Disclaimer: Remus Lupin still isn't mine in the sequel.
I.
October 1986
For nearly three years after that New Year's Day, 1984, Thea Ramora didn't hear anything from Remus Lupin. She was heartbroken for a good five months, and after the ache faded, she was a different person. Slower to smile, warier of sitting down and striking up conversations with complete strangers at odd hours of the night.
But knowing, loving, and losing Remus Lupin didn't kill her, and she didn't stay heartbroken forever. She stopped looking for him on street corners, stopped asking after him whenever she visited back at Mel's or the university children's library.
Thea published two more collections of essays and short stories, and a novel for children. All were well-received, though she was still a long way from literary fame. She moved up to a full-time position at Crossroads, and she made new friends. Sometimes she dated, people Faith or Sarah Scott set her up with. The relationships never lasted longer than three months. She moved from her low-rent flat to a slightly higher-rent flat in a better neighborhood. Larry the Goldfish died at the ripe old age of four, and Thea got a cat and called him Michelangelo.
And in the Spring of 1986 she was planting flowers in that little park by the fairy grove (she had tried, but had never managed to get them to come out when she visited on her own), and Rhys Davison came walking by with his nose buried in a collection of modern poetry. Thea called out to him, and the two of them struck up a conversation. They talked about their respective works, about Thea's impending tour of the Continent, about how Rhys was trying to teach himself Russian to read Dostoevsky in the original, about where they'd been and what they'd seen.
Thea had grown, and changed. And at the end of their conversation, she asked him to coffee. The two of them started seeing one another again. And this time, whether because she had matured or because there was no one else in the background, things worked.
They kept the whole thing quiet. And when the wedding was held in October of 1986, there were only fifty people in the little church. So Thea saw quite clearly the one man in the back that hadn't been invited as she swept down the aisle, dressed in white on her father's arm, towards the man she would spend the rest of her life with. It didn't throw her off. Not now. Instead, she smiled at Remus Lupin. And he smiled back, a little sadly. Thea hoped that he would wait, that she could say hello, ask how things were with him. He looked tired. But Remus slipped out at the end of the wedding before she had a chance to greet him.
He didn't come to the reception. She thought about him for half a second, a little wistfully. She wondered what he'd been doing. But then her father was crying, and her mother-in-law was embracing her, and Rhys was kissing her, and it became very hard to remember Remus Lupin.
A/N: So. This is a much shorter, even more plotless sequel to my story Making it Better a Little. If you haven't read Making it Better a Little, the random events that take place in this narrative, over a period of years, will make little or no sense to you. That isn't to force you to read the prequel. That's just fact. It just made more sense to me to publish this separately than to add this on to the main story.
If you enjoy it, though, leave a review and let me know.
God Bless,
LMSharp