Lone Wolf | SIRIUS BLACK

Chapter Fifty Two

| A L P H A |

July 1997

FIND RHEA. The instructions Dumbledore had written in his letter echoed on in my mind as I travelled. I had apparated as far as I had been able and upon exhausting my werewolf self from constant running through the forests and hills and mountains, I was now walking.

Excluding the urgency of my mission, casually strolling like this was kind of enjoyable.  I had liked being outdoors long before becoming a werewolf; as a child I would spend hours laying on my back, watching the clouds and shaping them in my mind's eye to become dragons or sea creatures.  At night, when the stars were out in full force, I would count them, the soft rustling of the grass lulling me to sleep.

Now everything was clearer, especially my sense of smell.  I embraced the perfume of the wildflowers as the wind carried it to me. Even with the smallest inhale, it felt as if I breathed the petals deep into my lungs.  I could see the sunlight boring down on the treetops, scattering golden rays downward, never quite touching the forest floor, although if it did the undergrowth of moss and roots glimmered a brilliant emerald green.  The earth moved differently beneath my feet, in a way I had never chosen to take account of before — like I was being embraced, welcomed as a force of nature.

I loved it.

This is what he wanted you to understand, something at the back of my mind whispered.  Everything good and worthwhile that exists within a world that also holds so much evil and destruction. 

When he looked at you, it didn't matter what was happening.  This is what he saw.

To the very end, this was it.

My fingers closed around the petals of a wildflower, too tightly, and liquid dribbled down my wrist to the ground.  It took me a moment to realize it was merely the juice drained from the vibrant red petals, not blood.

I had gotten so used to blood on my hands.  And maybe this was why I was being reminded of Sirius, here, in the forest.  I had geared myself to see one thing and one thing only; chaos.  But he was reminding me there was more, more than haunting and fear and blindness to the truth.  I just had to lift the curtain and refocus — see the petals instead of the blood, see the beauty in the scars, see how close I was to a bare chest—

I stumbled backwards.  I had been too distracted to notice what was directly ahead of me.

A man.

A half-naked man.

He looked incredibly suspicious of me, they all did.  The collective 'they' had just appeared, mostly materializing from thin air.  They came out of the brush, as one with the greenery as I felt.  I should have felt afraid, should've felt the back of my neck prickling and suggesting that this was wrong.  But I stood my ground.

"I know what you are. I'm just like you."  My eyes scanned them, faces which were both young and old, bodies of all shapes and sizes, claws subtly shown to me that they would attack if provoked.  Possibly, even if they weren't.

The man, whose dark brown hair was wildly mussed across his head, bent down to glare at me.  He held himself tall like the leader he was built to be, as he was stocky with broad shoulders and muscular limbs.  "Not just like us."