Warnings: Little spoilers for "Hymn, Glamourie, Fire," and for "Silvering," but nothing too drastic.

I hate Remus Lupin. I HATE him.

The hatred isn't tempered by the need.

When I got far enough into writing "The Luminous" to realize that a section on Remus Lupin was necessary to the story, I was dreading writing it. Canon!Remus is a nice man, certainly, and a great professor, but compared to a lot of the other characters in the series, he has no personality. I've seen this aspect of Remus utilized over and over again in fan fiction. The nice thing about someone with no personality is that he can be squeezed into whatever shape one needs to fit the plot. Very often, the shape of this hole is whimpering, subserviant, and totally in love. While part of me finds this version of Remus credible, another part of me thinks, Oh, for crying out loud! You're a werewolf! Snarl! Get riled up! DO SOMETHING, for heaven's sake!" It got to the point where I would avoid reading fics if I even suspected that I might have to wade through pages of Remus pathos before getting to the good stuff. I'll be honest: I am the lowest common denominator. The good stuff is smut and violence. Okay, and romance, but not the sappy kind! These are boys people!

Mini-rant aside, I really wanted nothing to do with writing an entire novella about Remus Lupin, but it was necessary for some cool stuff to come in later. Not to mention the fact that, if I wanted to cover the period of time while Sirius was in Azkaban, my choice of characters was a bit limited. Sirius: imprisoned. James: dead. Lucius: bit character; Draco's more important. Lily: Dead. Harry/Ron/Hermione: Gross, not part of "The Luminous." Severus: refuse to re-write Rowling material in "Harm" style; will have nightmares. Draco: Not even conceived during the first time period that I need, nowhere in the vicinity for the second time period, busy during the third, etc. More or less, I needed Lupin.

I tried to suck it up. I wrote a sex scene between him and Severus in "Harm." It's since been ripped out and revamped, but Remus wasn't bad the way I wrote him, just boring. (Sweet and willing bores me. Sorry.) I wrote the first chapter of Silvering I: Meditation on Wolf with Moon. It wasn't bad, but Remus was so complacent. Things just happened to him. It was two years later, and I still hadn't finished the second chapter. Something had to be done.

That's when Remus stepped in, and told me that I was a fuck up.

I truly hope that other people have their characters talk to them, and that I'm not a psych case. It's not just fan fiction characters either, but original characters from other works who are pissed that I'm not spending more time getting them on the page instead of fan fiction on the net. I'd say that they're like poorly behaved children, except they aren't. No children are this evil, this manipulative, or this nefarious.

Remus: Excuse me, but you've made a mistake.

Me: (typing) Hmmm? I'm busy right now. Go away.

Remus: You need to listen to me.

Me: No I don't. Go find Sirius or something. I don't have time to listen to you.

Remus: (grabbing me by the throat, pounding my head into the computer, and throwing me against a wall) I said listen to me, bitch!

Me: (rubbing head) Where did that come from?

Remus: I'm angry. You wrote me all wrong.

Me: Huh? I stuck to fanon conceptions that gel with canon. What's wrong?

Remus: You've made me shiver and whimper and beg. You've made me into some sort of fawning little slut puppy. I just keep waiting for my eyes to fill with tears whenever I think of not having Sirius. What is this tripe?

Me: Fan fiction, and none of your business. It's not my fault that you're only a tool so that Severus and Sirius can get laid more often.

Remus: Getting laid more often is a start, but you've characterized me all wrong.

Me: I am not rewriting!

Remus: Fine. Then I'm not telling you about fucking both Malfoys at assorted ages, losing my virginity at nine, the truth about the Wolf, or what Draco and I did to Severus . . . (starts to go)

Me: Get your ass back here and start talking, flea bag!

Therefore, if you'll notice, Remus has more stories about him than any other character in "The Luminous." I try to tell myself that it's because he was more available than any other character, but we both know that it's a lie.

Muse!Remus is much more of a taskmaster than any of the other characters. He's also very demanding, and hard to write convincingly. All the smut aside, the man has some serious problems.

One of the most dominating things about Remus Lupin's character is, obviously, the fact that he's a werewolf. I started wondering about the werewolf itself: male or female, old or young, guilty or remorseless, concerned or uncaring? Very slowly a picture of the Wolf began to emerge.

Without giving too much away, I will leave Wolf Aisling at this: she is a very cold, very twisted ex-Muggle who was bitten on her honeymoon twelve years before. She is now 37 years old, and according to the women's physiology, in the midst of her sexual prime. This is signficant only in the fact that when one becomes a werewolf, one also become a part of who that werewolf happens to be. So Remus, at nine, not only has to deal with the rigors of turning into a wolf once a month, but but must also deal with with the part of himself that is a conniving, sex-starved, extremely experienced woman.

It would be funny, if it wasn't so frightening. For Remus, his integration with the wolf manifests as a form of schizophrenia, with the Wolf speaking in his head and doling out lots of unsolicited and dangerous advice. Murder is her universal solution, hatred and anger are her only ways of communicating what has happened to her, and bitterness is her only solace. Naturally, she takes a great deal of delight in warping this clean young mind, and she leads Remus through a series of deviances that would shatter a weaker man.

However, Remus is strong. So strong that no one knows about the manifestaton of the Wolf until he chooses to tell James, Peter, and Sirius in this fifth year at Hogwarts. So strong that he would rather tear himself to pieces than hurt another living being. So strong that by the time he comes back to Hogwarts as a teacher, he's battled his inner demons and distilled the Wolf to an occasional flicker of thought that sounds practically like his own thoughts, allowing him to maintain his cool, calm, peaceful exterior, his grace under pressure, and his general kindness. Instead of allowing the Wolf to completely corrupt him, Remus simply fueled his emotions into becoming the opposite of all that she is. (Although, for a short period of time, he did run a bit wild . . .)

So hopefully, the Moony I write is still the canon Moony, jut with a few layers of pathos attached. Natually, as a teenager in "Hymn, Glamourie, Fire" and as a child in "Silvering I," he has nothing remotely like control over the Wolf. Very often, she controls him. This makes for his occasional biting comments, his temper, and his strange feminine streak during those early years.

The Wolf also affects Remus physically. Not only does the change make him a little sicker each month, but her fertility cycle also affects his sexuality. In the beginning, Remus was receptive to females, but as he grows older he grows far more exclusively homosexual. Sometimes he worries that he is only homosexual because of the Wolf. She also affects what he prefers in bed. As the moon waxes (grows full), he prefers topping from the bottom (or just bottoming if the person he's with has established dominance), but as the moon wanes he becomes much more of a top. At the dark of the moon, he is most like himself.

Another side-effect is color-blindness. When Remus becomes the Wolf, he can no longer see color. As a child, color was one of the most important things in his life because his mother was an amateur painter. He learned his oil colors before his alphabet, and naturally he is horrified when he discovers that he has to spend one night each month in a colorless world. Of course, black, white, and shades of grey remain the same. This becomes a psychological crutch for him: as a child he told his mother that his favorite oil paint color was Ivory Black which, surprisingly, is a color that she never uses. He's decided to find the color for himself, and this little obsession is what drives so many of his decisions. Namely, that initial jump out the window to look for Ivory Black in the halo around the moon (thus meeting the prowling werewolf), and, later, the fact that Sirius has the same last name as the elusive color he keeps searching for. Ivory (Sirius) Black is also his anchor, as it's really a shade, not a color, and therefore doesn't change when he becomes the Wolf.

It's because of this obsession with color that I chose to name the chapters of "Silvering" after oil paints.