He walks for hours, aimlessly, numbly, traversing the streets of London in a desperate attempt to leave behind the images of grey eyes pleading with him, vainly attempting to get him to believe their owner. People ignore him, a tattered figure with a face too young to be old, but still one denied youth by his wearied eyes and the flecks of grey in his sandy hair. They see him not as Remus Lupin, a man who has just lost everything in life that made it worth living, but as yet another victim of society. After all, is not London crowded with many who have lost everything?
And suddenly, his thoughts are broken as he finds his feet following a familiar path. He slows to a stop, and looks up, wondering that the building where Sirius’ flat is can still look so familiar, so unthreatening, when its occupant is now being carted off for killing two of his best friends. He thinks, dimly, that he ought to go in and pack up Sirius’ things, since there is no one else to do it, but realizes that he cannot bear to do it now. Another day will have to do.
So, sighing, he turns around and begins walking along the pavement again, willing his thoughts to still into some semblance of order. It rather annoys him that after keeping complete control over himself for so many years of his life, he cannot keep a few stray thoughts in order. Images keep springing to mind, of James, and Lily, and Sirius, and Peter. Little Harry giggling in his highchair as Sirius distracts him while his mother attempts to put a few more spoonfuls of baby food in his mouth before he notices. Little things like that, the things he cannot bear to remember because he knows that he will never be able to see those people again, that those times are now forever lost.
He tries to think of other things, that he should prune the roses at home and that he’ll need to pick up milk and bread. Little, unimportant everyday things, that shouldn’t be hard to think of, but are. Because he keeps remembering, and remembering is too hard because he doesn’t want to face the fact that those things really happened. Remus really doesn’t want to remember that those people in his memories are dead, because accepting that means accepting that his whole world is now gone.
So instead, he walks over to a deserted alley and Apparates home, and as soon as he gets there he walks upstairs and falls in bed, still dressed, and falls into a deep sleep.
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When he wakes up in the morning, everything is sunshine and for a moment he forgets what happened during the last few days. He thinks that perhaps he will go visit James today, and they will talk of old times and it will be a small moment of happiness in these dark times. And then later, maybe he’ll see if he can convince Lily to let him take Harry to the zoo, because Harry hasn’t been there yet.
And then he wonders why he went to bed last night in his clothing, and remembers.
And he realizes that he won’t be taking Harry to the zoo, or talking to James, because James and Lily are dead, and Harry’s off somewhere, and it’s all Sirius’ fault.
Suddenly, he doesn’t feel like getting up anymore.
So he turns over and goes back to sleep, ignoring the protesting grumble of his stomach because if he eats something he knows he’ll be sick. And he sits in bed all day, not caring about anything, because when he sleeps he doesn’t have to face reality. A small part of him knows that this is irrational, and that he ought to get up and go about the business of living as if nothing had happened, but he cannot.
So he sleeps, awakened occasionally by half-remembered fragments of dreams, and haunting grey eyes.
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Somehow, the next day, he gets out of bed, feeling musty in his creased clothing. He showers and dresses in fresh clothes, and makes the bed, folding every corner just so and ensuring that it is neat, more out of habit than anything else.
Remus walks downstairs, barely noticing anything, and walks into the kitchen. On the table is a stack of mail, untouched, and an owl waiting impatiently with a paper. He gives it a Knut and it flies off, as if it has better things to do than wait around for unemployed werewolves to fetch their paper. Unfurling it, he spreads it across the table, staring in shock at the headline sprawled across the top of the paper:
BLACK SENTENCED TO AZKABAN.
Just four words, but four words poignant enough to tear through him and rip out any semblance of self-control he has left. He wants to cry, scream, tear the paper to shreds, break something, just do something, anything, but he doesn’t, because he knows that even if he did so, it would not stop all this from happening. Slowly he returns to the paper.
Below the title is a large picture of Sirius, standing in a street full of rubble, laughing as Aurors pull him away. He remembers that laugh, the one he used to use when speaking of his family, bitter and mocking. But there is something else in the picture that he does not recognize, a hint of madness to the laugh, something he does not understand, even as he understands it all too well. Perhaps Sirius went mad, after all.
Suddenly he crumples the paper and throws it across the room, burying his face in his hands. Why? He wants to scream, over and over until someone answers him. He wants to know Why. Why Sirius had to betray them, why James and Lily had to die, why Peter had to die. None of it makes any sense to him, when his life has always been filled by constants and not whys, but explanations.
Although even then, things haven’t always made sense. He wants to know why he was bitten, why he had to live this way, shunned by the rest of humanity for something he has no control over. He wants to know why he had to befriend the other three Marauders, when in the end they would only leave him lonelier than before.
He wants to know why he is now sitting in an empty house, empty save for the memories in every room. Suddenly he stands up, almost knocking his chair to the floor. He walks through a door to the living room, where on one wall of striped golden wallpaper, now a little faded, pictures are hung from the ceiling to the floor. Pictures of everything, all hung carefully by his mother, who hung pictures there from the time she was married and moved into this house, to when she died, only a year ago.
The pictures are a varied assortment of years past, ranging from pictures of his parents on their honeymoon to pictures of a few months after James and Lily’s wedding, the last ones she ever hung. And in between, pictures of him at two, smiling and happy, to pictures at five, still smiling but exhausted on the day his birthday fell right after the full moon. Trips and family outings, times at home and even a few from at Hogwarts that he didn’t even know she had.
And in the pictures, James, Lily, Peter, and Sirius, all laughing, all smiling happily as if nothing would ever happen to them. They say that the young are always invincible.
And something breaks in him, at the sight of the pictures, and he starts grabbing them off the wall and throwing them on the grey-tiled floor, until all the glass is smashed and the wall is bare, save for the unfaded imprints of the pictures on the wall.
He crumples on the floor, not even noticing that he is sitting on glass, and curls up and begins crying, for the first time in years. He knows there’s something pathetic about a grown man in shabby clothes curled on a floor covered with glass shards, but at the moment he doesn’t care. And after he finally stops crying, he lies there, wishing that it would all end, or that better yet, he would wake up and find it was all a dream.
But the world keeps on turning, and he does not wake up, because although in the books he likes so much that may happen, in real life it does not. There is no happy ending here, he realizes. Sometimes they had used to joke that James was the Prince, and Lily the Princess, and they would get married and live happily ever after. And in a fairy tale they would have. But here, they did not. Here, although they lived together happily, there was no “ever after”, just a short time of happiness in the midst of war.
And though it seems like only a few moments, he sits there for hours, and only when the sun begins to set and golden rays throw their light across the floor, lighting up the bits of glass like miniature sunbursts, does he finally get up and dust himself off.
He eats something, just for the sake of eating, and goes to bed early because he cannot stand to stay away in a world empty of purpose.
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But somehow, as those things tend to do, his days reorder themselves into some semblance of purpose. A few days later he finally rescues the pictures, putting them in a box in the back of his closet. But for reasons he cannot explain, he leaves the glass and frames, as if to remind himself that there are consequences to losing control. Or perhaps it is for something else, but whatever the reason, he leaves it at that.
He discontinues his paper, not only because he needs to save money but because he cannot bear to read the articles that continually grace the front cover. Even when they do not deal with Harry and James and Lily, they somehow manage to sneak them in at every possible moment. Though it is getting easier to read about them now, it is only marginally less difficult than it was before, and it remains much easier to just avoid all references to them.
Somehow, as the days pass, he manages to forget that Sirius had once been one of his closest friends, and tries to think of him as “Black”, not as “Sirius” or “Padfoot”, which were much more usual terms. But even though he wants to hate him for everything he did, somehow, inexplicably, he cannot. Instead, he buries him in a corner of his mind, with memories of all the years the four had together, and tries to forget that he ever had three best friends whose names were Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs.
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He expects that the next full moon would be worse than ever, because the wolf is always worse when he is unhappy. But surprisingly, the wolf is less furious, almost complacent, and he ends up spending most of the night curled up, occasionally howling sadly at the moon.
And Remus knows that it is because the wolf somehow understands that he has lost his three pack mates forever. Even if the four of them had not run together for quite some time, as all had been busy, there was still a sense of comradeship among them. The wolf was always calmer in the presence of his friends, because it sensed that it was among friends. Now it is not angry, but merely lonely, as Remus himself is lonely.
The next day after he changes back and stumbles up the two flights of stairs from the basement to his bedroom, he wonders what it would be like to stay the wolf all the time. To not have to worry about changing once a month, to never have to explain himself to people, and though he knows it is because the wolf is still very present in his mind, not sitting in the corner like it usually does, he wonders if that would be altogether bad.
Would the wolf be truly as vicious if it weren’t locked up for so much of the time? And then he decides that he is tired, and after healing the few scratches he accumulated the last night, he goes to bed and sleeps in the chill light of early winter, not really dreaming.
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Suddenly, a month later, it is Christmas. Though it has always been his favourite season, he doesn’t bother preparing for it, as there is no one to share it with. A kind neighbor who knew him growing up invites him to dinner with her family, but he declines, not wanting to be an imposition to anyone. Undeterred, she sends him a fruitcake, part of which he ends up eating after dinner as he sits alone in his kitchen, watching the snow fall in thick flakes outside.
A few old Hogwarts friends send him Christmas Cards, but he doesn’t have the heart to write anything in reply, as he doesn’t know what he would write. After all, how do you tell people that while they went on living their lives, you spent each day going through the motions of living because it was what you had to do, not because you actually wanted to live. Remus scoffs at himself for being so cynical, then puts the rest of the cake away for later. Perhaps he ought to write her a thank-you note. It was, after all, a rather good cake.
Because it is Christmas, he decides to light a fire in the fireplace in the living room. He sits in front of it in a chair, reading a book, and is vividly reminded of all the times he used to read in the Gryffindor Common Room. But somehow, the memory isn’t quite as painful as it would have been a month ago.
Later, after he banks the fire and goes to bed, he decides that perhaps, after all, life can be lived.
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The rest of the winter is rather cold, but eventually it melts in a glorious burst of color around Remus’ house. As the days grow warmer, he takes to working in his garden again, pulling out all the things that don’t quite look that they belong there, and tending those that should be. He is especially proud of his roses, which almost cover the house in swaths of pink, and white, and red, with splashes of yellow here and there.
And then Spring turns into Summer, and Remus gets a job at a local bookstore because the person who owns it knew his parents, and is willing to give him a job even if no one else will. For five days of the week he works in the store, and on the weekends he tends his garden. Though he does not know it, he has accepted life again, and even if his smiles don’t reach his eyes, and he quickly changes the subject whenever anyone tries to talk about something painful to him, people understand that he has had losses, and let him change the subject.
Slowly, the weeks turn into months, and meld into a long string, punctuated by the occasional full moon. Before he realizes it, it is almost October 31st again, and he is a little surprised that a year has passed already. And then the day passes without comment, and the weeks pick up their string again, because there are no important dates to remember that would break the monotony. He rather likes it though, the mindless monotony of the days, because it ensures that he does not have to think about the date.
When another October 31st occurs, he only realizes it after the fact.
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And then, eight years later to be precise, the owner of the bookstore dies and it is taken over by the son, who does not like werewolves. And even though he has known Remus all his life, and was only a year younger than him in school, he fires him, because it turns out that he wasn’t even supposed to have been employed for the past two years.
It is hard for Remus, being fired for such a reason, but he is at least glad that the owner’s son does not turn him in for working illegally. That is small comfort, however.
As he soon finds, he was lucky that he was allowed to be able to work for so long. Again and again he applies for jobs, but again and again he is rejected, merely for being a werewolf. But he buries himself in reading, and working in his garden, and tries to pretend that it doesn’t bother him. After a while, he almost convinces himself.
Gradually, his clothes, rather threadbare to begin with, become shabbier and shabbier. Fortunately, he has always been thrifty and has saved most of what he earned over the past nine years, but he must save as much of it as possible, because there is no knowing when he will be able to get a job again.
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One morning after breakfast, he receives an owl, and wonders why someone would be sending him an owl. After all, it is the middle of summer, and people usually only send him owls at Christmastime.
He sits down at his table, noting by the seal on the letter than it is from Dumbledore. He opens it to read:
Dear Remus,
It would seem that we are short of a Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor, and I thought that you might be interested in the job. As I remember, you were quite talented in this subject, and would be highly qualified to teach.
As you most likely remember, term begins on September 1st.
Send me an owl if you are interested, and perhaps we could arrange a meeting to discuss specifics.
Albus Dumbledore.
Sighing, he drums his fingers on the tabletop, re-reading the letter a few more times. Of course, there wasn’t really any question to whether or not he would accept; after all, he needed a job, and it would be nice to be at Hogwarts once more.
But Hogwarts is full of memories, and it would be rather hard to be in a place that reminded him of his three other friends at every step.
Nonetheless, he pulls out a quill and writes a reply on a spare piece of parchment, giving it to the owl to take back to Dumbledore.
Slowly, he stands up, and begins walking around the house, slowly and rather aimlessly, more to give him something to do than to serve and actual purpose. Sometimes he stops to look at things, but rarely. The kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom are the only rooms that get any real use in this house, the rest gradually becoming covered with a fine veil of grey dust. He walks around the broken glass in the living room that he never swept up, and into the dining room that has remained untouched since his parents’ deaths.
And slowly, he continues walking, finally ending up back in the kitchen. Perhaps it would be good to get out of here.
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Most of the rest of the summer is spent planning lessons, tidying up, and packing what he will need for the school year. It is rather nice to be busy again, and he is rather glad that he will be teaching this year. But one day, when he is in Diagon Alley for a few extra things, he is shocked to see a picture of Sirius across the front of a paper. Numbly, he buys the paper and finishing his shopping in a rush, he Apparates home to read the article.
Apparently Sirius escaped.
Broken Glass by Morwen
Chapter Notes: This was originally going to be the second part of my other story, Prisoner, but I've decided to leave it separate. Anyway, hope you enjoy it. My poem, Those Who Say Nothing, is a companion piece to it, so if you've read it you'll notice that there are some/many similarities.