Previously in the Darklyverse: After having agreed not to have sex because of Sirius' complicated sexual orientation, Remus and Sirius changed their minds. Lily lay low in her flat with Sirius after announcing herself at graduation as having been involved in Elisabeth's and Millie's deaths; unemployed, she became the Order's de facto Healer, despite not having proper training. The Gryffindors' lives changed overnight when they began participating in Order raids on Death Eater attacks. The Order began work on a countercurse to Sectumsempra. Because of his lycanthropy, Remus couldn't find a job after graduation.
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August 30th, 1978: Remus Lupin
So he and Sirius are having sex now, apparently. Or—does it count if it's one-sided? Remus is still refusing to let Sirius touch him—he knows Sirius would reciprocate if Remus wanted, but he also is sure that Sirius wouldn't feel anything besides gross if he did. He hasn't really got the faintest idea what he's doing, still, but it feels nice, and it makes him feel closer to Sirius, and if that's the best he can get, Remus will take it.
Ever since it began, though, things have been—different—between them. Remus keeps catching Sirius staring at him when he thinks Remus isn't looking, and something about the softness in Sirius's face makes Remus feel like maybe, maybe, this whole thing isn't completely doomed to fail. Still, he's on his guard. He keeps noticing himself—almost avoiding Sirius, because if they don't spend much time together, maybe Remus can stop himself from getting attached to someone who's too straight to be with forever.
It's not really fair, how much sex changes things. If this is how Remus feels now, he can't even imagine what it would feel like if Sirius were to return the favor, and frankly, he doesn't really want to picture it: surely he'd just get even more attached, and it would be that much harder to let Sirius go when the time came.
And he knows the time is coming—knows it in his bones. There's no way that the uneasy arrangement he and Sirius have found will last for long. It just won't.
So it's a small mercy that Remus and Sirius are on different Order assignments at the moment: Sirius is on the countercurse to Sectumsempra, whereas Remus is helping James bolster the curse-identification spell with activity for Secrumsempra and other destructive spells that aren't necessarily Unforgivables. Lily and Sirius tend to host Peter and Dorcas at their flat to work on the countercurse, while Remus and James are already living together and make their living room double as a base for working on the orb. Alice isn't officially on the project, but she usually hangs out in the common areas when James and Remus are working, half listening, throwing out the occasional suggestion for what they can try.
"What we really need," James grunts, throwing down his wand on the coffee table next to the orb, "is to study the effects of Sectumsempra. Sirius and the others need it to devise a countercurse, and we need it to tap into its source code and incorporate it into the orb and, eventually, to test whether the orb is working, once we think we've got it down. But we can't do that safely unless we already have the things we're trying to develop in the first place."
Remus can attest that they're having a hell of a time trying to reverse-engineer the curse-identification spell without knowing more about how Sectumsempra really works, but they get their opportunity to test it later that week, when Dorcas and Fabian are watching the orb and Remus pops over there to compare notes about the curse with Dorcas. "Hey, Dorcas? Fabian?" he calls out, but there isn't any response.
It's only half past ten at night, so he doubts they'd turn in to sleep that early. Still, he goes back and knocks on their bedroom door, then cracks it open: nothing.
That's when he remembers that Benjy Fenwick is supposed to be on duty here with them tonight, and he's nowhere to be found, either.
Remus dashes back into the living room over to the corner of the room where Fabian and Dorcas have been keeping the orb this week behind a short curtain. He slides the curtain out of the way and peers into the picture it presents. He can't make out faces—everyone on both sides is wearing a mask of some sort—but there are two bodies bleeding out on the ground with a third stained red and thrashing in the air beneath the wand of one of the four Death Eaters on the scene. The other three Death Eaters seem to be laughing.
Oh, no. No, no, no, no.
Remus knows a lost cause when he sees one, so he has to be smart about this. Apparition is a lot harder when you've never been to the place you're going, but he stares hard into the orb before screwing up his eyes and visualizing where he wants to land. Two of the Order bodies are close together on the ground, while the third is off to the side and in the air. He aims for in between the two he can reach in one stretch, and he pops there, throws out his hands, and pops back in about three seconds flat.
Why, why hasn't Remus learned how to do the Patronus messenger thing yet? How is he supposed to get backup when owls are too slow and he doesn't have time to explain anyway?
Stripping the two wizards who came with him of their masks—it turns out to be Dorcas and Benjy—he casts a quick Episkey on both of them, knowing it probably won't do much good at all, and then spins on the spot, this time focusing on the ground underneath the place where he knows Fabian's body must be. This time, he's once again only in the room for a couple of seconds, but he's convinced in those few seconds that he's going to die here. He's going to die here, and his friends are all going to bleed out, and it's going to be the beginning of the end of the Order.
But he manages to grab Fabian and get back, and then he Disapparates once again and straightens up in Lily and Sirius's living room. "Lily?" Remus calls out a bit hysterically. "Lily, I need you. It—it's bad."
"We have got to get a proper Healer on our team," Lily grumbles, but her stark-white face gives her away. "Let's go. Who is it? Where are they?"
"Dorcas and Benjy and Fabian. They're at Dorcas and Fabian's place. I don't know if they… I just don't know."
Sirius comes, too, and he and Remus allow Lily to bark orders at them for the next forty-five minutes as she tries a patchwork of spells to get them cleaned up. She has them help her slow the bleeding on Benjy and Dorcas first, but when Remus moves to repeat the spellwork on Fabian, Lily yells, "Don't! This might be our only chance to try and figure out how this spell actually works. Keep doing what I showed you on Dorcas and Benjy, and I'm going to test some things out."
"Are you kidding?" says Sirius. "He could bleed out and die!"
"We could all bleed out and die, one by one, if I don't," Lily snaps back. "Do you really want that on your conscience?"
Remus doesn't pay close attention to what Lily is doing, but out the corner of his eye, he can see Fabian's wounds opening and closing and opening again like some kind of bizarre red lotus. He hopes she knows what she's doing, because if she doesn't…
It's touch-and-go there for a while, especially with Fabian, but when it finally looks like they might all make it out unscathed, Lily collapses back on her haunches and mops sweat from her forehead with a bloody sleeve. "They're going to be okay," she says quietly. "They're all going to be okay. This will help with the countercurse, but I still don't know how much longer I can keep doing this. Isn't there anyone who works triage at St. Mungo's who can help?"
"We can't exactly just waltz into the hospital and ask for volunteers," says Sirius. "But maybe we could find a way to get you some proper training."
"She's laying low right now, though," Remus points out, "because of—of graduation. Who could we find who would be willing to come to Lily's home and teach her without any real patients to practice on?"
"I mean… I have to get back out there sometime," Lily says with a sigh. "Some of you are Aurors, which have got to be almost as big of targets for Death Eaters as Order members, and you're not all hiding out at home."
"No, but you announced yourself as having participated in an attack on Death Eaters in front of Slytherins who might very well themselves be Death Eaters," says Sirius. "I'll bet you anything Snape is a Death Eater by now, and if not him, I wouldn't put it past the Carrows or Edgecombe or Ketteridge. Even if none of them are, I'll bet you anything that one of them would have told someone who is. They're bound to know about you by now, Lily."
"Then why haven't I been killed yet? It's not like I never leave the house, and word could easily have gotten around that I live with Sirius."
"Yeah, but it's different working out in the open somewhere that will go into your public record," says Sirius.
"How is that any different from marrying James when his location is known? I miss being able to live my life, Sirius."
"Enough that you're willing to risk that life?"
Lily sighs again. "Healer training isn't my first choice of how to spend my life after Hogwarts, you know, but I'm willing to do it to try to make sure I'm in a position to save my friends' lives if they need me. What happens the next time you bring me a body and I don't know what to do to save them? We're all taking risks by being in the Order—all of us."
"She has a point," says Remus quietly.
Sirius frowns. "I just want you to take care of yourself, Lily."
"I know. And I will. But I don't think this is the way."
Thereafter, they make a new policy: an extra person has to come on orb duty every night whose responsibility is to stay back, watch what's going on, and call for backup (or go in themselves) if things go south. Marlene's uncle, Doc, also gets a new assignment—teaching the young adults how to cast talking Patronuses to deliver messages to others in situations like the one that just happened. Being unemployed, Remus has plenty of time to practice on his own.
That's what he's doing when September first rolls around: working on his Patronus, breaking only to use the bathroom or get himself some lunch. He feels a strong, weird, frustrating nostalgia for getting on the Hogwarts Express, where he would patrol the cabins, buy sweets from the trolley, and see his friends for the first time since June. At Hogwarts, nobody cared that he was a werewolf: Dumbledore and Madam Pomfrey went out of their way to help him integrate into the school, and his friends were nothing but supportive. He got a bunch of O.W.L.s and almost as many N.E.W.T.s, and for anyone else, that would be enough to almost ensure employment after school was over. But Remus is a dirty, filthy werewolf, and nobody in the real world wants to get close enough to touch him.
He's used to spending a lot of his days with Lily at her flat, since neither of them have been working, but Lily gets into the Healer training program in record time after applying to it, which means that soon his daytime visits will have to stop. Lily working will leave Remus as the last Gryffindor of his cohort who doesn't have a job, and even though everyone knows it's not his fault, it still makes him feel like he's come up short on the great scale of adulthood.
What was even the point of going to Hogwarts if he can't use any of the skills he learned there? This isn't entirely a fair question, though, because Remus is using plenty of magic to fight and study and craft spells with the Order. Thank god he has the Order of the Phoenix to fill his time—he doesn't want to think about what place he would be in mentally if he didn't.
"Is it bad that I thought adulthood would have more… I don't know, more of a social life?" he asks James and Alice one day over dinner. Cooking duty always falls to Remus since he hasn't got a job to take up his time before meals. "I knew you'd all have jobs, but I thought it would be more like last summer when we always visited each other all the time. I didn't think… I mean, we go on double dates, and I see you because I live with you, but I miss Peter and Marlene and the others. It's like we only interact when we have to, on Order business, and even then, I never see Mary because she's not even in the Order anymore."
"I do know what you mean," says Alice gently. "I've been sending letters to everybody every week to try and stay connected, but it feels a lot like those relationships would just fall apart if I stopped writing."
"At least you're doing more than me," says James. "I'm not being distant on purpose. I'm not! But it feels so much harder to keep track of everyone now that we're not going to class and studying together."
How many of Remus's friendships only existed out of convenience? How many of them only exist now because he and his friends happen to belong to the same organization?