Written For The Quidditch League Comp, for Round 9 For The Falcons. My Prompt Was That Harry Had To Have Died At The End Of Chamber of Secrets, So Here We Are. My Other Prompts Were Winter Winds, Full Moon, And Glory. UuU
Remus had never expected to walk into Hogwarts again.
Yet here he was, walking on the path to the school with the early winter winds whipping at his face, looking up at the castle for the first time since he was seventeen years old. If he had ever thought about returning, he would have expected to be happy.
He was not. There was a knot in his stomach, deeper than the fear of the approaching full moon. He had not wanted to come back at first. Not after what had happened the previous year.
Not after Harry Potter's death.
There was glory in it, he supposed, glory in the heroic death of the twelve year old. What else could you call the discovery of the bodies, the way they were entwined, Harry's and the basilisk's? Harry had had his hand tightly wrapped around a broken fang in one hand and an old book in the other.
A glorious death, being slain while killing a basilisk.
Glorious or not, it still meant Remus Lupin would never get to see Harry Potter again.
He had hardly seen Harry at all, if he was honest. A bundle of swaddled baby with a mop of black hair that cooed and cried could hardly be counted as a person. Only when he was old enough to walk and talk and think was he a real person. Remus had never gotten a chance to meet the real person that was Harry Potter.
"Remus," came a kindly voice, a voice he had known and trusted all his life, a voice belonging to a man who had been too late for a twelve-year old boy not four months earlier.
"Headmaster," said Remus automatically. "It's a pleasure to see you."
The twinkle that was usually so present in Dumbledore's eyes was nowhere to be found, but he was smiling. Remus had learned long ago that you didn't have to be happy to smile.
"I'm glad you decided to join us after all, Remus," said Dumbledore. "You were quite hard to convince."
"You usually get your way, though, I'm sure," said Remus, not trying to sound like an arse but succeeding anyways.
"Not always," said Dumbledore. "Not recently."
What did Dumbledore want? Remus wondered if there was truly no better candidate for Defence Against the Dark Arts than an unemployed werewolf, or if Dumbledore was still taking pity on him, even now.
"How're you feeling, Remus?" asked Dumbledore.
"Fine," said Remus, a little annoyed at the question. He had barely known Harry. Why did everyone walk on broken glass around him?
"Did you hear the news?" asked Dumbledore. His tone was polite and conversational, but Remus could sense something serious behind it.
"What news?" asked Remus, hoping he didn't sound too suspicious.
"Sirius found out Harry died. It was in the paper the Minister gave him. They say he's nearly gone mad since."
"Because he wasn't mad already?" said Remus, more to himself than Dumbledore.
Dumbledore answered regardless. "Mad with grief, or so the reports say."
Remus was suddenly unable to speak, and didn't talk for the rest of the walk up to the school.
The class was subdued. Not only could he see it in their eyes, but they way they spoke, even their actions. There were Harry Potter's fellow Gryffindors, allowed to come back to Hogwarts only because of their dead friend's bravery.
When Remus had attended Hogwarts, he'd secretly imagined what it would be like to be a teacher. It had been a pipe dream to him, just like every career was for one of his kind. You couldn't live on pipe dreams.
It turned out that his teenage self had been right to dream. He loved teaching. It came naturally to him, and he worked quite hard at tapping into his students' potential and gaining their respect and all those other teacherly things he was now privy to.
But still, something nagged at him.
Would Harry have liked him? The teachers talked about him still, in a sad sort of way. Sprout and Flitwick and Sinistra would gush about how much they missed them, about how talented he was, but Remus chalked that up to glorifying the dead.
He paid far more attention to McGonagall after she'd have a few glasses of scotch, because then would she talk about how Harry had been an average student but an excellent Quidditch player, absolutely fantastic, and with him on the team they might have had a chance. Only when she was the most inebriated would she talk about how much she'd liked him. Dumbledore spoke freely about Harry, about his bravery and his courage and his kindness, but also his sometimes misplaced heroism and how he often rushed headlong into things.
Snape refused to speak of Harry at all, good or bad. Remus thought that spoke for itself.
When Remus taught, he wondered if Harry would have liked Defence Against the Dark Arts. He wondered if he would have been good at it. He wondered if he'd rather have been in his common room talking to his friends Ron and Hermione, friends who now spent their days in near constant melancholy.
"I think Harry would have liked you, Professor."
He had been explaining how to catch a wild grindylow when she'd said that, and he stopped short and stared. She offered him a watery smile. Her large teeth were quite endearing.
"You do?" he responded finally, feeling like an idiot.
"Yes," she said, sighing as she clutched her books even closer to her. "I do. And not just because everyone else likes you."
Never a bad thing to hear. Under other circumstances, he would have spent the rest of the week glowing from that praise.
"Why do you think Harry would like me?" said Remus.
"Do you really want to know?"
And suddenly, Remus was ushering her to his office where he could brew them cheap tea and they could sit in old chairs and talk, because Hermione Granger hadn't been able to talk to someone about Harry since he'd died.
As Hermione opened up to him, Harry began to solidify into a real person. As she told stories about her best friend, he stopped being someone who was Brace and Courageous and Impetuous and became a real boy, one with worries and fears and strengths, one who was slightly better than Ron at school but nowhere near as good as Hermione. He was a boy who liked Quidditch but hated the crowds and loved Ron's house and was indifferent about rats and lived like everyone else in the world.
"I knew Harry's father," Remus heard himself tell her. "I knew Harry as a baby."
And he told her, not everything, but a little of the Marauders, a little of their life after Hogwarts and about James and Lily, because now he'd never get to tell Harry, who'd been the one who really should have known. He dwelled on their lives so much he hardly remembered to mention their deaths.
It was late when they finished, so he escorted her back to her tower, just the way a normal teacher would.
Harry Potter was dead, but his other students weren't, and Remus Lupin was nothing if not a dedicated teacher. Of all the pipe dreams he'd had, he was glad this one was the that worked out.