Chapter 5: What If
He was stepping into the phone booth when she appeared. "You heard?" she cried, running towards him down the tawdry London side street, a slim figure with unnaturally red hair. She practically threw herself into his arms. "Merlin, Remus, you heard?"
His heart jumped in horror and embarrassed delight. He steadied her and held her at an arm's length. "What happened?"
"You didn't hear? Arthur . . ." She inhaled, blinking back tears.
"What happened?"
She dropped her voice so low he could scarcely hear it. "It—in the Ministry—it attacked Arthur last night."
He blanched.
"My parents—my mother has a portrait of Phineas Nigellus Black in her dining room. The portrait told me. He said—covered in blood—but Molly sent a note he was still alive. Harry saw something—I don't understand. I just came to tell the Auror Office where I am, I'm going to make Scrimgeour let me take the day off." She dropped her voice still lower. "Oh, Merlin, Remus, it was supposed to be me! I was assigned to guard duty last night, I was supposed to be there, but I was tired, I couldn't handle staying up all night again, and Arthur said—and we switched. Remus, it was supposed to be me!"
They sat in the ugly neutral-toned tearoom on the fifth floor of St. Mungo's. Before them, two teaspoons, two saucers, two cups of tea. Healer Smethwyck had said he would summon them when he finished working on Arthur. It was taking a long time.
What had Harry seen, wondered Remus. Fragments of conversations, stretching back over months and years, arranged themselves in his mind. What Dumbledore had said last summer—not wanting to see too much of Harry—not trusting—not knowing the full implications of that lightning-shaped scar . . .
"Would it have mattered if it had been me?" mused Tonks, more to the window blinds than to him.
"Yes," said Remus indignantly.
Tonks seemed not to hear him. "I could so easily just not have been here . . ."
"Tonks, what are you talking about?" asked Remus, suddenly uneasy.
She snapped to attention. "I—oh, well—never mind."
"Tonks?"
"Remus, you don't need to know." Her lips closed tensely, then parted again. "Look, there's Bill!"
Bill saw them and strode up to them, tugging at his fang earring, tired but calm. "Dad's going to be okay," he said. "He's asleep. You can't see him right now. Come back this afternoon, if you can. Actually, if one of you can go back to headquarters after lunch and collect the kids—they need a guard—"
"I'll do it," said Tonks quickly.
"Thanks," said Bill. "Thanks, you two. Thanks for being here."
He didn't tell her but he should have. He was twenty-two years old. It was the final year of the First War. He and Sirius were partners then, flying more than one daring mission. There was one particularly bold assignment they had undertaken. It was just before James and Lily went into hiding with their baby son. At the last minute, plans were changed, the mission postponed. No one seemed to be able to tell Remus why. The new date was the night of the full moon, and of course, he couldn't go. Gideon and Fabian Prewett took their places. They apparated straight into a nest of Death Eaters.
The night he discovered Sirius in the Shrieking Shack, he realized what had happened. All in a flash. Everyone suspected, everyone knew there was a traitor. Everyone knew someone close to James and Lily was passing information to Voldemort. Everyone thought he was the traitor. So they took him off the best assignments, they took him off the things that mattered. If they had trusted him, he would have been dead. If he hadn't been a werewolf.
A single phrase came unbidden to his mind. He had a hard war. Thus had John Lupin, who grew up in a Muggle family in a Muggle village during the fearsome Muggle war of 1914-1918, characterized his own father. My father was a good man. He had a hard war.
This expression had puzzled the child Remus. Weren't all wars hard, he wanted to know? And what, exactly, had made his grandfather's own personal war so hard? He had been a Healer, hadn't he, a—whatchamacallit—medic? And though he had been under fire more than once, he had never even been wounded. Nor bitten. What was so hard about that?
The child Remus had not thought to ask for details of his father's sad and somber childhood. He had not thought to ask why his grandparents' marriage broke up so suddenly, just as his father was departing for Hogwarts. He had not thought to ask why John Lupin had no living relatives, aside from his parents and two younger sisters. The probable truth came to him unasked for, from experience and not from his father, when he was about twenty-three. At the time his mother was dying and he had not wanted to injure his father's fragile peace by fingering old wounds.
It was a family tradition of sorts. Bookish men, quiet men, fighting, seldom dying, coming home with scars. John Lupin himself, youngish and as yet unmarried, had been an ambulatory Healer in the Grindelwald War, apparating onto battle scenes, treating fighters too injured to be transported to St. Mungo's. It must have been around then, Remus thought, that he had gotten interested in werewolves.
Remus wondered now if there was more to his father's story than he had imagined then. Not just death, but double-crossing. Certainly, his father had taken Sirius's apostasy harder than anything else that had happened in all those hard years.
Me too, thought Remus, stirring his cold tea. Me too. I had a hard war.