Title: To Loathe the Twilight Moon
Author: Lady Altair
Summary: Nineteen years before Lily Potter died to save her son, Silvia Lupin tried. The short and tragic human life of Remus John Lupin, 1960-1962.
A/N: Oh, angst, I have not abandoned thee. Reposted 6/11/07 for formatting/grammatical issues.
John's beside himself, the stoic academic in him slipping away into the frantic caricature of a not-quite-father. If Silvia had not been quite so exhausted with all her efforts (really, she thinks, we've come up with ways to turn our heads into turnips, why is childbirth still so ridiculous?) she might've laughed at him.
Her heart stills a little in regret, looking up at her husband's anxious face, and she thinks, why can't people see him like this, like he is with me? All they could see was a disgraced professor and his once-student, fifteen years his junior, a young, lovely little thing too talented and bright to throw her life away on such a man.
To think she had thrown her life away for him, when it had so clearly been the other way around! John had ruined his career as a teacher, thrown away years of experience and work just when he had finally returned to his alma mater as an instructor…he had tossed it all away for her.
He's looking so pitiably pale, his hand tightly grasping hers. Another wave of pain weaves through her abdomen and Silvia obediently pushes. Just once more, they promise. Damn them! She craves the soft warm weight in her arms, craves the knowledge that she is finished with this endless labor. She tries to loosen her tight grip on John's hand, discovering that the vice her hand is in is not of her making.
He's white now, murmuring what might be encouragement but sounds like fearful rambling…"not long now, darling, not long, he's almost here, you're doing so well, I love you, Oh God, Oh God." His head ducks to his chest, his greying brown hair falling into his face as she examines him in the long, empty moment between the pains. She loves his hair, so much greyer now in only three years. She likes to take credit for each new grey, and he always laughs at her teasing. She'll paint his portrait someday; it should be soon, or she'll have to buy out Diagon Alley's stock of grey paints.
Three years. Is that all it had been? Yes, of course, they'd had their two-year wedding anniversary a few weeks ago, her 21st birthday just a month before that.
Seventeen she had been, not the Head Girl and not the perpetual delinquent, and not the eager student in the front, just the quiet girl with a pretty, easy smile who never turned in a paper that was not heavily illustrated and written in the finest calligraphy, for what were words if they were not beautiful? She smiled at her teachers as she turned in her assignments because that was just her way and especially so at the new Defense teacher, tall and lanky, brown-haired and so sad-eyed. It had been weeks before he learned to smile back, hesitantly at first but more so as time went on and Silvia could not understand why her marks kept sinking in the class.
"Silvia! Push, just once more!" the mediwitch is quite insistent and Silvia obeys. Something changes and something new begins and despite the pain and weariness and the sudden chill that falls into her bones, Silvia smiles, because there is something warm and soft and breathing in her arms and she has never been more in love.
It's somewhere between midnight and the queer sort of not-quite-dark that is the hours just before sunlight. Silvia's removed every clock in the house—the world's general opinion on time is not held in esteem by Remus John Lupin, and it's far easier to pull herself out from John's arms and the nice warm hollow she'd made for herself if she doesn't define it as "3:30 in the morning" but rather "my baby is hungry now, bugger the time."
Her ears are empty and her back cold—there's no shrill infant cry permeating the air and no warm bony-limbed husband curled up around her. She shrugs on her new set of terrycloth robes, a gift from her elder sister Calanthe (her siblings are the only ones in Silvia's family that'll speak to her anymore—John is too old and three of his grandparents are Muggles; Silvia's shamed the name Greengrass and doesn't much care, and neither do Cal or Peneus) on the day of Remus' homecoming with the note spellotaped to the box wryly informing her to get comfortable with it, that it was the height of fashion for the housebound new mum.
Vanity had long gone. A shower consisted of a three minute scrub while Remus grew fussy in his bouncy seat on the floor of the bathroom, and it wasn't as if he cared if she had time and energy to wash her face and comb her hair. Sleep itself was a luxury (and oh was it, John had come home from work one night to find her slumped face-first on the cluttered kitchen table while Remus had looked on rather interestedly from the blessed bouncy seat. She had borne red impressions on her face the entire evening, the letters "J", "K", and "L" stamped on her cheek by some gifted toy Remus had not yet grown into.)
The door to the nursery is slightly ajar, and Silvia halts just outside when she hears the soft tones of John's voice. She can just catch a glimpse of his back through the slit the open door provides, and she watches as the sliver appears and disappears. He's pacing, talking softly to his infant son. "Now, there, don't be expecting any soft little lullabies from me. I'll leave that to your mum, she's far more talented as such ventures. You really must be easy on her; all this is very new to her and she's so very young herself." Remus coughs quietly, that coded little cough Silvia knows to mean he's shifting in his father's arms, curling into the warmth of his chest. She knows his sounds so well, which cry means what, which whimper, which cough and gasp and crumpling of his face.
"Don't you laugh at me, young man," John scolds the infant teasingly, oh-so-gently and Silvia's heart seizes in a sudden rush of love and affection. "You are her very mirror, I can see it in your face already, and I can only hope you have that perfect smile of hers." Silvia smiles at this, leaning stealthily against the wall beside the door, content to listen for just a little while.
"I fell in love with her smile, you know. I'd spent my life fulfilling every possible qualification I might possibly need to join the Hogwarts faculty. Research, lesser teaching positions, publications. And I arrived there, having sacrificed everything for this one goal, and realized how very empty I was. How very alone and unfulfilled, my dream come true and rather unimpressive in the light of day. And then your mother…in my N.E.W.T. class, turned in her paper on the Intra-Romanian Vampire-Werewolf Conflicts of the 1920s. And she smiled at me, this guileless, bright, eighteen-year-old smile and I was quite sure I had spent my entire life working to attain my position at Hogwarts for the mere purpose of crossing paths with this most remarkable woman." Silvia can very nearly feel him shaking his head, the pause in his speech so characteristic of his particular idiosyncrasy.
She creeps back to bed, laying awake and attempting to feign sleep in a rather unconvincing manner; she can't overcome the happiness that seems to bubble through her, can't bite back her smile. She buries her face into her pillow instead. John quietly returns some minutes later, slipping in next to her. Silvia curls back into him as he wraps himself around her and kisses her shoulder.
"Thank you," he whispers to her. Silvia almost asks him "For what?" before realizing she didn't need to. She falls asleep only minutes later, the effervescent feeling of contentment, of her husband's face buried in her hair and the knowledge that her perfect son lay peacefully asleep just feet away, lulling her into warm sleep.
Remus is the loveliest little child, eternally affectionate, even-tempered, and eager to please. Silvia thinks John was biased in his judgment of his son's looks, and most everyone agrees with her; he has the curl of her smile (John has his wish), her eyes and a few indiscernible aspects about his face that clearly echo hers, but in his hair, his nose, the shape of his face, the boy resembles his father much more.
Silvia illustrates a children's book that's published right around Remus' second birthday. She's slightly shocked at the sudden realization that they're no longer pressed for money, her agent is being flooded with offers, with books and money and exhibitions. Somehow, those doodles in the margins of her essays have become something to fuel a life.
She and John decide to have another baby four months after Remus' birthday. Silvia is overjoyed with their new resolution; she begins another painting. She paints the full moon behind lavender twilight clouds.
Two weeks after that, she's in the garden, waiting for John to arrive home from work, and Remus is sitting on a blanket in the grass two feet away. It's twilight in summer, and Silvia can see the glow of the full moon; she thinks it's beautiful, she thinks of her just-completed painting, in her studio upstairs.
Then there's a dark shadow over the hedge, streaking across the lawn and Silvia reacts, diving towards her laughing, oblivious son as he giggles up at her, the black, silent shadow darting up behind him, white teeth bared in the half-light.
He's in her arms but she's not sure she was fast enough. Silvia feels absolutely no pain as the werewolf's claws rip through her arm, over her shoulder and down her back. Her son is in her arms, shrieking, frightened. There's blood on him, and she hopes, god, she prays it's hers. Another paw hooks across her back, and she loses her balance this time, toppling forward, her only thought for the toddler in her arms.
She thinks she hears John as she falls to the blackness that used to be the soft green grass of her garden, please god let it be him, and it doesn't matter if he saves her, doesn't matter at all, she'll trade her life for her son's right now, any day. And the world goes black.
When she wakes, there is pain. Her arms are ripped, clawed from shoulder to palm—no bites; Greyback doesn't care to change adults. They will never heal, and her hands will never be steady again. They will shake badly until the end of her life, and all of her great talent is gone. A quill, a paintbrush, a pencil in her hand will never again be any more than a mockery.
John saved them, just in time, everyone says. It wasn't really just in time. It was already far too late. She had already failed them both, her son and her husband, by the time John had come to hex Fenrir Greyback off her, Silvia is sure. John blames himself, for some careless comment he made that featured in the Daily Prophet, but Silvia is Remus' mother, and she was there. They agree to blame no one, but they both lie.
People mourn the ruin of her talent, because they cannot mourn her son aloud. Remus still lives, her bright, beautiful son still unchanged, still affectionate and happy, but they mourn for him the life he'll never have for that row of scratches on his chubby arm, so light that they didn't even bleed; naught but the shallowest of grazes. But they are fang marks and that makes all the difference. Silvia would trade both her arms…her life to give back what was taken from her son.
Not quick enough. But a second faster, had she been…Silvia tortures herself with the thoughts.
She screams when he changes for the first time, moonlight streaming into the warded little cellar, but she knows that this is not the end. There is no little grave, there is no date carved in granite. Her son is not dead. She will draw him a future with her useless hands, because he deserves that. He will grow up and, God help her, she would not have him be any less for her failure.
There will be no more children. She and John never again speak of a sibling, of a sister, of a brother for Remus. There is only this child, this son, Silvia's greatest masterpiece and greatest failure.
The Twilight Moon is Silvia's last painting, and the sad irony in the work makes it infamous; wealthy men make offers, anxious to decorate in another's tragedy. It is worth a small fortune.
With her shaking, useless hands, Silvia takes a knife to it one night while Remus claws at his own little cub body in the cellar
Silvia loathes the beautiful moon.
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