The Fallen by 
ficexchange
Merry Christmas, Archee (alineofprose)!
The Fallen
For most people, the transition into adulthood is a journey, a slow progression of events over time which leads to a full-fledged, fully developed person. At least, that’s how it seems. But for some, there are those defining moments in which you’re a child one second, an adult the next. One minute, your life is relatively carefree and happy; the following minute is suddenly full of responsibilities and worries you never thought you’d have—or, at least, not for a while.
For these people, reaching adulthood is not the culmination of a journey; it is the end of a fall. And for one generation of wizards more than most, the fall into adulthood came often and early…
Severus Snape is four years old when he starts to understand the fights his parents have every night. He realises that the mysterious substance his father drinks constantly often fuels his anger, and that Tobias usually beats his wife after a few hours of the drinking and yelling. Only once does Severus see his mother pull her wand on her husband, hands shaking madly, in an attempt to defend herself; almost immediately, her antagonist snatches the piece of wood and throws it aside, though he looks scared, more scared than his son has ever seen him.
Severus then sees how he can defend his mother. He slowly makes his way over to the discarded wand, ignored in the face of his father’s rage. He picks it up, points it at his father, and channels all of his anger and hate—far more than any child should ever experience—into sending something terrible out of that wand. A beam of light (the color of which Severus cannot remember, no matter how hard he tries) flies from the wand into the figure of Tobias Snape, who crumples to the ground—dead? No, he still has a pulse.
Eileen looks at the small figure of her son, stunned, and it is only then that he realises that this is the first time he has performed magic of any kind. Neither moves, but both silently acknowledge the shift in power. From then on, Severus will take the brunt of his father’s beatings, despite his mother’s screams and protestations—for now he is the real threat to Tobias’ control over his house, not Eileen.
When Severus first sees the red-headed girl play with flowers, he is instantly drawn to her youth and innocence—characteristics which he has been lacking since that day so long ago. He takes to watching her, lusting after the beauty which is only heightened by his envy. Forever, she will epitomize his lost childhood—and so he never stops desiring her, even after the light leaves her green eyes and her bright red hair fades to nothing.
Remus Lupin is five when he is bitten by a werewolf, punished for a sin he did not commit and cursed to a life of torture forever more. However, he is only five, and so he does not realise the true meaning of the bite marks on his leg; in the twenty-seven days following Fenrir Greyback’s attack, he merely thinks he has an ugly, disfiguring scar that means he can never run like a five-year-old boy should. True, his parents seem subdued around him, and his mother can’t look at him without getting teary-eyed, but life in his house appears relatively normal.
(The only real hint that something was wrong came the day after the attack, when Remus heard his mother yelling at his father—for the first time he could remember. Something about ruining his son’s life through his stupidity, or being foolhardy and reckless…Remus can’t quite remember. Nor did he try when his mother entered his room with ice cream—a treat rarely served midday, and a gift which he would not question. Later, once he understands what the scar on his leg means, ice cream will taste like ashes, and his mother will not comprehend why his love turns into hatred overnight.)
Over the course of the twenty-seven days, he grows aware of certain changes in himself. An aversion to anything made of silver causes him to avoid the kitchen and his mother’s jewelry like the plague. He feels stronger, and sometimes has violent urges which he can’t understand. Red meat, bloody and raw, which had never looked appealing before, is suddenly all he wants to eat. And as the moon grows larger, he starts to feel a certain…pull. He becomes moody, wants to spend all his time outdoors, feels a little sick—he becomes paler every day, worrying his mother to no end—and has a tendency to act somewhat…animalistic. For any other five-year-old boy, moving around on all fours and growling at everyone else is normal. For Remus Lupin, it is an indication of something dangerous that has taken residence within him.
Three days before the full moon, he can barely get out of bed. His mother hovers around him worriedly, trying to get him to eat (he vomits almost everything he manages to get down, which is little enough already), and at the end of the day, his father sits down on the edge of Remus’ bed, his expression grave. Remus’ heart sinks; he’s dying. That must be it. The five-year-old boy doesn’t realize that there are things worse than death—and that he is subject to one of them.
His father tells him about being a werewolf, about what they have to do to him on full moon nights, about how he’ll never lead a normal life. For a moment, it seems like a joke, a horrible, terrible joke; Remus keeps waiting for the moment when his parents will beam and exclaim, “Gotcha!” before tickling him mercilessly, but they never do.
And then the full moon comes.
Remus never truly remembers that first transformation, only bits and pieces of it. He remembers fear; he remembers anger. He remembers bloodlust, and a desire to hurt, to kill, to destroy. He remembers howling for his mother. He remembers feeling alone. But he never remembers exactly what happened, that he threw himself against the walls, that he tried to dig himself out, that he eventually turned to mauling himself in a hope that the pain, the rage, the despair would stop.
When he wakes up the next day, in addition to his numerous scars (his mother becomes an expert in Healing spells by his third transformation, as his family can’t afford monthly St. Mungo’s bills), he has his first grey hair. Looking at it, he understands what it means: His childhood is over. He stops playing outside, he loses the few friends he had, he takes refuge in independent activities, such as drawing and reading books. And the more he reads, the more he wants to learn magic, but he knows Hogwarts is an impossibility. After all, he’s a werewolf and therefore, as the Ministry constantly reminds him and his parents, a danger to society.
When the letter of acceptance comes on his eleventh birthday, they all think it’s a mistake, or a cruel joke, and Remus doesn’t reply. But then Dumbledore comes to visit, and tells them that yes, Remus has indeed been accepted to Hogwarts, and that he and the other students will be safe, and for the boy whose life nearly ended at the age of five, there is a new, wonderful chance at having that lost childhood.
But when he gets to Hogwarts, he understands that no matter how much he tries, he will never be young again. Life has been too hard, and too harsh. And so when he befriends James and Sirius and Peter and sees the light of boyhood still shining in their eyes, virtually inextinguishable, he smiles and turns a blind eye to their stupidity and foolishness. Let them enjoy their youth, he tells himself, excusing the pranks, the hexing other students in the corridors, the general foolishness. After all, they’ll have to grow up eventually—and better later rather than sooner.
Only one boy in their class needs grey hair.
Eleven-year-old Sirius Black never thinks, in a million years, that the Sorting Hat will place him in Gryffindor, though after meeting James Potter on the Express, he wants nothing more than to be in the same house as the other black-haired boy. He never dreams that he will be able to escape his family so thoroughly, to get away from them at a school so filled with his relatives. After all, Andromeda wasn’t able to do so, and look what happened to her when she fell in love with a Muggle-born. For a moment, a hopeful, blissful moment, he dreams of being burned off the tapestry and being kicked out to live with his newly-married cousin or his new best friend. But then his parents’ first Howler comes, and he learns quickly that they won’t give him up without a fight.
And he fights them, all right. He locks himself in his room, he throws things, he abuses Kreacher, he yells at his mother, he nearly comes to blows with his father, he refuses to behave in company, he sets fire to random things, he very nearly provokes his mother into casting the Cruciatus curse on him. (The moment she starts to say, “Cr—” he knows he’s gone too far, and he runs for it, vowing not to deface the family heirlooms again. That doesn’t, however, mean he can’t hide or throw them.)
When his parents finally threaten to withdraw him from Hogwarts, or to at least prevent him from seeing his Gryffindor—they spit the word as if it were a curse—friends, he decides that enough is enough. Taking the money Alphard left him (oh, how his parents fumed that day; they were so angry they refused to attend their relative’s funeral), he runs away to James’. Sometimes he thinks that that’s the moment when he grows up: the moment he finally spits in his parents’ faces and leaves. But it isn’t, not really. He still depends on parents, even if they aren’t his own, and he still attends school, and he still reacts explosively to the smallest provocation.
In fact, Sirius is never able to pinpoint the moment he becomes an adult, perhaps because he doesn’t like to think about the event that incites his maturation. What he doesn’t realize is that the moment Regulus dies, the moment he receives the letter telling him that his own flesh and blood perished in the war, regardless of the side that flesh and blood fought on, something inside him snaps. Death becomes a reality, something that will eventually happen (and in the case of many of his friends and relatives, probably sooner rather than later), and the war becomes personal.
The next time Sirius faces Death Eaters, he is merciless, doing his best to punish each and every one of the assholes for his brother’s death. Even the Order members are scared to get near him. But everyone appreciates the dark beauty of the moment: the beautiful, only heir of the Blacks standing at the center of a spectacle of colored light, fighting for vengeance, with a black, murderous purpose in his heart.
Two months out of Hogwarts, Lily Evans resents the world. Or, rather, she resents the worlds, both the Muggle and magical. They’ve each betrayed her in their own way, slowly rejecting her until she’s ended up in this limbo between both universes, not truly a part of either. Of course, she’s more magical than Muggle at this point, but the differences between the ways in which the worlds’ inhabitants treat her are few. One hates her for being different and belonging to a different world; the other hates her for coming from a different world, even though she’s no different from the best of them. When she thinks about her initial feelings when she met Severus and talked to him about magic, when she received her Hogwarts letter, when McGonagall talked to her parents, when she went to Diagon Alley, when she got on the Hogwarts Express, she wants to laugh at the naïveté of her eleven-year-old self. She was such a Muggle, thinking magic would fix everything, thinking she wouldn’t be different, thinking that having Muggle parents and a sister who was the biggest Muggle on the planet wouldn’t change anything.
The rejections have come slowly, starting with those closest to her. First, her sister. Then, Snape—she could have tolerated the rest of the Slytherin idiots, the rest of the purebloods in Hogwarts who thought she didn’t belong there, so long as he’d stood by her—and now this. The Muggle world has betrayed her in a way she didn’t even think possible, severing every tie she could hope to have.
Her parents are dead.
It’s quite ridiculous, really; she was so terrified of Voldemort killing them that she forgot that death can happen regardless of the complicated defense wards and alarms you create, forgot that the Muggle world has death of its own. She never thought they would have died in a car crash, driving late at night and unable to react fast enough to avoid the drunk driver barreling down the wrong side of the road. (Her sole comfort is that the idiot who killed them died in the crash, too, or she might have been arrested by both worlds for murder—the sole time they’d unite for her.) And now, when she needs her sister most of all, when the two of them should be making up, Petunia has rejected her, cut her out of her life. At the funeral, no less.
So now her safe haven in the Muggle world is gone—and she has few enough of those in the wizarding world. She’s not sure she’s going to be able to find enough money to pay the rent for her flat this month (not that it’s much of a haven, with its odd smell and peeling wallpaper, nor is it really safe if Voldemort comes calling); while she likes the feeling that she’s making a difference and doing some good in the world, working for the Order doesn’t pay so well, and few places that she likes will hire her, Muggleborn as she is. And then she can’t go back to Hogwarts too often; she’s graduated now, and has to live on her own, without help from House-elves or professors, even though Dumbledore might give her a room if she asked. And James’ house is…James’ house. It’s his, he’s paying for it, and the house is already full enough, with Remus and Sirius living there and random Order members popping in and out. Besides, she could never just move in without an invitation.
So here she is, stuck in the wizarding world when she is still emotionally and mentally part of the Muggle world, with no place to call home except for her own tired, run-down flat. Adulthood was supposed to be wonderful, supposed to be the culmination of everything she’d worked towards in school. After all, why did she slave over her Herbology essays if she wouldn’t need the class’ knowledge for a job, a career? All she’s been using lately—or so it feels—are Potions and Defense, and maybe some Charms and Transfiguration on the side. Life in the wizarding world was supposed to be better; there wasn’t supposed to be a war, or hatred of her family…and she certainly wasn’t supposed to be living in a place like this, she thinks, wrinkling her nose as she looks around her dingy flat. No amount of magic can fix its problems, from the temperamental plumbing to the rickety windows to the lack of proper lighting; it is not, and never will be, a real home.
How elegant, she thinks, sinking into the couch and looking around with no little bit of distaste, frowning as she looks at the stain of ink on the table. She can’t remember spilling that… She catches a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror facing her, and hardly recognizes herself, so unhappy and tired does she look. When did she suddenly turn old and worried?
When you grew up, she reminds herself, standing with a sigh. Whatever it may be, adulthood is not glamorous, as the mirror reminds her so unkindly. She ignores it as she goes into her room and strips off her mourning clothes, climbing into bed and hoping that tomorrow will be better, though she doubts it ever can be.
James Potter has the longest childhood of his friends—maybe even of his generation. After all, he doesn’t need to grow up for a long time. His parents weren’t murdered by Voldemort, but instead went in their sleep after long, happy lives—and after their son left Hogwarts. He doesn’t turn into a creature of the night once a month, he doesn’t have family problems, he doesn’t have an identity crisis, and in general, tragedy has avoided striking too close to home. He’s engaged to the woman of his dreams, he has wonderful friends, and he has a loving family—even if almost all his family members are aging or dead. In short, his life is…perfect. And with his friends and fiancée living with him and the pressures of a real job removed from his life, he doesn’t really need to become a complete adult just yet. He can maintain some of his boyhood, even if everyone around him is losing (or has lost) their childhood in single fell swoops, falling to death and despair and war and life.
But then, on a scouting mission, he runs into Death Eaters. Hordes and hordes of Death Eaters. And he comes face-to-face with Voldemort, and suddenly he’s petrified, not ready for this moment. Nothing in his life has prepared him to face this demon of the wizarding world, this man who waves his wand and doles out death with all the remorse and forgiveness of the Muggles’ Grim Reaper. But Voldemort does not immediately kill him, easy a target as James is, shaking and pathetic. Instead, the Dark Lord makes his foe an offer, threatens his family, threatens his friends, threatens his life. The minute Voldemort pulls the people James cares for into this—this, which should be a private fight, an inner battle if anything—the minute he threatens to attack the sources of James’ love, the boyish fear evaporates, replaced by the confidence of a man. He defies Voldemort, making an eternal enemy of himself, and barely escapes with his life (even then, he is severely wounded and has to spend two weeks recovering in St. Mungo’s).
James never tells Lily or his friends exactly what happened (though Lily gets some idea after Dumbledore speaks to them of the Prophecy). Instead, he merely draws them closer, doing his best to keep them out of harm’s way. They are his family, as much his flesh and blood as his actual relatives, and if anyone dares to touch them…they will answer to him.
His parents would be proud.
In times of war, in times of despair, innocence is first to go, lost to death and terror and horrifying events. Then childhood evaporates; adults are created by the same things that destroy innocence, for no child can deal with the horrors of the world on their own. The fall is always elegant, always beautiful…but it is the landing that counts, the way the fall ends. Sometimes, there is no recovery, there are no cheerful postcards sent back up to the top saying, I’m having a great time; Wish you were here; Come and join me soon. But there is always hope, the single strand of innocence and youth that lingers even when childhood seems to have been obliterated, which carries youth through generations and keeps innocence alive and safe from the inglorious world of adulthood.