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For once, there was someone waiting for Remus when his international portkey deposits him dizzily on the ground. He staggered away from the empty sake bottle that had brought him across the Pacific Ocean, and nearly tumbled to the ground in surprise as he was tackled into a hug.
“Remus Lupin! Merlin and Morgana, it’s good to see you!” Mary McDonald said. She was laughing, an infectious, bubbling laugh that crept up out of Remus’s memories and brought a smile to his face despite his exhaustion.
“It’s good to see you too, Mary,” Remus said, gingerly returning her hug.
The Magical Customs official very pointedly cleared her throat, and Mary pulled back, giving Remus his first good look at her in more than a decade. She’d put on weight and dyed her chin-length hair a dark reddish-purple. Both suited her. There were tears sparkling in her eyes and she wiped at them before they could fall. Remus wasn’t close to crying, but he did feel a tightness in his throat that seemed like it came from the same well of emotions.
“Let’s get out of the way before someone lands on us when their portkey comes in,” Mary suggested. She took Remus by the arm that wasn’t holding his traveling case, and they hurried out of the International Portkey Arrivals room at the Northwest Regional MACUSA offices. Mary seemed to know her way around, so Remus let her tug him through a building that, by wizarding standards, was incredibly modern. Of course, by wizarding standards, most cities, and thus most buildings, in America were very modern.
Mary chatted amiably as Remus had his travel papers looked over and approved. Her Scottish accent had been worn flat and Americanized over the years, but her voice was still distantly familiar. It felt like a relic, some ancient scrap of pottery or papyrus from a world Remus had lost.
He wasn’t sure if he wanted to cling to Mary for that unnerving bit of familiarity, or if he wanted to run as far and as fast as he could from her and the memories already rising like a tide through his head.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t do more,” Mary said as they finally left the MACUSA offices, emerging not onto a bright daylit street but a gaslit, underground alleyway. Remus had read about that in preparation for travelling. Much of the wizarding community in Seattle had literally moved underground after the muggles had regraded their streets and buildings a story or two up following a devastating fire near the end of the 19th century.
“Mary, I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve already done,” Remus said, trying to laugh her concerns off. “If you’d done any more, I think I might owe you a life debt or my firstborn child.”
Mary smiled, but her eyes still looked at Remus with concern, sweeping up and down, taking in how thin he was, how worn his robes were, the grey creeping into his hair, and, of course, the scar cutting across his face. He hadn’t had that back when she’d known him at Hogwarts. The scar had come right after Remus had lost everything good in his life.
He tried his best to smile. He didn’t want to talk about the scar or the past. Remus had been running from his memories for close to a decade now, and being here with Mary already felt dangerous. It felt like slowing down, like it might give the past a chance to catch up to him.
It was necessary though. Remus was broke and desperate, and the little spellbook publishing company Mary worked for had a job for him.
“Can you tell me what sort of work I’ll be doing?” Remus asked. That was what he wanted to focus on. The present, not the past.
Mary looked almost as relieved as Remus felt. She’d headed off to America shortly after they’d all left Hogwarts, so she’d been spared the worst of the war, but Remus was sure the past still hurt her too.
He listened to Mary talk about the job he’d be doing, and the company she worked for as they wound their way out of the underground. The two of them walked side-by-side out into the August sunshine, the last survivors of their Hogwarts circle of friends.
*
Remus was doing fact-checking, line editing, and spell verification for a new line of charms textbooks. It was contract work, which meant the pay wasn’t great and it was temporary, just nine months. However, Mary said if he impressed her boss there would be more work to follow. Perhaps even a fulltime position down the line.
Even Remus’s lycanthropy, which had seen him fired or barred from so many jobs in the past, wasn’t an issue here. Mary had just shrugged, even when Remus mentioned he’d have to take time off around every full moon. “Mrs. Quincey,”—the little publishing company’s owner—“would hire a dragon if it could meet its deadlines and pick up the slack from any coworkers it burnt to a crisp,” Mary assured Remus. “She doesn’t care if you take a few days off so long as you don’t get behind.”
And Remus did. He’d always been a hard worker, almost to a degree even Hufflepuffs might envy. In the past that hadn’t usually mattered though. Even if he worked late hours or weekends to make up for his full moon absences, he’d almost always been given the boot as soon as employers deduced his condition or decided his mysterious “illness” made him too unreliable.
It helped having Mary there. She knew what he was, and something of who he was. She was settled and happy. She had built a life for herself far away from Britain, and she was eager to help Remus do the same.
Remus was surprised when his other coworkers soon settled into something resembling friends. It didn’t take them long to work out what so many others had in the past, but to Remus’s great surprise, not only did Mrs. Quincey not fire him, but most of his coworkers didn’t even reject him. A few of the older ones kept their distance once the rumor ran around the office about why that Mr. Lupin always took time off around the full moon. However, most of the younger ones asked a few bold—and sometimes offensive but sincerely curious—questions, then went on about their business, friendly and courteous as always. A few even invited him to get drinks after work once or twice.
Remus was surprised by how easily he fell into a routine in Seattle. It began to feel like he had a real life for once, not just a temporary stop on the way to his next panicked flight around the globe. Perhaps he’d finally found a place the past couldn’t reach him.
*
They didn’t talk about the past, not really. Sometimes things would come up, just a mention in passing. For instance, Mary once made a joke about ghosts taking naps, and Remus replied with a quip about Professor Binns’s history of magic classes. They both laughed and happily explained what was so funny to a few coworkers.
Shallow things like that were all right. They were safe enough. They were brought it up intentional though, and they never dug deeper than those lighthearted surface memories. Not until the night when the dam broke and they both nearly drowned in the deluge.
It started with drinks after work one evening. There was a group of them, Mary, Remus, Thien, Joseph, Melinda, and Ahmad. It was mid-October and the weather had started to turn foul, rain and wind, and a general damp greyishness that reminded Remus of England. He didn’t mind the weather. What he did mind were the decorations.
Halloween was omnipresent in America for both muggles—he still couldn’t bring himself to say no-majs—and wizards alike. Remus couldn’t go anywhere without orange and black decorations reminding him of that looming date, that holiday he dreaded.
The bar they went to that evening was no exception. It was a wizarding pub down by Pioneer Square, literally down below the square.
The lamplit underground alleys always made Remus a little claustrophobic, but the bar had false magical windows that were currently displaying a clear, starry evening and letting in a warm, almost tropical breeze. That stood in strange contrast to the fake cobwebs and grinning jack-o’-lanterns that crowded the spaces between booths and tables.
Remus ordered something strong right away, as did Mary. She hadn’t been in Britain back in October of 1981, but she knew what had happened. When their drinks arrived, Mary favored Remus with a small, private smile tinged with old sorrow and fond memories and raised her glass. Without saying a word, Remus clinked his own glass against hers and downed his whiskey in a single swallow.
They would have let things lie there, had it been just the two of them. The others didn’t know though. They were all American born and raised. Voldemort was not a part of their history, just a footnote of a thing that had happened half a world and a decade away.
Ahmad started the conversation about schools when they were all about two or three drinks in. He had gone to Ilvermorny and started waxing poetically about his glory days on his house Quodpot team before moving on to talking about his school house as a whole. Melinda, his fellow Ilvermorny alum, had chimed in. From there the conversation shifted toward a debate on the house structure within schools in general, Thien and Joseph both having gone to smaller schools without a house system.
“You know what I’m talking about though,” Ahmad said, pointing at Remus and Mary. “Hogwarts has school houses, right? What were you two then? I was a Horned Serpent.”
“I was in Pukwudgie,” Melinda inserted.
Remus felt himself tense, just a little, and he swore he saw Mary’s lips thin. Everyone was looking at them, expecting an answer.
“Mary and I were both Gryffindors,” Remus said.
“Home of the brave and the bold,” Mary added. She sounded almost sarcastic. Her chair scraped across the floor as she stood suddenly. “I need another drink. Anyone else want one? Remus?”
It probably wasn’t a good idea; Remus was already tipsy, but he nodded.
Two drinks later, it was down to just the two of them. Joseph and Thien had gone home before they were too drunk to apparate, Ahmad had taken the Floo, and Melinda, who still lived with her Muggle mother, had gone up to street level to wait for a bus.
Truth be told, Remus had wanted to head back to his drafty little apartment a drink and a half ago, but he hadn’t wanted to leave Mary, whose happy tipsiness had started to slide into melancholy with the drink after Ahmad’s mention of Hogwarts.
“That stupid hat got it wrong, you know,” Mary finally said. “I wasn’t brave or bold or chivalrous or any of that rot.”
Remus tried to laugh it off. “I felt that way all the time,” he told her. “I still do.”
“No!” Mary protested, grabbing hold of Remus’s jumper, both for emphasis, and to steady herself. “You were brave, Remus. Everyone was so fucking brave…everyone except me. I ran away. The rest of you stayed and fought, but I was a coward. I ran away…I ran away and left my friends…”
There was a lump in Remus’s throat. Mary was crying. He wanted to push her away, to leave her here alone. He couldn’t bear her guilt on top of his own.
“You weren’t a coward,” Remus told her. “You were the smart one. The rest of us…we were so young, and so stupid. We thought we could save the bloody world…” He scoffed and reached for his drink, wishing the whiskey still burned like it had at the start. He wanted some other pain to focus on.
The past was sucking him in, dragging him down. Remus was caught, as surely as a fly in one of the many spiderwebs surrounding their booth.
He could see them all in his mind, young and whole and smiling. His friends. The people he’d loved most in the world. He saw them as they’d become, hollow-eyed and frightened. He saw them as they’d ended. Dead or broken or worse.
“We didn’t know what we were doing,” Remus said softly, so softly he didn’t know if Mary could even hear him at all. “We went to war without knowing what that meant…It didn’t feel like bravery. In the end, we were all afraid…”
Mary sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve. Then she looked up and locked tearstained eyes with Remus. When she kissed him, Remus kissed back.
*
Mary had been married, but it had fallen apart about a year before Remus ever reentered the picture. He’d wanted children, Mary told Remus one night, as they lay tangled in the sheets of her bed. They’d been drinking again, bottles of sparkling wine to welcome in the new year. The perfunctory, almost friendly kiss at midnight had led them back here once more.
“I didn’t want them. Didn’t think I’d be a good mum,” Mary said. She was staring at the dark ceiling rather than looking at Remus.
Remus’s champagne-addled mind dredges up the first time he held a baby. It was Harry. He’d been so tiny and wrinkled, only a few hours old. James had ignored Remus’s protests and put his son in Remus’s arms. “He needs to get to know his Uncle Moony.”
He’d been terrified and awestruck, holding that baby. It had gotten easier, but he’d never entirely lost that mix of fear and awe whenever he’d held Harry.
“I don’t want kids either,” Remus told Mary, meaning every word of it just as much as she did.
*
Remus and Mary had kissed before that Halloween night in the bar, years ago, at Hogwarts. The first time was at a party in the Gryffindor common room. They’d both been drinking then too. There had been a few times after that, but it had never really gone anywhere.
Mary had liked Remus back then, back before she knew he was a werewolf, before she knew he was bisexual, before she really knew much of anything real about him. She’d wanted to date him and have a relationship with him
Remus had felt something for her then, but it hadn’t been enough. Not enough for Remus to dare revealing all the hidden parts of himself he would have needed to show Mary to have a real relationship.
Instead, Remus had let himself fall for someone who already knew all his secrets, someone he’d thought had loved him for who he was. It had been the wrong choice, though Remus hadn’t realized that until everything fell apart.
Now, lying here with his arm thrown over Mary’s bare hips, Remus couldn’t stop from wondering what would have happened to them all if he’d chosen Mary back then. There was no way of chasing all the tangents, all the possible changes it would have written over their history. The terrible part was, there was still a selfish part of Remus that didn’t regret falling in love with Sirius over Mary.
Even now, in a deep, dark, terrible place within himself, Remus was still in love with Sirius Black.
He stroked his hand over Mary’s skin. She knew more of his secrets now, but she still didn’t know all of them, and she never would.
Sometimes, he considered telling Mary about Sirius, about how he’d loved him, how he’d kissed him and fucked him only hours before Sirius betrayed James and Lily to their deaths. He didn’t think Mary would hate him for it, but he didn’t want to open the doors to the past.
After seven months in Seattle, Remus had come to think of the past not as something he was running from, but something he had wrapped in chains and locked away deep inside himself. The locks were the strongest on his memories of Sirius.
Besides, he doubted Mary wanted to hear about it. She’d locked the past away too.
That was why this thing between them would never last. They had missed whatever chance they’d had all those years ago. Remus knew it, and Mary did too. There was too much history between them, both shared and separate, and it would eventually tear them apart just as surely as Mary and her husband’s disagreement about children had torn them apart.
*
There was no offer of fulltime employment at the end of Remus’s contract. For once it wasn’t personal though. Mrs. Quincey’s little publishing company had missed out on three contracts in a row, and things were tight all around. She still offered Remus a bit of freelance work, and his coworkers all sent him references and referrals, and sent a few more offers of freelance work his way.
It wasn’t a lot, but Remus had survived on less. If he was careful and frugal, he knew he could make things work if he stayed in Seattle.
“You could just move in here,” Mary said one night. “You spend more time here than you do at your place anyway, and the house is already paid off. No rent.”
Once again, they were laying in her bed. Once again, they weren’t looking at each other.
Remus stared out the window at the thin sliver of a moon and the trees with their new spring leaves. He didn’t answer right away; Mary didn’t seem to mind.
Moving in would be a mistake. It would only hasten the inevitable end of things between them. Mary knew that; she probably didn’t even want him to say yes.
A tapping at the window saved Remus from having to find some excuse why he couldn’t possibly move in. There was a dark shape on the windowsill, blocking out the view of the moon and the trees. It was swiftly joined by a second winged shadow.
“Bloody fucking owls in the middle of the night,” Mary muttered. Remus got out of bed so she wouldn’t have to, crossing the bedroom naked to open the window. Two exhausted-looking owls sat on the sill, each bearing a similar-looking letter.
“There’s treats on the dresser,” Mary said, but Remus already knew that. He knew her bedroom better than his own at this point. He fed each tired owl a handful of little pellets and took their letters. They had been written by the same hand, but one was addressed to Mary, the other to him.
Crossing back to the bed, Remus handed Mary hers. She sat up, lit a lamp, and opened her envelope. Something stopped Remus from doing the same, some instinct that told him this wasn’t a letter from Mrs. Quincey or any of their coworkers, though he didn’t know who else it could possibly be from. Just about all the other people who knew both him and Mary were dead.
For one hysterical moment, Remus imagined it was a letter from Sirius. That, somehow, he knew Remus and Mary were sleeping together, and, impossibly, he’d written to them both to—what? Give them his blessing?
“Oh,” Mary said quietly. “Oh…I hadn’t thought. I never even…” Her words drifted off and she looked over at Remus, guilt and horror on her face.
“It’s from Hagrid,” Mary said when Remus showed no signs of opening his own letter. “Do you remember—”
Remus nodded. He remembered the enormous Hogwarts groundskeeper. He’d felt a small sense of kinship with Hagrid as a boy, both of them hiding some aspect of otherness that separated them from the rest of wizarding society. Hagrid had always been kind to Remus and his friends, but he couldn’t think of any reason why he might be writing to both Remus and Mary after all these years.
Mary cleared her throat. In the lamplight, Remus could see tears glistening in her eyes. “He’s asking…asking if I have any photos…for Harry…”
Remus finally tore his own letter open. It was short and impersonal. He wondered if it was the exact same letter Mary had received only with a different name in the heading. He wondered how many other people had received letters exactly like this. There couldn’t be many.
Hagrid was putting together a photo album for Harry, who’d had a tough end to his first year at Hogwarts.
His first year at Hogwarts.
Merlin, Remus hadn’t even realized.
Harry was eleven. He was at Hogwarts. He’d been back in the wizarding world for a year now.
“Fuck,” Remus said, crumpling the letter as his fingers squeezed tight. It was that or punch the wall.
He must have known. Somewhere in his mind, behind those locks and chains where he kept all the painful memories, Remus must have known how old Harry was. He must have known he was at Hogwarts.
He just…he hadn’t wanted to think about it. Selfishly, he hadn’t wanted to think about Harry at all.
Sitting on Mary’s bed, the locks burst open, and thoughts of Harry spilled through his head. What was he like? Did he still look like James? How was he liking Hogwarts? What house was he in? Who were his friends? What stories did he know about his parents? Did he know about Remus? Did he wonder why his Uncle Moony had abandoned him?
Worst of all, was the love. He didn’t know this eleven-year-old boy, only the baby he’d once been, but somehow Remus loved him all the same. That was what that mix of awe and terror he’d always felt really was.
“I—I have some pictures somewhere,” Mary said. She was babbling, near hysterical herself. She got up, half-falling out of bed, her letter still clutched in her hand. Dragging on a dressing gown, she went to the closet and began pulling down boxes. “I don’t know where I put them—I haven’t looked at them in years. I haven’t—I, Merlin…I never even wrote to him, you know?”
She finally turned back to Remus, who still sat frozen on the messy bed. The tears in her eyes had finally fallen, cutting mascara-tinted trails down her cheeks. “I never even thought about it. Fuck, I’m a cowardly bitch.”
“I tried,” Remus said quietly. “Once. I wanted to send Harry a present for Christmas, after…after…” He shook his head, unable to finish that sentence. “Dumbledore said Harry’s aunt didn’t want anyone contacting him.”
Mary sniffled and came back to the bed, an old shoebox clutched in her hands. She sat next to Remus. “Petunia always was a cunt,” she said. “I remember how she used to treat Lily. Do you…do you think…?”
Remus knew what she was asking, and he hated himself for not having an answer. Had Petunia Evans been treating her nephew better than she’d treated her sister these past ten years?
“Who else was there?” Remus said hopelessly.
He and Mary exchanged a look. Just them. They were the only ones left.
“No one ever would have let a werewolf raise the Boy Who Lived,” Remus said bitterly, though it felt like an excuse.
“And I was long gone before he was even born,” Mary added.
They sat in silence for a miserable minute before Mary whispered. “Cowards, both of us.”
Remus nodded.
Mary sniffled and opened the shoebox on her lap. “I know I have some pictures of Lily, but I don’t know if I have any of James,” she said, gingerly poking through the photographs near the top of the box.
“I have some,” Remus said. He looked away, not wanting to see the young, smiling faces in the photographs Mary had kept hidden away. “They’re not with me though. I—I left them at my dad’s house.”
There were two trunks stashed in the attic of his parents’ old cottage in Wales, full of all the memories Remus had been able to physically lock away. He had plenty of photos in them. Pictures of James smiling and happy from every year they’d spent at Hogwarts, pictures of James and Lily together, at their wedding, with baby Harry. He had so many photographs, all hidden half a world away.
“You could write to your dad,” Mary suggested. Once again, she wasn’t looking at Remus. There was a photograph of a red-headed, green-eyed girl in her hands. Lily was there, forever young, forever grinning as she charmed a handful of autumn leaves into butterflies and back again. “He could find them for you and send them to Hagrid.”
It was the closest she was going to come to asking him to stay, Remus realized. He reached for one of her hands, gently removing it from the photo and holding it in his own.
Mary sighed.
*
Remus had been in Seattle for ten months at that point. It was the longest he’d stayed anywhere in a decade. For all that, he was still able to wrap everything up in two days’ time.
He finished one last small freelance job for Mrs. Quincey and collected his equally small paycheck. She told him she was sorry to see him go and offered the name of a publisher she knew in England who might be able to give him a bit of work over there. Remus thanked her and said his goodbyes to his coworkers on his way out. He would genuinely miss them, and they seemed like they would genuinely miss him too.
Mary went with him all the way to the International Portkey Departures room at the MACUSA offices. She smiled sadly when they stopped just before an empty jar of peanut butter that would take Remus to London.
He wasn’t making the smart choice, Remus knew that. He could have built a life here. He could have had a career. He could have been happy here, not entirely, but maybe enough.
He could have spent the rest of his life being a somewhat happy coward.
That had been Mary’s choice, both then and now. He couldn’t fault her for it, but he couldn’t do the same.
Mary kissed him on the cheek and stepped back. She didn’t tell him to write or visit. He knew she was having dinner with her ex-husband on Saturday. He didn’t know if Mary was rethinking her position on children or if her ex had changed his mind, or if they were just putting things to rest for good. That wasn’t any of his business.
“You’re braver than I am, and I hope it makes you happy,” Mary said with heartfelt sincerity.
Remus didn’t know if it would. There were no guarantees where he was going. No jobs, no friends, no assurances that he could meet or even contact Harry. Remus could be setting himself up for nothing but disappointment and failure.
Even so, he couldn’t hide anymore. He would never be able to truly move forward with his past hiding in locked trunks in the attic—both metaphorically and literally. Remus needed to go home.
He needed to find those photos for Harry’s album.