Corrupted Souls | remus lupin

re-sensitization

He knew it was utterly selfish, but the severity of 'war' didn't quite hit Remus until Caradoc Dearborn disappeared.

It was February, nearly seven months since he'd attended his first Order meeting. Things were ramping up significantly and people were scared, members of the Order not excluded. Even Moody had been keeping his scathing sarcasm to a minimum, too busy looking over his shoulder and barely getting a wink of sleep as he tore himself apart trying to save what lives he could.

Remus had now been out in the field multiple times — so many he'd lost count. The lives he couldn't save, which haunted him at first, had now faded into a blurry, desensitized background. Death seemed to be an inevitable new feature in his life. It was all around him ... muggles, wizards, men, women, children ...

But when Caradoc disappeared, an Order member that Remus had grown fond of over the past months, Remus realized that the seemingly impenetrable walls of their organization were not as fortified as he'd allowed himself to believe.

They'd been lucky — extremely lucky — so far. Impossible missions had gone in their favour. Injuries, while plentiful, had been relatively minor: broken bones, deep cuts — nothing magic couldn't fix.

This, unfortunately, gave Remus a false sense of security. 'Fortune favours the bold'— isn't that how the saying went? They were untouchable because they were heroes, and in all of the books he'd read over the years, the heroes came out on top. There would be civilian casualties, of course, but he quickly learned to live with that — as horrible as it sounded.

But what if The Order's fortune was drying up? What if they were vulnerable to the same fate as those they desperately tried to save?

He'd ignored these thoughts for as long as he could. He pretended it simply wasn't an option. But now, as he found his face hovering above a toilet, upheaving his breakfast, the reality knocked around his skull and constricted his throat with barbed fingers.

James could die. Sirius could die. Peter could die. Lily could die. Neoma could die. Alice, Frank, Dorcas, Marlene, Moody, Kingsley, Fabian, Gideon, Edgar Bones and his new baby, maybe even Dumbledore...there were more on the list, but his brain couldn't focus on just one person.

James, Sirius, and Peter flashed behind his eyelids the most, mangled to an unrecognizable point, or just staring emptily at the ceiling, gone, hit by the curse that they'd managed to evade so, so many times.

Neoma: pretty eyes torn from her skull, or neck broken, or bleeding out somewhere dark and cold and alone.

Lily: tortured cruelly for her blood status before they finally put her out of her misery. They would keep her around as a trophy of sorts until her body was gray and rotted.

How had he kept these thoughts — these fears — buried for so long? Now that they'd seeped into his conscious mind, he was scared they would never stop. His body shook as bile tore through his throat again.

He'd returned from a rescue three hours ago. The Lahey family — consisting of a witch mother, muggle father, and six children, ranging from three months to ten years of age — was evacuated from their home just twenty minutes before it was attacked on all sides by vicious bolts of fiendfyre.

The high Remus had felt from rescuing eight people crashed around him when he realized that Caradoc hadn't returned. 

It had only been the two of them that were dispatched to help the Laheys; evacuations often went smoothly, so they felt no need for backup when Neoma frantically sent a patronus warning them of the attack. She'd been on another mission when she overheard the malevolent plot, coming straight from the loud mouth of Bellatrix Lestrange.