Title: A Better Year
Characters/Pairings: Remus Lupin

Forum/Challenge: HPFC Friends Competition
Prompt: TOW The Soap Opera Party (9.19) - Write about someone who feels alone

Forum/Challenge: TGS Back to School Event
Prompt: Getting your money: Write about a character using a Knut, Sickle or Galleon (10)
Opt-Prompt: (object) butterbeer (5)
Points: 15

World: Hogwarts
Word Count: 844

The years had not been kind to Remus Lupin.

His was mother dead from a Muggle illness, and his father was holed up in his childhood home. Lyall Lupin had once loved his son tremendously, but over time that had grown to resentment and, finally, loathing. Remus had not seen him since his Hogwarts graduation.

His friends were gone—James, Lily, Peter, Marlene, Mary, the Prewetts all dead from a war that Remus had just barely survived.

Although he wasn't sure that he'd call what he was doing surviving.

Every day he trudged to the Muggle grocer, worked his shift, and trudged back to the flat he shared with two other men.

He slept in a closet. Cheaper rent.

On his days off, he would hang around Diagon Alley. He never bought anything—he never had the means to—but he would wile the day away in Flourish and Blotts, perusing the latest releases in Defense and Magical Theory.

Mr. Blott always turned a blind eye when Remus settled on the floor with a particularly interesting tome. The bookseller had known Remus a long time, ever since his schooldays at Hogwarts; he knew the lad had fallen on hard times and did what he could to offer a small reprieve from the wizards troubles.

Remus, for his part, was grateful for this small mercy.

And the years passed, marked by painful moons and uncelebrated holidays.

And then it was the summer of 1993, and Remus was once again on Diagon Alley, headed toward Flourish and Blotts. But before he could make it to the bookstore, he found himself staring at a newsstand, the morning edition of The Daily Prophet proclaiming Sirius Black's escape from Azkaban.

He was older, he was dirtier, he was much, much crazier, but the man screaming out at passersby from the paper's front page was every inch Sirius Black.

Every inch the man Remus had fallen in love with.

Absently, he took a paper off the stand and started reading about his former lover's disappearance from the inescapable island prison.

"Oi!" The wizard tending the newsstand glared at Remus. "I ain't runnin' a charity here!"

Remus fished in his pocket and pulled out a few coins. A few Knuts, three Sickles. He sighed; he'd hoped to treat himself to lunch at the Leaky, but he'd have to make due with a butterbeer instead. He handed the man a Sickle and bypassed the bookstore for the pub.

He drank one butterbeer, and then another, as he learned that his best friend had vanished in the night. The prevailing theory was that Sirius had drowned in the North Sea, but given the lack of a body the Ministry of Magic was not taking any chances: they had ordered the Dementors to patrol the coast, looking for signs of the escaped wizard, and they recommended the British magical community be on the lookout for the fugitive.

Remus felt numb as he finished his second butterbeer. He dropped his last two Sickles on the bar for Tom and made his way to the nearest apparition point.

It was later that afternoon, Remus enjoying the rare peace of his flat as his roommates were both at work, when he heard a knock. He folded the paper—it wouldn't do for a Muggle to see the moving picture of Sirius screaming—and opened the door.

"Headmaster?"

"Mr. Lupin," said Albus Dumbledore in his grandfatherly tone. "You are a difficult man to find. I was hoping to take a moment of your time to discuss an opportunity with you this afternoon. May I come in?"

Remus stepped aside. He glanced down the hallway, wondering absently if Dumbledore had cast a notice-me-not on himself to avoid odd looks at his midcentury tweed suit. Seeing no one, he closed the door and offered the older man tea.

An hour later, Remus sat, stunned. A job? Teaching Defense? At Hogwarts? It was almost too good to be true.

But it wasn't. And to top it all off, Harry would be there.

Harry.

Remus closed his eyes and thought back to Harry's first birthday. All the Marauders and Lily, sitting around the dining room table at the Potter cottage in Godric's Hollow, laughing and giggling with the child. Sirius, eyes glowing with pride as little Harry reached out and cried, "Paa! Paa!" in what was, everyone agreed, the most adorable approximation of 'Padfoot' that ever existed.

Harry would be thirteen now. A teenager—only a few years away from being a man.

Remus had missed so much, he thought as he walked Albus to the front door, shook his hand, and promised to owl Professor McGonagall that week to discuss appropriate curriculum for each year. He had missed Harry's whole childhood. Would he have Lily's gift for potions? James's skill on a broom?

That he would be protecting Harry from Sirius—the boy's godfather, the love of Remus's life—was less exciting. But finally, finally, he would be doing something important. Something good.

This year, perhaps, would be better.