I'm forever chasing after time, but everybody dies.
"Immortal" by Marina and the Diamonds
I.
He was going to keep them safe if it was the last thing he did.
James and Lily had to survive this war – they just had to. They were Remus' only proof that any sort of normalcy could exist beyond this chaos, that people could still get married and have kids and build a family even when the darkness was settling upon all of them like a thick cloud of ash.
Remus had found out about the prophecy from Dumbledore himself; he'd gone to meet the professor for a briefing on his next Order mission, and instead found out that the Dark Lord was specifically chasing down two of his closest friends and their newborn child.
After that meeting, Remus had raged for hours on end. It wasn't fair. James and Lily didn't deserve this – didn't deserve to have targets over their head over some stupid prophecy that no one even knew was real.
So once all his anger at the unjustness of the world was expended, Remus resorted to what he did best, what he'd always done best when the four of them were in school and coming up with some elaborate scheme: he read. He combed through extensive books on defensive magic, looking for something, anything, that could protect the Potters.
It was 5 a.m., and Remus was getting dangerously close to falling asleep on his books and letting the dimming lantern extinguish itself, when he found it. The thing that was going to save James and Lily and baby Harry.
He met with Dumbledore the very next day, suddenly bursting with energy at this newfound discovery. The professor had, naturally, already known of the charm, but Remus' enthusiastic proposal was the thing that pushed him to suggest the idea to James and Lily.
Remus had known there were suspicions in this war – that everyone suspected a double agent in the Order – but he hadn't realized that anyone suspected him. And he especially didn't realize that Sirius of all people thought him a traitor.
He didn't know how to feel when Dumbledore told him that Sirius didn't want him to have access to Lily and James' house. He realized this meant he wouldn't be able to see Lily or James or baby Harry until Voldemort was no longer hunting them – but he could live with that.
As long as they were safe, Remus didn't care.
But Sirius thinking that Remus was working for You-Know-Who…
He wanted to be furious at Sirius for thinking so little of him, for thinking that he'd betray his friends – the same friends who were ensuring that Remus wasn't living in total poverty – to a man who thought his kind nothing more than half-breeds.
But he understood. It shook him to his core, but he knew where Sirius was coming from. Sirius wanted the same thing Remus wanted: for James and Lily to be safe.
So he accepted his fate to not know where his friends were, and focused all his energy and focus on the one thing that could reunite him with them: fighting for the Order and defeating You-Know-Who. He may have been putting his life on the line on a daily basis, but at least James and Lily were safe.
He was up north when the news broke.
James and Lily Potter: dead. Sirius Black: a traitor. Peter Pettigrew: murdered.
It was as if Remus' world imploded on itself all at once. All the people he loved most were gone. James, Lily, and Peter were dead, and Sirius was as good as dead to him – he'd betrayed their best friend and led the Dark Lord straight to their door. And after accusing Remus of doing that very same thing…
He was going to be sick.
The shock and grief turned to physical manifestations – it took every last ounce of Remus's strength to crawl out of the flimsy tent before he started dry heaving, fingernails digging into the frozen dirt underneath him, his already-frail body reacting in the worst possible way to the news that everything he'd known – everyone he'd cared about – had been swept away from him.
And so Remus lost everything for the first time.
II.
He was going to keep him safe if it was the last thing he did.
Sirius meant everything to him. There was the obvious reason for that: the fact that Sirius was one of his best mates from school, that he was the only thing still tying him to those much more carefree days of his youth, where his biggest worries were missing prefect rounds after full moon transformations and getting caught by McGonagall in the middle of executing some elaborate prank.
But it was so much more than that too. So much more than what other people could see.
Because other people couldn't see the way Remus crawled into Sirius' bed every night, the way that Sirius curled up against his chest as Remus wrapped his arms around him. The fact that this intimacy was the only reason Sirius' nightmares finally started decreasing in frequency and the only reason Remus was able to fall back asleep after one of his.
They couldn't see the way that Remus had come to rely on Sirius for, well, just about everything. The way that they'd lay on the couch at Grimmauld Place, talking through all the betrayal and confusion of the first war and everything that'd happened afterwards.
And then the full moons would come, and Remus would transform, but it was nothing like before. Not only did he have Wolfsbane Potion still being provided to him regularly by Snape, but he had an animal companion with him the whole time as well. It wouldn't seem like that big of a thing - having an Animagus around who could match both his animalistic physical form and human mental capacity - to someone who's never experienced a transformation, but it meant absolutely everything to Remus.
They weren't quite lovers, but they definitely weren't just friends either – and really, when the world is erupting into war for the second time in your life, who has the time to care about technicalities and labels?
The constantly-growing threat of yet another war may have been sucking the life and happiness out of everything, but that queen-sized bed inside 12 Grimmauld Place was their safe haven.
Until suddenly, it wasn't.
Because suddenly, instead of turning up to Grimmauld Place for a regular Order meeting and hoping nobody noticed that Remus stayed behind instead of leaving with everyone else, Remus got a Patronus announcing that Harry and his friends were in the Department of Mysteries, locked in a battle with Death Eaters.
And so instead of the normal night he'd been hoping for, Remus found himself Apparating to the Ministry, praying to Merlin and every other magical deity that he could think of that somehow, Sirius didn't get the same message. He wanted Sirius to stay behind – to stay where he'd be safe – because he knew that Sirius would be a prime target for any Death Eaters looking for vengeance, being the traitor that he was.
But sure enough, Sirius was there as well, clapping Remus on the shoulder when he'd arrived and making some overly confident statement about rescuing Harry and 'kicking some Death Eater ass.'
Remus had watched, out of the corner of his eye, as Sirius had gone charging at Dolohov – because of course he would, of course he'd put himself in danger without a second thought to protect Harry. That's who Sirius was.
And then he went off to duel Bellatrix, and Remus found himself intervening in what could've been a deadly interaction between Lucius Malfoy, Harry, and Neville.
Remus didn't know, then, that that brief moment would be the last time he'd lay eyes on Sirius. Or, at the very least, the last moment he'd lay eyes on him while he was still living.
But then Dumbledore had come storming into the room, and Remus breathed his first sigh of relief; the Death Eaters were fleeing, and everyone was okay.
They were going to make it through this. Sirius was going to make it through.
And then he spun around and watched as Bellatrix hit Sirius straight in the chest with a bolt of red light.
Remus swore that time froze in that moment, as Sirius's body fell backwards with an almost-artful sort of grace – Sirius would've loved that level of dramatic effect, wouldn't he? – until he was gone, gone forever, gone beyond the veil.
Remus's feet started moving before the logical part of his brain could remind him that chasing after Sirius was a fruitless endeavor. This turned out in his favour though, because Harry had started running towards Sirius at the same time.
And Harry didn't have the years of practiced self-control that Remus did, so he never stopped running. So instead of running towards where Sirius's body had once been, Remus had run towards Harry, grabbing the boy before he could do anything to put himself at risk.
After all this, he couldn't lose Harry, James and Lily's son and Sirius's godchild, too.
Harry was in denial – Remus knew that feeling intimately. Harry kept insisting that Sirius wasn't gone, that he couldn't be. But Remus knew the truth. He knew exactly what it felt like to have the most important person in your life ripped away from you, and, well, it felt exactly like this.
It felt like numbness and torture and paralysis and agony all at once.
And so Remus lost everything for the second time.
III.
He was going to keep her safe if it was the last thing he did.
He told himself, after Sirius, that he wasn't ever going to let anyone in like that again. He wasn't going to let himself love anyone in that same sort of way – not in the middle of this war – because he knew what it felt like to lose that, and he didn't think he could bear to go through it again.
But Tonks had worked her way into his heart with all the grace and fury of a wrecking ball, and really how could he not love her?
She'd made her feelings for him known ages ago, because Remus had been consumed by jealousy at her comments about Sirius – although, whether he was jealous at the time because he wanted her or because he wanted Sirius was never something he'd been able to fully discern.
But nonetheless, she'd quickly become the most important person in his life – and then she'd given birth to Teddy, and the two of them were instantly his whole world.
Now, they were that family that was supposed to prove that people could still find a way to lead normal, happy-ever-after lives in the midst of a raging war.
And they did that well enough. It helped, too, that Voldemort wasn't specifically after his son in the same way he was after Harry. They still lived in hiding though, much in the same way James and Lily had, because keeping his wife and his son safe was the most important thing.
The war didn't come to their doorstep until the very end.
They'd talked about what would happen if – no, when that day came. Tonks was going to take Teddy, and go to her mother's. She'd hated the idea of hiding from the action, but Remus had, eventually, convinced her that it was for the best.
Tonks was the better dueller, but she was also the better parent. Remus feared that, if he lost her, there was no way he'd ever be able to be the parent that Teddy deserved. That train of thought was the only thing that had gotten her to finally agree to stay out of harm's way.
The possibility of Teddy growing up without one of them was hard enough, but the possibility of him growing up without either of his parents?
To Remus – to both of them, really, the thought was unfathomable.
And so when the news came that Harry had appeared at Hogwarts, and all the Order members were called to join the battle, he and Tonks had said their goodbyes. Remus had kissed his wife and his baby boy, before watching as they Floo'd away.
Part of Remus' heart ached, because he knew there was a chance that he'd never see them again, but the other part of him – the other part of him didn't really care what happened to him, so long as the battle was won and his family stayed safe.
So he'd rushed into the Battle of Hogwarts with all his usual wholehearted dedication to the cause.
He'd even managed to show Fleur and Harry a picture of his blue-haired baby boy along the way.
But his duelling speed was slower from months of inactivity – a fact made abundantly clear to him when he duelled Dolohov and barely made it away from that fight alive.
If Remus could barely handle one Death Eater, there was no way in hell he could handle four. But that's what he found himself up against, somewhere in a secluded corner of the grounds.
And then, unexpectedly, a flash of bright pink hair.
Tonks had come anyway.
The two of them were there, and they were both trapped.
Amidst the battle, amidst throwing curses and shielding themselves from the four Death Eaters closing in on them, he had a moment of clarity. Of heart-wrenching, earth-shattering clarity.
They were both going to die.
It happened so fast that, if his adrenaline wasn't at an all-time high and his senses weren't at their peak, he might not have been able to piece together the chain of events that unfolded next.
A bright green light aimed at his chest. A blur of pink suddenly rushing in front of him. His wife's body falling to the ground like a ragdoll in front of him.
This time, there wasn't even a spare moment for his world to fall apart. Because as soon as his brain connected the scene in front of him with the fact that he had, once again, failed to protect the people he loved, another curse hit him in the back and the world went black.
And so Remus lost everything for the third and final time.