Disclaimer- I don't own it.
A singular blatent allusion to Remus/Sirius and another vague sex reference.
Enjoy! :)
When Wizards Ask
When wizards ask Remus what he is doing now that everyone he has ever cared about has been ripped away from him, Remus does not tell them he visits Holocaust museums. They only ask because they think its polite, and Remus is frightened that they might not know what the Holocaust is.
Sirius had known was the Holocaust was. Sirius had gone out of his way to know. When Sirius came across it in one of Remus' books, he had been so mesmerized that he had researched and read every bit of material on it he could. Sirius, raised in a world of pureblood tyranny, could not comprehend the idea that Muggles could be so cruel and unjust to each other. He did not understand the concept of supremacy between Muggles because he had been raised around supremacy over them. Despite his frequent claims, Sirius simply could not separate his mind from the image that non-magical folk were really just a big flock of untended sheep. The Holocaust helped him stop that.
Remus' and Sirius first date had been to a Holocaust museum.
When Sirius devastated Remus' world, broke it into fragmented little pieces of what it was before, dooming Remus to a lifetime of bone-shattering transformations and haunted days, Remus started visiting Holocaust museums. All Holocaust museums. Any Holocaust museum. He visits the ones nearby three, four times, dressed in his best Muggle clothes, which grow shabbier by the day.
It isn't the concentration camps that horrify him. They were terrible, yes, Remus knows that, but they are so alien and remote that Remus can't possibly wrap his mind around what has been done in those dust-soaked, blood-drenched places.
It is the before that scares him. The years of tightening security and rations and the destroying of Jewish shops in Germany that frightens him. It is the years of living in a constant state of unease, never knowing when you might be 'relocated' and never seen again. The idea that the Jewish and the Gypsies and the Witnesses and the homosexuals had all known that somewhere along the line, they too would be taken.
Try as he might, he can never shake the feeling that he is inexorably connected to this stage of the Holocaust, because no matter how he tries to deny it, if he closes his eyes and imagines his future, it is not filled with stable employment and bouncing babies, but with tightening restrictions and moons spent in chains and hungry nights. Remus can envision a future where the red W on his Ministry's visitors' badge is extended to a W on his wizards robes at all times, so that he wouldn't dare to deceive anyone, so that he isn't given any privacy or chance of a prejudice-free life.
It is hard to disconnect himself with this idea that he is one of them when he goes home and thinks about his ten N.E.W.T.S, even in Potions and Divination, his worst subjects, because he thought at fifteen that if he proved that he was exceptional he would be able to overcome lycanthropy. It is hard not to feel kinship with those lines of Jews waiting for food when he goes back to his graffitied flat and opens his cupboards to find a loaf of stale bread and realizes he has to save it because he has already had a slice today or waits in line for the bimonthly meal assistance at the Ministry, trying to hold his head up high because letting it sag would be admitting defeat, even when it means he has to watch everyone who walks by gasp and skitter around him.
It is impossible separate himself from the breaking of store windows when he goes to his job as a shelver at a bookstore in Knockturn Alley, where he gets half the salary his coworkers do and has to pray for no Ministry raids, because every time there is one the manager docks his pay, claiming that the Ministry deals out a higher fine because they employ someone like him. There have been four Ministry raids this month, and if he earns enough to pay his rent he will be lucky. If not, he will have to swallow his pride and his shame and go downstairs to one of his neighbors' flats to get on his knees in exchange for a ten pounder until he can.
When he is looking at the concentration camps, he thinks of Sirius. Azkaban is not really so different, except instead of being kept in by barbed wire and guns, the prisoners are locked in with their own minds.
Sometimes Remus wonders whether he is in Azkaban.
As Remus stares at the photo of starving children waving at him, he puts a hand to his ribs and feels with satisfaction that he in not as thin as them. As he leaves, he ignores the hollow feeling in his chest and slips a fiver in the recommended donation box, pretending as he walks by the welcome lady that it wasn't his meal money for the next week. He thinks, as he leaves, that Sirius must eat better than him.
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