Sometimes, one just gave up on life. When there was nothing left to fight for, nothing left to live for, nothing left to even hope for. In one terribly short amount of time, he had lost... everything. The people he had come to love like family - James, Peter, Lily. Their beautiful child he had been so excited to meet, murmuring to the little one in the womb in a way that always made Lily laugh. Even his brother, his best friend, his... maybe one day they might have been something more, but then to find out in one blow that it had been Sirius who had become a traitor, whisked away to Azkaban before he could even find out why. Why he had murdered Peter, why he had told...?!

Why Sirius had said he was the traitor. But... he was all too easy to blame, wasn't he? Who else could Sirius have gotten away with blaming the leak to that everyone would immediately believe? Some people knew who shouldn't ever have, but equally, some of them were dead. He had no idea who knew anymore. What he was, what Sirius said he was... some probably believed Sirius had lied about anything, everything-- hell, he didn't even know.

So he sat waiting, staring up at the horizon as the sun fell. It was a beautiful sunset, streaking bloody red and purple across the sky, more beautiful than he felt. No one was out here nor would they be, on this desolate moor where Dumbledore, bless him, had set him up a place to be able to hide now that he was long out of school. Enough for him to recover and go back to home... but now there wasn't even that. No home, no one to go back to.

His head hung. The tears came. They hung, then fell. Every time he thought there couldn't possibly be more within him, more to wring out of his soul, they came. It hurt more than waking up tomorrow morning would, far more. The nightmares were even worse because they were glorious. James and Lily laughed in his memories, Peter squeaked and shared food, and Sirius gave him that grin and told him to come sneak out to the village with him. Then he woke to nothing.

When the moon started to crest the far hills, Remus reached down and tugged off his shoes, tossing them to the side, then did the same with his pants. It was hard not being a little used to being nude given the amount of times the boys had found him as such, but even more so when no one was around. This time, he met the moon straight on, eyes watching it as it came up. It would take away his humanity and with it, the pain that came with knowing.

What he never would have expected was that long after it happened that night - the change, the creak and crash of bone, the moments between knowing and not until Remus faded away completely and Moony cried to his namesake, the running through the heather, even a hunt that started to bring him towards morning - that something would go horribly wrong. What it was, he had no idea, couldn't know. All the wolf saw was light, smelled the reek of burnt fur, then darkness.