Six
Amy Elizabeth
Disclaimer: All characters, locations, and terminology belong to J.K. Rowling, no infringement or financial gain intended, direct quotes footnoted.
There were six people missing, he had to keep reminding himself, six. He felt a slight twinge of guilt as the thought came unbidden again that he was really scanning the skies for one. It was his wife after all.
When they had planned the mission, all those weeks ago at the Burrow, Lupin had felt a small gratitude that his wife's portkey was scheduled to arrive before him. That way, he would be greeted with the certainty of her survival. However, after the ambush, those slightly selfish reassurances made it even more maddening that he arrived to an almost empty Burrow.
Though unable to tear his eyes from the sky Lupin noted, in his periphery, Harry and Ginny join him, Hagrid, and Hermione in the yard outside the dimly lit and anxious house. How must it be for them, Lupin thought, to be waiting on not one but two brothers. Yet, even as he reminded himself of their anxiety, he couldn't stop looking for a feminine form streaking towards the house; his wife, his newlywed wife.
Irrationally, Lupin felt that he could have flown to Muriel's and back in the time he'd been waiting. Yet he couldn't tell if it had been minutes or hours since he'd returned George to his mother. George. Lupin felt a pang of guilt. He knew guilt over his injury was unfounded, there was little anyone could do in an aerial ambush but try to keep each other alive, but he knew it wasn't so much George's ear that tugged on his conscience but instead that, at the moment George cried out from the attack, Lupin still had a guttural instinct to stay, despite the injury, and make sure his wife followed him out of the fray. It had been momentary, fleeting, but he couldn't shake the knowledge that it had occurred. Now, as immensely glad that George was resting safely with his mother as he was; he was just as immensely worried that after he had left his wife had been unable to do so. With thirty or more death-eaters, Lupin knew the morbid improbability that everyone had survived the night.
A shock of movement caused Hermione to jump and Lupin quickly followed her gaze to the bushes along the edge of the fence. He peered along them, trying to discern movement, while Hermione, growing tired of being disappointed by wind in the leaves, turned back towards the sky.
And that's when she screamed. A dark streak tumbled towards them, a broom being barely held under control by a young, terrified witch. His wife. As the dust settled from her landing, the terror in her face abated greatly as she locked eyes with his.
"Remus!"1 she stumbled off her broom and launched herself at him. And yet, even as he felt her chilled hands grasp his neck, her face burrow into his chest, and the rapid, erratic beating of her heart he could not shake the tension that had plagued him since arriving before her. He was unable to form words and settled on tightening his arms around her fiercely, as much in relief as in residual fear.
"Ron was great" 2 Lupin registered his wife's release on his neck as she turned to her companion. Lupin, however, released from his wife's abrupt arrival and life confirming grip finally regained his sense of speech.
"So what kept you? What happened?"3 Lupin was distantly aware that his voice sounded harsh, angry. He knew it was not directed at her, but at his own fear that she had not survived and the guilt that his worry, until she arrived, was directly almost solely towards her.
"Bellatrix" The harshness in his wife's voice was unmistakable, "She wants me quite as much as she wants Harry, Remus, she tried very hard to kill me. I just wish I'd got her. I owe Bellatrix. But we definitely injured Rodolphus…Then we got to Ron's Auntie Muriel's and we'd missed our portkey and she was fussing over us…"4 she tried to add a lightness to the end, joke about her delay, to belie her ominous words about her own aunt with the overbearing actions of Ron's. At the sight of her husband's tensed jaw, however, she stopped. As she was brought up to speed on the injuries, the still missing, and the reunion of a mother with her son Lupin resumed his scanning of the skies, with his hand firmly on his wife's hip. They didn't have to wait long as the last two, and their thestral, landed in the safety of the Burrow.
The last two. Of the four.
And as they all stood in the kitchen of the usually warm, inviting home, reeling from the betrayal and horror of losing a friend Remus felt his deep grief mix with a selfish, painful happiness that he could feel his wife's warm body pressed against his as she cried.
1 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pg. 76
2 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pg. 76
3 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pg. 76
4 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pg. 76-77