Not long before moonrise.


He undressed in his cell, carefully folding clean joggers and sweatshirt into the safebox.

This wasn't his first Ministry transformation but it came on the heels of a disastrous attempt at solidarity[1] last week - his face in the papers, naive words. Waiting to enter his cell tonight, excrutiating, surrounded by werewolves and Ministry folk.

Robin could escape the sting of all that at St.Mungo's, in nightclub backrooms, between pages of a book. Here? There is nowhere to escape when you're alone in the dark with your thoughts.

The tall wizard moved to a wall, now fully naked, and sat on the floor with his back against it. He crossed his legs and arms, breathing deep. The stone was cold against his shoulder blades.

He didn't have it as bad as some, he liked to say. Didn't feel much pain in his scar... or sense much change in mood with the waxing of the moon, besides a prediliction for rough sex. No. The gods were kind to him. Saved it all up for the full moon.

He bowed his head and shut his eyes. 

1.	21st Oct - Tread Lightly, Tread Loudly

The hour fell upon them and the first sign came as a shock. It always did - like seven years ago was happening all over again, searing pain in his shoulder bursting inwards, wrenching out the first of tonight's screams. And no, no he couldn't remember. As a memory, the attack was held only by his body.

What came to mind instead, every time, was another image. When the agony shot from shoulder to chest, fractured rib to rib, ruptured the softness inside with unbelievable hunger.

He never understood why they brought her. The parents had come to apologise at hospital[1] for failing to register their child: for wanting to preserve her childhood from ostracisation. A girl, nine, dark-eyed, failed by every single fucking person in her life. Family, community, government.

And try as he might, Robin could not turn her unsmiling face from his thoughts at the point of transformation. It stared him down worse than pain. It accused and demanded and unstoppered in him the last trace of awareness. A scream becomes a wail becomes a howl.


The wolf makes itself by splintering and mending every bone in its own body. The wolf forces what is human to become what is not, monstrous in size and nature. The wolf does not care if you want it because the wolf is inevitable.

If he could see himself, he would not call this creature wolf. He would not even call it a creature but a living curse - who just so happens to growl and bark and quake the heavy hinges of its prison.

1.	Robin was turned by a werewolf child in Peru, who had not been registered or appropriately restrained.