Summary: Teddy Lupin protests the werewolf laws.
Other Notes: written for barefootboys winter 08 challenge #21: civil disobedience. Sirius/Remus, slight and discouraged Remus/Tonks, and Teddy/OFC.
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, any of its characters, including and especially Teddy, Remus, Sirius, and Tonks, or any of its settings.
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Teddy Lupin's father was a werewolf. He had scars on his chest, his legs, his arms, scars that not even magic could heal. He had a band of identification numbers tattooed around his ankle. He was denied jobs, and he was fired, and he was turned away without a second thought. He sometimes called his lycanthropy his illness. Teddy never calls it an illness.
Teddy Lupin is a werewolf, too. His godfather is rich, so he gets the Potion his father could rarely afford, and he lives under the full moon as a docile wolf. Sometimes he changes his colors. He is red, green, blue. He knows that the wolf is an ugly creature and he vows to make it beautiful.
Teddy is an orphan. His parents are dead. His grandmother raised him; his godfather helped; he went to school with a second generation of war children who never thought they would become a third generation of war casualties. Their parents are known for forgetting, for moving on. Teddy thinks about the wars, both wars, all the time.
He is twenty-three this year and wants everyone to call him Theodore. They are always 'forgetting.' When his father was twenty-three, he was just leaving the first and greatest depression of his life, a time he would speak of to no one, and because his father is dead now and no one else ever knew, Teddy is unaware of this long ago and long buried crisis. He does not know that his father almost jumped from a bridge into icy winter waters. He does not know that what saved his father was not hope but anger and hatred. He does know about Sirius Black, but he does not know what the cold grip of a Dementor's touch does to a once-handsome face, or what prison cracked fingers feel like on pale, scarred, skin.
Teddy Lupin is a werewolf and his godfather is the most influential wizard in their world, and he does not get a string of numbers tattooed on his skin. He is lucky. He joins protesters outside of the Ministry and gets arrested, and his godfather pays the money to bring him home. He is lucky.
He wonders what years of Azkaban would do to him, but he does not find out, and he never finds out, and he is lucky.
Teddy was named after the war dead, before his parents too joined the war dead, and sometimes he thinks he sees ghosts, but in the mornings he wakes and realizes again the line he can draw between dreams and counterpoint reality. He closes his eyes and waits to go back to sleep. He thinks how cruel it is to be named after a casualty. He feels like a replacement, and a sorry one.
His parents were married during wartime, and there are no surviving pictures of them together as husband and wife. There is one photograph of them as children. His father is eighteen and his mother is five, and they are with Sirius Black and Teddy's grandmother, Andromeda. His mother is laughing but his father's smile is tense, and he keeps on looking over his future wife's shoulder, trying to meet Sirius Black's eye.
Teddy doesn't think his parents were ever in love.
Today there is another werewolf in his room, stretched up tangled up in his sheets. He is sitting at the foot of his bed and holding her ankle in his hand and tracing over the smudged numbers that she has tried to have erased. He tells her she is beautiful and she says he would be more handsome if he had a battle scar or two, and he tells her she is right. That evening, they blockade the Ministry doors. He shifts his features until they are moonlight-distorted, and she pushes up her sleeves to show where she has ripped into her own skin. They write each other love letters and pass them back and forth. They are quiet, and when they are arrested, they are silent, and when Teddy's godfather has to bail him out again, Teddy listens to the lecture with his ears closed. The girl spends a month in Azkaban and when she gets out she says she does not want to see him anymore. She says his fake scars disgust her.
Teddy's father never wrote love letters. Or if he did, they are lost now. Teddy has looked for them. He's looked for some sort of proof. But there's little to find, and for long periods of time, he loses hope and stops his search and pretends there is nothing to search for.
When he travels to France for the summer, he uses Wizard transportation but does not disclose his status. He transfigures his papers like he transfigures his face. It is that easy. He smiles as he passes through the Floo.
In Paris, he searches Wizard libraries for the Black family history. It is a history of pureblood aristocracy, dotted here and there with offhand references to traitor sons and rebel daughters, the cigarette burns of the London tree Teddy has never seen. At night, he is haunted by the ghosts again. He wakes up sweating at midnight and finds he cannot close his eyes.
He will fix his papers, he tells himself. He will change the color of his hair and his eyes. He will throw the Potion away, and with it all of his godfather's money. He will live his life proudly. He will be a teacher, like his father was a teacher, and he will take every risk and tell no lie. He will live proudly.
It's what his father would have wanted.