The Marauders: Year Three | #Wattys2016

The Omega and the Beta

The Omega and the Beta

Remus went to see Professor Veigler almost every afternoon now. They talked about Veigler's past experiences in the wolf pack in Albania. "It wasn't easy," Veigler said, "When you're the Omega of the pack, you're controlled by so many other wolves - especially in a pack the size of Fenrir Greyback's. It's as though you're never your own. You're just everyone else's all of the time."

"It must've been horrible," Remus said.

"Indeed. That's why I knew I had to run away."

Ned Veigler had been living in a small town in London, not very far from where Remus lived when he was a toddler. His father and mother were muggles, but there'd always been something special about him, something different. His father didn't like it, nor did his mother, and they had mistreated him for it all of his life. His father had been the sort that would go out to the pub after work and come home and take out all of the frustrations of his life on his boy; Ned wore the stripes of his father's many stresses. When he was eleven years old, his Hogwarts letter came, and his father refused to let him go. And so, one night when his father had come home from the pub absolutely smashed and drawing his belt from his waist, Ned ran, screaming he was going to Hogwarts. Already bloody from his father's belting, Ned had gone into the woods to try to hide as his father had come after him, shouting his name, shouting threats. The smell of Ned's blood attracted Fenrir Greyback, who quickly hunted him down, intending to kill - until Ned's father had run into the clearing where Greyback had found the boy.

"It is a horrible, terrible thing to say," Professor Veigler said now, "But when Fenrir Greyback stepped between my father and I and bared his teeth and -- and killed my father... I thought he was the guardian angel that I had prayed for all of my life. I wasn't afraid of him. I loved him and I trusted him."

Remus drew a deep breath and a shiver.

"I think Fenrir knew that when he turned back around, for I was staring up at him in awe and perhaps that was what made him decide not to kill me," Professor Veigler said.

Ned never made it to Hogwarts, of course, because Greyback changed the boy and brought him back to the pack in Albania, where there was an old boarding house building where dozens and dozens of Greyback's werewolves lived together in a sort of community.

"Greyback had a knack at keeping only the most terrible," Veigler said, "The people who lived in the Packhouse as they called it were all very intimidating people with horrifying pasts. Murderers, thieves. They were people who had no place else to go, and their service to Fenrir Greyback was loyal as any gang would be to their leader. I was the smallest, I was the only child. I was the easiest to pick on and abuse. I was the Omega, even in human form."

Ned had grown among the werewolves, always wishing to run away - but never daring to. Controlled by the pack, watched carefully by Fenrir Greyback, he was always too afraid to go. He cherished days when Greyback was off hunting with some of the most violent of the pack, and moments when he could be alone, apart from the others, when he could be himself.

"When I was thirteen, a witch came to live with us at the Packhouse, a very terrible witch who was being hunted by the Aurors of the Ministry for Magic for killing hundreds of muggles. Druella was her name. She had a fierce, terrible personality - she wasn't a werewolf, nor would Greyback change her - although she actually begged him to multiple times. She was possibly the only person that Fenrir Greyback had ever loved, but it was an odd sort of relationship... But she was the first there that seemed to notice me. She had children of her own, I heard, back in London, and perhaps she cared for me because I was almost the same age as he daughters that she missed so much. She taught me the skills in magic that I should have learned here, at Hogwarts, and she protected me from the other wolves in the pack. She couldn't protect me from Greyback, but she could from the others. Druella was the closest I ever had to a mother... though don't get me wrong, she wasn't a good person, she was a terrible person. She was only good to me."