Okay, here is my first Harry Potter fic. I mostly do TT and ATLA; y'all can check those out if you wish. Though I am mostly a Tonks/Remus shipper, this pairing just seemed to good to let pass.
A note on the OC's name: her name is Seonaid and it is a traditional Celtic name. I don't know whether it is pronounced Shin-aid, like Sinéad O'Connor the isnger or if it prounced See-oh-nad. If anyone knows the correct prouncenation, let me know, but personally I prefer it as See-oh-nad, I think it's just sexier.
On with the show!
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"Alright you lot, let's get a move on! I want to get to Remus's place before dark!" Lily Evans shouted down the train car at her friends as they stumbled out of their compartment, still laughing at one of the many jokes James had told during the long trip back to London from Hogwarts.
"Oh, keep your hair on luv, we're coming, we're coming." James grinned at Lily as he spoke, removing her satchel from her arms and tossing it at Sirius, who stood behind him, to wrap his arms around his new girlfriend and kiss Lily sweetly on the cheek.
Sirius's girlfriend of just about seven months Amelia Ryden, a plump little creature who greatly resembled her Italian grandfather in her olive skin and chin length black curls, slid out of the compartment also and smiled up at the handsome animagus she called her own. "Honey, how are we getting to Remus's home?"
Sirius, James, Lily and Amelia looked inquisitively at Remus as other students made for the train doors around them. "Don't worry, it's already taken care of. We're going to take the Knight Bus out of London. It can take us as all the way up to Cumbria. And then it's just a quick walk up to my house."
They all nodded and filled one by one off the scarlet train. It was the end of their sixth year and the five friends had made plans several months ago to spend most of the summer with Remus at his family house in the north, near the Cumbrian waters.
Peter Pettigrew meanwhile was being forced to spend the summer months in Uganda, mourning over the death of an aunt he had never known. Mrs. Pettigrew had actually arrived at the school a week before to whisk her son off to East Africa to join the Pettigrew mourning party. Needless to say, it had not been a happy parting with Peter in the sour mood brought on by it all.
They moved together off the train, out through the northern entrance of Kings Cross Station and into the nearest deserted side street they could find. James grinned wolfishly, sticking out his wand arm and the next thing they knew, a violet monstrosity of a bus had screeched to a halt beside them.
Laughing and shoving each other the five friends boarded the vehicle and Remus gave the location of his home in northern England to the bus driver.
The bus surged forward with a crack and suddenly they were trundling along a narrow dirt road as it curved around a medium sized mountain. Remus's head snapped up excitedly as his home came into view. A valley stretched out far below, surrounded on all sides by a thick forest and cut along the north side by a wide, slow-moving river. Though mostly open fields, a small handful of ancient manor homes were scattered about the valley, each separated by small stands of trees. One beautiful creation of stone and wood drew Remus's eyes.
The Lupin family had been living in the Thirlmere Valley for hundreds of years, ever since Remus's great-great-great-however many times over-grandfather had emigrated from the Scottish highlands, carrying with him a great wealth and a tremendously powerful title in the magical world.
Though the wealth had been squandered many generations before Remus's parents were even born, the house had remained where it was, kept up in good repair mainly due to his father's pride and the medium income of a St. Mungo's Healer and an intercontinental apothecary supplier.
The Knight Bus rolled to a stop at the base of the mountain, right in the center of the intersection of the only two main roads in the entire valley and the conductor, and elderly, bespectacled man by the name of Louie Shunpike nodded goodbye to Remus.
Remus stood up and, motioning for the others to follow him, hopped off the bus. All of their trunks and James and Amelia's owls had already been sent ahead, so the mile long walk from the spot where the bus had left them to the manor was an easy one with only a few satchels to carry.
As the five friends gamboled down the road Remus leaned his head back and took a deep breath of that fresh Cumbrian air; god it was good to be home. Not even the impending full moon in three week's time could put a damper on Remus's high spirits that day.
Amelia's voice intruded on his thoughts. "Wow! Remus!" He looked around to find her staring in openmouthed surprise. She had not been expecting the grand country house that stood before them…Remus had described it as 'a small place in the middle of nowhere', and to a girl born and raised in the heart of London, the ancient building with it's ivy-covered walls and soaring turrets was almost as surprising to her as Hogwarts had been on their first day six years ago.
He grinned. He was home.
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Several hours later, after having all been kissed and hugged and fretted over by Remus's mother, the five young witches and wizards lay in the soft grass beneath a weeping willow whose branches danced over the portion of the Ulls River that cut through the Lupin's estate. It was turning out to be an easy afternoon; it was just now about five o'clock and the last hour or so had been spent with Lily tracing cloud shapes in the sky with her wand and Remus reading aloud to Amelia and James from an ancient tome of tales about goblin wars in the early fifteenth century. Sirius was busy napping under a mulberry bush at the water's edge. It was all very relaxing
Remus's ears perked up as the wind carried the sound of his mother's voice to him; she was calling his name from the back terrace, arms waving energetically.
"Be right back."
He handed the book off the Amelia and jogged off in the direction of the wide stone logia in the direction of his mother.
"Hello darling." She greeted him fondly.
Remus smiled up at his mother. In his mind there was no more a saintly woman anywhere than Aurora Lupin. In her healer's way she had nursed him back to health as a small child after receiving the bite that would change his life and she had never stopped loving him…as the younger Remus had once feared she might. No, Aurora was a certified angel, though Remus could see how her energies over the last few years were beginning to take a toll on her: the small lines around her eyes and mouth, the increasing number of gray hairs in her once solid golden mane (Remus took after his father Liget in looks).
"Aye Mum?"
"Remus dear, I have wonderful news! It's about Sophie Murphy." She said, referring to their nearest neighbor whose house (so like the Lupin's) was just visible through the trees bordering the Lupin's land.
Remus's brow furrowed. He hadn't heard anything about Mrs. Murphy for several years, not since she and her husband had divorced and he had immigrated to America with their daughter. "What about her?"
"Well she came running over to me last night so excited because it seems her daughter Seonaid has tired of only coming home to her mother on the holidays and wants to spend her last year of schooling here in England. Isn't that wonderful?!"
"I guess." Remus really couldn't be too moved by his mother's words as the last time he had seen Seonaid Murphy was when they were ten years old and she had been clinging to her mother's robes, begging not to let her and daddy go to America without mummy.
"Now I will have none of that half-heartedness from you Remus Liget Lupin! This is one of the best days in Sophie Murphy's life, to have her daughter return from the Salem Witches' Institute, and I want you to be as welcoming and cordial to that girl as is humanly possible!"
"Mother, I barely remember her!" And this was true. When Remus tried to imagine what Seonaid must look like now, his mind conjured up not the seventeen year old woman she would have become, but instead an image of the child she had once been: a tiny, freckly imp with gingery hair in two long messy braids forever getting caught on branches and thistles in the meadow.
"Oh don't be ridiculous Remus. You and she used to play sometimes."
"That was almost eight years ago mum."
"I don't care Remus, you are missing the point-"
Remus quickly intervened before his mother could get her full, and considerable, ire roused. He held up his hands in an appeasing fashion. "Alight! Okay mum, I promise that if I run into her, I will play nice."
"That's all I ask for."
Remus's mother smiled down at him one last time, then turned back into the house while her son half ran, half walked back across the sloping lawn to his friends.
Remus's gait slowed as he drew nearer to the group and their voices reached his ears. Evidently, Sirius was pleading with Amelia to perform some sort of traditional Mediterranean wedding dance, to which she was profusely refusing, saying that it made her feel silly. Hence Sirius insistence that she should dance; he loved it when she blushed
Remus halted just outside of the orb of his friend's welcoming circle. Happy as he was that his two best friends had found a pair of incredible women, his happiness was quite often stained by jealously. Because of what he was, he could never honorably ask a woman, any woman, to share a life with him. These ideas had been constantly in the back of his mind ever since he had begun to notice women at the age of fourteen, but never had it cause him as much pain as it had in the last few months.
The beast that dwelled deep inside him would be with him forevermore. Never would he be able to, honorably, to ask a woman to stay by his side. He had once maintained this idle notion…until an episode that had occurred just that past autumn, through which Remus had finally come to terms with the fact that he would never be able to keep a woman and be completely truthful with her, as a gentleman should be.
It had been just the previous fall when Remus had met and become instantly enamored by the young Ukrainian cousin of a shopkeeper in Hogsmeade. Tasya had been a simple beauty, just a year or two older than him, with sleek dark hair and wide blue eyes that had mirrored the wonder of the Ukrainian planes on which she had been raised. Remus would never forget that supple, swinging walk of hers as she had moved through Scrivenshafts Quill Shop that first fateful day in October.
The attraction had been swift and mutual and before Remus could stop himself he had allowed James to talk him into borrowing his invisibility cloak to sneak out of the castle in the middle of the night to meet her for a quick kiss. Their liaison had progressed quickly, perhaps too quickly, and soon enough Remus had begun feeling unrelenting pangs of desire for her at his every waking moment. It had actually been Tasya's idea to use the Shrieking Shack to christen their LOVE, and a fine idea it had seemed, for Tasya had not believed the rumors of the haunted-ness of the building and Remus, for obvious reasons, knew the rumors to be untrue. It had all seemed a dream.
The tragic fall back into reality had occurred one day not long after Tasya had first broached this idea with Remus, when he had been sitting with James, Sirius and Peter in the Three Broomsticks during a Hogsmeade weekend and Tasya, then employed by Madame Rosmerta as a barmaid, had overheard Remus mention something about planning to be in the Shrieking Shack by nine that very night and she had misunderstood it to mean that that was the night that Remus would come for her.
She in turn had then planned to be waiting to be waiting for Remus when he arrived, and had not been at all prepared for the horrific scene that would erupt around her.
Because that terrible night in November had been the night of the full moon.
Tasya couldn't have known, Remus couldn't have controlled it, none of them could have stopped it. None of them cold have been prepared for an aroused Ukrainian barmaid to be waiting for a lover who wouldn't come, at least not in the form she had expected.
Instead she had come face-to-face with the deadly creature that is the werewolf.
It was said for a long time afterwards that her screams had woken the village and kept small children from peaceful sleep for days. Had not James, Sirius and Peter arrived just in time and been able to detain Remus while Peter returned to human form to rush the still screaming Tasya out of the shack, Remus would have torn her throat out, and not even have been able to remember it the next day.
The worst of it was that the situation might almost have been salvaged had not Peter, in his haste to quiet the still screaming Tasya, sputtered at her not to yell because there was no danger; Sirius and James could easily keep Remus under control.
Unsurprisingly, this didn't help. Tasya's screams petrified screams only increased when she learned that the man she would have let be her first lover had been keeping such a terrible secret. Finally Peter was forced to perform a poor stunning charm on Tasya and then wait for one of the others to arrive.
Remus learned this later, a half day later to be precise. It was during one of their free periods when Remus was hustled up to the owlery by his three friends and he was told about the rest of the night.
It transpired that Sirius, in dog form, had lured Remus away from the village into the nearby mountain foothills whilst James had returned to his human form to find Peter cowering beside the still stunned Tasya. James had carried her back to the little loft above the Three Broomsticks that Madame Rosmerta had given her. He had revived her, given her a quickly conjured calming draft and somehow convinced her not to tell anyone what she had seen.
But nothing could convince her to stay. By sunrise she had gone from Hogsmeade on a broom stolen from Madame Rosmerta and by noon she was gone from Britain all together.
The incredible pain that had wrenched through Remus after that awful night had sent him into a terrible depression that his friends feared would never lift.
But finally Remus had come to a place where he had overcome the pain of losing his Ukrainian paramour in the face of his true beast. Though the continual low buzz of pain of knowing he would never find a lover still kept him awake at night.
Remus shook his head like a dog trying to rid its ears of water and forced himself to walk smiling back through the curtain of willow leaves to the place where his friends sat laughing and in love.
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Barely half an hour had passed before Remus's mother came upon the five under the willow, a wide, beautiful smile gracing her angelic features.
She looked around at all her young guests. "So I suppose Remus has told you all about our neighbor's good news!"
There was a general murmur of ascent from the assembled crowd.
"I just got an owl from Sophie Murphy. Her girl Seonaid has arrived home and she might be coming over to say hello sometime today and I hope you all will be especially nice to-"
Mrs. Lupin broke off and her head turned as the sound of hoof-beats came floating across the glen and quite suddenly a horse burst through the trees on the horizon.
The roan stallion moved swiftly towards them following the flow of the river, lead by a petite woman riding sidesaddle. As they came nearer Remus realized that the tiny, red-haired woman was none other than the neighbor he was supposed to welcome home.
She rode up to them with a practiced ease and dismounted smoothly to smile nervously at the crowd of witches and wizards who had risen to meet her.
Remus was stunned. Seonaid had blossomed into a true beauty; her russet curls, which were slowly beginning to fall free of the pins that had held them in place during her ride shone under the early afternoon sun. White and teal robes covered her petite, perfectly rounded body, and impossibly creamy skin set off soft hazel eyes shot with gold. There was a sharpness to her features; a pleasing wit sparkled in her eyes and shone from her charming smile.
Remus's heart gave the tiniest flutter at that smile.
"Hello Mrs. Lupin." Her voice was nervously tentative, though Remus was certain he could hear a hint of the gay laughter that had encased it as a child.
Remus's mother was immediately all smiles and hugs. She held Seonaid's face between her slim white hands and kissed her on each cheek intoning loudly, "Seonaid! My darling child, look at you! Look how you've grown! You've become a young lady! It is so wonderful to see you."
Seonaid smiled with a little less nervousness than before. Remus's mother released her and turned to her son, one had extended in his direction.
"And I'm sure you remember my son, Remus."
"Welcome home Seonaid," he murmured. Without knowing what prompted him, Remus's hand moved out to clasp Seonaid's small hand in his much larger one. A sudden warmth spread up from the place where they touched and her eyes flew up to his face.
She blinked once, smiled prettily and said, just as softly as he, "Thank you, it's good to be home."
Now the others were swarming around Seonaid, shaking her hand and welcoming her home. Remus was suddenly very proud of his friends. When they disbanded again, Seonaid was all smiles. Mrs. Lupine gave them all one last satisfied look and departed.
"Would you like to join us?" Lily said, indicating with a sweep of her hand their grassy haven, the book of goblin tales and Sirius's feet, just visible from where they poked out from under the mulberry bush.
"I'd love to."
They resettled themselves into the grass under the willow and Amelia resumed reading at the place where she had left off, halfway through a thrilling tale that was the goblin equivalent of Beowulf.
Remus leaned his back up against the base of the willow and let his mind wander somewhat as Amelia read from the book in her small rough voice. A gentle breeze had begun tap sweep through the valley, rustling the vines of the willow. Remus watched in rapture silence as one of the spidery vines was amen hold of by a particularly strong gust of wind and became entwined in Seonaid's red chignon. The light green of the willow practically sparkled against her curls and Remus had to master the impulse to reach out and remove the offending leaves from Seonaid's hair, thinking it best to leave that action to her, as she was now doing.
He sighed. It was somehow surreal to be sitting so casually beneath a willow on a sweet summer's day with a woman he hadn't seen for almost seven years. Seonaid seemed so changed in looks and mannerisms that he felt he barely knew her. And yet…there was also the lingering familiarity of their somewhat scattered childhood together. He began to study her in earnest.
She was as diminutive as ever, but now her pettiness leaned more towards sensuality than immaturity. Perfectly rounded breasts were just visibly outlined through the folds of her white and teal robes. And that mouth, that incredibly sultry mouth, taunted Remus with the idea of how soft it must be.
Quite suddenly, as though she could feel his gaze upon her, Seonaid raised her eyes from Amelia to Remus. She cocked one elegant brow in questioning amusement and immediately Remus closed his eyes and begun to feign sleep.
Had he kept his eyes open, he would have seen Seonaid's small smile of pleasure.
Amelia read on through the afternoon through tales of goblin love, betrayal and war. When her voice tired she passed the book off to Seonaid, whose smoothly lyrical voice filled the dozing Remus's half-dreams with visions of joyous laughter and the familiar purr of a lover.
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Well, there's the first chapter of "Of Honor and Angles" I hope you enjoyed it, tell my what ya think! This is gonna be a rather quick fic, so hopefully I will be able to update quickly.
Ciao, Lovers!
Belle Mortre.