The quote is by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Anything recognizable is not mine.
Remus stood on the busy sidewalk and tried to convince himself to enter the shop before him. There was nothing very intimidating about it really. It was a little bookstore, situated between a laundryman and a Korean deli. The window display was also benign, a sign proclaiming children's reading hour every Friday afternoon was situated against a book with cracked binding.
It's just a job interview, he told himself as he finally took a step forward towards the door. Just breath Lupin, they don't know what you are and they'll never have to find out. Hoping his new resolve would last so he could make a decent impression he pushed open the door and stepped inside, causing a little bell to ring.
The shop, being small, was crowded with bookshelves and one or two worn looking chairs. There were so many books that some had been crammed on the shelves side ways and even more were perched onto the shelves in precarious looking piles. It smelled of old paper and the familiarity of it calmed his nerves.
Just visible through the shelves was a counter with a till. Behind the counter a young woman sat on a stool reading a magazine. Her long black hair was piled on the top of her head, what appeared to be a chopstick holding it in place. As he approached, Remus noticed the earring in her nose and that she was wearing bright red lipstick.
"Excuse me," after all his mother had taught him to be polite, "I have an interview at 2, with Dana."
The young woman looked up from her magazine, which had a picture of a brown haired man on it and said in small white lettering Gorby does Washington, among other things, a board look on her face. The look quickly changed when she saw him.
"You're Remus then?" she asked sounding unsure.
He smiled slightly, "I am. "
Her eyes were scanning him and he wondered if it had been a mistake to wear jeans, although Dora had insisted he did saying that he wanted to look as "young Muggle" as possible but still presentable.
"You're early." She said still checking him out. She had now returned to his face.
He knew that he was only a minute early, but asked, "Is that a problem?"
Instead of answering she said, "You're younger than you sounded on the phone. Your voice is misleading."
He didn't really know what to say to that, but thankfully she didn't seem to expect an answer. Instead she pulled out a form from under the counter and grabbed a pencil.
"Right, so I'm Dana, as you may have figured out from my previous comment about the phone." She was still staring at him and it was beginning to become unnerving. "I'm the manager here, the owner is an old bat who never comes in, so I pretty much run this outfit. As you can see it's a bit of a mess, but don't go thinking it's all over the gaff, I know exactly where everything is to be found. " She said vehemently, as if he had accused her of being disorganized already.
"So you wanted full time?"
"Yes, that would be preferable." she didn't even look away as she jotted on the form.
"Uhhuh. You have very nice eyes you know."
"Thank you," he said slowly, somewhat taken aback. What did his eyes have to do with anything?
"I'm just stating the truth," she smiled; her teeth were almost perfectly straight. "You don't have any other commitments that will interfere with working here?"
"No." it wasn't really a lie. The shop closed before the moon rose.
She held his eyes with hers then and he noticed that one was blue and the other green. She seemed to be trying to read his mind. Either that or she had been staring at him for so long that her face was stuck like that.
"You can start tomorrow." She finally said, sweeping the unfilled form off the counter and picking up her magazine. She now looked away from him, her eyes seemingly riveted on whatever article she was reading. "Be here at 8 am, that's when we open, or so the sign says. Sometimes I actually wonder if it was supposed to say 9 and there's just a smudge on it." She shrugged.
"Right. Thank you Dana, I'll see you at 8 tomorrow." Quickly he turned and made his way out of the shop. He could feel her watching him as he left.
"What a strange woman," he thought as he slipped into an alley to disapperate. She left him feeling somewhat unsettled and he couldn't help thinking that that didn't bode well for the longevity of this job.
The rest of the afternoon found him cleaning the house. He changed into an old t-shirt and set to work starting with the kitchen. A few dishes sat in the sink and he set them to scrubbing them selves and sent a scorgify at the windows that looked out into the garden. Examining the floor he decided that it didn't need a scrubbing yet and moved onto the living room where he picked up a few discarded items, including a pair of Dora's socks and his robes. As he picked a sofa pillow up off the floor he couldn't help the smile that pulled at his lips. If his friends could see him, they'd be despairing for his man hood. In fact he was sure that if there was an afterlife James was looking down at him and shaking his head. Perhaps he had a touch of that obsessive-compulsive disorder, but he had always felt better after putting things in their rightful place. He didn't need everything organized; as long as he could find it a little mess was fine, natural even. But he was still feeling disconcerted by the meeting with Dana. So he cleaned to get his mind off of it.
Satisfied with the living room he took the robes and socks and headed upstairs to deposit them in the hamper. He looked around the room and shook his head. It looked like a tornado had whirled through. He flicked his wand and all discarded clothes flew into the hamper. He definitely was not going to try to suss out exactly which clothes were clean and which weren't. Picking up a pair of Dora's shoes he went to the closet and threw them in. The shoes landed on top of a box and the sight of it caused him to lurch back and sit on the bed. Running a hand through his hair he continued to look at it. There was nothing really alarming about the box, but he knew what it held.
After Dora had moved in they had decided that not using the bigger bedroom was silly. So they had spent an entire weekend rearranging things, using a paint charm to change the colour of the walls from white to a light green and replacing the bed, where Remus was sure he was conceived. After they were done it had seemed a different room completely. Which was what they had bee going for. If it hadn't been he would never have been able to so much as spend more than a few minutes in there, let alone sleep.
He didn't like to think of the night his parents had been murdered. At first he had been haunted by the images seared into his mind. Seeing the dark mark, finding his father but still somehow hoping that his mother had survived. Then going into the very room he now sat in and finding her sprawled, dead. She had still been warm, death only just setting in.
So it had been necessary to change the room, make it his and Dora's and not the place that his mother had died. When they had been cleaning out the room, they had simply boxed up his parent's things and stored them away. Now here was this box, one of the many that held the remnants of two people.
Slowly he stood and strode across the room back to the closet. Crouching down he pulled the box out and carried it over to the bed, where he set it and again looked at it. It was much too heavy to simply contain clothes. Taking up his wand he used it to slice through the tape that held it closed.
The first item he saw was a leather bound book, the brown covering was worn and embossed on the front were the words "It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up - that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had..." He remembered this book well.
One of his earliest memories was of his mother and himself down by the water. He remembered that he had been chasing the waves that rolled onto the beach, and that Sarah had been sitting on a blanket, her long legs crossed and writing in this book. Eventually he got tired of running into the waves and had sat down in the sand and watched her as she wrote. Finally she had looked up at him arching a brow. "What are you doing?" she had asked, her lilting voice filled with amusement.
He had shrugged and replied, "What are you doing?"
She had smiled then and closed her book. "Remembering, love."
He hadn't known what she meant; it was years before he found out that the fat book was his mothers journal, a journal she had been writing in since she was had been given to her by his grandmother, bought at a muggle shop in Dublin.
21 years of her life was recorded here in this book that he held in his hands. Remus carefully opened it to a random page. His mother had doodled in the corner of it, whirling patterns in black ink. The date on the page was November 1957. She would have been 16. The page held two passages, both short. The first read:
" Jarrett asked me out today; still hoping that he'll win me over I suppose. That'll be the day. I had to result to finally telling him that the day I went out with him hell would freeze over. He didn't quite know what I meant, but I'm sure he got the meaning. Ramona is now mad at me though, says I should have given him a chance. Just because she likes him. People baffle me."
Remus smiled and flipped further into the journal again stopping at a random page. This one was dated March 16 1960. The day he had been born.
"I made John bring me my journal," the passage read. "I had to get how I'm feeling down while its fresh. He says I should be sleeping, but how can I, exhausted as I am, when I can see my child asleep, cradled in his fathers arms. My child. It still amazes me that he's mine, that he came from me. I'll probably be staring at him for days. When they put him in my arms it was like nothing I had ever felt before. He looked at me and I knew that he knew that he was mine. I thought I was going to loose him, the birth was so long and hard and the healers wouldn't tell me what was wrong. But he's here now. Even if they tell me I can never have another, I won't be sad. He'll be enough."
Remus closed the journal and sat it carefully on the bed. He would read more later, just then he felt that he couldn't. This book didn't deserve to be relegated to a box in a closet. He would put it somewhere safe.
He reached into the box again and pulled out another book, this one a photo album. This too he put aside for later. He looked into the closet where other boxes were placed on the shelf. It was still early and he had time.
"Remus?"
He looked up from the box he was going through to see Dora standing in the doorway to the room, her Auror robes draped over arm. Her eyes scanned the boxes that littered the floor.
"What're you doing?"
He closed the box and sealed it, shoving it over with five others. "Going through my parents things. I figured we could take their clothes to that second hand shop in Diagon."
She nodded and entered the room to sit on the bed. "What's this?" she held the journal up.
"My mum's Journal. I found it in the first box I went through." He shoved the last box over to the ones that would go up to the attic and joined her on the bed.
"Can I?" she indicted the book and he nodded.
"I don't think she'd mind you going through it."
She opened the book to the first page, "May 25th 1956."
She read and then laughed; "She says that some boy tried to snog her behind the greenhouses after telling her some story about loosing his toad. She hexed him and told him he could find his own bloody toad and that his breath smelt like he had been kissing it and that's probably why it had run away."
"She didn't really." Remus said in amusement. It really wouldn't surprise him, his mother had hardly been mild mannered.
"She did. Says that besides getting this journal it was the worst birthday of her life."
Dora closed the journal and looked at him. "So?"
"So what?" he knew what she wanted, but couldn't help teasing her.
She rolled her eyes, " you know what."
He suppressed a smirk, "No, I'm afraid I don't Nymphadora."
She gave him a severe look. "Now you're just asking for it. I will not hesitate to take my shoe off and hit you with it. Come on, I've wanted to know all day."
"I got the job, if that's what you wanted to know."
She sighed. "You're so mean to me sometimes you know."
He laughed and wrapped an arm around her pulling her against him. "I try love."
"So what's the place like, when do you start and what's your boss like?" she asked apparently deciding that she forgave him for teasing her.
"It's small, packed with books, tomorrow and I think she may be a bit spaced honestly."
She pulled away to look at him. "What?" she seemed to trying to tell if he was joking or not.
"I'm serious. I'm no stranger to strange behaviour, it was par for the course being a Marauder, but there was something about her that really unnerved me."
She was smiling now, "Oh really, what did she do, invite you to be part of her cult?"
Remus snorted, "Hardly. She stared. A lot. And she said she liked my eyes. Mostly though it was the staring. Other than that our conversation was brisk, she was very vehement."
Tonks raised a brow. "Maybe she's just eccentric."
"Perhaps. I hope so; I can deal with eccentrics. Invitations to join cults are another matter all together."
She tapped her lime green nails against the journal absently. "Maybe, she was checking you out. Did she watch you as you left?"
Remus swore he could hear a possessive note in her voice. Was she jealous? No, Dora always laughed these kinds of things off. "I'm not sure, although I did get the feeling that she was staring again."
"Well, I'll just have to come see you on my day off wont I. Reassert my territory."
"I'm sure she's just eccentric." He said amused.
"Uhhuh." She didn't sound convinced.