The Macdonald house is a sorry sight. Mary has been in the process of selling it ever since her parents, both Muggles, were killed two years ago in a Death Eater attack; the place is stripped bare of all décor, empty save for a few key furnishings like the dining table and telly. Mary deposits Remus in an armchair by the fireplace and tells him to stay put. Remus stares vacantly out the south window. The house overlooks the York moors, faded brown in the late autumn. High winds batter at the walls and roof.
"I'm sorry, Remus," says Mary softly. She's returned with her healing kit, and she crouches at his side to start dressing the wounds he's accumulated during his bender: the black eye, the bruised cheek, the checkerboard of scrapes and cuts. "I'm so, so sorry."
Remus says nothing. He's getting that far-away feeling again, the one that makes him feel like he's watching himself from a great distance.
"So much has happened," says Mary. "I'm guessing you haven't been keeping up with the news?"
He shakes his head.
"I figured. Well, Sirius—" she pauses to check Remus's reaction, continuing when he doesn't so much as flinch, "was sentenced to life in Azkaban. He confessed to the crime, so there was no trial."
Remus feels a wave of static building in his ears. He pictures Sirius, alone in a dingy cell, rotting and withering into dust as the Dementors chisel away every last bit of his sanity. Sirius hates to be alone, he thinks. Sirius hates to be alone.
"Remus? Remus, you gotta breathe, love."
He tries to suck in a gulp of air, but it lodges in his throat, and he sputters up empty oxygen.
"Try again." Mary places her warm palm over his heart, anchoring him. "Deep breaths, that's it."
She moves her hand in slow circles, only retracting it when Remus is able to take five slow breaths in a row without gasping.
"There you go."
He slumps forward, trembling and faint.
"No trial?" he whispers.
"Minister wanted to make an example of him. And like I said, he confessed. Pretty much a closed case." Mary is only ever this curt when she's trying very hard to hold herself together. At her parents' funeral, she turned to a sniveling mourner and asked if there was any way he could possibly cry any louder.
Remus grips his head in his hands, pulling at the roots. "How could I not have seen it, Mary? How could I not have known?"
She carefully disentangles his hands, placing them back in his lap.
"You didn't know because he didn't want you to," she says simply.
She resumes smearing ointment over his black eye. Remus feels the skin healing itself, the broken blood vessels beneath his skin knitting back together. When she gets to his arms, her hands hover for a moment over the constellation of red needle marks.
"This isn't like you, Remus."
It's true. Remus has been smoking and drinking since he was fifteen, but he's always been careful to indulge responsibly. He was a Prefect, after all, and one of the top students in his year—not to mention he had so much to prove to his father and to himself, about whether a werewolf could ever be a high-functioning member of society. He's long abandoned that cause.
"What else?" whispers Remus. "What else has happened?"
Mary exhales sharply. "Alice and Frank were captured. Tortured for days by Bellatrix and Rodolphus and—if you can believe it—Barty Junior. They're in St. Mungo's now, but it…it doesn't look good."
Mary's eyes are shadowed with dark bags. Remus wonders if he looks as haunted as she does.
Mary runs through a list of Death Eaters who were captured and sentenced to Azkaban, and another list of Death Eaters who got off scot-free—Snape is among the pardoned, naturally, having been promptly acquitted once Dumbledore confirmed his status as a spy.
Mary tells him that a monument to Lily and James is being erected in Godric's Hollow. After that, there isn't much else to say. She finishes her healing work and hands Remus a nutrition potion. He drinks it without tasting anything, and then they sit in front of the roaring fire until long past nightfall, until nothing can be seen from the window but darkness, and nothing can be heard but the shrill of the wind, battering, battering at the glass.
Mary tells Remus to stay for the full moon.
"It's no problem. We've got about five acres of land, and the wards are airtight. I'll stay inside all night, and you can…roam free and hunt rabbits, or whatever it is you do."
Remus doesn't have a better alternative, so he accepts.
The wolf is still adjusting to being alone on the full moon—the Marauders had maintained their tradition for the first few months post-graduation, but then the demands of work and life and the war had slowly disbanded the full moon congregation until only Sirius was left. And then he had left, too.
The wolf never reacts well to negative events in Remus's life—the first full moon after his mother died may very well have been fatal if the Marauders hadn't been there to distract him. As he suspects, the wolf doesn't take kindly to Sirius's betrayal and imprisonment and the murder of Lily, James, and Peter. The transformation itself is blindingly painful, and the wolf runs feral all through the night, howling and crying and clawing at its own flesh until the sweet release of dawn.
Remus and Mary sit on the living room floor, eating porridge and watching a quiz show on the telly without processing any of it.
The two of them were never as close with each other as they were with Lily, but they were compatible in an easy, low-maintenance sort of way.
It's been three days since the full moon, and they've fallen into an effortless cohabitation—Remus sleeps in till noon, still recovering from the intensity of his transformation and the resulting injuries; Mary works as a part-time paralegal at a spell patent law firm, and she goes into the office for a few hours each morning. They've silently agreed to take their meals together and then leave each other to their own grief-addled thoughts until the evening, when they reconvene to pass a bottle of whiskey between them till it's dry.
When they're inevitably woken by nightmares, they sit on the back porch together and swap bad jokes until they fall asleep again on each other's shoulders.
"Remus," says Mary calmly, "I have a favor to ask."
He looks up from his porridge. "Anything."
"I want you to Obliviate me."
For a moment, neither of them speak.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. I've thought about it a lot. I'm moving to America, you know."
"When?"
"Tomorrow." Mary scrapes the last bite of porridge from the rim of her bowl. "I've been accepted to a law program there. In New York."
"Oh. Congratulations." Remus winces at the insincerity in his voice. In his defense, if he hadn't been so caught off guard, he would have had a more genuine reaction.
She snickers. "Thanks."
"And you want me to Obliviate you because you—you want a fresh start?"
"I don't want to live like this. I can't live like this. What we've experienced…there's no coming back from it. My grandmother, you know, lost her whole family in the London blitzes. She was miserable for the rest of her life. People say that grief gets easier with time, but I don't think it's true. I still feel like—" She closes her eyes for a moment, and then looks Remus full in the face. "Like my parents were just buried this morning. And I can't wake up every day for the rest of my life and have my first thought be that Lily and Marley and Dorcus and all the rest of them are gone, too. I can only take so much."
"I understand," says Remus gently. "Of course I'll do it."
She sinks back, relieved. "Thank you."
They return to watching the telly for a few minutes. It's raining out, and the downpour thumps lazily against the roof.
"Remus?" asks Mary.
"Hm?"
"Are you going to do it, too? Get someone to Obliviate you?"
"No." He doesn't even give it a moment's thought. "I need to remember them. It's the least I can do."
Her brow furrows. "It's not your fault, Remus. We talked about that."
"We did. And I didn't change my mind."
"Stubborn prat."
He feels his lip quirk upward. "Can I ask you something, Mary?"
"Shoot."
"You and Emmaline…aren't together anymore?"
She shakes her head.
"Were you ever?"
Her eyes drift away from him. "Not in so many words."
Remus understands; labels always made Sirius squeamish. He and Remus had been mutually exclusive for nearly a year before he finally clarified to the group that, yes, they were boyfriends, if you were nosy enough to care about something like that.
Sirius didn't like the word "gay," nor the word "bisexual," nor the word "queer"—he somewhat tolerated the idea of "fluidity," especially as it pertained to his gender.
Sometimes I think that I wouldn't mind if I hadn't been born a bloke, Sirius once told Remus while sharing a post-shag cigarette. I like makeup. I like all kinds of clothes—not just guy clothes. And I feel—I don't know. That I'm a guy, yeah, but also, maybe something else, too.
Remus, who had a fairly straightforward relationship with his own masculinity and his attraction to masculinity, was fascinated by this. What else do you think you are?
Sirius shrugged in his faux-casual way that indicated he was quite nervous.
I don't really know. Not a woman. But maybe—maybe something outside of gender altogether. Because it's just another label, right? It's just stuff we made up. I think maybe I'm…just me.
Remus took his hand and gave it a firm squeeze. Well, I love you whatever you are. You know that.
Sirius grinned. Yeah. I do.
Git.
Remus dreams of that conversation after he and Mary go to bed. He's not sure why. It's the first time in ages that he manages to get a full night of sleep.
When the morning comes, Remus draws his wand.
"I hope you can be happy, Mary," he says. "You deserve it."
She squeezes his hand. "You too."
"Ready?"
She nods. When she closes her eyes, two slow tears roll down her cheeks and drip onto the pale carpet.
Remus slips out the back door and Apparates back to his flat. He finds a letter from Lyall on the kitchen table.
Son,
It wasn't my intention to upset you. I can't be like your mother, as I'm sure you well know. I can only be what I am.
But you're better than me, Remus. You've always been strong. The strongest person I know.
I'm sorry that you're in pain. But you're smart enough to know that taking out that pain on yourself won't help anyone. It won't change the past. It won't bring them back.
Your friends wouldn't want you to suffer like that, and neither do I. When you're ready, come see me at the house. I want to help.
The door is always open, my ngwas bach.
Dad
Remus traces over his father's signature with his index finger. His father hasn't called Remus by his Welsh nickname in over a decade, and the feeling it invokes in him is too large to fit inside his ribcage. He folds the letter into eights and sticks it in his back pocket.
He decides what to do without really making a decision at all. He cancels the lease on the flat and gathers his few belongings of value, leaving everything else for the landlord to sort out. He pawns off a gold pocket watch that Sirius had gifted to Remus for his seventeenth birthday. He walks up to the ticket booth at Folkestone Terminal and forces a small smile for the haggard-looking attendant.
"A one-way ticket to Paris, please."
If he can't forget, then he can run.