Descend - Wolfstar + Marauders

Persistent Pain

There were obvious downsides to being a werewolf. Turning into a dangerous, raging monster every full moon is the one most people would pick. Being seen as a monster by the rest of society every single other day of the lunar cycle is the one most people would rather not think about. The discrimination, the marginalization, the chronic unemployment, the loss of family and friends, the lying, the hiding. The list could go on and on.

Remus’ close friends knew about all of this. They had seen it in action. Though even the Marauders, even Sirius, didn’t get the fullest extent of it. Not for lack of trying, they just couldn’t. By the time they came into his life his family had already been reduced down to just his parents, living in poverty, thanks to his illness. That was a whole fun journey that they had not been there to witness. They hadn't watched as it slowly changed his mother into someone other than the warm, gentle being from his earliest memories. As his father had slowly killed his liver to cope with it all, and now in turn it was killing him.

There was one particular aspect of lycanthropy that didn’t really get talked about. Perhaps because it seemed almost trivial compared to the rest of it. Perhaps because, unlike the mistreatment from others, there was nothing to fight. Nothing to rage against. Nobody to blame.

Pain.

Every day of his life, Remus Lupin was in physical pain.

Sure, they had all seen the immediate aftermath of his transformations. And they knew about his aches and nausea in the week leading up to the moon. Intellectually, if they thought about it, they probably understood that the pain never really went away. How could it? There was never enough recovery time. It ebbed and flowed with the moon, but it was always there on some level. Still, it was very easy for everyone else not to think too hard about it. After all, he’d been sick and exhausted as long as they’d all known him. They were so used to it they could hardly imagine him any other way.

Remus was very good at compensating for pain. He was very, very good at functioning through the kind of pain that would put most people out of commission. He didn’t talk about it, didn’t complain. If it got bad enough that he had no choice but to accept help, he would do so with a stoic calm. It was usually on him to offer reassurances to Sirius and the others that he was okay. He knew they hated feeling helpless and he wanted to protect them from that.

But he wasn’t okay.

The thing about pain is that you never really get used to it. Everyone around you gets used to it, and you learn to cope, to function. The pain never actually gets better, but you get better at dealing with it, and isn't that basically the same thing from an outside perspective?

Then Remus tried morphine.

For the first time for as long as he could remember, he wasn’t in pain.

It had never even occurred to him that this was a possibility. There were potions and charms designed to alleviate pain, but they generally only worked on specific ailments or to treat minor pain. Wounds associated with curses were especially difficult to treat, and there was very little headway being made on the matter. Remus suspected it was yet another symptom of the Wizarding worlds (particularly in Britain) cultural tendency to deny suffering, preferring the grit your teeth and buck up approach.

Remus couldn’t believe that all these years there had been an alternative. Sure, it wasn’t a cure, but it was a fucking break.

A couple of those pills and he was floating somewhere high above it all. His body felt light. It always felt so heavy all the time, but on the pills, it was light. The euphoria wasn’t like anything else he’s tried. It wasn’t the loud buzzing rush of cocaine or the quite ease of benzos. It was a sense of peace, gentle. It spread through his whole body. He could just lie there for hours, letting the world wash over him, totally content.