Warning: Language, death, sadness, a little depressing. This is just one shot, no second chapter. Remember English is not my first language and is not beta'd. Full credit to JKR and WB.
Summary: Hagrid writes Lily and James Potters friends for photos to put together a photo album for Harry his first year at Hogwarts. Remus Lupin is one of them. Remember this is in book ONE and nothing in the other books has happened yet.
Layers of TimeBy WittchWay
Remus POV
Sometimes living alone is a lovely thing. It gives you time to think and room to do your own thing. There's know one in your way or underfoot. Sometimes the silence is welcoming and peaceful. You can come and go as you please. See friends and family at your own whim. There's the comfort of curling up with a good book before the fire with out a worry of being interrupted. But it spirals you into a nest, giving you a falseness that you are secure and safe that it's okay to be alone. You think you're okay until you are reminded that you are not.But sometimes it's those very things that drive you up the wall when you live alone. Sometimes you go days with out speaking, thinking, living, breathing. Sometimes you go days with out going outside, days with out seeing the blue sky, a bird, a cricket, an owl. Sometimes living alone is not all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes it's that very silence that was okay before that disturbs you now.Most of the times you don't even know you were on the edge. Sometimes it's the sound of your own voice that awakes you, sometimes it's the murmur of a cricket to make you realize there is a life outside these four walls. Sometimes it's the squawk of an owl, which will ensnare your senses back awake.
Remus Lupin looked up startled at the owl that landed on the windowsill of his kitchen. The owl looked back, large amber eyes blinking innocently at him. A medium size brown leather bag was tied to his leg, the Hogwarts symbol stitched to the outside. Remus cringed, these arrivals were never a good things, he looked back at the owl "I suppose you are to wait for me?" his voice cracked looking to the bird.The owl made no sound except a small ruffle of feathers. Remus felt a small tightening in his chest and untied the bag from the owl's leg, opening the bags flap. He pulled out a small bundle of parchments and photos tied neatly with a ribbon. He unfolded the letter on top, the tattered parchment had apparently seen quite a bit of travel. Remus ran a tired hand through his graying hair. The letter was addressed simply with a request…a request that startled Remus Lupin…
"It may take a few a moments to find the...." he stopped, his hand shook as nodded toward the bird, holding the parchment tightly in his hand.
He looked again at the handwriting and the broken seal of Hogwarts across the envelope. His own name was the last on the list. A long list of people he had barely thought of over the years since school had ended. He felt faint and wished he wasn't alone. Just the presence of someone else in the house would have been enough. Would have been welcoming.
He lay his hand across his chest. A few moments indeed, it was most likely going take the rest of the day and then the following to recover.
Remus sighed and headed up the narrow step of stairs toward the attic still clutching the letter in his hand. He looked back over his shoulder to see if the owl was still there. It was.
The attic was little more than a large closet with a sloped ceiling. Remus knew he should have magically enhanced it a long time ago, he definitely needed the space he just never had gotten around to it.
He stood in the doorway looking over the small room, it was dusty and filled with boxes of all size, wooden crates of items long forgotten, items that were broken and were someday going to be fixed, repaired, or replaced. Somehow these were things that never got done nor taken care of. Somehow he always found other things to do or something suddenly was always more important.
Attics are always a haven for memories. Old clothes and robes, his childhood broom, his parent's things, his brother's things from school. He slowly walked into the closet his fingers ghosting over an old sleight, hats and gloves hanging from an inside hook covered in dust.
I turned my back to the far corner, I don't know why. It wasn't like I didn't know where my box of school stuff was at. I don't know why I tried to pretend I didn't. It was best to just get it over with, dig out a few pictures and send them to the one person who needed them. I had memories and other items from our time at Hogwarts. I had nearly 10 years with James, first at Hogwarts and then the few years after and Harry Potter had none. He looked over the room again wondering where to being looking.
The thing is I wanted to be selfish, I wanted to keep all the pictures and memories I had of James and lily to myself. I could make copies of the pictures but somehow that just didn't seem the same, I didn't want to share them. I knew Harry deserved the pictures, deserved some memory of parents who had died when he was so young but I was the only one who could give him those true memories. I was the remaining link to his parents. Parents dead, Peter Pettigrew long dead trying to protect Harry from a godfather that now lay in prison for life and off to live with muggles it was rumored.
I faced the boxes and mess packed upon my old school trunk and started to pull boxes and such down from it leaning them against the opposite wall. My school trunk was at the bottom, dark blue with stickers of Hogwarts and Gryffindor on the outside now faded over with years of attic. I just stood there starring at it for what seemed like forever. I don't think I've opened it since the day I returned home from school except to get out a few personal items such as clothes and such. It sat for years at the end of my childhood bed collecting dust till my mother cleaned out my room changing it into her sewing area. I was already out of the house at that point for many years.
I dropped to my knees trying desperately to hold on to all the courage I had. I turned the small brass lock and opened the trunk. Courage gone… some Gryffindor I am.
A shadow of dust billowed up to meet me, I realize I should have placed some sort of preservation spell on the trunk now. My school robes and books looked up at me, old quills and inkwells that had long ago dried out, decaying potion ingredients waif up to me, entailing my senses. I scooted around odd objects I had kept to remember and cherish. And now all I wanted to do was forget, slam the trunk shut and run scream from the room. Ironic wasn't it.
I just stared down at what once had been such a promising future. I was an ace student, a prefect. Graduated with high honors and hopes, ready to defeat the world, Lord Voldemort included. With all the diluted grandeur of the young soul I was.
I pulled a small wooden box out. It was beautiful with the details, gold stars etched along the top, that seemed to glisten at me and light up the box. A scene of animals carved along the base, wolves and what looked like a large dog, a head of a stag, and over the tree stumps little mice and rats and snakes. Little did I know years ago it was my future it told. The lock was long ago broken, I believe before I even got to school. My brother and I had fought and tumbled one day and the box had gone flying. I had hid the damage from my parents, as it was a very old box. I had carted this thing around for years, from home and to school and back. It was filled with memories of my life.
Hagrids letter lay open on the floor next to me. I was attempting to ignore it and it's contents. I tried not to look at it and the rush to get the requested item, I had to do this in my own time. Yet I was doing what the letter asked of me in a numb sort of way. It was time to deal with what I had shoved from my mind for so long. The ghosts that were my past. I tried to force all thought and images of Lily and James Potter from my mind as I ruffled though the box. I had to focus on the fact that this was a memory that their son, Harry needed more than I. Though I had refused to deal with it for years.This was something only I and several other close friends could provide to the young boy…pictures of his parents. It was hard to believe that nearly 10 years had passed, that the son of a dear friend was now completing his first year of Hogwarts. It was hard to believe I was this old, that this much time had gone by or that James had been dead for so long. I knew this day was coming, I just hadn't expect it so soon.I always thought someday far far down the road. A timid knock at my door would sound and when I opened it there would be a boy of maybe twenty on my doorstep looking like James standing before me.
Instinctively standing the way James did, running his hand threw that mess of hair the way James did. I thought we, Harry and I, would sit around drinking red wine telling stories of our lives. I would tell him pranks that the Marauders pulled and stories of Hogwarts. Secret passages and past teachers, the night would wind down and I would tell him what a great man his father was.
I thought that was twenty years down the road…hoped it was twenty years away.
I would deal at that moment. But it was creeping closer and closer to that moment. He was already at Hogwarts. People were talking about him already. Whispers of his greatness. He was in the daily prophet and word of his end of the year turmoil was slowly becoming legend. He had faced Voldemort once again and his survival once again had reached my ears though I don't know how.
Yet here I was unwillingly be dragged into his life through a third party and already it seemed like it was going to fast.
The smell of mildew and dust tangled through my senses, the acid smell of paper and the cedar of the box made me stumble back still clutching the it to my chest.
I willed myself to open my eyes to see my past. I thought of slamming the box shut and just sending the whole damn thing to Hagrid.
I slide down the wall, resting, trying to regain control of my breathing, the box by my side, the letter long forgotten lay by the door, my head in my hands. I sat there in silence most of the morning and afternoon. Not thinking, not remembering, my mind was blank, and if I thought of anything I don't recall what it was. It wasn't till my stomach started to rumble did I remember why I was in the attic on this Tuesday afternoon.
I picked the box back up and opened the lid. A picture of Sirius Black looked up at me instantly. He smiled in that lopsided way he does and stretched and yawned up at me. The castle behind him looked so nice and so much like a true home. My head was spinning. My fingers grazed the edge of the photo, tracing the outline of Sirius. He had been my greatest friend. True, loyal, worthy of all the greatness that would befall him, that is till that day. A day I never would have thought possible. A day that doesn't even makes sense in my mind and I replay what I read in the papers over and over again in my head. Sirius Black betraying James and Lily Potter.
It didn't seem real, they were the best of friends, knew each other since before school. Had grown up together. Had been best man at James wedding. Both powerful in their own right. What could Voldemort have offered Sirius to make him kill James? What power could have Sirius possibly had wanted that he wasn't capable of? That is what had always disturbed me…Sirius had it all, a wealthy family, old wizarding blood, would never have to work a day in his life, though he did at the ministry. I never understood it, the pieces just didn't fit together. And I had lost one of my dearest friends because of it, because of him, Voldemort. It had put me one step closer to being alone.
I flipped to the next picture, Sirius on brooms, then Peter and Sirius and I on the steps of Hogwarts. Peter was another ache in my chest. A foolish wizard, who had followed the three of us around till he just slowly became part of our group. Peter smiled up at me in his mousy sort of way. He was always a shy, timid boy. Him cornering Sirius Black that day on the street had probably been the most courageous moment of his short life, what Gryffindor's are made of. But what made him think he could take on Sirius was beyond me, of course it probably had been anger of James and Lily's death that had done it. But all that day did was take two of my truest friends from me tragedicly.
More photos of random other friends and students, teachers, girls we dated, the first picture with Lily drifting in and out with her group of friends. Then the first one of James. He's standing besides me in front of the school waving madly up at me, so happy.
Another of us in more formal robes going to a dance, then us in muggle clothes, us at Diagon alley, a few still photos of Lily and I. As I dig deeper into the box, we get older, taller, wiser. More friends, more of lives little events, quidditch, birthdays, new brooms, us at each other's houses during the summer, small weekend trips abroad.
James and Lily's wedding, the reception. I stopped and look at them, formal robes of white. Flowers in her hair, smiling so happily up at what was to become their short future together. I always knew they would be the first of us to get married. They were happy, in love, young. They had waited a year after graduation to get married. James took over the shop in Diagon Alley his father operated. Lily did charm work as needed or commissioned by the Ministry of Magic.
It was a beautiful day of faithful vow's, promises and kisses. Flowers in her hair and all around, the ancient trees of Godrics Hollow, James family home. Fairies and small glitter pixies fluttered from guest to guest casting small charms of joy and well wishes, though none were really needed.
I picked that picture up and set it aside. It would be the one I would give Harry. It would be the picture I could live with out, I had the memory closely glued to my heart. I had their beauty and time firmly in my heart and mind always. It was the way I would always remember them, forever young and beautiful. Forever my friend, forever my James and Lily. It was a picture of before time changed for the bad. Before life became a living hell, a time before I stopped thinking and living and loving.
I set the box aside and picked up the fallen letter of request and headed back downstairs. Dark shadows crept across the room, night had fallen and I hadn't even noticed. I had been so lost in my memories and the layers of our time together I hadn't even noticed. The owl had her head tucked under her wing. I waited to wake her, placing my photo along with the others not daring to look at them. I unfolded the letter, crossing my name off at the bottom along with the others before me. I placed the photos back in the bag and tied it shut again.
I looked up at the owl, she was waking up on her own, "want a little food" I whispered to her, she only held out her leg for me to tie the leather case back to it. I didn't want her to leave, I didn't want to be alone. I spelled the case light and tied it back up, "just to Hogwarts" I tell her thought she seems to already know this and is gone before I have time to gather my thoughts.
I turn to face my empty house, the shadows suddenly seem creepy and give me the chills. Some how I know I could light ever candle and oil lamp in the house and it would still be to dark… I would still be alone. I could go to my brothers or a friends tonight but some how I don't want to explain my day to them. I know my brother would just laugh and punch me in the arm, and tell me what I child I'm being. And I think that would only make me cry. I'll do what I always do in moments like this… sit in my chair by the fire and drink firewhiskey till I'm numb. Till I fall into some dismal uneasy sleep in that chair and simply wait for the sun to rise.
The End.