A/N: In answer to Little Loony’s question, this fic when done should be just over forty chapters. So you’ve a fair way to go yet…;)
14: Family Ties “ Part Two
No five hours in the history of the known universe had ever passed so slowly. As the afternoon wore on, Rey started to wonder if he would need to drink the contents of the pot by the fire to be scraped gibbering down off the ceiling.
There were only so many times he could feed his menagerie before they grew ridiculously fat. His mission report was so polished that it shone. He even tidied for Merlin’s sake. The meal making might have taken up a good portion of time if his culinary abilities hadn’t been limited to the brief and rapidly make-able likes of cheese on toast and boiled egg. Rey would have wondered at his wife’s odd urge to experience her husband’s uncertain skill in the kitchen if he had not been certain that she and Remus would have filled up thoroughly in Hogwarts Great Hall over lunch.
He managed to drag out the food making by burning the first three rounds of cheese on toast to small charred heaps. That was something.
On the fourth attempt, he managed a few rounds that were vaguely edible and was just debating whether to eat them himself or attempt the warming charm his wife was so proficient at, when he heard the flare of the floo in the lounge. Hurriedly fanning out the smouldering remains of his previous attempts to cook, he had taken only three steps towards the kitchen door when Diana appeared, wearing a broad, happy smile and clasping a sleepy looking Remus in her arms. Her eyes swept across the kitchen, taking in the haze of smoke, her husband’s ruddy face and the distinctly blackened offerings that were laid out on plates on the table. She raised an eyebrow with deliberate slowness.
“See that Remus?” she said with bantering cheerfulness. “Daddy made us bad cheese on toast. We’re surprised, aren’t we?”
In spite of the fact that his eyelids were drooping, Remus still managed to grin and shake his head.
Rey folded his arms, taking his cue from his wife’s playful tone as he adopted a posture of distinct offence. “So you’ve finally corrupted my son. It had to happen, I suppose.”
Diana’s eyes twinkled as she deposited her sleepy bundle of son onto the specially child-warded kitchen chair nearby. “I fail to see how good taste and common sense constitutes corruption. I mean, look at the state of that toast, Reynard Lupin. And judging by the smell, I’d say that was your best effort.”
Rey stood firm against the playful teasing of his wife. “If you don’t want it, why did you ask me to cook?”
Diana grinned openly. “I thought it would be funny?”
“Charming.” With grim determination, Rey lifted a piece of his charcoal toast and bit down. “Mmmm,” he lied. “Just how I like it. And very nice for those of us who haven’t been gorging ourselves on house-elf fare all day.”
Diana gave him a long hard look as she bustled over to the sink to inspect the damage to her utensils. “Are you casting aspersions on my sylph-like physique?”
It was an open goal-hoop. Even with the risk of a night in the spare room or on the couch, there was simply no avoiding it. “If you keep eating Hogwarts sized servings, your sylph-like physique won’t be able to fit through the doorframe.”
The wet tea towel he had to admit he had earned. The porridge ladle however, hurt. The small snicker from Remus at the antics of his parents didn’t help.
“Ow.” Rey rubbed his forehead. “What sort of example is that to set our son?”
“Serves you right.” Diana sniffed as she retrieved her projectile and deposited it back in its pot. “You know if I wasn’t in love with you, you’d be in a great deal of trouble right now. If you wanted to marry a beanpole, you should have stayed with that Sylvia Venner.”
Rey groaned. Oh dear Merlin, there were times that he wished he and his wife had not been in the same year at school. “Why is it always Sylvia Venner? So I went to Hogsmeade with her. Once. In fifth year. Before we started dating. I hardly even remember what she looks like.”
“You know she’s sixteen stone now. And in a show-marriage with an effeminate German Quidditch player with a bad moustache.”
“I don’t care about Sylvia Venner!” Rey had no idea if his wife was telling the truth or spinning one of her glorious webs of fantasy “ it was usually best not to ask, for showing any kind of interest in old girlfriends or other women led inevitably couch-wards. Diana was a wonderful human being; the kindest woman he knew, gloriously witty, infinitely patient, amazing with children and a wonderful wife and mother but she also had a much-denied but unavoidable streak of insecurity. And she never, ever forgot.
At this emphatic denial, Diana smiled. “Good. Glad to hear it. Now, Remus.” She crouched in front of the chair of her nodding son. “Do you want some of daddy’s nasty burnt food or would you like to go to bed?”
Remus regarded his mother with sleep filled eyes. “Bed,” he murmured at once. “‘M not hungry.”
Diana ruffled his hair, making him giggle. “Good choice. Honestly, no wonder you’re so tired, the fuss everyone made of you today. I thought Molly Prewett was going to run off and take you home with her, bless her heart. She couldn’t get enough of you.” She chuckled and grinned conspiratorially at her husband. “Poor Arthur Weasley looked terrified. I hope the poor lad doesn’t mind a big family.”
Rey shook his head. “Will he have a choice?”
“I doubt it.” Diana turned back and rose to take a hold of her little boy once more. “Come on then, sweetie. I’ll just take you up to get washed and changed and then I’ll choke down some of grumpy daddy’s toast.” She glanced over her shoulder at her husband with a smile as she hoisted their limp son back into her arms and started towards the doorway. “I’ll bring him down for his goodnight kiss when he’s clean.”
Rey watched her as she carried their precious child into the hall, his entire world encapsulated in those two fragile human forms and fought back a sudden chill.
“Diana?”
His wife’s dark head appeared back around the doorframe. “Yes, love?”
He met her eyes and saw the light-heartedness of her expression drop as she read the sudden seriousness of his gaze.
“Be quick. Something happened on the mission last night that I need to talk to you about. It’s important.”
Diana’s features tightened as she drank in her husband’s welter of emotions but she was restrained from asking more by the sleepy stretching of Remus in her arms. She nodded. “I won’t be long.”
Rey listened in silence as his wife’s footsteps vanished up the stairs. A moment later he could hear her pattering about in his son’s room overhead. He sighed.
His family meant everything. To live without them would not be living at all. If anything were to happen to Diana or to Remus because of this confusing mess with Kane, he would never be able to forgive himself. It might be nothing, Moody had said. But in spite of himself, his instincts were telling him over and over that this was real. Kane’s face was familiar and the hatred that had filled it on seeing him inescapable. Perhaps it was paranoia, fear of losing all that he had fought so hard to gain. But what if it wasn’t?
This, it seemed, was the price of boredom. It was not a price he considered even remotely fair.
He rested his head in his hands as he slumped into his seat at the table. What had he done wrong in his life to deserve this mess?
Aside from abandon the boy.
Guilty feelings rose in his heart once more as he remembered the one event in his life of which he was desperately ashamed. But his father had been so angry and he had so wanted his respect back “ the sacrifice had seemed worth making at the time. And he had not just been his sister’s son but Isaacs too “ how could he have looked at him every day knowing how he had come into the world, knowing that in his moment of gaining life, he had taken away Rhea’s?
It had been ten years before he had learned that his father’s use of “lost” instead of “dead” had been deliberate. Rhea was dead. But her child was not.
Isaacs had played one last card that awful day. He had snatched the child from the hospital and fled.
He still remembered clearly the day a little over ten years ago that an Auror and a senior official from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement had approached him at work and asked him to join them in a quiet office. He had been deeply surprised to find his father and Rolphe already there. But more shocking still was what they had to say.
Adam Isaacs had been found dead that morning. He had hanged himself.
A ten-year-old boy had been found furious and crying in his house. His mother, according to the suicide note left behind, was Rhea Lupin. And it was into her family’s care that the boy was now to be offered.
Rafe had exploded. He called it a lie, an abomination “ any child of his daughter’s was long dead and he would not raise the gutter-brat of that creature and some other brood-sow he had captured. For all he cared, the monster’s child could drown. Neither he nor any member of his family would touch the spawn of a werewolf.
Then he had stormed out. Rolphe had followed him.
But Rey had hesitated. For so long, he had wanted a child but somehow he and Diana had been unable to create one. They had been considering adoption. Could he adopt his sister’s son?
He had asked questions, many of them. Were they sure the child was Rhea’s? As sure as they could be. What was he like? Difficult, they had admitted “ Isaacs, apparently depressed and moody for some time had not made the best of single fathers. Was the boy magical? Possibly, they said “ he had shown signs but it was unlikely he would ever be very powerful. Was the boy a werewolf? Although Rey knew the condition was not hereditary, there was a chance that the boy could have been bitten by his father. But no, they had said. The boy was human. Could he meet him? Gladly, they told him. What was his name?
His name was Abel. Abel Isaacs.
He had discussed it at some length with Diana. She had been quite happy with the idea. But the boy was his family, she had said. The final decision lay with him.
And so he had gone to meet him. Abel Isaacs, a sullen boy whose dark eyes held pain much beyond that a child of ten years deserved. He had been snappish, unpleasant, temperamental. He had asked his uncle where he had been for the last ten years.
Rey’s answers “ that he had not known of his existence, or where to find him “ seemed to placate him a little. At times in the conversation, he even thought he caught a glimpse of hope.
But he had not been sure. The boy had truly had a difficult upbringing but he was far from friendly; he seemed to possess his mother’s fire with his father’s personality, not a pretty combination by any measure. It would be difficult and they would not have much time to bond before the boy would be off to Hogwarts. Adopting this child, he sensed, would be a great deal of burden for very little reward.
And then his father had found out. That had been rather less than fun.
Rafe Lupin had been incandescent with rage. Being disowned had been the least of his threats. Take that thing in, he had been told, and he would be wiped from existence in Lupin terms, never to see or go near his family again. Marrying a penniless Muggle-born had been bad enough but this would be the limit. The end. From this, there would be no going back.
Rey and his family had not always seen eye to eye. That did not mean he did not love them. And more than anything else, he longed for his father’s respect.
Was it worth it for a sullen child who would probably not even thank him? Was it worth it for the son of the werewolf that had caused his sister’s death?
He had decided not. He had turned down the adoption.
He had asked if he might be allowed to see Abel sometimes. But they told him the boy did not want that. He was given to foster parents and that was the end of any contact.
Rey sighed. It had probably been for the best. But he still wondered what had become of Abel. He would be somewhere in his early twenties by now…
His train of thought stopped short. He went cold.
He pictured Abel’s face.
And then he imagined Abel’s face older.
No!
He came to his feet, unaware of anything but pure, blinding shock as he stumbled into the hall and across into the lounge, grabbing one of the pictures from the mantle and staring at it. A family photo taken at Christmas, the last before his sister died, his parents, Rolphe, Rhea and himself. He stared at his sister’s beaming face and crossed it in his mind with Adam Isaacs. He juggled features, swapped parts and got the same result.
He got the older Abel.
He got Kane.
Kane was Abel. Abel was Kane. Oh Merlin, no wonder he’d seemed so familiar!
But he hadn’t been bitten. He hadn’t been a werewolf, not then. He had been safe, well as could be expected and most definitely human, given to the care of his foster parents. What had happened to him since that day? How had he come to this?
“Rey?”
Diana was standing in the doorway, a pyjama-ed Remus still yawning in her arms. She was staring at his stunned features with the deepest concern.
And then the fireplace flared with emerald light.
There was no time to react. Even if he had not been in such shock, it still would have happened too fast.
He felt something hurl against him, lifting him almost off his feet as he was catapulted across the room. Silver light glistened on black as his head struck the wall with a thud “ he felt himself slump to the ground but could do nothing to prevent it. He heard Diana scream, heard Remus cry out and saw them dragged past him into the room, both tumbling to the rug with a thump with expressions of terror and shock. The door slammed shut beside him.
And then a blood-splattered face straight out of his horrified realisation filled his sight from side to side.
Abraham Kane grinned. It was the coldest expression that Rey had ever seen.
“Hello uncle,” he drawled softly. “Remember me?”