Disclaimer: In case you weren't sure, I don't own Remus, Sirius, Lily, James, the ministry of magic, the condition of lycanthropy, or the Harry Potter universe in general. I do own Mum Lupin, the rest of the Lupin clan, and various other original characters throughout.

Warnings: Adult situations, graphic violence, nudity, slash.

Balkeirv

Chapter Five: Learning Curve

By: Irish

There were about three dozen men in the building and quarters looked tight, but no worse than in the average military barrack. All eyes were on him as he stood in front of the door and tried to regain both his physical bearings and his mental ones.

Had there been a clock it would have been ticking loudly in the silence.

Remus knew he was poorly socialized as a werewolf, not having any experience with others of his kind. The beasts of the other men, just behind the window of their eyes, were all perking up their ears and watching the new comer. They were waiting to see if he would challenge whatever hierarchy was in place. For the first time he saw in other people what he saw reflected back in the mirror. The knots in his stomach froze and sat like cold stones.

Moony lunged forward in his mind, throwing himself against the bars of Remus' iron control. There would be violence. He could see it scared deeply on the faces and bodies of the others. He might be able to survive if he let Moony have his way. If he was ruthless enough.

Remus felt the seconds eroding away. He could only stand here frozen for so long before the choice of how to present himself was made for him. He needed a game plan but it was so hard to think around the snarling in his head. Submission or dominance?

From the far right corner, someone rose from a crouch, swaggering forward, thumbs hooked in his pockets. Remus felt his hackles rise and Moony growled in his chest. This was the alpha. Remus shifted his weight mostly to one foot, standing casually, his body not squared off directly with the approaching alpha, but he turned his head a little, eyes unwavering.

"Vee hkohtetye?" The alpha growled. He strode directly into Remus' personal space, pressing forward until Remus's upturned face was only an inch from his chest. Remus wasn't one for biblical allegories; but it was a bit of a 'David and Goliath' moment.

"Yeah, see I don't speak Russian," Remus said, smiling with faux apology. He shook his head and lifted his shoulders briefly. The alpha was at least at least a foot taller than him and probably had close to a hundred pounds on him and seemed to be trusting on his size alone to intimidate the smaller werewolf.

"Oh, I see," the alpha said, a malicious grin parting his lips. "You are from U.K. then, dah?" He didn't even pause long enough to hear Remus' answer. "You need to learn your place here, suka." He glared harder at Remus. It almost made the smaller man want to laugh in his face. A glare was impotent. It was like bring a knife to a gunfight.

"I'm no one's bitch," Remus said coolly. Suka was one word he knew. "Better step back unless you're looking for a clatter," Remus shrugged as if it was nothing to him either way. He shifted his stance again, so he was squared off with the challenger. It was an aggressive stance. If he'd had a tail in his human form, it would have been held high in the air, ears back.

The nameless alpha stared back long moments, then finally took a step back, conceding nothing other than that he didn't want a fight right his moment. Remus sidestepped, circling around without every taking his eyes off the other man, before backing away slowly to the far opposite corner from where the alpha had come from.

It had been no choice, he realized as he finally broke his gaze to look around at the other men in this back corner, and the space they occupied. Moony had always had a dominant personality. He was the alpha of their ragtag animagi pack. Not that Padfoot and Prongs couldn't control him when they had too. Prongs especially.

"You're British? Thank gods, I'm getting mighty sick of these Ruskies."

Remus turned, a little surprised. The man who had spoken was offering a hand, smiling at him. Automatically, he stuck his own hand out and shook with the man who had greeted him.

"Ah, no, Irish, actually," Remus replied.

"Close enough! I'm Charlie. You'll want to avoid Vlad, he's a real wanker, and his other… nastiest damn wolf I've ever seen, and around here, that's saying something!" Charlie said, either the type to end all of his sentences with exclamations or really just overly excited to meet him.

"You haven't met mine," Remus said darkly, a new worry over laying the rest. Moony had always been a grumpy cuss, but not too terribly violent, as werewolves went. That had changed though, in the last few years. Moony had become rabidly violent, so much so that Prongs, Padfoot and Wormtail couldn't even be with him during the moon any more. During his years at the Auror Academy, he tore himself up worse than he had in his early Hogwarts years.

In the last year or so, since they'd all settled into their communal life, Moony had calmed a down a bit, but Remus still made his changes alone, afraid of what Moony might do to his friends. Now, in this new and very upsetting situation, Remus was sure that the darker side of Moony, what Remus thought of as Not-Moony, would reappear. If that was the case, everyone here was in very big trouble.

"Oh they're all nasty, right?" Charlie chuckled, though Remus noticed it had a shrill and hysterical undertone. "Well, Vlad's top dog around here, and unless your wolf is bigger than you are, you don't want to challenge him," he shook his head. "Let me introduce you around. That there is Sven, he's from Sweden, obviously."

Sven was another very large man, even bigger than Vlad had been, but he looked very young, and there was something in his face that made Remus suspect the young man was a bit slow. Remus smiled and offered his hand.

"Pleased to meet you, Sven,"

Sven just continued to smile slightly vacantly, though his eyes darted away from Remus to Charlie every couple seconds as they shook hands.

"Sven's mute," Charlie shrugged. "He knows his English letters well enough though, sometimes he'll write a bit if there's something he really wants to tell you."

Sven offered a thumbs up.

"Ah, great…" Remus said uncertainly returning the gesture.

"And this is Jacques. Crazy French son of a bitch," Charlie indicated a man even smaller than Remus who was approaching them with a bit of a skip in his step.

"Oui! Je suis fou! Oui!" Like Vlad had, the petite Frenchman came right up to Remus and into his personal space, circling around him, sniffing. "But my mother was not a bitch, non! You sir, smell like a Welshman."

Remus craned his head around, watching Jacques pace around him in tight circles. He glanced at Charlie, "What does a Welshman smell like?" He half whispered. Charlie shrugged unhelpfully and Remus sighed, feeling more like he'd been sent to the sanitarium. "Ah, well I'm Irish... and French."

"Mon dieu! You are French? At last, some civilization!" Jacques threw his arms around Remus in an unexpected hug, which Remus forbore stiffly. "Parlez-vous français?"

"Oui, je parle français couramment." Remus replied. Because of the political strife in Ireland, his father's family had fled to France before World War II, and though they still had a strong cultural Irish identity, his father had grown up speaking French, before he moved to Ireland to join the Republican fight. All Remus' older siblings had gone to Beauxbaton, because of his parents' political feelings about the British. So Remus had grown up speaking French and English, heavily interspersed with Irish. It was an unusual pidgin.

Remus' response in French had earned him another embrace from the small man. Remus patted him on the back awkwardly. "Ah, nice to meet you too."

"And that old duffer in the corner is Gordon. He's Scottish." Charlie hitched a thumb at an older man laying on one of the lower bunks in their little corner. Gordon lifted a boney hand briefly, but offered no further acknowledgement.

"That bunk's open," Charlie indicated one bunk out of the two sets of two that were in this somewhat secluded corner. The thin matress had been made up tight, hospital corners and all with a wool army blanket. There was what looked like a grain sack for a pillow. Remus was impressed that they got pillows at all.

"Sure, thanks Charlie," Remus said, taking a seat on the bunk, looking out over the barracks again. There were probably three dozen men in the building, most of them idling around, playing what looked like games of chance using whatever they'd managed to come up with in the way of dice. Some were talking idly, but many were simply lounging on their bunks, like Gordon, apparently just waiting for whatever came next.

English speakers were obviously in the minority, and seemed to be segregated to the corner he was now in (Jacques and Sven notwithstanding). Snape hadn't been kidding, he really would have to learn Russian, and fast. Remus knew his history well, and knew that in prisons and camps trade and bribery was everything. If Russian was the trade language in here, not to mention what the guards spoke, he simply had to learn it.

The barracks were 'u' shaped, with what Remus assumed were the jakes in the middle. Two outside walls, and one of the bathroom walls made up the little corner of native English-speakers. Remus wondered if they actually had running water and guessed they must have something or the smell would have been overpowering, not to mention incredibly unsanitary.

There were small braziers on the floor every ten feet or so, one right in the middle of their area for heat, though nothing burned there now. It wasn't cold enough. Honestly, the conditions could have been much worse, Remus realized. These weren't exactly comfortable accommodations, and in the winter it was probably far worse, but that they had pallets, blankets, some sort of toilet facility indoors, yes it could have been far worse.

Charlie had taken up residence on the floor with Sven, playing tick-tack-toe on the floorboards with a sooty stick from the small wood stove towards the front. Remus was glad to be left alone for the moment.

It wasn't long before one of the guards came to the door and shouted at them. The men stopped what they were doing shuffling for the door. Remus immediately looked to his new companions for a translation.

"Dinner. Or what passes as," Charlie said.

Remus slipped off his bunk and followed along with the herd, staying quiet, disappearing easily into the small crowd. His head swiveled back and forth as they moved out of the barrack and into the dooryard, watching everything and everyone around him. Every detail he knew was one more tool in his bag of tricks.

They moved over to another long building, inside it was dark, and smelled of unwashed bodies and stale food. There were three or four times the number of men in his barrack already in the mess hall, obviously several different barracks worth. Remus stayed close to Charlie and Sven as they shuffled through the mess line, served bowls of a thin soup and a small ration of bread.

After they sat, Remus poked experimentally at his soup with his spoon, trying to judge the contents of it, surprised to find actual vegetables and bits of meat in it. The meat looked and smelled like chicken, and several experimental sniffs revealed no odd scent about it. He looked up at Charlie, who was already literally licking his bowl.

"You'd better eat that before someone steals it from you," Charlie said, after he swallowed. "It's not often we get meat."

"Uh," Remus said, some small alarm going off in the back of his mind. He was hungry though, and if they only rarely got meat, Remus was sure he would need whatever nutrition he could get. After another long moment of hesitation, he ladled a spoonful of soup into his mouth. It was salty and his nose wrinkled a bit, but he'd certainly had worse.

The alarm bell in his head wouldn't stop ringing though, and after a few spoonfuls; he set the bowl aside, opting to eat his bread ration instead. Down the table a ways, Gordon and Jacques didn't even have bowls in front of them. Remus frowned, wondering if they'd gotten their food stolen.

"You're not going to eat?" Charlie asked with a frown. Slowly Remus shook his head, and without hesitation, Charlie snatched up the bowl for himself. Remus sighed softly to himself, nibbling at his bread ration, washing it down with water. At least the water was clear, though it tasted flat from being boiled. Remus just counted his blessings that it had been boiled and he wouldn't have to worry about getting sick from it.

Charlie barely had time to finish the remainders of Remus' soup before a handful of guards came in and barked commands. Remus assumed they were saying something like "get moving" based on the fact that everyone stood up. Remus stood too, popping the last bite of bread in his mouth and taking one last drink of water as he did.

Remus was glad for the fresh evening air as they were marched back, his stomach starting to churn a bit, with what he assumed was nerves. The cool air helped calm him some, though beside him Charlie and Sven were both looking apprehensive. Remus looked at them.

"So, what's next on the agenda? Charades?" He asked with feigned cheer. Neither of the other men seemed amused.

"Nothing, they'll mostly leave us alone for the night," was Charlie's response. Sven grimaced, a hand pressed to his stomach. Remus own stomach gave another lurch, this time Remus was certain it was a lurch of nerves. It was bad news, very bad news, if his stomach wasn't the only one churning. He looked around at a sea of pale and drawn faces as he started up the steps to the bunkhouse with the rest of his barrack. Already a couple men were making tracks for the jakes.

Remus pressed a hand over his own stomach. The only good news for him was that he was pretty sure if he got sick it would only be coming up. Vomiting wasn't exactly dignified, but he was confident it was better than the alternative. Ignoring his new companions, he moved straight back to the jakes himself. He would make himself throw up what he'd eaten, it wouldn't take much with how he felt, and that would hopefully get it out of his system enough for him to stay in control of his bodily functions.

The jakes appeared crude at first, nothing more then a trough in the floor, but on closer inspection Remus could see that there was a constant flow of water through the trough, to wash away filth. If it was decently designed it probably was washing into a sand filter that absorbed the waste and purified the water. That was all moot though. There was no privacy at all, just the trench, not even half walls along it to give some illusion of privacy, and Remus was able to see and smell what those who were already making use of the facilities were doing. It took almost no effort on his part to make what bit of dinner he had rise into his throat. He knelt and braced a hand on the floor on the other side of the trench as he heaved.

It didn't take long to vomit up everything he could, but by the time he managed to get to his feet, legs trembling, several others were already expelling their dinner from one end or the other. It was going to be a mess back here soon. Remus washed his hands from a pump, then took a moment to fill a basin and rinse his mouth and wash his face. His stomach was still roiling and knotted from whatever they'd put in the food. The meat hadn't been rotted; he'd have been able to smell that.

Remus staggered back to his bunk, Charlie pushing past him, hand to his mouth, as he did. The tawny haired-werewolf lay down on his bunk, not even bothering to remove his shoes. His body wanted to vomit more, but there was little left in him, and the acid or the act of dry heaving over and over could make the situation worse. So he did his best to focus on his breathing, ignoring the sounds and ever-increasing odor around him.

It was overwhelming, the illness around him, his own discomfort, but by the time he felt like he was losing control over himself, he knew that there was no place back in the jakes for him to be sick, because now, almost everyone in the barrack was ill, and vomiting (or worse) in whatever container they could find. The door was barred from the outside, although a few had tried to escape to be sick outside.

Part of Remus' own ever-compounding nausea was the illness around him, the sheer stench, how it overwhelmed his every sense. If only he could get a bit of fresh air. Like the door, the windows latched from the outside, though, and short of breaking the glass, there was no way to open them.

He opened his eyes slowly, hoping to see some sort of salvation, lest he be reduced to vomiting on the floor. There was a knot in one of the planks of the wall, a knot with a hole in the center that opened into the night. It wasn't much, but Remus thought that even the small draft from that would be better then breathing this rank, festering air. He rolled off his bunk and onto the floor, crawling a few feet to the hole in the wall and pressed his face against it, breathing deeply from the small draft that blew through.

There Remus lay, curled on his side, face pressed to the wall as he inhaled from the small stream of fresh air, shaking with his illness. Eventually the sounds and smells faded, not because the rest of the barrack was finding some relief from their ailments, but because Remus had faded somewhat. Not quite into sleep, but into some quiet blackness, his mind gaining some rest, even as his body shivered and sweated. He'd spent worse nights in his time, but not many.

Morning was long in coming.

Author's Note: Well it's not the tightest chapter I've ever written, but it's the only thing I've written in a while. I hope you all enjoy it. Please feel free to leave me a review, I can always use a kind word, or a well thought out critical one. Keep your eyes open; I hope to post more to many of my stories soon.