"Maybe they just miss you," suggested James, when Remus finally met up with him and Sirius and told them about the letter from his parents.
"No, they're definitely going to tell you some bad news," Sirius decided instead. "You're not in trouble, are you?"
"I don't think so," replied Remus, certain he'd kept a clean slate since the last time he'd seen his parents. Unless they had somehow found out about Tobin knowing that Remus was a werewolf, but unless Tobin had explicitly told them— which really wouldn't make any sense whichever way you looked at it— Remus had no idea how else they would have found out, so he tried not to think of that as an option. Maybe they did just miss him.
It wasn't as if he had to wait long to find out.
The Hogwarts express was fairly empty on the journey home; none of his friends were heading back for half-term, except for Jethro, who tended to spend every holiday with his family. They sat in the same compartment, and Remus realised he had never been on his own with Jethro before. The two didn't know much about each other, but Remus soon found out that they had a fair amount in common, and that Jethro also had a muggle mother and wizard father, although it turned out his father died in a raid before he was born. Apparently his father had been an auror.
"I'm sorry to hear that," said Remus when Jethro told him, with genuine empathy in his voice. Jethro brushed it away.
"It's alright, it's not as if I remember him. I am named after him though. Where do you live?" he asked without warning, changing the subject so quickly that Remus took a moment to register the question. He soon became accustomed to the fact that changing the subject seemed to be a regular quirk in Jethro's conversational skills.
"Gwynedd," he replied amiably. "It's in the north of Wales, where the most Welsh is spoken."
"Is it muggle or wizarding?"
"Well I live in a house away from everyone, but the nearest town is muggle." The majority of the journey was then spent with Remus attempting to teach Jethro a little bit of Welsh, which ended up being very funny indeed. Especially when Remus ripped a corner off a piece of parchment paper in his trunk and wrote down the full name of Llanfairpwll, the station with the longest name in the world. Jethro blinked at it.
"It means St Mary's Church in the Hollow of the White Hazel near a Rapid Whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the Red Cave," explained Remus, struggling not to laugh halfway through at the look Jethro was giving him.
"That has to be a joke," was all Jethro could say.
"It is. Someone named it just so it could be the longest station name in the world and hey! They succeeded in that at least." Jethro laughed incredulously, and then launched into an entirely separate conversation about Quidditch World Cup predictions. He certainly had a knack for filling in any conversational holes, whether the filling had anything to do with the previous conversation or not, and the journey passed them by in a blur.
The platform was predictably emptier than usual, so Remus didn't have to search long before spotting his parents, his mother waving him over. Remus did a mental check over them, but they seemed fine, if a little tired looking. His father had noticeable bags under his eyes, although since he was rather partial to staying up late night after night, this wasn't really anything out of the ordinary. His mother's hair looked a little greyer.
The three of them greeted each other as usual, his mother finding comments on every aspect of Remus's appearance.
"You've grown so tall... your hair needs a wash... your voice has really changed... I have some cream you can use for those spots on your forehead..." and on and on it went, as if she was afraid of letting the three of them fall into silence. His father didn't say much except to ask him how school was.
"It's fine," Remus replied. "I'm getting better at potions and the full moons have been alright." Apart from that one little snag where Tobin found out that he was a werewolf, but they didn't need to know about that.
The car ride home was very similar to being on the platform, where Hope chatted away about this and that ("You know, Tegan down the shop just had a baby, lovely little boy named Rhydian. Looks just like his father.") and Lyall would sit in silence in the passenger seat, occasionally offering affirmations to Hope's anecdotes when needed. Remus sat in the back, fidgeting uncomfortably. The atmosphere between his parents was definitely different. It felt like Christmas holidays again, where they had argued for days until Remus unwillingly had to butt in.
They couldn't possibly still be angry at each other about that, could they? Remus couldn't even remember how the original argument had started. Something about a broomstick. Of course, what he did remember was his father calling him Dahlia instead of Remus, something he wasn't likely to forget in a hurry, but even Remus couldn't see the point of feeling angry anymore; he just ignored it instead. He wondered why his parents didn't do the same.
When they arrived home, and the lights were switched on in the hallway and the kitchen, it didn't take long for Remus to notice that something wasn't quite right. It started with the coatrack by the front door. It wasn't hard to miss how sparse it had become. Lyall had a number of jackets and shoes and robes for different occasions. All of them were now gone, except for what Lyall was wearing. Only his and his mother's coats remained.
Remus decided that perhaps they were in the wash.
But the house itself felt like it was missing something. You could almost always tell a magical house from a non-magical house, even if there were no real outward signs. It just had a... feeling. And the Lupin household had been no different, but Remus quickly realised what was missing. That feeling was gone. He felt like he was in the house of a muggle neighbour instead.
There was definitely something going on that his parents weren't telling him.
"Where are dad's coats?" asked Remus. They had only been in the house for less than ten minutes, but the awkwardness between his parents was so blatantly obvious. They talked cheerily enough to him, his mum asking him what he wanted for dinner, his dad asking more questions about school; but they hardly spoke to each other, and when they did, it was rather curt. Hope told Lyall to stop asking so many questions, Lyall responding with a terse "am I not allowed to show interest in what my son's been up to?" Remus really hoped another argument wasn't about to start.
They managed to make it to dinner without a bickering match opening up, where Hope served up Remus's favourite meal of spaghetti with her special tomato sauce (it was special because the tomatoes were homegrown, and Hope was an excellent gardener). But the polite tension was starting to get on his nerves, so Remus decided to cut to the chase. The coats were his starting question, but he had more on the ready if required.
Although it didn't seem like he needed any backups, because his parents took one look at each other, and placed their forks back down onto their plates almost simultaneously.
"Listen, Remus..." began Lyall, but Hope interrupted.
"I think I should tell him," she said, causing Lyall to raise his eyes to the ceiling.
"For once, Hope, let me take charge. I'm the man of the house, and it's my responsibility."
"Man of the house my arse, you won't break the news gently enough." News? Well that immediately confirmed to Remus that something was wrong, and all his parents were doing was arguing. Bloody hell, this was going to be a long evening.
"I'm not incapable of—" began Lyall, but Remus wasn't in the mood.
"For Merlin's sake, stop it! Just tell me what's wrong." They both looked at him again, and Lyall managed to allow Hope to take the reigns, nodding at her to begin. She looked down at her plate.
"We were going to tell you tomorrow," she said. "So as not to ruin your first night here, but maybe it is better we get it out the way."
"What?" Remus put his fork down. He wasn't hungry anymore.
"Your mother and I have been doing a lot of thinking," continued Lyall. "A lot of arguing too. It's no secret that our relationship has been strained over the last few months, years even... this has been a long time coming."
"So what are you saying?" asked Remus, already having a slight inkling over what was coming, but not daring to let himself think it until it was said out loud.
"Nothing's official yet," said Hope. "But your father has been spending more time away from the house, and... we're thinking of making this a permanent arrangement."
"So you've split up?" Remus's chest constricted, but weirdly, he had no idea what he was feeling. His mother replied with "No, cariad, we're just trialling things out." But the slight hesitation before she spoke suggested that she was trying to pretend things were better than they really were.
Remus had, naturally, never experienced a splitting up before, but he still had the feeling that his mother was feeding him the usual lines that every kid who went through a splitting up was fed: "your father and I just need some space", "this has nothing to do with you, it's between us", "we'll need some time to adjust but we'll get through it". By the time his parents had finished speaking, Remus had already been zoned out for a good five minutes. He just wanted to go to bed now, go to sleep, and hopefully wake up tomorrow back at Hogwarts, with this whole evening being just a bad dream.
His parents allowed him to excuse himself to his bedroom, and he immediately flopped down onto his bed. Arianrhod flew over from his desk. He'd put her there just after he got back, but had left the door of her cage open, and the window, so she could go off hunting. In this instance, however, she had chosen not to. She ruffled her feathers against Remus's cheek and he instinctively lifted his hand to stroke her, but he was hardly aware of his surroundings by this point. He had a lot of different emotions to sift through, and some of them didn't make sense. Perhaps nothing had really registered yet, because he didn't feel how he thought he was supposed to feel. In books, when a character finds out that their parents have split up, or divorced, or were "taking a break", they were angry, and confused, screaming at their parents and breaking shit in their bedrooms. But Remus didn't feel like doing that. He knew his parents argued all the time, he knew that they couldn't live together, and he wasn't angry— or at least he didn't think he was— because... well actually, he didn't know why he wasn't angry. Obviously, he didn't want his parents to split up, but what he mainly didn't want was for his parents to argue, and he was old enough to see that if his parents didn't live in the same house together, they couldn't argue. There'd be no more bickering, no more living on eggshells. No more nice times together being ruined without warning because a friendly argument turned into a full blown screaming match. No more hiding in his room, unable to give into the urge of covering his ears in case he was called down to get involved.
Had he wished his parents' relationship had got to this point? Of course not. He wished he had two parents who got along and loved each other and were always happy, like any normal kid. But the point was, they didn't. So if separating them meant that Remus could always eat dinner without worrying about a plate being smashed halfway though in anger— something that had happened once when he was nine and his mum had immediately ushered him up to bed, where he had to listen to their shouting until he could no longer keep his eyes open— then separation it was, and Remus couldn't help but feel mildly relieved.
Over the next week, Remus had a hard time trying to work out why his parents kept him at home when he could have easily gone back to Hogwarts for the rest of the half-term. He felt bad about it, like he was avoiding his own parents even after being at school for months on end, but it wasn't that he was avoiding his parents, he was avoiding the situation they were in. And finally— predictably— the thoughts of how his parents never argued before Remus came out as trans, before he became a werewolf, started to filter into his psyche. Nights were spent in Remus's bedroom, with thoughts of "what if" and bullshit statements of "it wasn't your fault" kicking around his head. But as the sun rose the next day, a more logical part of his brain kicked in and firmly claimed that it wasn't his fault that he was trans, or that he was a werewolf. He hadn't asked for that, and if his parents couldn't deal with it without splitting up then their relationship wasn't strong enough in the first place.
This logic lasted until dusk, and the cycle would start again, and Remus would exhaust himself from crying. Relieved as he was that there was no more arguing, the initial novelty of it soon wore off, and there was no denying that the situation still sucked.
His dad was staying in the Leaky Cauldron all the way in Diagon Alley, which wasn't hard to get to using floo powder, but Remus could tell his father hated it. The room was small and dingy, and the room service was nowhere near as efficient as Lyall would have liked. Remus was surprised his father had agreed to live there, but Lyall certainly had enough dignity not to kick his wife out onto the streets of muggle towns without an income, with a kid to look after. Of course, Hope would always be welcome to live with her parents, but according to Lyall— after Remus had asked why he didn't just stay with his mother or sister— he and Hope didn't want to tell the rest of the family until things had been properly worked out.
"Well, you'll have to work things out by Christmas," said Remus. "They'll all be coming round then."
"Actually, Remus, we may have to lie to them when Christmas arrives," replied Lyall. "Do you think you can do that?"
"Yeah, I guess." What was one more lie in Remus's growing list of Essential Secrets He Had to Keep? His father went on to explain that the Leaky Cauldron was only temporary.
"I have a job, so it won't be long before I'm able to move into a place of my own. In fact, I can probably do that now, but it would be a permanent move, and nothing's permanent at the moment." He then asked if, when the time comes, would Remus like to help him find a new place?
"Could be fun!" Lyall said with a smile.
"Okay," replied Remus, with little enthusiasm. It didn't sound fun at all, in his opinion. It sounded depressing, and he didn't want any part of it, but a smile from his father was rare these days, so he said nothing.
Hope on the other hand decided that she wanted to get a job.
"I'd rather not rely on your father for everything," she explained. "I've been doing that for the past fifteen years or so. It's time for a change." It was late, his father was back in London, and the two were sitting on the sofa, watching Ryan a Ronnie, a Welsh sketch show that had only started a year ago, but it was quickly becoming a favourite between Remus and his mum. Right now Ryan was pretending to be a jockey without a horse, and his mum was laughing softly beside him. Remus was trying to get invested, and he almost did before Our House began, but suddenly his mother had turned the TV off, thinking this was as good a time as any to have a deep conversation about jobs and futures and feelings, and other stuff that Remus didn't care about. It annoyed him how she didn't even ask if he wanted her to turn the TV off, she just did. If it was up to him, the TV would stay on permanently and he wouldn't have to talk to anyone. But it wasn't up to him.
Remus assured his mother that he was fine with her getting a job, supported her even, in a disconnected, non-committal way that was becoming familiar to him whenever he talked to his parents these days. Hope said she could return to her old job of being a secretary, before she met Lyall. Or she could go back to school, train as anything she wanted.
"I could be a lawyer," she said, half-joking.
"You could," replied Remus, deciding to just echo back his support, while his eyes were focused on the black TV screen.
"Or a teacher," she continued. "I'd be a good teacher. I taught you, didn't I?"
"Yes." She'd been wanting to be a teacher for ages, but she never got round to it, so Remus wasn't expecting anything to come out of this; just wishful thinking, because as far as he was aware, nothing had changed except that his father was no longer in the house, and Remus was pretty sure Lyall had never discouraged Hope from getting a job before. Then again, it seemed that Remus had been much less aware about his parents' lives than he'd originally thought, and perhaps ignoring his mother's ideas of university and training and jobs was a bit selfish, or immature of him.
"You'd be a great teacher," Remus said, plastering on a genuine smile. His mam smiled back.
By the end of half-term, Remus was finally able to admit that staying at home for the entire two weeks had probably been useful. He'd managed to settle into a routine with his parents, or at least begin to settle into a routine. He went up to London on the weekends to see his dad, and Lyall would take him round Diagon Alley, and they'd usually end up in Flourish & Blotts, and if Remus was lucky— which he usually was, as his father was clearly trying to compensate for everything— they'd grab an ice cream at Fortescue's.
Remus had a feeling the routine wouldn't last. Lyall would eventually decide that he'd paid his dues, and the two would most likely end up sitting in awkward silence; it had already happened a few times at dinner. But Remus tried to pretend otherwise, pretend that the ice cream would last and that his father would stay in this out-of-character happy, enthusiastic mood, and at least it was only for the weekends. He could go back to his normal routine at home, with his mam, and he could easily ignore the sound of muffled crying coming from her bedroom door whenever he got up at night to get a drink of water.
He never let on to her that he knew, that he'd heard. She was alright around him, and that's all that mattered.