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James’ and Lily’s son faints on the Hogwarts Express, not two minutes after Remus first lays eyes on him.
Remus sees the boy fall and sees James fall: the same knobby knees folding in on themselves, the same narrow torso crumpling slow-motion smooth, eyes rolling up neck rolling back head of black untidy hair grown too long at the ears dropping as his body sinks, too slow yet too fast, to the floor of the train. James—!, Remus’ mind supplies, then, Harry, and before he can feel his own body move he’s kneeling next to him, staring down at his old friend’s face, if his old friend had ever been given flimsy round glasses and too few full breakfasts. Harry’s eyes are closed, his head lolling at a wrong angle. Remus slaps Harry’s cheek, briskly, twice, three times, as the students around him murmur and shift. Wake up, James, Remus’ mind implores, and next to him a young frightened voice calls, “Harry—Harry—Harry!"
Then the boy’s lashes flutter open to reveal two shocks of sunlit-grass green, a plunge into bright forests and morning fields, and Lily Evans’ eyes stare up at Remus from James’ too-thin face. And that’s Remus’ first glimpse of Harry Potter in twelve long years.
Remus hands Harry chocolate and goes to speak with the driver. When he exits the engine room he stands in the small close corridor and wishes he hadn’t given all his chocolate away. He holds his hands up in front of his face to see if they are shaking.
They aren’t. Inside his chest a thin taut line is quivering from his sternum to his navel; but the rest of him is still. Stillness, he thinks, is his specialty, ever since that day, the one that lives in his bones: a swallowing black void, numbing and huge. Or maybe it’s in his veins—slowing, anaesthetizing, like the first sluggish symptoms of the Draught of Living Death. Remus looks at his hands, and they don’t shake.
One of the Dementors of Azkaban. He didn’t expect these words to be among his first to Harry Potter since he’d held the boy in his lap in 1981, drool on Remus’ fingers and Harry’s baby laugh lodging itself in his chest. For the last twelve years of Remus’ undeserved shadow of a life, Dementors have meant Azkaban has meant Sirius Black. Scabbed death hands on his neck in his dreams, the reaper-rattle of breath haunting his sleep, the warm weight of dream-Sirius in his bed turning nightmare-cold as Remus rolls over and sees a gaping toothless mouth coming in for a kiss. When he wakes up—even now the night horrors come for him two, three, four times a year—his bed is empty but the feeling of his soul moving inexorably upwards and away remains. And, staring flat on his back at the ceiling, Remus lies still.
Now, on this bad-dream version of the Hogwarts Express, Remus understands for the first time Dumbledore’s decision to leave the boy with the Muggles. Not just because it’s safer, because he’s been protected from not-quite-ex Death Eaters and the frail tumorous Voldemort-thing that Albus Dumbledore believes is growing somewhere in a hidden crook or cranny of the wizarding world. But because Harry has grown up ignorant of Dementors and of Azkaban and, until now, he has never had to hear the name Sirius Black.
Remus had meant to keep his distance, despite being Harry’s professor. Even now, with Sirius at large, there are so many things the boy doesn’t know. And if he tells Harry he was James’ friend—if he pulls on that thread, he knows it will all unravel: all those days and years spilling out, all the schoolboy plans and pranks, the detentions and Quidditch victories and first tastes of Firewhisky, the heady moonlit animal nights; the sliver-twists of doubt and anger and the breathless promises, the hushed midnight meetings, the kisses and the curses, the blooming plants on Remus and Sirius’ windowsill and the growing curve of Lily’s belly—her stifled laugh when James would put his mouth to the bump of Harry-to-be and whisper solemnly, “I swear to you that Puddlemere United will always be your Quidditch team.” The night it all went up in smoke; the night a yawning chasm split the earth beneath Remus’ feet and swallowed Lily and James and Peter and Sirius and Harry himself. The day the Dementors slipped into Remus’ dreams.
But Harry, and Remus isn’t sure if this is irony or simply makes a cruel kind of sense, wants Remus to help him learn to fight the things. They’ve slipped inside Harry, too, at long last, despite all he has unknowingly sacrificed to keep himself safe and free.
Harry tells Remus he hears Voldemort killing Lily when they’re near. Slow thunder rumbles in Remus’ chest at that, but his voice, his face, his hands: still. Numb, Remus thinks, and doesn’t tell Harry that Lily was the last person who would still look him in the eye during those last horrible, confusing days before she and James died. He doesn’t tell him that he understands, now, why Sirius was pulling away, and how easy it must have been to pull James along with him.
He doesn’t tell Harry that he thinks of Sirius in Azkaban and hates him, hates him so deeply his numbness almost burns away, but that every time he conjures a Patronus he imagines the silver-bright beast—the one everyone has always believed is a wolf—charging down the gates of the prison and standing in front of his once-lover, snarling and snapping and holding the Dementors at bay.
“Remus,” Albus Dumbledore says in the corridor one grey cold morning after breakfast, “a word?”
Palms going suddenly damp—muscle memory from his days of schoolboy mischief, or a guilty conscious?—Remus follows the old man up to his office. Fawkes, splendidly red and bigger than Remus has ever seen him, croaks a dignified hello. Remus strokes the bird’s head with appropriate respect. Sometimes Albus used to bring Fawkes to Remus’ shamble of a house, out on the Brontë-grim heath, and Fawkes would look with haughty disdain at his shabby surroundings until Remus, shamed, washed his dishes and swept the crumbs from the floor. In those first empty impossible years, Fawkes did Remus as much good as Albus’ unexpected friendship, which, all things considered, was saying a lot.
“They’ve sentenced Sirius to the Dementor’s Kiss.”
Remus looks at Albus silently. His former headmaster looks back. Albus is better even than Remus at the casual tone, the mild expression, in the face of horrible things.
Remus feels everything go a little quieter, feels his pulse slacken slightly. Nothing more. “I see,” he says, and his voice is steady.
“Would you like me to argue against it?” Albus asks. “They won’t listen, but I can try.”
A pulse of shock ripples through the bubble in Remus’ chest, and he breathes in sharply.
Albus smiles just a little, one of his terribly sad smiles that reminds Remus just how old he is. “There was talk of executing Gellert Grindelwald. I had a say in the decision to imprison him instead. You should have the same choice, I think.”
Over long painful silences that seemed to last for days, over weeks of Remus refusing to talk to Dumbledore except to beg in vain to see Harry, over years of unwanted visits to Remus’ house with Hogwarts pies and puddings that Remus hated to accept but couldn’t refuse, his old professor had insinuated himself stubbornly into Remus’ life. It wasn’t until one rainy night in 1985 that Albus told him about his own love affair gone nightmarishly wrong and described how, forty years to that day, he had seen Gellert Grindelwald for the last time, that Remus understood. Albus wasn’t there because he pitied Remus and wanted him, mercilessly, to keep on surviving. Albus was there because he understood, more than anyone should have been able to, what Remus was going through. And Remus could understand him. Albus Dumbledore had wanted a friend.
“But it isn’t my choice,” Remus says. “They’ve made up their minds. What’s done is done.”
Albus gazes at him levelly. “Surely you don’t want this for him, Remus. Even after everything he’s done.”
“I want him dead,” Remus says, heart suddenly pounding, high up in his throat. “I want him dead, Albus, and if I were there at his execution I believe I’d jump in front of the wands and take the Killing Curse myself. So.” He raises his palms. “What else is there to say?”
Albus puts his hand on Remus’ shoulder, squeezing gently with his bony, brittle fingers. Remus closes his eyes and breathes. Behind him, Fawkes lets out a low croon.
“Nothing,” Albus murmurs. “Nothing else.”
That afternoon, Remus has to explain to Harry what the Kiss is, and to tell him that Sirius Black will receive it if, when, he is caught. When Remus thinks of Sirius Black and kissing, in the infinitesimal moment before rotting skin and death-scabbed mouths bloom evilly before his eyes, he can still smell cigarettes, comfortably unpleasant, and feel warm close breath on his lips.
Sirius Black almost murders Harry in his bed and Remus, lying paralyzed and open-eyed night after night, doesn’t tell Albus about Padfoot. Whether it’s because he’s afraid of losing Albus’ friendship, or because he’s still, insanely, loyal to Sirius, or because those memories of wolf and dog and stag and rat tearing through the woods at night, young and vital and alive, are the one bright hard secret Remus has guarded, dragon-like, for all these years—he doesn’t know. Guilt climbs through him, twisting around his bones, his heart and lungs, but he stays quiet. He learned a long time ago how to harbor such cancerous growths inside him, to let them bloom and flourish in secret, while on the surface all is cool and silent, like frozen ground, barren and hard.
Remus sees Peter Pettigrew’s name on the Marauders’ Map and that cold blank surface cracks.
He feels it happen: a jolt of lightning straight into his veins. He stands without realizing it and the Map falls to the floor. His chair tips back and crashes against the stone. His hands, he sees, are shaking.
Breathe, he orders himself, and sets off down the corridor at a fast walk.
Out the doors and into the darkening night, the sky purpling like a bruise above the long stretch of grounds, the smoking chimney of Hagrid’s hut, the Willow lashing at the air—and three children hurtling towards it, and—
A big black dog, and Remus starts to run.
Afterwards, he remembers most vividly the pain of his bones shifting and grinding under his skin, the beast rising up like bile in his throat, the pull of the moon and the heightened agony of the transformation, the first without Wolfsbane in eight months. The time spent in the Shack with Sirius and the children comes back to him like an underwater dream, handfuls of minutes that Remus wishes he could lay out in the palm of his hand, examining each shiny unreal moment in its turn: seeing the life-altering gap of rat-Peter’s missing toe, hearing himself pronounced a werewolf in front of James and Lily’s son, feeling the second great sea-change of his life wash over him, the suffocating wave of the last twelve years receding before his disbelieving eyes. The feel of Sirius’ body—brittle, broken, breathing—in his arms once again. But those moments Remus remembers through a film, through the blurred haze he had come to accept as normal since James’ and Lily’s deaths. A haze that doesn’t fully lift until he is examining his new scars the next morning and Sirius is somewhere high in the air and far, far away.
Remus doesn’t even realize that it’s vanished until Minerva McGonagall takes him aside and tells him, more gently than she’s ever told him anything in his life, that Severus Snape “let slip” that he’s a werewolf to the Slytherins at breakfast. Remus hears her say this and, as sudden as a wave of nausea or the splitting axe of a headache, rage bursts up inside him.
“Damn him,” he says, heart racing, fists clenching, “damn Severus Snape to hell.”
Minerva raises her eyebrows.
“I’m sorry—no, I’m not. I want to—Merlin, I want to pull his greasy hair out by the roots.”
“Please don’t,” Minerva says, but there’s a wry note of approval in her voice all the same. “Remus—Albus wants to see you.”
With effort, Remus suppresses another curse. “Yes. Of course.”
Minerva grasps him briefly by the wrist. “I’m sorry, Remus.”
Grief swells up in Remus’ belly, rolling over and out and leaving him breathless. “So am I.”
Albus is waiting for him, his expression grave. Remus feels another wave of sorrow hit him, nearly knocking him sideways.
“Oh, Remus,” Albus says, as Remus sways. “Please. Sit.”
He sinks into a chair, head falling into his hands.
“It’s for the best,” he says to his knees. “I’m a danger to them. I ought to have known better.” He looks up at Albus. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Sirius.”
Albus tilts his head: an almost-nod, of almost-understanding. Almost-forgiveness. “We’ll miss you, Remus. I’ll miss you. And Harry most of all, I think.”
Remus can feel his blood circulating, pumping deep wells of sadness through his veins. To his surprise his face begins to crumple. One tear, then another, leaks from his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says, and his voice is trembling.
Albus is silent for a long moment. Remus weeps, not quietly. Then, gently, Albus hands Remus a handkerchief, his fingers brushing comfortingly across Remus’ arm.
“I sent a Patronus to Sirius,” he says. Remus looks up rapidly. “It was a risk. But I needed to make sure we don’t lose touch with him.”
“Because he might be of use,” Remus says, some of the old bitterness at Dumbledore and his plans and his priorities, his pitiless focus on the end goal even in the face of sorrow and suffering—bitterness he’d thought long dead—rising up in his newly-awakened self. “For whatever’s ahead.”
Albus nods, taking Remus’ resentment as his due. “Yes.” He hesitates for a moment. “I told him he ought to go to your place first. Before he goes on the run.”
Every function of Remus’ body—breath, blood, hearing, sight—seizes up, stops cold, and then—kicks up again, faster, sharper, louder. Brighter. Something is roaring in Remus’ ears and he looks at Albus, eyes wide.
“He’s—”
“If he followed my instructions, he should be there now.”
Remus stands abruptly. His hands won’t stop moving: to his chest, to the desk, to his face. A low rumbling deep in his bones, in his guts, builds into a roar.
“I resign,” Remus says, and a smile cracks his face wide open. His veins are full of Firewhiskey. He can feel his pulse in his fingertips. Joy, he thinks wonderingly. Fierce, unrelenting, flame-bright joy. It’s going to burn him up, hollow him out, leave him empty and clean. He knows it, true as the smell of cigarette smoke on warm close breath.
“Be careful, Remus,” Albus says, touching him lightly on the shoulder.
Remus shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I won’t.”
There are still Dementors at the gates and as Remus strides down the wide front lawn, suitcase in hand, he raises his arm.
“Expecto Patronum!”
A big bright dog erupts from the end of Remus’ wand, and bounds, silver and shining, through the opening gate, scattering Dementors in its wake. Letting out a clear bell of a laugh, Remus steps outside, and, with a bone-shaking crack, Apparates home.