Sinope's Fiction: Secrets

Title: Secrets
Author: Sinope at (no spam!) gmail dot com
Rating: PG
Pairing: None (gen)
Summary: Sometimes Lupin's life feels like that: an utterly dull, outdated book, made interesting only by the cryptogram of secrets within.
Author's notes: For Sophia Helix, who requested a ficlet about Lupin. Many thanks to Underlucius, Nancy, and Lore for their wonderful betaing and Britpicking.
Disclaimer: This is an unofficial fan work. No profit was made; no ownership is implied.

You like books; all your friends and acquaintances know this fact, and, to be fair, it's really quite accurate. What's less known, though, is the fact that you particularly like old books, the kind with faded yellow newspaper clippings between the pages and inscriptions written in spindly, delicate handwriting. It's not their age alone that appeals to you; it's the secrets kept between their pages in an intricate puzzle of pen marks and obscure annotations, the rare letter slipped in as a bookmark.

Sometimes your life feels like that: an utterly dull, outdated book, made interesting only by the cryptogram of secrets within.

Your mother told you many times how she and your father met, describing it as if it were a deliciously romantic novel. She'd been studying pharmacy at King's College, working as a barmaid for the summer at the Muggle pub where your father went after work to escape his Ministry of Magic colleagues. She didn't know he was a wizard, of course, but when she returned to her classes in autumn, he sent her letters on thick, antique parchment, speaking in anachronisms and hinting vaguely at a position in Government. Your mother was thrilled. After months of correspondence, during which she began to firmly believe that your father was either an international spy or a fabulously rich and eccentric gentleman, they began seeing each other regularly, and she discovered that he was a wizard. Naturally, as a romantic young woman, she became even more enthralled, and they were married within a year.

Every time your father heard her tell this story, he smiled fondly, kissing her on the cheek, and for a moment you believed that they didn't regret the choices that drew your mother into a world of werewolves and wicked witches. Then, one Friday afternoon, you came home early from your primary school - there'd been a leak in the gas lines, or something of that nature - and heard voices as you approached the front door.

Your mother: - but I can't, Remus is still so young, Richard wouldn't be able to care for him.

A man's voice, a stranger: - but you have to think about yourself. You're miserable here, you said so yourself; how will you do Remus any good in that state? I promise I'll take care of you, dearest.

When you looked through the window, through the crack in the curtains that your mother could never quite get to shut, you saw her hugging a tall man, younger than your father, and kissing him longer than you'd ever seen her kiss your father.

You went around the alley to the garden behind your house and hid in the hollow behind the blackberry bushes. The space was too small for you to read one of your schoolbooks, so instead you imagined little fairies weaving nests out of the brambles, and wondered whether you'd have a mother by tomorrow morning.

You checked for her coat by the door every time you came home after that, but your mother never left, and you never told your secret to anyone.

this is what you remember, six years later -

- hungry HUNGRY thirstyforblood humansmell tenderlittlechildren pale moonlit necks hungry HUNGRY -

- animals. strangers. smells of human, shaking when you turn to them, but they don't run. sniffing. smells like human but wilder. smells like something you've forgotten. -

- strangers. smells safe. friends. play?

When you woke, you were still too tired to do anything but stare at the three eager faces ringing around your head. Breathe in, breathe out, feel the pain fade into dormancy. "How could you?" you finally said. "It's against the rules - it's dangerous. I might have killed you, or worse."

James laughed and shrugged. "Don't worry, Moony - we had everything under control. Aren't you glad we figured it out?"

Peter nodded eagerly, chiming in. "Just think of what we can do now! We can unlock you and go to the Forbidden Forest together, now that we know you're safe around us!"

You looked at them with wide eyes, too exhausted to shout, and bit your lip so that your anger wouldn't come out as tears. "But it's not allowed, you know that. You're not supposed to be here at all, let alone running around the Forbidden Forest with a werewolf. Dumbledore's already done so much -"

Sirius rolled his eyes and sighed. "Don't be boring. We've kept your secret; can't we trust you to keep ours?"

But that's not what you heard. What you heard was this: keep our secret and play along, or we might not keep yours.

When you heard that James and Lily planned to hide within the Fidelius Charm, you never really expected to become their secret keeper. The problem wasn't only that the Order viewed a werewolf as inherently untrustworthy; the core of it, you knew perfectly well, was the countless times that you'd reluctantly looked down at the Prefect badge on your chest and told Dumbledore just enough hints to stop your friends from mischief-making. Just enough hints to stop them, without losing their trust - that was what you'd hoped, anyway. Eventually you realised that trust doesn't just shatter all at once; mostly, it just wears away, like soapstone under a stream.

It still rankled you, though, when they told you that they'd chosen Sirius - Sirius, of all people. You'd forgiven him ages ago for his prank, of course, but you'd forgive him anything; that didn't mean that you forgot a single moment of that night. (How could any of them expect you to?)

But James forgot, and Lily loved him too much to remind him, if she ever knew in the first place. For a brief moment, when they first told you that they'd be going into hiding, you thought about asking them What about me? Haven't I kept the most dangerous secret of all?

Then you heard your inner Prefect's voice pacifying you: Never mind them. You've chosen the safer path, anyway.

The worst part was when that voice ended up being right.

There's a book from Persia, The Secret and Most Strange Nature of the Moon-Wolf, by Farjad Rezanour; only three copies, to your knowledge, exist. One resides in the Bodleian Library, where you once pulled in a series of favours to peruse it for an afternoon. One is locked away, rumour says, in the collection of a Muggle arms dealer in Bukhara. The last copy sits on the shelves of Severus Snape.

It's a curious book, alternating between lurid myths and endless catalogues of anatomical details, but the strangest chapter of all attempts to explicate the origins of werewolves. Rezanour's hypothesis is staggeringly controversial (and likely the cause for the book's unpopularity): he argues that lycanthropy is no magical curse at all, but a mere psychological delusion. Between the pain and shock of the werewolf's bite, a chemical from the saliva to make the subject more open to suggestion, and the cultural context of werewolf traditions, a bitten wizard comes to believe that he will change upon the next full moon. This strong belief becomes self-fulfilling, inducing an Animagus transformation and the apparent loss of control.

Rezanour goes on to conclude that the change and animal rage are, in theory, entirely controllable and changeable. If a wizard were to approach the full moon with the firm belief that the change need not take place, then it might not happen. Of course, any wizard corrupted by moon-madness would be unable to undertake such logical analysis; thus, his theory remained historically unprovable.

Severus refuses to give you details, but you suspect that the Wolfsbane Potion was built around that theory.

You've asked him about it twice - once when he first published his discovery of the potion, and once last year, after the War was over and you thought you'd been reconciled. Both times he stared at you through narrowed eyes, as if you'd enquired about the passwords to his personal quarters. The second time, you tried a different approach.

"All right, I respect the privacy of your research," you said, and despite a quiet snort from Severus, you continued. "But if Rezanour is right, if I'm a wizard gone dangerously mad, then why haven't you turned me over to St. Mungo's? Why keep that secret?" Why keep that secret, and none of my others?

Severus smiled slightly, then, a glint of triumphant pride in his eyes. "You really are a Gryffindor, Lupin, whatever Ravenclaw passivity you may hide behind. Not all motivations are divided into virtue or malice, and you of all people ought to realise that most of the secrets we keep are based on neither."

For a moment, you wondered when Severus became so wise and you became so foolish. For a moment you glimpsed something curious in those hooded black eyes - and then you remembered all his arrogance and his petty grudges, and you realised that Wisdom is a fickle temptress, and that most secrets are valuable only so long as they remain unknown.

Your father died during the War, the first one; too minor a bureaucrat for Voldemort to target, he died in a simple car crash, taking your mother to the theatre. Two years later, she married a Muggle, a pleasant and portly constable. They met, she told you, while walking their dogs in Ruskin Park, and fell in love over shared Coronation Street speculations.

Your mother divorced him last year when he ran away with an American girl twenty years younger than him. In all that time, he never learned anything of your nature or your world.

She lives alone now, your mother, and now that Sirius is long dead and you still can't find employment, you've gone home to the house where you grew up. The back cupboard is still there, soundproofed and walled with silver-laced cement, but all the trivial mementos of your father's presence have long since been removed. Some days, you think that even your mother's forgotten about the wizarding world; she chatters about her customers at Boots and occasionally chides you for your lack of children or wife - "not that there'd be anything wrong with a handsome bloke, either, as long as he treated you right, but I don't think that you're that sort, do you?" You smile quietly and look back down at your books, the ones you're reading and the ones you never quite finish writing.

One day, when you're taking your afternoon tea together and she's busy nibbling on a chocolate biscuit, you ask her, "Mum, before Dad died, did you ever fall in love with anyone else?"

She blinks suddenly, and stops halfway in the middle of a bite. "Well, I suppose we all have silly fancies sometimes. Your father was a good man, though - there wasn't ever anything serious." She turns her gaze on you and says sharply, "You're not thinking of going off with some other man's wife, are you?"

"No, Mum, of course not." You give her a fond, wry smile. "Besides, I'm hardly the most eligible bachelor in London. I couldn't keep my condition secret forever, and I'd hate to lie to someone I loved."

She shrugs and returns to swallowing her biscuit. "Isn't that what we all do?"

You laugh, then, and you know she's right.

finis.