Chapter 60: The Scars
On their last day in Florida, Sirius made good on his threat to take Harry to Disney World. Harry and his friends chattered excitedly about this strange new adventure; Dora and Sirius were hardly less energetic and intrigued. Remus felt their delight washing over him in waves. It was good to see all of them looking so very happy.
He packed the moment away for the next time he had to cast a Patronus. (After spending years in the depths of misery because all of his happy memories had been tainted, he had developed a habit of making a particular note of it each time he felt truly, purely joyful. He'd never discussed it with Sirius, but he suspected that his friend did the same thing.)
And Sirius, now, was watching him.
"Well?" Remus questioned.
Sirius caught Dora's eye and exchanged an exasperated look with her. "You're right, he can't go out like that," Sirius said. "It's practically a violation of the International Statute of Secrecy."
Remus didn't know what either one of them was talking about. He glanced at himself in the mirror and didn't see anything wrong. "What are you suggesting?" he asked Dora. He was confused, but pleased that she was suggesting anything. She'd been nothing but polite for the past week, but her laughter had been saved for the teenagers and her earnestness had been saved for Sirius. He liked to feel her attention on him again, whatever the reason.
"You need to put on a short-sleeved shirt," she told him.
He wished that she had asked him for literally anything else.
"I think my scars would make us stand out more than we would prefer," he said as delicately as he could. Dora was made of stronger stuff than most, and she'd been properly prepared, but she had still recoiled when she'd first seen his bare arms and legs.
"You'll stand out more if you keep covered up like that when it's two million degrees outside and so humid that you need gills to breathe," said Dora. "People will look at your scars for a second and then look away. They'll stare if you dress like you're in Scotland in the winter."
"They'll attribute it to my being English."
"And is it really fair to the people of England for you to represent us this way?"
"It wouldn't be fair to the people of England for me to look like someone who— who—"
"Has scars?" she asked. "If anyone is rude enough to ask, we'll tell them you were in a fire. Cursed scars don't look that different from burn scars."
The half-pleading tone in her voice made his stomach turn over uncomfortably. He remembered it well from the future-past. She'd always insisted that their romantic partnership, their marriage, and their family could thrive even in a world that viewed him as a monster. He'd always thought that she was ignoring his perfectly valid concerns out of youthful naïveté.
He'd forgotten how annoying it was.
"Cursed scars do not look like burn scars," he told her. "They take the Statute of Secrecy very seriously in the United States, and any Muggle— or No-Maj— who looks at me will know that—"
"That magic exists?" He stiffened. It wasn't Dora who had answered. It was Harry. He hadn't even realized that Harry and his friends had come back into the room. As much as he hadn't wanted to argue with Dora, he wanted even less to argue with Harry.
Harry lounged against the bed, green eyes guarded behind his glasses. "I went to a Muggle primary school for six years, and no one ever said 'look at that scar on his forehead, there must be a whole parallel society where they fly around on broomsticks and brew stuff in cauldrons."
"To be fair, he went to primary school with a lot of duffers," said Ron, and Remus wasn't sure if Ron was trying to support him or just winding up Harry.
"You could just try wearing normal clothes in front of us first," suggested Ginny. "If any of us faint in horror, you'll know that you'd better cover up."
He supposed she'd outgrown her shyness right around the time she'd turned fourteen the first time around, too.
It felt much too much like the night in the Hospital Wing. The night Dumbledore had died. The night Harry had revealed that Severus Snape had put a target on the Potters' backs. The night that Bill Weasley had been mauled beyond recognition. The night that half the Order had taken time out from trying to save the world to weigh in on Remus' romantic life and ignore the realities of living as a werewolf.
He'd wanted to do better this time. He'd taken every precaution. It hadn't been enough.
"Thank you, Ginny," said Remus.
"You're welcome, Professor," she said sunnily.
He sighed. He wasn't ready to walk around half-dressed in public, but he supposed that he could at least take the initiative to diffuse one of the secrets that thickened the air. "Ginny, sit down, please."
She obediently settled herself on the bed next to Harry, face aglow with interest and seemingly not at all concerned with what Remus was about to tell her.
"How much did you overhear?" he asked.
"Just that you have a bunch of scars so you want to dress like it's Scotland in the winter."
"Before I tell you this, I want you to be aware that you will never be alone with me while we're here, or when you're back at Hogwarts."
"All right," she said, looking at him as if he had suddenly grown three heads.
"And I'm going to ask you not to share this secret with anyone who is not on this trip. I shall not, of course, compel you."
"I'll compel you," said Ron. "I'll smother you in your sleep if you get us stuck with another Gilderoy Lockhart."
"You're not making any sense," said Ginny to Ron. "Not that that's abnormal, mind you. I just thought I'd mention it."
Remus rolled up one of his sleeves. Every one of the children gasped, even Harry, which Remus found mildly gratifying. It was nice to be reminded that he wasn't crazy: his uncovered skin was, in fact, a revolting sight.
"What happened?" asked Ginny.
"These are scars from the teeth and claws of a werewolf. They're cursed wounds, so they can't be healed."
"You fought a werewolf?"
"In a way. I am a werewolf. I was bitten when I was four years old, long before the invention of Wolfsbane Potion. In order to keep me from biting other people, first my parents and then my teachers were forced to lock me up on nights of the full moon. It is in a werewolf's nature to attack, and since I was separated from other people, I bit and scratched myself."
Ginny shrugged. "I suppose that explains why you're ill about once a month and your lesson on werewolves was the most boring one all last year."
She was awfully calm. Even Dora had been more worried. "Did you already suspect?" he asked her.
"The rumor I heard was that you have a blood curse that someone hexed you with during the war against You-Know-Who. This isn't that different."
"And now that you know the truth?" he prompted.
Another shrug. "I'm good at keeping secrets."
Dora clapped her hands. "Well, now that that's settled you can go downstairs to the shop and buy a short-sleeved shirt at least."
Sirius, who had been watching carefully from the back of the room, pointed at Hermione. "You go with him. Make sure he does it. Just charge it to the room. Buy yourself whatever you want, and charge that to the room, too. Buy yourself two things if you can get him to buy one of the shirts with the goofy dog on them."
Hermione nodded briskly, and so Remus found himself shopping for clothes with a determined teenage escort.
"How has your summer been, Hermione?" he asked, hoping to restore some semblance of normalcy to the whole ridiculous situation.
"I finished my homework first thing," she began. "I went to visit Viktor for a week last month. The parks in Bulgaria are really beautiful. I wish I'd known earlier that we were coming here or I would have read more about it. It's hard to believe that Walt Disney wasn't a wizard, and did you know…"
He listened with interest to her recitation. It was hard not to appreciate Hermione's intellectual curiosity and thoroughness.
In the store, he let her persuade him to buy the dog shirt (was this Goofy fellow really a dog?) so she could justify the second book she wanted, and so Sirius would be amused.
Ever since Harry and Dora (not to mention Dumbledore and Snape) had learned the truth about the life he'd been leading for the past two years, he had felt exposed all the time. He might as well add literal exposure to the metaphorical sort.
They took a boat to the amusement park. There were few other people along for the ride, and all of them seemed to be minding their own business. Remus noticed that despite the heat, one of them was wearing a shirt that covered his arms. He was inclined to point it out to Dora— after all, Muggles couldn't protect themselves from a sunburn with a simple charm, so there was a perfectly valid reason that they might choose not to expose their skin— but he stopped himself. There was no use in choosing to argue now when he hadn't bothered to argue before.
And he rather liked the feeling of the sun and air on his arms. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been outside without covering himself. That wasn't terribly out of the ordinary for a wizard; wizards wore robes, and robes covered everything. He hadn't even thought about it for years. It hadn't felt like a choice since childhood, when swimming in the Black Lake with all of his classmates had been very much not an option. (Swimming in the lake near James' parents' property with all of the Marauders around to help in the unlikely event that anyone else came within miles of them had been fine. It was one of his fondest memories.)
The first incident occurred when they joined a crowd of people pushing their way through the gates. A child demanded to know what was wrong with him; Remus replied that he had been burned in a fire; and the child's mother shushed her. Over the next few hours, several other children stared and a number of adults flinched. Hermione was kind enough to glare at the one man who dared to point at him.
Harry and Ginny dashed around attempting to try every thrill ride that mimicked flight or jangled their brains. Sirius and Dora, too, wanted to do anything that gave them an excuse to scream or take a risk— real or pretended.
Hermione and Ron were less impressed. Hermione announced that she didn't enjoy feeling as if she were about to die and that she only flew through the air or fought dark wizards when she absolutely had to. Ron at first tried to keep pace with Harry and Ginny, but slowly began spending more and more time wandering away from the rides with Hermione, muttering about Muggle nutters under his breath.
Remus didn't really care whether he rode the roller coasters or not. He agreed to ride each time Sirius pestered him; he agreed to skip the ride each time Hermione pointed to some decoration and wanted to speculate about how Muggles had recreated magic so well (or poorly).
Late in the afternoon, Hermione decided that she did want to ride the roller coaster rising above them because she wanted to see how accurately it portrayed the yeti who lived at Mount Everest. Ron told her that she had never seen the yeti who lived there, or any yeti at all, so she couldn't possibly make a comparison. Hermione ignored Ron completely, and Ron raced to catch up with Harry, asking Harry if they could make sure to sit in the very front row.
Ron and Harry did, as it happened, manage to claim the front row. Ginny and Sirius climbed in behind them, laughing as they did. Dora reached out to Hermione, who looked slightly green, and helped her into the next row.
That left Remus alone in the fourth row of their mock train car. He didn't think much of it; a group of three teenagers were ushered in to join them. Two would sit in the last row; one would sit beside Remus.
She looked at him and screamed. "I'm not riding with him! He's probably contagious— look at—"
Remus stepped out of the train.
They were not going to have a breach of the International Statute of Secrecy because of him.
They most especially were not going to have a breach of the International Statute of Secrecy because of him on the last day of Harry's summer holiday.
They were not going to have a breach of the International Statute of Secrecy a week before Hogwarts started its new term and Remus would have to see Dumbledore and Snape on a daily basis— if he wasn't asked to step down for having a hand in a second international incident in less than a year. And Dora was here, too, he realized; it wouldn't do for her to annoy MACUSA so soon after annoying the magical governments of Denmark and Serbia by killing Igor Karkaroff.
Dora somehow (Remus suspected that "somehow" was in fact "non-verbal magic") disentangled herself from the ride's safety bar and jumped out of the train as it started to move. She landed next to Remus, her face flushed and her hair even redder than it had been to start the day.
The train attendant— what on earth were the employees around here called?— rounded on the two of them. Remus wasn't certain whether she was going to scold them for leaving the train without permission or whether she was going to apologize for the girl's screaming (which truthfully hadn't been at all hurtful to someone who had been thrown out of homes and jobs for being a werewolf). He decided not to wait and took Dora by the arm. "We'll leave," he said hastily.
"Please don't," said the train attendant. "We'll put the two of you on the next train, right in front."
"Thank you," said Dora, suddenly sweetness and light and squeezing Remus' arm tightly. "They're only burn scars," she added in a not-unfriendly tone.
The train attendant nodded and subtly directed her gaze to a child in a wheelchair who was approaching with his family. "We do not want to send the message that anyone isn't welcome," she whispered. That, more than any curiosity about the ride, made him smile and thank her.
When the next train arrived, he stepped into it, still holding onto Dora's hand. The bar fell over them and he smiled at the idea of being trapped with her.
"If I'm going to be mauled by a yeti, I'm glad it will be with you," he murmured in her ear.
She smiled and his heart jumped as the train lurched upward on squealing wheels.
Fake birds uttered fake chirps of fear as a fake snow-covered mountain rose before them.
The artistry was very well done, of course; Filius Flitwick's own charmwork could not have made much of an improvement.
But everything felt terribly fake next to Dora, who was so very real.
Dora screamed— playing along, Remus knew, not remotely frightened— as the train moved up and down. The track in front of them ended in a twisted mass of metal; even Remus, who fancied himself not afraid of any sort of physical danger, gasped. Dora snickered next to him as the train flew backwards and was confronted with the yeti.
"Your mother was a troll!" Dora yelled.
Remus laughed, and was still laughing when the ride reached its endpoint.
The others were awaiting them just beyond the gate.
"Hermione got sick all over the twat who complained about you," said Ron gleefully. "It was great."
Remus looked swiftly to Hermione, but she showed no sign of lingering ill effects. If anything, she had a hard, proud look to her face.
Remus decided not to investigate further, but rather to be pleased that he and Hermione Granger were on the same side. "So, Hermione," he asked, "How much better do you think you could have done with magic?"
"I don't know," she said thoughtfully. "The scenery was very detailed, wasn't it?"
And for the next two hours, they all pretended that nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Perhaps nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
In the evening, as they awaited a light show, Dora appeared at his side with a bag in her hand. "For you," she said. "This is as close as I'll get to saying I was wrong."
He looked into the bag and saw a lightweight long-sleeved shirt.
"You shouldn't have to put anyone at ease if you don't want to," Dora continued. "And if you'd rather be in Scotland in the winter, that's your business."
Even though she had taken on the Weasley bone structure as well as the Weasley hair for the week, her face was still heart-shaped and her eyes were still uniquely hers as she looked up at him.
The way she looked at him, too, was unchanged. She'd looked at him that way during their too-short marriage. She'd looked at him that way during their too-short springtime romance. She'd looked at him as if she admired him and enjoyed him and wanted to protect him.
"Am I still forbidden to suggest anything remotely romantic?" he asked quietly.
"Yes," she said just as quietly.
"You held my hand," he pointed out.
"We were in danger from a pretend yeti."
"You bought me a present."
"As an apology for nearly fucking up your day."
"You jumped out of a moving train for me."
"Aurors are trained to protect. It's an instinct by now."
"Your feelings for me are clearly unchanged," he said, almost dizzy with the boldness of the declaration.
"If we're going to have this discussion, we're going to have it at the hotel."
So he was pushing her to admit her feelings, and she was asking for privacy.
For the first time in a long time, Remus wondered if he was caught in some strange mirror-like hallucination between life and death. This couldn't be real.
But she was real. If she wasn't real, he would know, as he'd known when the apparition of Hope had appeared to him.
He enjoyed Dora's realness as they watched the light show and returned to the boat and the hotel. In the hotel lobby, Remus asked Sirius whether he and the teenagers would mind waiting ten minutes to come upstairs to the rooms.
"Ten minutes?" asked Sirius. "Surely you can do better than—"
"I will feed you to the flamingos outside if you finish that sentence."
Remus watched as Sirius thought of at least two dozen filthy retorts, decided not to share any of them, and promised that he most certainly would not interrupt them before the ten minutes were up unless it was an emergency.
Remus might have believed Sirius if Sirius hadn't sealed the promise with a deep bow.
As soon as Remus and Dora stepped into the room, the telephone rang. They glanced at each other with a complete lack of surprise before Dora answered.
"Is this the manager? I would like to report that Mr. Lupin has been eaten by a flamingo," she said.
"That is most disappointing," crackled the voice against Dora's ear. "It is so difficult to find good Defense professors, and I was so hoping to speak to him."
It wasn't Sirius.
It was Albus Dumbledore.
Dora passed the telephone to Remus.
"Headmaster," said Remus as courteously as he could manage.
"Remus! I'm delighted to hear that you have made such a complete recovery."
"Fortunately, the flamingo decided that I was not pink enough," said Remus.
"Regardless of what color you may be, I would like to see you tomorrow. The new term is starting soon and we have matters to discuss."
"Certainly," said Remus. "I will see you tomorrow."
"Wonderful," said Dumbledore, and his voice crackled away as suddenly as it had come. Remus returned the telephone to its resting place.
"D'you think he was proving that he could find us when we didn't tell him where we were going?" asked Dora, all Auror-style paranoia. Remus decided not to be distracted by how attractive paranoia looked on her.
"It's possible," he admitted. "But how difficult would it be to find us? We didn't attempt to hide. One question to Molly Weasley about where her two youngest children are, and he'd have everything he needed to contact us."
"That's true," said Dora. She squared her shoulders and stood up straighter. "I don't suppose there's any reason to be concerned about whether Dumbledore wants to remind us that he's the most powerful man who ever lived, let alone whether he knows where we are."
"Then why is it on your mind?" asked Remus.
She settled into a cross-legged position on one of the beds. "What you told me about what happened in your past has been a lot to take in," she said. "It makes me look at everything differently. The possibility of avoiding a war, of sparing almost everyone I care about from pain… it's why I became an Auror in the first place. It makes me wonder how much everyone else has changed as a result of what you've done, because I know how much I've changed. Sirius and I discussed this the other day while you were talking to Harry. Sirius says he's the same person he was in your memories. But I'm not the same person I was in your memories. I don't want to be her. I don't want you to turn me into her. I want to be myself. I don't want anyone to have that kind of control over me."
"I would never try to turn you into someone you're not. I made certain that every step we took in our relationship was at your suggestion. You initiated the first kiss. You wanted us to socialize outside of Hogwarts. You made it abundantly clear that you wanted…"
She shook her head in frustration. "That's not what I'm talking about. I liked you then and I like you now. Fine. We connect. But I'm not going to lose myself to you. I'm not going to let myself love anyone so much that I'm not myself anymore."
He had to admit that he couldn't imagine the woman he'd fallen in love with before his death saying anything of the kind. "I can't claim that love doesn't change someone," he said honestly. "Every time I've loved someone, it's changed me. Perhaps you most of all. You and Te—"
Teddy's name was halfway out of his mouth before he stopped himself. He couldn't talk about Teddy now. He couldn't stand the thought of Teddy's mother not caring whether Teddy existed or not; no more could he stand the thought of Dora believing that he was somehow trying to groom her into a person who could be a mother to their son.
It was too late, of course. Dora sat up even straighter. "Me and who?" she asked dangerously.
There was no point in lying. He wanted all of his ersatz family to be able to live in a world with fewer secrets, not more. "Teddy," he said hoarsely. The name hurt in his throat, a small price to pay for the way he had traded away his child's life. "We had a son. He was born a few months after your father died. We named him Teddy."
She slumped, her face twisting with a dozen emotions, before she regrouped and sat up straight again. "No wonder you're so desperate to pretend that I'm her," she said, her voice more pitying than outraged. "You want your son back and I'm the only person who can give him to you."
"I'm not pretending anything!" he snapped. "And I certainly would love you whether we ever had a child or not! I didn't want Teddy, by the way. I thought that he would inherit the werewolf curse and rip you open from the inside at the first full moon. I thought that it would damn you forever to be the mother of a werewolf, just as it damned my mother! I asked you to end the pregnancy and you refused. You were disgusted that I even suggested it. For that first week, every time we saw a child you whispered in my ear that perhaps we should murder him because he might become a werewolf, what with Fenrir Greyback being on the loose. I was frustrated that you wouldn't take my concerns seriously and I was so convinced that your connection to me would be your downfall that I— I walked out on you while you were pregnant. Only for the few hours that it took me to come to my senses. After that— well, it wasn't always easy but we were as happy as it is possible to be when you're in the middle of a war, the government has fallen, your friends are dying, and your photograph is plastered on Undesirable posters all over Diagon Alley."
"How far up the Undesirable list did we get before it was over?" asked Dora in such a flat voice that Remus had no idea what she was thinking.
"Five," he told her in just as flat a voice. "Harry was always number one, supposedly for his involvement in killing Dumbledore. Hermione was next because she helped Harry run, and of course it infuriated them that a Muggle-born witch could be quite so clever. For most of that year, Voldemort's Ministry thought Ron was ill with spattergroit, but once they began to suspect otherwise, he was third. You met Lee Jordan when you were helping with my sixth years last term? He had an underground radio show called Potterwatch. Once the Ministry had wind of that, he was four. So the unregistered werewolf and the Auror married to him were pushed all the way down to five and six."
"I can't have done much good as an Auror if I was pregnant and in hiding," she said.
"You did more than most."
"I want to do more this time," she said earnestly. A tiny part of him wanted to scold her for having a death wish.
"There isn't going to be a this time," he told her. "And you have already helped protect Harry and teach students how to protect themselves."
"It's not enough." She uncrossed her legs and jumped to her feet to pace aimlessly about the room. "It's never going to be enough."
He wasn't sure what she meant.
He wasn't sure whether she knew what she meant, either.
To be continued.
Author's Note: Happy new year! Also, my apologies for those messages I didn't answer because I didn't realize that message alerts have been disabled for a month…
Author's Other Note: I wondered whether I would be called out for the Expedition Everest ride being an anachronism (it opened in 2006). The callout came six hours after I posted this chapter, so I'll explain myself.
It was a conscious choice on my part because I thought the witches and wizards would enjoy a ride centered around a rampaging yeti. As such, I ignored the timing even though I'm normally careful to make the pop culture references in this fic 90s-appropriate. If you must have an in-universe explanation, I blame it on the butterfly effect. Something Remus changed caused a chain reaction that led to Disney opening the ride nine years early. So there. Don't play with time if you aren't prepared for it to affect your favorite roller coasters.
Recommendation:
Shag Marry or Throw off a Cliff by eprime. It is story ID number 6407618 on this site.
Summary: Hogwarts-Era. The marauders play a silly game.
We've already established my fondness for silly Marauder one-shots, yes? Good, I thought we had. Anyway, be warmed: allusions to slash here, as well as Severus-hating by the Maurauders, in the event that either of those things is a complete no-go for you.