N/A: Upon reading 'The Chamber of Secrets' again and reading that Dumbledore posted an advert for the Daily Prophet for the post of DADA professor, I decided that I couldn't resist.
Disclaimer: All characters and places are the property of J. K. Rowling.
Job Opportunities
For the past two and a half days it had rained. Remus had hardly ventured outside his flat, confined to blankets and the electric fire while he hacked up his lungs. The week of May sunshine now seemed like a fleeting impossibility, the imagined highlight of an unsurpassably gloomy summer. Today, cabin fever had finally driven him mad and his insane need for air had taken him out into the driving sheets of English summer rain. As he wound through the sodden streets towards the Leaky Cauldron, Remus felt despair soak through him far faster than the weather. By the time he reached Fortesque's even the welcoming glow of the ice cream parlour couldn't lift his spirits. He felt utterly defeated, crushed by six months unemployment and the rapid swelling of the moon. A droplet of water slid the length of an old scar as he placed his last few coins on the counter.
"Tea, please." He hardly glanced up, watching instead the expansion of the puddle he was creating on the polished floor. Guilty fingers pinched his stomach.
"We've got summer berries today, if you'd like?" The chirpy woman behind the till smiled sympathetically at his dripping hair. "Nasty out there, intit?"
Remus nodded and looked such a sight that she was moments away from offering him a towel until the innate sense of propriety that governs the British in such matters prevented her. "I'll bring your tea over," she said instead.
There was the day's copy of the Prophet on the table, the front page adorned with a stern but relieved Professor Dumbledore, who's piercing blue eyes caught Remus off guard as they had Hogwarts students for generations. Remus glanced over the article and felt his heart contract painfully at every mention of his old school. Hogwarts had caught the best days of his life between its walls – there was no escaping that fact. He went to put the paper to rest when something in the corner caught his eye.
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
requires applicants for the post of
PROFESSOR IN DEFENCE AGAINST THE DARK ARTS
Possession of a full set of N. E. W. Ts is recommended but is not necessary
if a satisfactory level of proficiency can be demonstrated.
Salary to be fixed upon successful application.
Applications to Professor Albus Dumbledore,
Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorc., D. Wiz., X.J.(sorc.), S. of Mag.Q
Remus' stomach somersaulted. It was unthinkable. The likelihood of even an interview was so slim that it didn't bear considering. He drank his tea in a daze, scalding the skin clear off the roof of his mouth. Staring out into the rain he was not at all surprised to see his own gaunt, weary features replaced by those of his fresh faced, seventh year self who was staring woefully back at him.
"You should take it Rem." Sirius was already halfway through his strawberry sundae and had paused to gesture animatedly with his dessert spoon. "McGonagall told me there's a whole line of them clamouring at Dumbledore's door after Badminton made such a killing out of it, but he's offered it to you." Sirius was glowing with pride. It was radiating from him in great waves exactly as it had from James and Lily and Peter, his parents…For them, his success was blissfully uncomplicated. "Remus Lupin, youngest ever Hogwarts Professor. You'd be set for life, Rem."
Gangly and still clinging on to freckles and teenage acne, Remus stirred his tea with automatically, caught between a rock and a hard place. "What would we do?"
"About us?" Sirius shrugged, "God Rem, Auror training's got me out of the house 24/7 anyway and think of the holidays! Come on, Rem. It doesn't get better than this."
"But…" Remus stopped and turned to stare through the misted window into the rain. Hogwarts without them would be nothing but a shell. He'd be that batty professor, forever lost in better memories. He loved his school but it was love for what it had contained. The stone and glass of Hogwarts devoid of his friends meant very little to him. He didn't have Sirius' bizarre attachment to place. And then, then there were the transformations. Here, he had Sirius, he had Padfoot's great canine bulk. At Hogwarts there would be nothing and no one.
Nothing but good pay and lodgings, free food and if he should choose so, a lifetime's work.
Sirius lent across the table and placed his slim fingers over Remus' hand. "I don't want you to go," he said softly, "I don't want to have to fall asleep on my own as much as you, I don't want to revert to take away meals for one, I don't want to come home to an empty flat, I don't want to watch the full moon rising and know I can't be there for you but Rem, this is what you were made to do. Please, at least consider it. Don't work in dead end jobs for the rest of your life just because you're scared it won't get any better than now."
Entangled in the memory, an upsurge of regret rushed through every nerve and sinew in future Remus' body. Not a single one of his countless jobs had made it out of Sirius' "dead end" classification. Not one. He stared at the advertisement while his tea cooled, heat spiralling up into the air and creating dense pockets of condensation on the window.
"Alright," he said finally to the boy trapped inside the glass, "Alright."
"Why," said the blazing face of Albus Dumbledore when he appeared for their interview in Remus' paltry grate, "Should I give this position to you, Remus?"
Faced with those eyes, Remus' anxiously rehearsed responses flew from his head. For a moment he faltered, kneeling on the cold tiles of the fireplace in the briefly borrowed back room of the Leaky Cauldron. Dumbledore's flames crackled.
"I've got nothing left," Remus finally croaked, "It's just memories now."
"And you'd torture yourself by going back to the source?" Dumbledore stared out of the grate kindly as Remus disintegrated on the hearth. "You realise you'll be teaching Harry."
Remus looked up and his eyes were glistening, "Give me the post," he said. "You told me once you'd never met anyone more suited to it."
"And you turned me down."
Remus closed his eyes, "Give me the post," he repeated, "Please, Professor."
"The receipt of your successful application is already waiting for you on your doormat, Remus," Dumbledore smiled. "Our recent Defence Against the Dark Arts Professors have been something of a disappointment. You, on the other hand, I have absolute faith in." He paused, "Both you and Harry will, I feel, benefit from this. He is most remarkably similar to his father."
The grate popped and a penniless, teary eyed Remus Lupin was left Hogwarts' latest Professor fifteen years after he had been offered the post. Hundreds of miles away, an emancipated slip of a dog slid its bars and disappeared into the broiling waters of the North Sea and Remus, packing his memories with his clothes in his old school suitcase had absolutely no idea how solid they were about to become.