2 May 2003
Harry Potter / His Dark Materials

Lupin is Dumbledore's ambassador.

Disclaimer: Harry Potter and associated concepts belong to J.K. Rowling.  His Dark Materials and associated concepts belong to Phillip Pullman.

I was told there's really no way to warn for this.




Care of Magical Creatures was a good, basic class, and Defence Against the Dark Arts taught him a lot.  In becoming a professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts, he'd managed to teach himself rather more.  Being a werewolf did, in the end, give him a certain sight into things four-legged and beyond the pale.  All very good, but until he went to Russia he hadn't any idea of the fascination offered by a bear in armour.

The witches of the tundra were a completely different bunch than he was used to.  None had attended Hogwarts, and if he mentioned Durmstrang they spit at his feet.  They were amazonian, half-naked in the cold, ethereally beautiful, and almost universally sapphic.  Gorgeous, smoky lesbians of the frozen north.

They let him into their homes, though.  They knew him for a Dark Creature on sight, welcomed him anyway, showed him paths he'd never have found alone.  Nights he talked with their leaders, curled into soft feathers and the winter hair of reindeer.  None of those women would promise help against Voldemort, but he knew they'd side against the Dark Lord before they'd bow to him.  He thought Dumbledore should have sent a female ambassador.

Still.  It was only the beginning of the trip.  His broomstick was utterly unsuited for the arctic winds, and he couldn't apparate if he didn't know where he was going.  In the end, he waited for the full moon. The wolfsbane Snape had brewed before he left was going off, but it still worked, after a fashion.  Well enough that his mind was still in his skin when his body changed.  It gave him three days to run.  In the deep midwinter, sunrise never came, but moonset brought him back to himself, naked in the snow.  He burrowed into banks, lined them with the spells he could remember and slept.  Ran again at moonrise.

He was almost out of Russia, running north towards the ice, when he met the Armoured Bears.

These were nothing like the bear-myths he'd read at school.  Nothing about them was anthropomorphic.  They were bears, moving like bears, in a world to which they were adapted.  Only, their fur lay under heavy, gorgeously-crafted metal shields.

They knew him before he'd shifted back.  He stood in front of them for an hour before the change came.  Afterward, he stood naked in the snow.

He walked among them, when they accepted him, wrapped in spells instead of clothing.  The bloody meat they offered at dinner set the wolf growling, and he ate anyway.  Sat in their councils and listened more than he spoke.  Walked among them.  Bears bowed their heads and growled, told him they could smell Dementors on his skin.  He didn't know where they'd encountered the Dementors, but the hatred there was pure and permanent.

That was the key.  A dozen tumbled nights in Sirius' arms, wrapped in the warmth of the Canary Islands.  The coast of Africa smelled more or less as he remembered it, even far out to sea.  Sirius smelled completely different.  Fear and fury all over him.  Still necessary to him in ways that twisted Lupin's heart.

He wondered, how much damage to an aged boy-wizard was worth a hard alliance with the Bears?  He didn't have hard promises, yet, but they were coming, in whatever form the Bears offered such things.

What came, finally, was one of the younger Bears, to his cave in the night.

The world was made of ice, and he was only marginally used to sleeping in it.  The spells he cast around himself for warmth were exhausting, so soon after the moon change.  In the end, the bears brought him skins of things they'd killed and eaten, and he cured them magically.  Laid in them and smelled prey.  The bears approached him carefully when he was sleeping, and he suspected it was more because he smelled like food than out of any particular type of respect.

The bears themselves made nests of their own fur and summer grasses.  Their sleeping caves smelled nothing like his own.

He hadn't known, though, until he walked through the hive of rock and ice to Gluyar's cave.  No human had come into that room before, and certainly none had stretched out in the pressed belly-fur on the floor.  He knew that other wizards had laid down with bears, because the tundra witches had stories, but no one had done so in the bear's home darkness.  So here, at least, he was the first to be spread open and slicked with alien fluids and fucked by something so very alien.

He remembered sex from the times he'd been in wolf-shape, and this was nothing like that.

He curled into the fur later, aching and wanting.  The bear wrapped itself around him and growled softly until he slept.  Its smell was all over him.

The witches knew, when he walked out of the darkness at moonset, a month later.  He thought of going back to Hogwarts, just to make Dumbledore read the new accord off his skin.

The last time the moon went up, he ran in the dark for a long, long way.




jane
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