased to be recognised no matter how he managed it. At this stage, she's grateful to have anything to praise him for. It helps smother the worry that he might still die on her watch.] You're going to be all right.
[A younger version of herself needed to be soothed after a nightmare of being chased by a werewolf. That little girl wasn't scared of dying. She was afraid of losing her status. Afraid of being worthless in the eyes of everyone she cared about. Only a child, and already sure that all the love and safety in her life was conditional, subject to expectations being met. As a mother herself, the thought is abhorrent. It's impossible to look at Dora and imagine anything she could ever do or say that would make her less completely loved. It's such a helpless affection, she marvels at how any parent could act against it.
Under the sofa bed, blood has begun to drip and pool on the floor. The mattress he rests on is ever more deeply drenched. Remus is still bleeding vigorously enough to put strain on his heart; an organ already stressed by his transformations. The hem of her dress drags through the blood puddle, catching and sticking. Her sleeves are scrunched up above her elbows now, and her disposable gloves are dip-dyed pink or smudged bright red and periodically replaced. She's single-minded and heedless to everything that's going to become a mess to clean later.
Inside the now-sealed cavity in his chest, his right lung's shrunk down to the size of an infant's. It'll grow back whole and healthy over the next few hours. His pulmonary system is reconnected again, temporarily lopsided. All the while, she has to try to make filthy beast just meaningless words to her; part of the same forgotten language as blood traitor. She would never choose to think in those terms, yet they bubble up from the past at some very inconvenient moments, unbidden and intrusive.
She's starting him on the first of many Blood-Replenishing Potions before she's actually stopped the bleeding. As potions go, it ramps up fairly gradually. By the time it's working, she hopes he'll be less of massive open wound of a man.]
Try to drink this for me, [she says, one hand cradling Remus' head to help him lift up and the other holding the potion bottle slightly in front of his lips. Half of it is healer's orders. The other half is the typical I-know-best style of someone who has a few years over him who's decided to count it as a whole lifetime. She takes that tone with Sirius mostly, so Sirius' schoolmates have to go in the same boat to make it fair. Easy to hear that her cousin was once little Sirius to her. It's hard to reconcile this with the fact that they all have a much more important part in the war than she does. It should be more embarrassing, how it falls to a bunch of fairly recent graduates to win for everyone.]
You might be concussed to boot. Is it always like this? [She's not expecting too profound of an answer.]
They wouldn't have any nice reasons for separating one werewolf from the pack, now would they?
Remus Lupin is spread flat on his back against the cold stones of a cellar floor, bolted down in four places. The heavy manacles on his wrists and ankles are connected to each other and to all four points, with enough slack left in the chains for him to writhe about to his captors' delight. When the time comes, perhaps. They've not done anything yet besides leave him for a full half-hour in this dehumanising surfeit of chains. It's not a matter of believing he might avail himself of transformed strength in his human form. It's about illustrating how lowly and bestial he is, regardless of his physical state.
"What does it claim its name is?"
A female Death Eater—the tall, slim figure standing over him, hooded and masked—makes him sound unworthy of being spoken to directly, yet there's no one else around to answer her question. If not for the obvious disdain with which she speaks, her cut-glass accent might be pleasing. It would help if she made a point to speak always at this quiet volume; alas, she becomes shrill and sharp whenever she's agitated, and agitates easily. He might well recognise that voice.
Her wand passes by her face, revealing the contemptuous countenance of Bellatrix Lestrange. If anyone else unmasked themselves, it wouldn't bode well for his chances of escaping alive. With her, it makes no difference. She's too proud to seek refuge in deniability. Few in the wizarding world wear their allegiances as openly. She's just daring someone to name her, to bring charges against her for her righteous cause. (They won't, until the wind changes.)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2024-11-04 05:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-27 09:02 pm (UTC)Sirius, what does this even mean?
no subject
Date: 2024-12-06 04:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-12 06:18 am (UTC)All right, all right. I'm not sure what that first symbol is meant to be, but then there's a surprised face, and a car, and... I'm not sure what that next one is either, then a happy face that's upside down, and a - star? Explosion? And then there's exclamation point-question mark-exclamation point-question mark, and an OK symbol, and then another surprised face, and - maybe a mushroom or something, and then some gloves on a string, and the last one is some stars.
You're... surprised by a car, and then you fell over and got confused? But now you're okay, and you're eating a mushroom and wearing mittens, and stargazing?
That's my best guess, sorry.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-06 08:56 pm (UTC)Had Remus arrived at the Tonks' starter flat merely ten minutes later, Ted would not have been home to help bodily ferry him from the door to the sofa bed in their spare room. It's a modest distance to cover, but if she'd done that first part by herself, magically or otherwise, perhaps the enormity of the task ahead would've sunk in sooner.
It's only Remus, Andromeda recalls saying, with the astonishing overconfidence typical of her bloodline. This was what she needed to say to convince her husband not to be late for his own shift. Ted hadn't wanted to leave her to deal with this crisis on her own.
What problem could Remus possibly have that would be beyond her ability to solve? Her unbothered tone conjured up the image of a plain schoolboy, inconspicuously huddled under the boughs of a tree with his head in a book. So; Ted goes, Andromeda stays, and the misshapen, bloodied form of Remus Lupin presents its own evidence.
Her floor-length, long sleeve paisley dress might give the false impression that she has someplace else to be. It looks a bit much for sitting around at home. All secondhand clothes and costume jewellery for her now, regardless. School robes had once been a welcome reprieve from the state of sartorial readiness required to receive guests.
Ted's departure robbed the room of much of its warmth. Andromeda sometimes feels best understood in his presence, with her aristocratic bearing balanced out by his unassuming joviality. It concerns her less with Remus than most. Right in front of her, Sirius has told his friends not to hold her snobbery against her.
Her grand gesture was one thing. The rest has to be worked at gradually; a slow unweaving of the same tapestry her likeness was burnt from. She retreats into learned poise whenever she feels self-conscious, which is unhelpfully often around Ted's friends and Muggle family. She was mortified to have brought nothing to her marriage except herself. By increments, she's come to understand that her in-laws neither expect nor value the same things she was always told that a husband's family would.
Her long hair ties itself in a bun as she moves to stand over Remus, wand drawn. It is unfair to him that it's her and not the team of fully qualified healers he most likely needs and deserves. She'll only be surer of that once she makes a proper assessment. Already, she sucks a breath through her teeth in sympathy with the first impression.]
Oh, Merlin. What have you gotten yourself into?
[It isn't very professional of her to say, but he's not just anyone, and this is all happening very quickly in her place of safety. It can still form part of the communication by which she'll establish his state of consciousness. Remus isn't expected to answer that in facts and details.
They're not members of the Order. They're just sympathetic civilians whose flat happens to be bursting at the seams with protective enchantments. Andromeda always stays one step ahead of the precautions other people take against dark magic. That's how anyone would be if the person they once loved most, now feared most, vowed to kill them. She wouldn't stake Ted's or her own life on the fact that the threat was made in a moment of anger, shock and profound betrayal, and possibly not meant.
The residence as a whole is fastidiously neat, with only small pockets of concession to mess in Ted's most visited spots. What initially appears to be clutter in nearby cabinets and boxes reveals itself, under any scrutiny, to be necessary potion ingredients.
If she darkened her hair and sneered with enough cold contempt, she could likely infiltrate the Dark Lord's cabal without the use of a Polyjuice Potion. Her favourite cousin, a charming liar, used to claim that he couldn't see any resemblance between her and her elder sister. Later, she'll wonder if it's possible that she willed a Metamorphmagus into existence using only pregnancy hormones and the heartfelt desire to have a wholly new, unrecognisable, unreminiscent face. No child of hers would be eclipsed by the strength of a larger personality.
Infiltration is more the forte of the damaged man in front of her anyway, not that she's to know it.]
no subject
Date: 2025-05-07 07:41 am (UTC)He wakes up again a few minutes later, disoriented, dizzy, and distantly aware that something somewhere in his body feels very wrong. He's - on some kind of soft surface, cushions or a mattress perhaps; he can feel cloth sticking to to his skin, glued there by something wet and viscous. There is light coming from somewhere nearby - he opens his eyes to look for its source, and such a powerful stream of brightness hits his retinae that he instantly flinches back, blinded. That causes a new symphony of pain to erupt across his body, thundering chords of stabbing pain along his ribcage and arpeggios of brutal aches up and down the muscles of his arms and legs and a base beat of deep, sucking pain on the right side of his chest. He gasps and finds that he hasn't pulled in nearly enough air. And now he's starting to panic.]
'Ndruhmdha -
["Andromeda" is what he is trying to say, but it comes out only as a slurred mess of consonant sounds. Honestly he's not even sure how he knows that it's Andromeda standing over him - perhaps he heard her talking, or maybe it's just the smell of her house that is registering somewhere in the back of his mind. But he's not in the best state of mind for deep, thoughtful analysis at the moment, and it will be much clearer to Andromeda than Remus why this is. The gasping, shuddering body currently displayed before her is covered in blood, and underneath the blood it is covered in injuries. Remus has a long, narrow gash across the top of his head, a right arm that lies at a strange and very broken angle, a large section of skin and muscle down his side that has been ripped open so deeply that at least a few centimeters of white rib bone are exposed to the air, and a hole in his chest, three finger-widths below his right collarbone. It is from this last injury that a whistling, sucking sound can be heard with every struggling breath.]
'Msrie'fyedy'nerhhs...
[That phrase should have been, "I'm sorry if I die in your house," but it's impossible to understand at this point.]
no subject
Date: 2025-05-08 01:48 am (UTC)When Mr. and Mrs. Tonks are working back-to-back, or their schedules are otherwise impossible, they rely on Ted's family. Nymphadora's paternal grandparents are having to do more than their fair share. This will prove bitterly ironic someday when Andromeda becomes a grandmother herself.
Andromeda understands none of what Remus tries to say. His sad attempt to speak is a dim, faraway sound that can't compete for her attention. He surpasses the graphic sights that have caused herself and others to briefly duck out to vomit. She wastes a little of his important and fleeting time on a wide-eyed stare.
It's an obscene test of her order of operations. The bad angle of his right arm is the least important to her. He's lost and is still losing a lot of blood. An impossibly large chunk of his flesh is gone. His ability to breathe and the hole in his chest become her top concerns. The whole grisly spectacle of him—which she now feels completely inadequate for—is going to take a combination of spellwork and potions. She has some of the needed potions already made: Wound-Cleaning, Blood-Replenishing.
What she might never have known, if her life hadn't changed, is that healers aren't using healing magic all the time. It's mostly the intention and the application of the same spells they've all learned. Without adding to his many cuts or slicing him at all physically, the simple Severing Charm bisects the function of his lungs. Breathing only through his left lung prevents his wheezing in and out of the punctured right. He'll get the use of his other lung back only when she's sure it can function. Anapneo keeps him from choking or more likely aspirating on his own blood.
She's an inconstant presence beside him, away and back again with a stinging purple solution to daub around the opening on his chest. The colour smokes and burns off on her wand-tip to reveal new, pink flesh underneath. It's nowhere near enough to outweigh the magnitude of his pain, or to rise above all his body's frenzied signals, yet at the edge of his frayed awareness he may be able to track some of her progress by a pattern of searing heat, blistering cold, and then relief.
She'd be alarmed to see injuries this severe if they were shared and spread across ten bodies. There's a sick absurdity to seeing them all on one, and that one still living, if only barely.
Even if they assume she has no prejudice of her own, which they can't, the gaps in her education reflect the wider stigma. What she knows about treating werewolves was not reiterated and reinforced the way other things were, only mentioned offhand like macabre trivia.
Eventually, she's aware, he'll need a topical application to be sure of the wounds she closes staying closed. She can't remember if it's still powdered silver and dittany for those who've already suffered from the affliction a long time, or if that's only for the first exposure. When she strains her memory for knowledge she simply doesn't have, other memories return to her instead.
A little Bella, always the bravest, trying to coax a little Dromeda out from under her covers of her bed:
"Why should you be frightened? You'll never have to see one. I'll kill it first — outside, so the fleas don't jump to us."
Or a mean-spirited disruption from the back of a Hogwarts classroom:
"Do we really need to know? They're just beasts, aren't they?"
Andromeda finds that she does, in fact, need to know. She's barely struck one item off his long checklist, and she's already anxious and then guilty for feeling anxious. She hopes she's been remembering to talk, saying anything at all to fill the time in what must be long stretches of agony. The exact words of the conversation are lost to her in the widening gap between what she's doing and what she's thinking.]
no subject
Date: 2025-05-14 11:09 pm (UTC)But he doesn't want to die. He knows, even in his extremely addled state, that dying is not an option right now. There are - things he needs to do, people he can't disappoint. And there's something - someone? - he needs to save, before he can allow himself to die.
So he waits, patiently, in the impenetrable haze of agony that makes up his entire world right now, for things to improve. At first he's quite sure that he's going to lose the struggle to stay alive anyway, whatever his intentions are, because he can't get enough air into his body - it must have something to do with this terrible band of tension around and inside the middle of his chest, like red-hot wire that burns and constricts him with every attempt to inhale, pushing the air out and away from his starving lungs until he sees black spots collecting at the sides of his vision even behind his closed eyelids and he knows that he won't last much longer...
And then, quite suddenly, the tension evaporates. He gasps in several desperate breaths with a sound that rumbles and vibrates deep within his ribcage, and it causes a fresh wave of agony that almost causes the blackness to swallow him again but he doesn't care because life is so much easier when you can breathe. He can't quite understand how it has happened - the band of tension felt as immovable as a boulder to him - but somehow, he's been given a reprieve. It's still hellish to exist in this body, pain from all directions eating away at his resolve and the new breath he has been given feeling heavy and fizzy and tasting of iron at the back of his throat - but at least he can remain alive in this very moment. Yes, that's better.
Now he just has to keep it up, keep existing from one moment to the next, allow someone - who is it? Andromeda, right, it's Andromeda's voice that he can hear, rising and falling indistinctly in his ears - to fix whatever is broken in him. He can hear his own breathing now, more even and less panicky, even over Andromeda's distant speaking. He knows in an equally distant way that with each breath, with each beat of his heart, he is losing more blood. He knows this because he can feel the way the hole in his chest is leaking even as a gentle hand is pressed to it, like a faulty hosepipe, soaking the skin of his chest and shoulder with what he can only assume from context is blood. Presently the warmth of his blood is joined by another sensation, something smooth and viscous being smeared onto his skin, not in the wound but around it, and where it touches the edges of the wound it sparks and flares with a round constellation of pinpricks that make him flinch more in surprise than pain. He wants to reach out and feel it with his fingertips, but there's no response from his arm when he tries to move it - and then all at once the little twinkles of pain flare up into a single unit, a tiny bomb detonating right against his skin, against the open flesh and muscle of the injury, sublimating the leaking blood and broiling the skin and cauterizing the open wound tract; he makes a sound somewhere between a cry and a groan through his teeth, stifled as quickly as he can. It's not too painful to bear, he reminds himself, he can exist through this - and there, the heat is receding, it will be gone in a moment - and then the heat is plunging away, down into cold as intense as the preceding moment of heat, a blaze of cold, a starburst of frost driving into the heat-scoured tissue and filling it, packing it with mass like liquid water expanding into bulkier, frozen ice crystals, and then sealing it off. The sucking, bleeding hole in his chest closes up, raw and new and only very faintly stinging, hermetically separating his innards from the surrounding air again; the terrible cold dissipates as quickly as it appeared.
He shudders, swallows once. Opens his eyes, just enough to let in a narrow slit of light. He speaks one word at the shadowy shape he can see among the confused shades of light around him, and this time his voice, though still full of gravel and wheezy at the edges, can at least be understood.]
Andromeda?
[He's still not really in the right state of mind to be much help to his savior, but he's at least curious about what she's doing. Is he still dying? Or is she just worried because he looks the way he always looks after a full moon?]
no subject
Date: 2025-05-28 05:41 pm (UTC)[A younger version of herself needed to be soothed after a nightmare of being chased by a werewolf. That little girl wasn't scared of dying. She was afraid of losing her status. Afraid of being worthless in the eyes of everyone she cared about. Only a child, and already sure that all the love and safety in her life was conditional, subject to expectations being met. As a mother herself, the thought is abhorrent. It's impossible to look at Dora and imagine anything she could ever do or say that would make her less completely loved. It's such a helpless affection, she marvels at how any parent could act against it.
Under the sofa bed, blood has begun to drip and pool on the floor. The mattress he rests on is ever more deeply drenched. Remus is still bleeding vigorously enough to put strain on his heart; an organ already stressed by his transformations. The hem of her dress drags through the blood puddle, catching and sticking. Her sleeves are scrunched up above her elbows now, and her disposable gloves are dip-dyed pink or smudged bright red and periodically replaced. She's single-minded and heedless to everything that's going to become a mess to clean later.
Inside the now-sealed cavity in his chest, his right lung's shrunk down to the size of an infant's. It'll grow back whole and healthy over the next few hours. His pulmonary system is reconnected again, temporarily lopsided. All the while, she has to try to make filthy beast just meaningless words to her; part of the same forgotten language as blood traitor. She would never choose to think in those terms, yet they bubble up from the past at some very inconvenient moments, unbidden and intrusive.
She's starting him on the first of many Blood-Replenishing Potions before she's actually stopped the bleeding. As potions go, it ramps up fairly gradually. By the time it's working, she hopes he'll be less of massive open wound of a man.]
Try to drink this for me, [she says, one hand cradling Remus' head to help him lift up and the other holding the potion bottle slightly in front of his lips. Half of it is healer's orders. The other half is the typical I-know-best style of someone who has a few years over him who's decided to count it as a whole lifetime. She takes that tone with Sirius mostly, so Sirius' schoolmates have to go in the same boat to make it fair. Easy to hear that her cousin was once little Sirius to her. It's hard to reconcile this with the fact that they all have a much more important part in the war than she does. It should be more embarrassing, how it falls to a bunch of fairly recent graduates to win for everyone.]
You might be concussed to boot. Is it always like this? [She's not expecting too profound of an answer.]
anyway, here's more trouble
Date: 2025-05-30 02:41 pm (UTC)Remus Lupin is spread flat on his back against the cold stones of a cellar floor, bolted down in four places. The heavy manacles on his wrists and ankles are connected to each other and to all four points, with enough slack left in the chains for him to writhe about to his captors' delight. When the time comes, perhaps. They've not done anything yet besides leave him for a full half-hour in this dehumanising surfeit of chains. It's not a matter of believing he might avail himself of transformed strength in his human form. It's about illustrating how lowly and bestial he is, regardless of his physical state.
"What does it claim its name is?"
A female Death Eater—the tall, slim figure standing over him, hooded and masked—makes him sound unworthy of being spoken to directly, yet there's no one else around to answer her question. If not for the obvious disdain with which she speaks, her cut-glass accent might be pleasing. It would help if she made a point to speak always at this quiet volume; alas, she becomes shrill and sharp whenever she's agitated, and agitates easily. He might well recognise that voice.
Her wand passes by her face, revealing the contemptuous countenance of Bellatrix Lestrange. If anyone else unmasked themselves, it wouldn't bode well for his chances of escaping alive. With her, it makes no difference. She's too proud to seek refuge in deniability. Few in the wizarding world wear their allegiances as openly. She's just daring someone to name her, to bring charges against her for her righteous cause. (They won't, until the wind changes.)