ATARAXION: application

[fullmoon]

C H A R A C T E R   I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Remus John Lupin
Canon: Harry Potter (books)
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: April 1982
Number: RNG

Setting: The Wizarding World, First Wizarding War, werewolves, information from Pottermore.

History:

Remus Lupin was born in Wales, the only child of Lyall Lupin, an expert on non-human spiritous apparitions, and Hope Lupin née Howell, who worked in an insurance office. Remus was a cheerful, clever child, and the first four years of his life were happy and uncomplicated. But even though Voldemort's rise to power wouldn't be understood or acknowledged for years, it touched Remus early. An unexplained upswing in activity among the Dark Creatures Voldemort was recruiting led Lyall to join the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures in the mid 1960s. He soon crossed paths with Fenrir Greyback, a werewolf who would become notorious for intentionally cursing children. In 1965, however, Greyback was still unknown. When the Ministry picked him up in connection to the deaths of two children, he was able to convince most of them that he was a harmless muggle tramp. Over Lyall's protests—during which he said werewolves were evil and soulless and deserved nothing but death—they decided to release Greyback, who overpowered his escort before his memory could be wiped, then sought out Lyall's home at the full moon and bit his four-year-old son.

Lyall never forgave himself, but he did quickly change his ideas about werewolves. He and Hope did the best they could for Remus. During full moons, they kept the neighbors safe from him; the rest of the month, they kept Remus safe from their neighbors. Most of the wizarding world agreed with the whole soulless, evil, death-deserving thing, and the British wizarding community was particularly on edge due to the increasing number of werewolf attacks throughout the country. Remus was never allowed to play with other children for fear that he'd give himself away, and the family moved whenever anyone began to notice something was wrong with him.

The Lupins assumed that Remus wouldn't go to Hogwarts. No young werewolf ever had. But before Remus's eleventh birthday, Albus Dumbledore arrived uninvited at their home, reassured them that he already knew about the secret they were guarding, and played a game of gobstones with Remus while explaining his plan to allow him to safely attend school. 

On arrival, Remus was sorted into Gryffindor and quickly adopted by popular troublemakers James Potter and Sirius Black. Even at eleven he had a soft spot for underdogs, and it was his influence that made James and Sirius include little Peter Pettigrew as well. The four boys soon became a very tight-knit group, and they grew even closer when they discovered what Remus was hiding. Remus had expected to lose his friends at best and be expelled at worst should anyone find out about his lycanthropy, but when James and Sirius figured it out during Second Year, they weren't bothered. They even gave him an affectionate nickname, "Moony" and hatched a plan—equal parts stupid and brilliant in a way that only 12-year-olds would be capable of—to become Animagi and join him for the full moons.

By Fifth Year, James could turn into a stag, Sirius a large dog, and Peter a rat. The combination of animals was fortuitous. Peter was small enough to sneak up and tap the knot that made the Whomping Willow stop trying to thrash whoever came too close. James and Sirius, meanwhile, were large enough to herd a full-grown werewolf. Instead of keeping him company in the Shrieking Shack, the Marauders took to releasing him and exploring the grounds. Between their monthly romps and James Potters' invisibility cloak, they came to know more about Hogwarts and its grounds than just about anyone else. They distilled their knowledge into the Marauder's Map, an advanced bit of magic that showed the current location of everyone in the school and was a dangerous violation of everyone's privacy incredibly useful for pranksters wanting to avoid getting caught.

Also in Fifth Year, Remus was made a prefect. He was really the only option. Although he'd spent his fair share of time in detention, it wasn't nearly as much as James and Sirius, and he was at least more likely than Peter to exercise some authority over their friends. Unfortunately, he didn't do the best job of it. In addition to continuing to endanger the entire school on at least a monthly basis, he never stopped his friends from going after Severus Snape. Severus did sometimes give as good as he got, but he was outnumbered and clearly not the instigator. Soft spot for every other underdog in the world aside, Remus only ever tried to privately make his friends feel bad about bullying him. In public, he looked the other way.

The rivalry between Severus and the Marauders came very close to being deadly. At some point during school, Sirius told Severus how to follow Remus when he left Hogwarts for the full moon. Remus, transformed at the end of the tunnel, would have either killed or cursed him, but James found out at the last moment and went after him. In the aftermath, Dumbledore somehow kept Severus from telling anyone what had happened, and Remus was allowed to stay in school.

Remus finished at Hogwarts in 1978 and quickly learned that Europe's finest magical education meant nothing for a werewolf. The only things waiting for him outside of Hogwarts were a civil war and James Potters' charity. All four of the Marauders and Lily joined the Order of the Phoenix, a secret society of spies and vigilantes organized by Albus Dumbledore. By this time Lord Voldemort's attempted takeover was less a power struggle than outright chaos. The government fell into disarray, giants and werewolves attacked, whole families were massacred in their homes, and with the availability of mind-controlling and shapeshifting magic, even those who trusted their friends couldn't always be sure they were themselves. Casualties ran high—even counting only the members of the Order still alive to be photographed in 1981, only about half survived the next few months to see the end of the war.

Meanwhile, the Marauders fell apart. By late 1980, Peter was leaking information to the Death Eaters. Aware that someone was a spy, Remus and Sirius each suspected the other. There was never a direct confrontation, but concerns about Remus, at least, were serious enough that his friends kept information from him. Important information. When Sybill Trelawney's prophecy made James, Lily, and their infant son particular targets of Voldemort, they eventually decided use a Fidelius Charm. Remus knew about the charm and the initial plan to use Sirius as their Secret Keeper, but no one told him when they decided to swap Sirius for the less obvious choice, Peter.

Peter betrayed them within the week. During the first days of November, 1981, Remus was in northern Scotland on Order business. He heard secondhand that Voldemort had been defeated, then that it was little Harry Potter who had done it, somehow, and three of his closest friends were dead and the last was on his way to Azkaban.

The war didn't end overnight, but Remus's involvement in it more or less did. Bartemius Crouch and the Aurors had everything in hand—maybe a little too in hand, since they were using Unforgiveables and Sirius wasn't even given a trial, but they certainly didn't need help quelling the pockets of resistance, and it likely wasn't the best time for Sirius Black's unscathed werewolf associate to do anything but keep his head down. When the Order disbanded and the survivors returned to their lives and families, Remus quickly fell out of contact with them. He declined to return home to live with his father—a widower, at that point, as Hope had died prior to the end of the war—for fear that he would cause Lyall trouble.

Without James' financial support, Remus has taken to working menial jobs and leaving them before anyone can discern the pattern in his sick days. His life isn't scheduled to change at all for eleven years, and five years after that he'll die, because that's how JKR rolls.

Personality:

Saying Remus is the best behaved of the Marauders isn't saying much, but it is true. He's amiable, on the soft-spoken side, and usually even-keeled, with a strong sense of empathy and social intelligence that he's more likely to use to diffuse conflicts than create them. On the whole he's terribly easy to get along with, if only by virtue of being unlikely to offend. But he's also terribly easy to underestimate. Studious "good boy" or no, he's mischievous and quietly, breezily confident. Even in his thirties, after a decade of being worn down by a lonely, hand-to-mouth existence, he'll casually win over a class of skeptical thirteen-year-olds by shooting a wad of gum up a poltergeist's nose, help a student dress the apparition of another teacher in his grandmother's clothes, and return the Marauder's Map to Harry as soon as he's no longer technically a professor—yet still walk away with a reputation for being the responsible, mature one. 

It's a gift. Or maybe it's a testament to how low his peers set the bar. Let's say it's some of both.

Mild manners aside, Remus is far from shy and even further from spineless, possessed of hard-earned thick skin that allows him to hold his own against aggression with an unperturbed, amicable calm. He's good at lying with a smile, using manners as a shield (or a sword), and being assertive without ever needing to raise his voice, e.g., when he pleasantly side-steps Severus Snape's 100% correct assessment of the Marauder's Map or steps into the crossfire between Molly and Sirius to make them both calm down. While he never made a public scene when his friends bothered Snape in school, he did try to make them feel ashamed of themselves sometimes. Given how deftly he later plays the "I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed that you're disrespecting your dead parents" card with Harry, he was probably pretty good at it.

Underneath, Remus isn't always as serene as he pretends. He's often putting noticeable effort into keeping himself contained, betraying himself with aborted movements or fumbling or brief flashes of emotions he'd have rather kept hidden. When he is pushed far enough to lose his head, there's shouting and kicked furniture and everything. It's pretty spectacular.

If his equanimity is sometimes affected, Remus's good nature and kind heart are entirely genuine. He can turn self-protective and cagey when things cross from polite into personal, but for the most part he's warm and approachable. He tends to be peacemaker and voice of reason, and he was always the Marauders' "moral compass," though a faulty one. He's principled (and political) enough to care about goblin rights and house elves when few others seem to, to disapprove of the Dementor's Kiss, and to reach out to newly-cursed werewolves when they have no one else. He has a Gryffindor's requisite bravery/recklessness with a side of selflessness—the side he chose in the war was the one nominally less inclined to afford people like him any rights or dignity—and he's quick to reach out to underdogs, from Peter to Neville. He's determined to find the good in everyone, or at least to not dwell too much on the bad. He knows what it's like to be defined by the worst part of yourself.

The worst part of him, he'd say, is his lycanthropy, and Remus has a complicated relationship with it. For starters, he's terrified of his transformations. Despite everything else he's seen and everything he's lost, hurting someone else during a full moon remains his greatest fear. He doesn't embrace or enjoy his lycanthropy, especially now that he isn't using it to gallivant around the Forbidden Forest with his friends, and he's bitter about being equated with other, less well-behaved werewolves. That he doesn't exhibit whatever tell-tale signs allowed Lyall Lupin to identify Greyback as a werewolf even in his human form is a testament to both his "tame" upbringing and to his personal effort to maintain that distance from what he is. 

But however much he hates his condition, Remus doesn't believe he deserves to be treated the way he has been. He's used to it; he resigns from his job at Hogwarts without any fuss or resentment, and when his condition is public knowledge and he can't find a job at all, he's nonchalant enough to joke with Harry about not being a very popular dinner guest. But he does care. Whatever he has to say privately about Umbridge and her anti-werewolf legislation is colorful enough to impress Sirius, and his meltdown in Deathly Hallows makes it clear that the prejudice does find its way under his skin. Beneath all the oniony layers of public good-humored acceptance and private indignation, disapproval of how other werewolves behave matched with disapproval of how the Ministry reacts, there's a kernel of genuine self-loathing and fear. Avoiding his father to keep from "disrupting" his life, dodging Tonks' affection for over a year, and trying to walk out on his family because he doesn't want them to have to be ashamed of him—that's not reasonable behavior, however convinced he is that it's the right and logical thing to do.

When people manage to get past all of that and accept him for what he is, Remus is so astonished and grateful that there isn't much he won't do in return. At this point that list of people is very short, and Albus Dumbledore is at the top of it. The headmaster accepted him both at Hogwarts and within the Order when few others would have. In return Remus is, to borrow a phrase from Harry, Dumbledore's man through and through. Remus trusts his judgment and follows his orders without exception. He's similarly loyal to his friends—or, rather, he's loyal to the memories of the friends that he currently doesn't believe betrayed the rest and prepared to grimly execute the friend that he does.

But Remus can and does take the loyalty thing too far, often cutting people who have been kind to him a lot more slack than is constructive or reasonable. He's maturing into a man who understands that some of things he and his friends did at school were terribly dangerous and others were pointlessly cruel, but even when he reaches that point he'll continue to talk about what happened between Severus and James and Sirius in terms such as "getting carried away" and "schoolboy grudge." Whatever they did to Snape, after all, they loved Remus when not many people would have, performed dangerous and illegal magic to help him, and supported him when he couldn't support himself. As long as he lives he'll never hear a bad word about James, in particular, without explaining it away or brushing it aside.

In a way, he cuts himself the same slack as he does other people. His reputation and his own sense that he's a good person are so important to Remus that he's willing to lie, evade, and do some impressive mental gymnastics to maintain them. As a boy, he coaxed himself into believing before every full moon that setting a werewolf loose on the grounds was perfectly safe, and a decade later he'll still be so worried about disappointing Dumbledore that he'll conceal the fact that Sirius is an Animagus even when he's successfully broken into the castle. When he tries to leave Tonks, someday, he'll have genuinely convinced himself that it's for the best, and being forced to deal with the fact that it's actually pretty awful will make him throw a tantrum. 

In an environment where he isn't universally despised, Remus probably won't remain as enamored with or desperate to please everyone who accepts him. But it will take some time for him to get used to that and shake the habit, and even then he'll probably remain abnormally forgiving. Just not to the same extent. He's also arriving on the Tranquility six months after the end of the war, so he's still grieving and suffering from some survivor's guilt, and some of the wounds that will be old scars in 1993 are still raw. But he's a resilient kid, he's getting out of bed of his own volition and everything these days, and SPAAAAAACE and the familiar faces floating around in it will be a good distraction. So he'll be all right, to the extent that anyone on the Tranquility ever is.

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:

Remus is a wizard and a reasonably clever one, "exceptionally gifted" at Defense Against the Dark Arts and especially knowledgable about Dark Creatures. Although he'll be a good teacher someday for reasons more to do with his methods than his knowledge, the fact remains that in ten years he'll be qualified to teach all seven years of DADA, despite having only worked menial jobs that wouldn't have given him much relevant experience—so he's already pretty good. Due to his time with the Order, he has three years of combat experience and can conjure a corporeal and communicative Patronus. He can do nonverbal magic, but wandless magic is hit or miss. He was a dedicated student and is generally competent in all of Hogwarts' core subjects, less Potions (he's crap) and plus Ancient Runes and Care of Magical Creatures, but on average he's less naturally talented than James, Sirius, Lily, and Severus. 

Being a werewolf in Potterverse is almost entirely a weakness rather than an ability, but if he ever wants to go on a murderous rampage, it will come in handy, I guess! In wolf form he's very difficult to contain, stop, or kill; his parents tried "everything" to make his transformations easier, presumably including anything that they thought might immobilize him or stop him from hurting himself, to no effect. Although Remus is conscious and remembers everything afterwards, in the moment he wouldn't hesitate to attack his closest friends. Animal company distracts him and lets him stay more human, but not enough to make him ignore a human who comes too close. For most of his life Remus has mitigated the damage by locking himself in a secure space, at which point his frustrated prey drive makes him bite and scratch himself. That's about as fun to clean up after as you'd expect. Even when his transformations aren't violent, the change itself is excruciating and takes a lot out of him. Remus is peaky and out of sorts for several days prior, then drawn and noticeably thinner while he recovers.

Other weaknesses include the big empty part of his brain where most other people would store reasoned criticism of their friends and mentors, hesitance to get close to anyone who didn't meet him when he was a bright-eyed and hopeful preteen, and trouble identifying his own mistakes until it's too late or nearly so. His muggle mother and grandparents left him more familiar with nonmagical culture and technology than some wizards, but while he can, e.g., navigate the controls on a 1970s television, he doesn't understand how it works or why he should care.

Inventory:

→ A wand (10.25", cypress and unicorn hair, pliable).
→ Spellman's Syllabary and two of the five volumes of Practical Defensive Magic and Its Use Against the Dark Arts.
→ A ratty red sweater and a denim jacket.

Appearance:

In his thirties, Remus Lupin will be thin, worn, and ragged, with brown hair already liberally streaked with premature gray. That all applies at this younger age, albeit to lesser degrees. His gray hairs are plentiful enough that he's stopped yanking them out but sparse enough that one has to get close to find them, and while the wear and tear of life isn't so permanently engrained into his features, he already looks a few years older than 22.

Remus has a bite scar hidden beneath his shirt, a souvenir of Greyback's attack when he was four, and a few lingering claw and bite marks of his own doing. His wolf form is largely indistinguishable from a common wolf save for a shorter snout, humanoid eyes, tufted tail, and at least two other signs that are never mentioned and so are probably even more minor.

For a PB I use Matthew Hitt

Age: 22 23