Author's Note: A fair warning, this chapter is a bit creepy. It's not gory or anything, but it's told from Healer Ray's point of view, and he sees nothing wrong with things that you and I might think of as immoral. Enjoy!
If back when I attended Hogwarts someone told me Remus Lupin was a werewolf, I would have asked them what they smoked. Seriously, that kid? A werewolf? I did not know Remus too well back then, of course, but two of his best friends were on my quidittch team and we were in the same house, two years apart. Like the rest of the school, I assumed his mother got ill. I did not hear about it until years later, when I read an article in the Prophet the year after I- the year after- the year after he taught at Hogwarts.
My very last patient fell down a flight of stairs after receiving a series of curses from Death Eaters in a battle that resulted in the world learning the truth about Voldemort's return. Remus Lupin, along with the man who would one day become the Minister of Magic, Kingsley Shacklebolt, levitated the still woman into the hospital and I, one of the best specialists in the field of spell damage despite my young age, received the call to treat her. Although future former Minister Shacklebolt left as soon as we got her stabilized, Remus stayed with her until she awakened, I remember.
"Nymphadora, is it?" I asked her as she climbed out of slumber. Remus winced.
"Where's my wand?" She mumbles. "Gotta curse you."
"The battle's over, Miss," I inform her. "You should stay still."
"She's trying to curse you." Remus whispers. "She prefers to be called Tonks."
I nod and mentally remind myself to call her that. Earlier someone told me she was a trained Auror, someone not to cross.
I proceed to check how she's doing when a hospital executive, Ulysses Smithers, entered.
"Healer Harley Ray," Mr. Smithers said as he enters the room.
"I'm with a patient," I told him.
"We know about your relationship with Ms. Marta Keel."
Marta. Marta Keel. Oh God.
I met Marta in this same room, while she laid on the same bed Nymphadora Tonks did. Despite the heavy spell damage inflicted on her by her father and uncle, her smile lit up the dull hospital on that dreary Christmas day.
"I'm Healer Ray. I'll be treating you."
"Must be bad, coming here on Christmas. Not being able to spend time with your family."
"Don't really have any. That's why I'm here. Told them I should be on call today."
"You're a good man."
"Not really. Just doing what anyone else should."
"You are, Healer Ray. I can see it in your eyes."
She was the first, and only, one to tell me I was a good person. A lie as beautiful as she was.
We weren't good for each other, for more than the obvious reasons of she being my sixteen year old patient and I being her thirty two year old healer. We fed each other the words no one else would say to us, the love no one could share with us. Things…escalated rather quickly. A New Year's kiss that did not end after a lingering moment, but transformed into tongues rubbing tongues, bodies against bodies, skin touching skin. Neither of us acknowledged it as a mistake. In fact, there were many more mistakes after that, despite her constant pain. Being with me, she claimed, made her feel better.
Shortly before she was to return home, I made the discovery that changed everything. I waited an hour before telling her what I had found, simply because I had no idea how to break it to her.
"You're pregnant," I told her simply, when I was sure no one could hear, handing her the parchment proving myself that I knew she could not understand. The two of us were silent for a very long time.
"Do you know how far I am?" She asked me eventually.
"Two weeks. Otherwise, I would have figured out earlier.
"That means you must be the father."
She did not tell anyone I was the father, or talk to me again, for that matter. I visited her, when Caleb, my son, was born.
"Would you like to hold him?" She asked me. I declined. I knew where this was going. "Right now, I don't want you in our lives," She told me. "Maybe latter, when Caleb's older."
So that was that. I left the room, to not see the only person I had ever loved for years, and to not hear her name mentioned by others until Ulysses Smithers entered the hospital ward.
"I'm with a patient," I repeated in panic. "I don't think she should-"
"I'll take over her treatment," Another Healer said, entering the room. I stepped away from my charge and pulled Mr. Smithers outside.
"We cannot allow you here anymore, not after receiving the knowledge that you had sexual relations with a patient, an underage one at that."
But she loved me! I thought in protest. And I loved her! More than anyone.
I was not stupid enough to tell him that. Instead, I collected my things and left.
Not a few months later, I met Marta again, crying over her book in the Apothecary. No longer did her face turn the autumn cold to a warm spring, the dreary clouds to a sunny day or the dark shop to a bright store. The two of us were no longer the lost lovers who found their living drug on a lonely Christmas morning. I held her clammy hand for the first time since I discharged her from the hospital three years ago and promised her I would not only find Remus, but the research done on the Total Blood Transfusion spell.
I remembered that my old classmate visited my last patient. Unable to track down him, I found her instead.
"Ms Tonks?" I asked the dejected young woman as she opened the door.
"You're that creepy healer who got fired."
"Creepy?!" I exclaim.
"Remus told me Marta was one of his students. Only sixteen when she took off nearly a month of school to recover from that spell. I don't know what you did to her then, but if it got you fired-"
"I'm trying to help Marta!" I begged. "I need to find Remus! Her son got bitten, she's so scared, she needs someone to tell her-"
"Remus won't tell her it's going to be alright." She responded bitterly. "Don't let him near that kid. He'll just tell the two of them that there's no way out and that the kid's doomed to be miserable."
She nearly slammed the door on me, but I held it open. "I promised her."
"Fine, Mister Ray," She said to me, voice full of venom and mocking, purposefully reminding me of what I had let be taken from me. "I know how to extract him. Follow what I say exactly…"
Remus told Marta everything he knew about surviving with Lycanthropy, but like Tonks warned, his pessimism bled through. There was something between Remus and Tonks, I realized quickly, that the two tried hard to ignore. They matched as a couple, both so tired and uninspired, dull despite the excitement in their lives.
The two of them also agreed that my plan to transfer little Caleb's, my son's, lycanthropy to Marta was insane. It did not matter. Marta only listened to my words of fleeting hope for our child.
I didn't take advantage of Marta until that night, when I preformed the spell despite all sense telling me to not do so. She should have listened to Remus and Tonks. Hell, if not for the fact she loved me, she never would have followed my mad fantasies. She wouldn't have gotten lycanthropy too. Caleb never would have been taken.
Not a year latter, Remus and Tonk's organization, The Order of the Phoenix, lost trust in St. Mungo's. They desperately took an injured comrade to me for treatment. Then another. Then Remus asked if I had ever, in my research, come across a case of lycanthropy being passed from father to child. I explained that I had only stumbled across the blood transfusion charm by chance and that spell damage was always my forte.
Next, he brought me a young man who had been poisoned. A man named Tim Grey.
Mister Grey told me after much deliberation that his own father suffered from lycanthropy and practically laughed when I suggested it might be genetic. I made a false promise to the dying man and upon finding out he had left, told Remus everything Mister Grey told me.
"You promised you wouldn't?" Remus asks after I let slip that Tim Grey asked me not to tell Remus what I told him now.
"Well, maybe a little."
"I already knew all of this! Why did you feel the need to tell me all of this against Tim's wishes?"
"Because I know what it's like," I whispered. "To wait, if only for a few days, and wonder if your son is cursed for eternity."
"Caleb's yours?" Remus asked after a long moment.
I struck up an odd, uneasy alliance with the Order. I practically became a member, on par with a common thief they reluctantly kept around because of his connection to their fallen leader, of course. Like the criminal, they kept me for my skills and connections. In the end, Remus and Tonks shared a tentative friendship with me. At least, when they called me "Mister Ray", their voices lost the darkness they once held and almost took on a playful jest, which is about as close to a friend as I ever had.
Years after Remus and Tonks had perished, a teenager, barely more than a child, showed up on my doorstep, begging me to save the son of my lost comrades. I had almost forgotten about Mister Grey, oddly enough. Now, it all came rushing back, with the younger, red haired Lainey Grey, his bubbly "sister" almost kneeling at my stoop.
After Tim Grey recovered, I tracked him down and called upon him to find the son that over the years I began to suspect over the years had lived.
I didn't do it for myself. I did it for Marta Keel, the woman I loved.
And Caleb Keel. The son to whom I owed the world.
Author's Note: Like I said before, Healer Ray is not a person anyone should emulate. This is just how he sees things, and I thought it would be an interesting side view. I debated not posting this chapter, or even raising the rating, but because Marta was totally consensual in the whole affair, I figured it was okay. Side Note: This story takes place in the UK, of course, where the age of consent is 16, I believe.