Remus Lupin and the Shrieking Shack

I was very young when it happened, and at the time, I didn't understand it.

My father was a brave, brave man, but he was arrogant. Much like James and Sirius.
He wasn't ready for me, a baby, because he was still very much a kid himself, and a reckless one too.

It happened in the Summer of 1967, a cool breeze passing the old oaks I was sitting under, and a battered old copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard sitting on my lap, opened to one of my favorites: The Fountain of Fair Fortune.

I was seven years old at the time, having learned to read a year prior, and I was just getting to the part where Sir Luckless bathes in the fountain and realizes his love for Amata, when I felt a pair of eyes looming somewhere in front of me in the wide wide stretch of forest.

I remember jumping a bit, because along with this sense of being watched, I could hear whatever it was, too. It's breath was coming in ragged waves that chilled my bones and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

My seven year old eyes stared blankly at the page I had been so consumed by just seconds before. Slowly, with a bitter foretaste I looked up.

It was a sight that I will never forget, and one that shakes me with every full moon; A great wolf gazing back at me, his matted fur a dark coat, his eyes like gangrene moons, and I think at that point I already knew my fate, but I ran anyway.

I remember how the ancient trees swayed and how my knees began to wobble, I did my best to reach the house before it got me, but I was moving more and more languidly, much to the beasts delight. I know now that it was merely playing with it's food, letting me flee only to thwart my hopes of escape.

Of course, I couldn't have outrun the thing. It was much too strong, and I was much too young to even know what it was.

It bit me around the neck with inexorable force, and I crumpled. My body was in such pain that I was paralyzed there, I could not even scream. What a clever weapon this thing had, it could immobilize it's victim and silence them within seconds. How very, very clever it was.

Later I found out that my father had offended the werewolf -Fenrir Greyback - and that is why he chose to attack me.

I never blamed my father, though. I thought it my fault, for I was the one who told no one where I was going, I was the one who sat deep within a magical forest at twilight.

I never took any thought to Greyback. I never once realized that it was very much his fault more than it was mine. You see, Greyback liked to infect young children with lycanthropy, and raise them to hate wizards and muggles. He wanted an army, so he could overthrow them all.

And to think, at first I had felt sorry for him! I had thought that he wasn't able to control it. Now that I'm older, I know better.

It was very fortunate that my father noticed my absence and panicked, because if he had not I might have never returned home that evening, and my life would have been... very different.

There are potions now that make the transformation easier, but back then, in the Summer of 1967, such potions did not exist yet. And so my transformations were very scary, and very painful.

You have to understand that I was only a child, and when my parents acted as if I was as dangerous and ugly as an acromantula, it only made me fear - and hate - what was to come.

I remember it well, because it was the single most terrifying night of my entire life thus far, and that is not so easily forgotten or cast aside.

I remember my parents shouting, and my father rushing upstairs and my cries of worry, only to get shushed as he scooped me up and carried me downstairs into the kitchen.

I had thought that we were going into my parents bedroom, that maybe they would hug me tight while whatever was going to happen happened, but instead my father took me outside.

"Daddy, what's going on? What's going to happen to me?" I would have asked then, to which he would have replied something like, "Hush, Remus. You must try to be quiet, now. Try to be brave for daddy."

Of course, how could I have known at that age what exactly it was to be brave? I didn't know what that took, but I shook my head yes anyways.

I let him bind me to a tree far in the woods where no animals occupied. I let him kiss me goodbye and I didn't say a word as his dark figure faded into nothing, but I must have cried.

The transformation itself was almost unbearable. It felt first as if I was being drenched in Greybacks sickening, redolent saliva.

the epinephrine that was crashing through my body was so high I could barely breathe. Every atom of me was shaking - changing.

I could no longer remember who I was, or who I had been moments ago. I wanted to eat something whole and rip and bite and moan and kill, and then I was howling. Howling at the moon to release me from my bindings, howling at the night sky to blanket me and become my invisibility cloak, and I needed to bite now.

And so I did. I bit myself all over to keep from going insane. I scratched and clawed at my skin until I was soaked in my own blood and my skin was so itchy that I just wanted to take it off entirely.

How could I forget how that felt? Especially when it happened for ten years on every full moon?

It got a bit easier, though. I learned to control it better, and soon I got an opportunity I thought had been lost to me the moment I was contaminated.

But I guess, with a headmaster like Albus Dumbledore, even werewolves can get an education.