Remus glanced up at an unassuming row home in Essex. It had a yellow front door, decorated with a simple, flowery wreath.
"You see it?"
"Which one?"
"The one with the yellow door."
Remus nodded. "That's where you live?"
Tonks looked at him, her distress barely concealed. "It's where we live."
"Right," he said, clearing his throat awkwardly. "With your mother. Sirius's cousin, Andromeda."
"At least your mind didn't forget the location."
Tonks looked over her shoulder. The Auror, Kingsley Shacklebolt, and another Order member, the Weasleys' eldest son, Bill, kept a safe distance from them, ensuring it was safe to move.
"The Fidelius Charm can survive memory loss," Remus informed her. "I read that in a book awhile back."
"Must've been before '94," she muttered, swaying on her way to the door.
Remus sighed and trotted behind her, apprehensive over what came next. He'd tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Tonks to let him stay with his father for a few days to reacquaint himself with his new reality.
Tonks refused, in no uncertain terms. She was within weeks of her due date and insisted the baby's father be with her when it was time to give birth. Remus tried to protest, put off by the idea that he'd watch a near-stranger give birth to a son that couldn't possibly be his. In the end, Lyall stepped in and told Remus he'd turn him out if he dared leave his pregnant wife again.
It was the again that made Remus feel inexplicably, unreasonably guilty. The other Remus, as he referred to the man in his head, had left his pregnant wife. This Remus was thrust into a life he'd always wanted, but he hadn't planned or hoped for. In the blink of an eye, he had a tetchy, pregnant wife who he'd wronged at least twice.
He didn't want to know how else he'd wronged her, or why she decided to stay with him. That was the other Remus's problem.
Tonks got to the door and waved her wand over the knob. With a click, she pressed the door open and gestured for Remus to follow.
He took a deep breath, bracing himself to meet his mother-in-law.
His limbs were still heavy and awkward from the skirmish in which he'd sustained his memory loss. The other Remus was a regular speaker for a resistance radio program called Potterwatch; at the last broadcast, he, Kingsley, the Weasley twins, and Lee Jordan were ambushed. Though they were all injured, only Remus was hit with a series of botched charms, possibly meant to disorient him. His attackers wiped four years' of memories and broke most of his bones for good measure.
Tonks and her mother were able to heal his bones well, but when he started spouting nonsense about Hogsmeade, hinkypunks, and dangerous gambles, they decided to take him to St. Mungo's. There, they managed to ask a favor of Ted Tonks's friend and former housemate, Healer Shafiq, to direct Remus's care. They bought a few days of time with Shafiq's help, but as Remus was lucid and able to walk – albeit unsteadily – they couldn't risk his presence at the hospital any longer.
They left in the dead of the night, with Remus leaning on Bill and Kingsley for support, and spent the rest of the night at an Order safehouse, owned by Hestia Jones, who Remus was delighted to see again, having remembered the warm, kind-hearted witch from the first iteration of the Order.
"We're here!" Tonks called. "Mum! We're home!"
A woman who looked too much like Bellatrix Lestrange emerged from another room. Remus was ready to defend himself, but his wand flew out of his hand as the hex arrived on his tongue.
"That's my mother," Tonks snapped, holding his wand in her right hand. "Not her sister."
"Give the bloke a break, Tonks," Bill said, leaning his lanky frame against the doorway. "He's not the same Lupin as before."
Remus tried to give Bill a grateful smile, but he didn't return it, and instead cleared his throat loudly.
"Well, I'll be off," Bill announced, breaking the uncomfortable silence in the foyer. "Let us know when baby Lupin arrives."
Tonks gave him an awkward hug and he sped out. Kingsley nodded at the three of them before Tonks closed the door and warded it shut.
"Your father stopped by," Andromeda said stiffly, turning to Remus. "He informed me of your memory loss."
"Yes, er, it's 1994 up here." Remus pointed to his head. He mustered a weak smile and held out his hand. "I know you know who I am, but it's nice to meet you, Mrs. Tonks."
"You can call me Andromeda." The Bellatrix-lookalike turned to her daughter. "Give him his wand, Nymphadora. He'll know better than to try to hex me."
Remus gulped and took his wand back from Tonks.
"I should show you around," she said, looking at her mother. "Follow me."
Remus followed her through the ground floor, which contained a well-ordered, cozy living room, a good-sized kitchen with a table set for three in its corner, and a sitting room containing stacks of familiar books.
"You spend a lot of time in here," explained Tonks. "We talked about turning it into a library, but we don't want to live here forever."
They went upstairs and she pointed out the three bedrooms.
"That one's mum's," she said, gesturing to the end of the corridor. "This one's ours—" she pointed at the bedroom with the front window. "—and that one will be for the baby." She concluded by opening the door to a small bedroom, which already contained a wooden, spindled cot, a matching rocking chair, and a bookshelf filled with children's books.
From where he stood, Remus could see the inside of the bedroom he supposedly shared with Tonks. His worn clothes were folded neatly at the foot of the bed. Another stack of books decorated one of the bedside tables. A cemetery of half-used mugs littered the dresser.
The other half of the room was an explosion of color and feminine garments. It was unmistakably a shared room, but Remus couldn't imagine sharing that space with the woman standing next to him.
"I probably know the answer to this by now," Tonks said, her lips already downturned, "but you'd prefer to sleep alone?"
Remus clenched his jaw. "I can sleep on the sofa, if you prefer?"
Tonks made a quiet, sad noise from the back of her throat. "I'll sleep with mum. It's fine."
Remus rubbed the back of his neck with his hand and looked away. "I'm sorry. I'm not…I don't really know you."
"You're not going to get to know me if you don't talk to me."
Tonks's hair flashed to a neon orange. Remus did a double take, as he was still trying to get used to the sudden changes of her body. She sighed and turned away from him, casting a charm on her clothes to fly out of the bedroom and land with a fwump in her mother's room.
A loud, gurgling sound emanated from Tonks's midsection.
"It's almost lunchtime," she said, her hands resting on her huge belly. "If you want to join us."
Remus murmured an agreement, his own stomach growling, and joined Tonks and her mother in the kitchen for lunch.
He'd never felt so self-conscious in his life. He knew the witches were watching him, the two of them having an unspoken conversation with their eyes and facial expressions. Remus, not wanting to offend, said almost nothing, save for a small compliment over the cooking.
As it turned out, it was his own cooking, a meal pre-prepared during the winter months to help them save gold until the baby arrived.
He offered his help for the washing up, until he realized he didn't know where anything went, so he excused himself to the sitting room with a cup of tea.
A tufted brown chair appeared to be the place his body liked to be, so he settled down there and peered over at the books on the end table to his left.
A battered copy of The Magic of Pregnancy was on top of the pile. He leafed through it, morbidly curious over what his previous self was studying. He blanched upon finding a bookmark stuck on a graphic diagram of a baby's head crowning from its mother's womb, with a note, in his writing, that read "Transfigure forceps as needed."
He shuddered and set that book aside. The next one was on magical infancy and childhood, which he found rather interesting, until he found another note near the end, on non-magical children, that read "Better a Squib than a werewolf."
A plunging feeling overtook him. He hadn't truly entertained the thought that Tonks was expecting his child, despite her assurances to the contrary, or his father's remarks that he stay with his wife and soon-to-be-born son. Like everything else he'd experienced in the last twenty-four hours, he assumed there would be some rational explanation.
Werewolves didn't breed. It was absurd, laughable even, that he'd gotten her pregnant. The child would be like him, if it even survived. If he'd truly conceived a child with Tonks, she would've made the sensible decision against having it.
No one wanted a werewolf for a child.
It was this note, however, written in his hand, that led him to think he—or the other Remus—had committed the unthinkable. He'd impregnated a poor woman with cursed seed, and the mutant that grew within would ruin her life.
The subject of his apparent crime decided to make an appearance.
"Molly Weasley's coming by today. She's bringing us a few more baby things."
Remus nodded at her. The urge to bolt from the spot coursed through him - how could she look at him, knowing what he'd done to her and the monstrosity he'd helped create?
"You don't look well," she said, her forehead creasing. Tonks moved across the room to stand in front of him, but he didn't dare look her in the eye. "What's wrong?"
He continued his silence. She took the book from his hand, scrutinizing the notes, and let it drop to the floor.
"So that's what you were really thinking that day."
Remus lifted his head slightly and, from the corner of his eye, saw her ease herself onto the sofa opposite him. She groaned and ran a hand through her pale pink hair.
"I doubt this'll make you feel better, but there've been several full moons since this kid was conceived and we've made it through." Remus finally looked up from the floor, stunned. "I know you better than you think," she said, with a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "Healer Shafiq checked as best he could while you were out. Our baby should be just fine."
Remus's fears weren't completely assuaged; even if the Healer thought the child would be fine, what would happen when it realized its father was a monster? Or that he'd doomed it and its mother to a life of poverty and ridicule?
"Could you say something?" Tonks demanded. "You had plenty to say to Hestia-fucking-Jones this morning but don't have anything to say to me?"
Remus felt his jaw grow slack.
"Er, I…" He looked down at her cobalt blue, stretched-out jumper and found an eagle on it. "Were you a Ravenclaw?"
Tonks looked as offended as if he'd slapped her.
"This was my dad's," she replied stiffly. "I was a Hufflepuff."
Remus nodded and put his hands on his knees, aching for something to make sense. His eyes drifted to a framed photograph bearing the image of a gap-toothed, pink-haired girl, beaming brightly next to a jovial-looking man with golden hair and a kind smile.
"Did I know him?" Remus asked quietly, his nose pointed at the framed picture.
"Not for as long as you should've," Tonks replied, sniffling into the crook of her arm. "He had to run away to keep us safe-left in November and n-never made it h-home." She trembled and wiped her cheeks, the too-long sleeves becoming damp with her crying.
Noticing that talking about her father seemed to keep her anger at him at bay, Remus pressed on, despite the discomfort it caused him.
"He was called Ted?"
Tonks nodded, her eyes shining with tears. Remus tried not to look directly at her; even with her tears, he felt nervous around her, caught between elation that he had a wife and unending dread that he'd ruined her life by his existence.
He pressed his lips together, an idea forming on the tip of his tongue.
"Does the…er," Remus ventured, waving his hand around her midsection, "does it have a name yet?"
Something peculiar shimmered in her wet, red-rimmed eyes.
"No, he doesn't."
Remus had never given much thought to naming children, other than cursing his parents' decision to give him what would become an ironic namesake, but he decided he didn't care what Tonks named the child who would bear the surname Lupin. Its name wouldn't change its paternity.
"If you wanted to call the baby Ted, after your father," Remus suggested, seeing Tonks's chin quiver, "you can."
"Is that what you want?"
Remus pulled at a loose, fraying thread around one of the patches in his trousers.
"Yes," he said, after a moment's thought. "It - he can be called Teddy when he's young and Ted when he's older."
Tonks let out a weak chuckle. Remus peered up, seeing her hair's pink stripes deepen.
"You said that about two weeks ago."
"I thought you said the baby didn't have a name?"
"He didn't, but I wondered if there was some name you were too afraid to tell me about before."
Remus clasped his hands together and looked down, unsurprised to see a few more faint lines marring his skin. Four years had clearly left their mark upon him.
Another odd thought crossed his mind: he had no idea how old Tonks was. He frowned, trying to remember the gap between Sirius and his cousin, Andromeda, who he'd always claimed was his favorite. She'd left Hogwarts before Sirius, Remus, and James began. He couldn't remember a young Tonks while he was at school - he felt such a colorful witch would've made an impression - so he concluded that Andromeda's daughter had to be at least seven or eight years his junior and Andromeda, at least seven or eight years his senior.
The calculations didn't quite add up in his head.
"If I'm 38 now," he said slowly, "and Sirius would've been 39…that makes you…?"
Tonks scrunched her nose. Where a petite, button nose had been, a droopy nose replaced it. Her skin was covered in liver spots. Her hair became a silvery white and wrinkles appeared around her eyes and mouth.
If she wasn't pregnant, Remus would've assumed she was well into old age.
"My age doesn't matter," she answered, tapping her foot against the floor. "You're not old enough to be my father, if that's what you're asking."
Remus wasn't satisfied with her answer.
"If you must know," she continued, rolling her eyes dramatically, "you're about thirteen years older-"
"Thirteen years?" Remus gaped at her, open-mouthed and disgusted with himself.
"Yeah, but it doesn't fucking matter. I'm not going to hear the 'too old' for me bullshit speech again. You're 38. I'm 25. When we met, I was a fully qualified Auror and already in my twenties."
Remus snapped his mouth shut. She was annoyed again-livid, by the way her eyes gleamed and nostrils flared-and he couldn't stand the tension. He didn't think he could dislike himself any more than he already did, but he was beginning to loathe the other Remus for screwing up so often with Tonks that she was this defensive and irritable around him. He was certain she had every right to be angry with him, but not this him. The other him.
He schooled his expression, forcing a neutral smile, and said, "Age is just a number, as they say. Perhaps you can tell me how we met?"
Tonks narrowed her eyes at him.
"Playing the avoidance game, are we?" she spat. With a labored huff, she got up from the sofa. "I need to not be here. If you need me-and I'm sure you won't-I'll be up in mum's room."
She grunted and waddled off, leaving Remus to wonder how he'd find a way out of the mess someone else created.