Author's Note: Enjoy!

Disclaimer: The following characters belong to J.K. Rowling, and this story derives from her original works, storylines, and world. Please do not sue me, I can barely pay tuition.

Hogwarts: Assignment #1, Careers Advice Task #4 Write a fic using one of the following themes: love, death, time, or curiosity.

Warnings: Canon character deaths

This week's AU: Ghost!AU

The Business of the Living and the Business of the Dead

Oh hey, heaven is the place we know

Heaven is the arms that hold us

Long before we go

Oh if you're there

When the world comes to gather me in

Oh if you're there

I will be blessed

-I Will Be Blessed, Ben Howard

When Remus woke up, he knew from how deep the ache ran that this transformation would leave him particularly sore for particularly long—and not only because the floor of the Shrieking Shack was made of unforgivingly hard wood. He was going to push himself off the dusty floor and try to grab the blanket hidden under the cupboard, since he'd torn the clothes he'd transformed in, but he found that he couldn't move. He panicked for a second and looked around him. The Shrieking Shack was familiar, nearly intimately so after years of transforming. He could breathe through his nose, in and out, alright. But he couldn't move.

He tried again but his body ignored him. No, ignoring implied an action, whereas his arms and legs were just completely unresponsive.

Remus tried not to panic. His friend Marlene sometimes had sleep paralysis; she would wake up and be unable to move or speak for a few minutes. Maybe, maybe he was just having trouble coming back to himself after the transformation. Madam Pomfrey always mentioned, every month without fail, how much of a shock to the body these transformations were. But oh God, if he wasn't fully himself yet, did that mean he was still dangerous? What if Madam Pomfrey or McGonagall came looking for him? What if…

He tried to calm down but was failing. His breathing was becoming erratic, which didn't help with the exhaustion and the faintness he always felt the morning after. He had been a werewolf for fourteen years now, and the full moon still managed to surprise him…

Then, someone knelt in front of him. Maybe he should have been more afraid—nobody was supposed to be with him during these transformations, that was the point of it all—but the curious little face that popped up in front of him seemed too soft and inquisitive to be frightening. It was a girl with a strong nose and high eyebrows, round cheeks and an easy smile. Her hair was chopped mid-neck and she was wearing an old-fashioned gown that seemed far too old for how young she was. She looked just about his age.

"Don't be afraid," she said. She lay down on the floor next to him and it was at this point that Remus realized that she moved too lightly, like an aria in a sea of percussion. And she was silver, like a… like a…

"You're okay," she said. "You're you, you're real, you're awake." Her curls had flopped onto the ground. Remus saw a grey ribbon in her hair that looked soft enough to be satin, though he knew that if he reached out, it wouldn't be soft. It wouldn't be anything, actually. You couldn't touch a ghost.

She kept talking to him, saying more or less the same thing over and over again on a loop. Eventually, Remus' breath calmed. His clenched jaw relaxed. But when his muscles finally reconnected with his mind and he could sit up, she vanished before he had fully risen.

He wrapped the blanket around himself and scrambled out of the Shrieking Shack, so that Madam Pomfrey wouldn't have to come looking and see the mess he had made overnight. As he walked the tunnel back to the secret entrance under the willow, he nearly managed to convince himself that it had been an extension of a dream the same way the paralysis had been an extension of his sleep.

But then, when he changed into fresh pajamas he kept in the infirmary, he found a silver ribbon in his pocket.

Madam Pomfrey had so much on her hands at any given time that she didn't question Remus when he said that he was feeling angsty and wanted to go to the Shrieking Shack early that night. Really, he just wanted to spend a few extra minutes in there before the transformation took hold. Over the last month, he had tried to learn as much as he could about ghosts. This year's Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher was useless, but he had read that ghosts were attracted to candlelight so he had sneaked a candle with him tonight, tucking it in the waistband of is jeans. He lit it with the tip of his wand and sat down in the Shrieking Shack's parlour, waiting.

The girl he had seen last month peeked around one of the doors before stepping into the room. The candlelight danced against her silvery form, making some parts look nearly opaque albeit colourless.

"So you are real," Remus said.

"I gave you a ribbon so you would know," the girl said. She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear.

"I'm sorry," Remus said. "I meant to bring it back but it disappeared."

"That's alright," she said. "I don't really need it. I kept my hair short around the time I died."

Remus didn't know what to answer to that.

"So you…"

"I'm a ghost," she nodded.

"Yes, I—well I had gathered so much," Remus said. "But…"

"I'm not an important ghost," she clarified. "You wouldn't know me, I think."

"Dumbledore—the Headmaster at Hogwarts—he told me that he was encouraging rumours that the Shrieking Shack was haunted so that the villagers wouldn't notice my commotion so much," Remus said. "I didn't know there were actual ghosts here."

"Not ghosts, just me," she clarified. "And, like I said, I'm not a very important ghost. Nobody knows I'm here, I think. Well, except for you, now."

"So you… you see me transform, then," Remus mumbled.

The girl cocked her head to the side as if she was wondering what answer he wanted to hear before she decided to be honest and nodded.

"I could go before the moon rises, if you want," she said.

"If you… if you don't mind, yes please," Remus said.

The girl nodded and disappeared, passing through the floor to a lower level of the house—possibly a cellar.

But when Remus woke up the next day, there was a blanket across his shoulders and she was sitting at his side, soothing him in a language he didn't understand.

"What's your name?" he asked. His voice was croaky.

"Nymphadora," she said.

"That's an old name," Remus said.

"I've been dead a long time," she said. "You can call me something more modern if you'd like."

"No, I wouldn't want to…" Remus stumbled over the words and blushed. She grinned at him, but it didn't feel mocking so much as… well, mischievous. "Can I call you Dora?"

"I like that," Dora said.

Remus smuggled candles into the Shrieking Shack from that point onwards. He lit them for the ghost and wondered why it was that she liked the light so much since she hadn't gone to it herself, when her time had come.

"My mother, she was from a very old pureblood family," Dora explained one day, when they were talking as the sun set. "She ran away and married a Muggleborn man and had me. They hid out in Hogsmeade for a long time, but one day an aunt of mine—an absolute madwoman—found us in our house, this house, and killed us all."

"I'm sorry," Remus said. "Are you… are your parents here too?"

"No," Dora said in a tone that indicated that she would say no more on the subject.

Remus showed her the pile of Daily Prophets he'd brought her, in case she wanted to read up on the modern wizarding world. It had been quite a trick to bring them with him, under Madam Pomfrey's nose, but he managed it. She asked if she could do the crosswords too and looked pleased when he said yes, dismissing his apologies over the fact that he didn't have any quills with him.

"I'll help you," Remus offered.

"You won't need to," Dora smiled. "I'm very good at puzzles. I'm quite brilliant, I'll have you know."

When he woke up the next morning, she had tucked the pile of newspapers under his arm.

The next week, when he borrowed a Muggle ballpoint pen from Lily and brought that too, the crosswords were filled and there were mustaches drawn on the pictures across the paper—which seemed quite cross about it, though Remus only laughed.

Madam Pomfrey took his temperature and seemed quite happy at the results.

"You seem much more well on the day after your transformations than you used to," she said. "Tired, of course, on account of being awake all night, but better."

"That's funny," Remus said. Luckily, his yawn changed the subject and Madam Pomfrey put him to bed before she could ask more questions he didn't want to explain.

She didn't come to him when he lit the candle and for a split second he worried that she was gone. He went looking for her in the house and he found her curled up on a bed frame with no mattress, hugging her legs to her chest.

"Hello," he said.

"I thought it might be you," Dora said. Her words seemed more hesitant and slow to come than they usually did. She sounded as she had when they'd first met.

"What's wrong?" Remus asked. "Are you alright? You look…"

"I… I forgot how long summer was," Dora said.

"Oh," Remus said. "Yes, well… it's a few months long. It's… been a while."

"A few months shouldn't matter," Dora said. "I've been dead a few decades. But it… well, going a few months without company was more difficult than spending a few decades without feeling a difference."

Remus nodded and crossed the room to go sit on the bed frame with her. He extended his hand to her, palm up, even if that was an empty gesture between a boy and a ghost.

"I was very alone," Dora said quietly. "I thought to myself, quite a lot actually, what the point of this was if I was going to be so alone. But the light didn't come for me, no door opened or anything like that. It keeps leaving me here so I kept waiting but I… I'd forgotten how lonely the waiting was, when you don't know what you're waiting for."

"I'm sorry," Remus said. This was the most he had ever heard her say of the reason why she had become a ghost. It had never occurred to Remus that you could die before fate was done with you, that the choice to stay behind was not always yours.

"Don't be sorry, I hope you had a good holiday," the ghost said.

"I did," Remus said. "But I missed you too."

She smiled shyly and extended her hand so that it floated above his.

"You've got more candlelight here than I would usually see in a year," the familiar voice said. Remus turned around, away from the kitchen he was filling with candles. Dora stood in the doorframe, lazily leaning against it without sinking through the wood. He couldn't quite understand her physics. There was a lot about Dora and about the afterlife and the business of ghosts that he didn't understand and tried not to think too hard about. Luckily, Dora didn't usually give him time to think.

"I…" Remus cleared his throat. "I wanted to make it special. Like I told you last month, I'm graduating soon and this is…"

"Shh," Dora said. She flew across the room to him, candlelight flickering as she whizzed by the ones he'd already lit. "Give me my newspaper, I'm dying for the answer to last week's riddle. Seriously, I might die again."

"Dora," Remus asked. "I'm… I'm serious. We should talk about this."

Dora seemed deflated at his seriousness. She slumped down at one of the kitchen chairs.

"You really won't be coming anymore?"

"I won't have access to the tunnel from the castle, and that's the only working entrance to the Shrieking Shack right now," Remus said.

Dora humphed, dissatisfied.

"So you're graduating and what now? They'll leave you to deal with your transformations all alone? Without this safe place, without… without me?"

Remus shrugged.

"It… it's like that, for people like me."

"It's rubbish," Dora said, her voice snippy.

"Dora?" Remus said shyly.

She stopped fuming for long enough to look up at him.

"You made it better," he promised.

Remus didn't know that ghosts could cry, but Dora smiled a wobbly smile and tears collected in the corners of her silver eyes.

"You made it better too," she said.

Remus couldn't help but go to Godric's Hollow, to the place where his friends had been murdered and their child orphaned. He had read in The Prophet and heard from other Order members how utterly destroyed the Potter's cottage had been, but a pang of hurt and longing still threatened to tear him to shreds when he saw it. There were piles of bricks where he and Lily had curled up to read by the fire, a broken beam snapped like a twig where Harry had taken his first step while playing on the floor with James, a mess of glass and debris in the kitchen where he'd cooked lazy weekend breakfasts for the lot of them so many times…

Remus chewed on his lip and looked around at the devastation. Part of him had wondered if Lily and James might… if they might… it had been silly, a desperate last hope. Dora hadn't known much more about the afterlife than he had; she hadn't gone into it, after all, she had been kept in this world, forever waiting for more. Remus couldn't help thinking that Lily and James had had so much more to look forward to, so much life left to live. Still, he couldn't picture them staying in these ruins when they had died only a few meters apart. It had been in James' wedding vows. I'll go wherever you go, if we can go there hand-in-hand. His friends were gone.

Remus turned away from the cottage, burying his face in his scarf against the November wind. On his way out of Godric's Hollow, he stopped at the post office where one could, if they asked the postmaster politely, acquire a copy of The Daily Prophet and have mail sent by owl. He had a few coins rattling around in his pocket so he sent a copy of today's paper to the Shrieking Shack.

He swore under his breath when he saw Peter Pettigrew and Sirius Black's names collide on the map. He grabbed his wand, grabbed his cloak, and ran out of his office—neglecting even to lock it as he got out of the castle as quickly as he could, taking back routes so that he wouldn't run into students or colleagues who would want his attention.

He had spent years making sure nobody saw him enter the secret tunnel but today he cared so little that he entered as soon as he could get the willow to cooperate, with little regard for his surroundings. He raced down the tunnel into the Shrieking Shack and heard noise above—screaming, to be exact. He could make out both Harry and Sirius' voices quite clearly. Oh no.

He barreled up the staircase and only stopped when he nearly ran into—no, through—a familiar figure. A girl who looked older than when they'd first met, impossibly, though she'd aged more gracefully than he had. Her hair had gotten shorter, her figure was still lean, but her eyes…

"You've been teaching at the school for months," she said. Her voice was familiar, but it had lost that cool and joking quality that made it border on indifferent. She sounded disheartened and guilt curled in the pit of Remus' stomach.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "But I need to go up there."

"I know," she said. She lifted herself onto the banister of the staircase, leaving the path open for him. "The living always have a deadline on their business."

Remus wanted to stop and turn around and explain everything to her, but…

"You're right, I'm sorry, but we will talk," he said. He ran upstairs.

When Remus woke up, he was on the floor of the Shrieking Shack. He hadn't woken up in this particular position in quite some time now.

There was a blanket over his shoulders.

Towering piles of all the copies of The Daily Prophet he'd sent over the years were surrounding him.

He sat up hastily, looking around him, wide-eyed and panicked. Dora was laying on the sofa across the room, parallel to him. Her eyes glinted with that mixture of excitement and boredom that meant she'd been waiting for him to wake up.

"The children," he gasped. "Sirius—Peter—Severus…"

"Are all in the castle," Dora said.

"They're…" Remus said. "But I—I never got my last dose of Wolfsbane Potion, I…"

"Did no harm to anyone," Dora said. "I brought you back to the house."

"You did… you did what?" Remus stutterd.

"I brought you back home," she said simply. "Werewolves are just as fantastic as ghosts, you know. It had been… it had been years, but you followed me in. It appears that you recognized me."

Remus' stomach sank. He sat up, blanket sliding off of his shoulder.

"I'm sure I did," Remus said softly.

"You'd been in the castle for months," she said. There was no accusation in her tone, even if she would have the right to. There was just hurt.

"I was," Remus said.

"You didn't want to see me again?" Dora asked.

"I did," Remus said. "I nearly… I nearly crossed the grounds and stopped the willow and walked the tunnels a hundred times."

"But you didn't," Dora said. "I'm the one bound to the place where I died. You're the one who didn't come."

"You're right," Remus said. "It just hurt so badly last time I left, I couldn't… I knew things at Hogwarts were too good to last. I was prepared for that to end, but I couldn't go through leaving you again."

Like he inevitably would after this disaster.

"You might not," Dora said softly. "Only people who knew you were a werewolf or who like you quite a lot saw you transform, before you came inside. Once Sirius saw you were safe, he went after the one who's a rat—Peter? I only caught bits and pieces of the fight you were all having upstairs so I'm still quite confused, but I do think that Sirius may be able to prove his innocence, which will be nice for James' boy."

Remus' stomach dropped.

"You… you really think so?" Remus asked quietly.

"I think…" Dora trailed off and froze. She looked towards the door. "I think your friends are looking for you."

"They can wait," Remus said.

"No, the living always have places to do and people to see," Dora said. She didn't take her eyes off the door. "I'm very good at waiting. Although I wouldn't go in there if I were you. I hear it isn't haunted."

Remus laughed.

There was a knock on the door. Dora disappeared and let him answer.

Remus did not know that this would be the last time he would wake up on the floor of the Shrieking Shack. He was just confused about the fact that it wasn't even a full moon.

Then he was confused about the fact that Dora was laying on the floor next to him—though that wasn't the confusing part. Over the last four years, that was how he usually woke up; no, he was confused because she was holding his hand. She was actually touching him. She was touching him. Her fingers were curved to fit his hand and they were warm and soft and…

"Dora," he said quietly. His voice wasn't as groggy as it usually was when he first woke up.

"Remus," she said. He watched her smile crumple before she could smile it fully. She squeezed his hand and he was so shocked by the touch of her that he nearly missed what she told him. "Remus, I'm sorry, there was a battle at the castle… I could only see bits and pieces of it…"

"Harry," Remus said. "Is Harry okay?"

"I think… I saw blue sparks just after dawn," Dora reported. Remus' shoulders relaxed.

"Blue sparks and no… and no Dark Mark? No skull or snake in the sky?"

"No," Dora said. "Just blue sparks."

"Oh thank Merlin," Remus said, breathing out a sigh of relief. "That means we won. We won, Dora, we won…"

"Remus," Dora said. "Remus, yes, I think your Order won but I also think you… I also think you died."

Remus knew that was true because he didn't feel his body tense or his blood freeze or his jaw drop at her words. He had spent most of his life in and out of a body that was his and that he could control, which may explain how now… now he knew very keenly that he wasn't in a body before he even sat up and looked at the silvery grey hands that moved as if they were his own.

Dora sat up with him and kept a careful eye on him.

"You'll remember more about how you died as you settle into this life," Dora said gently. "Remus, I'm so sorry. You died a hero, but I'm so sorry you died, I can try to find out what happened if you want to know right away…"

"I don't think I do," Remus said, looking at the woman before him. "Somebody quite brilliant once told me that it was the business of the living that had deadlines."

Dora processed his words and smiled.

"Whose business are you now, then?" she asked.

"I'll be yours," Remus said. "Especially since I think I can kiss you now."

"I think you can too," Dora smiled.

Shipping Wars

Word count: 3602

Ship (Team): Remus Lupin/Nymphadora Tonks (Technicolour Moon)

List (Prompt): Spring Micro 1 (Creature AU)