The bolded text is Lyall's flashbacks as he tells Remus the story of Fenrir Greyback's hearing. Also, trigger warning, Lyall recalls the night that Remus was bitten so there's some blood... Enjoy!
Remus' heart pounded in his ears as he watched his father scrub his hands over his exhausted face and take a shuddering breath, preparing to tell a story he had fought for so long to hide or perhaps he had even tried to forget. Remus shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Yes, he wanted to hear this. He needed to know it, but at the same time, he wasn't sure just how much more heartache and pain both he and his father could endure in such a short amount of time. It had to be done, though.
"I'm sure," Lyall began slowly, meticulously choosing his words as he spoke. "That you remember very little from life before that day. You were very young, obviously, but you were quite a sharp kid even back then and I'm sure you remember what I did for work back in those days."
Remus nodded. "You worked for the Ministry. Something to do with magical creatures, I expect. I used to read through all of your books about them."
"Yes," Lyall said, a sad and tired smile ghosting across his face. "I worked in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. I had been called upon specifically by the Ministry to take the position due to my well-known knowledge of Non-human and Spirituous Apparitiosn and my success in vanishing all dorts of dark matter. They wanted me because there had been some trouble." Lyall closed his eyes as if remembering a specific image. "This was back when this war was really just beginning to pick up. There had been an uprising in magical creatures and it seemed as though they were starting to pick sides, or rather they were being recruited, and not by the good side." He paused momentarily, opening a drawer in his desk to retrieve a pair of gold, wire-rimmed, rectangular reading glasses which he carefully placed on his face. He then picked up the clipping from the Prophet that Remus had thrown in front of him. He sighed and shook his head. "This right here," he said pointing to a part of the article. "'Multiple disappearances of both muggle and magical children from 1959 to 1962' That was a case we were working on at the time and we had brought several suspects in for questions, including this man – Fenrir Greyback – after he was found associating with a pack of werewolves."
January 1965 – The Headquarters of the Ministry of Magic
Lyall Lupin's head was still buried in paperwork detailing his recent success of ridding a small Muggle town of a particularly troublesome Boggart that had come to be known as the Screaming Bogey of Strathtully by trapping it inside of an ordinary matchbox.
He smiled to himself as he recalled the look of fascination on his young son's face when he had come home that very night and told the boy all about it. At just five years old, Remus had developed quite an interest in Lyall's work, and the strange and mysterious creatures is often involved. He was spectacularly bright for such a young age and Lyall was constantly impressed with just how fearless his son seemed to be when hearing about these beasts.
A knock on his office door shook him from his thoughts and he looked up just in time for the door to open just enough for his boss to pop his head inside.
"Still here, Lupin?" The older man smiled warmly at him. "You were scheduled to be off an hour ago."
Lyall grinned and shrugged his shoulders. He looked pointedly down at the stack of papers on his desk. "Just finishing up on that Strathrully case, Mr. Scamander."
Scamander let the door open the rest of the way and he leaned against the doorframe in the most casual way possible for the usually awkward and highly energized man. Lyal always found it amusing that a man like Newt Scamander, a renowned genius and the world authority on magical creatures, was so utterly out of place when it came to most human interactions. He was a very kind man, though, and Lyall had the utmost respect for him and was pleased beyond his wildest dreams to be working so closely with him.
"Paperwork's not nearly as important as getting home to your wife and kid, I'm sure," Scamader said. "Really, Lyall, I can't thank you enough for the way you handled the situation. Inspirational, really, catching that Boggart in a matchbox, and safely at that."
Lyall beamed, feeling his face grow warm at the compliment. "I appreciate that."
Newt nodded, his eyes focusing on something in the corner of the room rather than Lyall, which Lyall had become used to after spending enough time with the man. Then Newt bit his bottom lip. "Since I've got you here, I've been meaning to let you know you've been added to the questioning committee for the suspects in those missing children cases…"
Lyall frowned. "That's not really our department, is it?"
Newt made an odd face and shifted uncomfortably. "Well, you see… it seems this chap's pretty friendly with a pack of werewolves just outside of Bibury."
Lyall shuddered. He was all too aware that the Ministry had been searching for a pack of rogue werewolves, and the location was just a little too close to where he lived. "Yes, alright, sure. When's the hearing?"
"It's tomorrow afternoon. Sorry for the short notice, Lyall."
Lyall waved it off dismissively. "No, no that's quite alright. I know you've got your hands full."
Newt smiled brightly again. "Thanks again, Lyall. Say hello to Hope and your boy for me."
"I will."
—-
"Wait." Remus interrupted. "I thought Scamander started the mandatory Werewolf Registration back in 1947. If this happened in 1965, wouldn't they have Greyback on their records already?"
Lyall grimaced and shook his head. "Remus, there was so much happening back then, so much going on and the Registry itself had caused so much controversy–" Remus snorted and rolled his eyes at that, but Lyall ignored it. "-unfortunately, it wasn't very well maintained. People were being bitten and turned all the time and no way to keep track of the newly turned to make them register themselves. He had been slipping just under the radar for years up until then."
Remus stared hard at the desk in front of him, the wheels in his head were turning, trying to make sense of what his father had shared so far. "Alright… So then what about the hearing? He was found guilty wasn't he?"
"No."
Remus' eyes shot back up to his father's face and he gasped. "What–? But then–?"
"Our first question to him was about the company we had found him keeping and the fact that they were Werewolves. We asked him if he himself was a werewolf who had managed to dodge the Ministry's Registration laws…"
The filthy, beastly-looking man, bound at the wrists by magical shackles in the center of the room, gave a grizzly grin at the accusation, flashing a set of teeth much sharper than that of any human. "No, sir." He answered seamlessly, though there was the rumbling of a growl in his voice. "I'm nothing but an ordinary street tramp. Just got myself mixed up with the wrong crowd, it seems."
Lyall scoffed in his seat among the questioning committee. Surely his peers did not believe that his monster before them was a common muggle living on the streets who just happened to come across a pack of dangerous werewolves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Yet that was exactly what they believed. Every single one of them except for himself was prepared to accept this lie, obliviate the 'muggle', and send him on his way.
"Your honor, if I could give my own professional opinion." Lyall found himself saying. He had never been a very outspoken man himself, but he couldn't just let this go without voicing his concerns. Not when this pack had been spotted so very close to his own home and family. What if the next child to go missing was Remus?
The Minister, Nobby Leach, raised both of his eyebrows at him, but he nodded. "Yes, Mr. Lupin?"
Suddenly anxious, Lyall swallowed hard and cleared his throat. "I'm sorry, Minister Leach, but how can we be so sure that this man is not a werewolf himself?"
The rest of the committee whispered among themselves. Some groaned, clearly wanting to be done with this and return home to their families.
Lyall ignored them and continued. "I've been studying dark creatures for most of my adult life. I'm one of the front runners of my field and I can tell you that this man is no average muggle."
The man in question snapped his head around to face Lyall, his eyes – which were far too bright and yellow around the rims – glaring like daggers at him. Lyall tried not to let it intimidate him into backing out of his argument.
The Minister himself seemed to mull over Lyall's objection and he tapped his cheek thoughtfully. "And how would you suggest we prove this, Mr. Lupin?"
Lyall blinked, his mouth hanging open as he tried to think of something quickly. The idea hit him. "The full moon is tomorrow night, isn't it? I suggest we keep him detained here, in a secured area of course. If he's truly not a werewolf, he won't transform. Simple as that."
The committee broke out into an uproar.
"For Salazar's sake, Lupin! As if we haven't enough on our plates!"
"We can't waste precious resources and time just for some theory!"
"He's obviously just some muggle bastard!"
"We've got more important things to do than watch some man in a cage all bloody night."
Angered by his peer's refusal to see what was so obviously in front of them, Lyall felt the last of his reserve slip. He slammed his fist down and stood. "This is completely ridiculous! So we're just going to let him go on nothing but his own word? Well, that's bloody wonderful, but who knows where he and the rest of the filthy, soulless beasts will strike next? What if it's one of your own children that goes missing next, eh? The registry is shit! Evil creatures like that deserve nothing but death."
"Mr. Lupin, that is enough!" The Minister shouted over the outraged chattering in the room. He frowned at Lyall disapprovingly. Greyback's eyes were glued to him, wide and bright and threatening and his teeth were bared. No one but Lyall seemed to be paying him much attention though. The Minister shook his head. "I'm sorry, Lyall, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave the courtroom immediately."
Lyall eyes his son warily from across the desk. Remus' expression remained unmoving, his brow furrowed and his eyes downcast as he continued to let his father's words settle in his mind.
"They let him go after that." Lyall's voice broke slightly as he concluded his tale. "And right as they were going to wipe his memory, still believing he was a muggle, he escaped and ran off with two accomplices. They never caught them."
Neither Lyall nor Remus said anything for a long time. The room was deafeningly quiet except for the ticking of the clock on the wall.
Finally, Remus spoke. "Soulless, evil creatures that deserve nothing but death." He repeated quietly.
"Remus," Lyal said softly, trying to reason with him. "I… I didn't know back then. No one knew better in those days. You've read the available texts on Lycanthropy, even things that have been written in the last decade don't paint Werewolves in a good light."
"It doesn't matter!" Remus spat angrily. "It doesn't matter if that's what you believed or what everyone believed! You still said it, out loud, in front of everyone! In front of someone you knew was a dangerous werewolf! Of course, he'd want to come after you after hearing you say that!"
"I wasn't thinking about that, Remus! I wanted the committee to see what I saw, they all thought the same things about Werewolves that I did they just think he was one!"
Frustrated and completely in sync, both men ran a hand through their mussed curls and slumped in their seats. Remus was angry, visibly shaking and Lyall couldn't blame him for that.
"When Greyback escaped, I did worry that he would come after me for the things that I had said." Lyall's voice shook from the memory. "I was young and foolish enough to believe that if he did come after me, I could fight him off like I had so many other dark creatures. I didn't think he would attack the way he did. I didn't know his target was my greatest weakness."
A piercing scream rang throughout the house, no more than one hour after Lyall had put his son to bed.
Leaping out of his own bed, Lyall grabbed his wand and ordered Hope to stay in their bedroom no matter what she heard and he ran. He ran from his room down the hall to his son's and kicked the door open. The sight that greeted him would forever haunt his dreams and ultimately change his life forever. The window was wide open, blood soaking through his son's bedding and the carpet, and a massive wolf with its teeth sunken deep into his child who had gone completely limp beneath the animal.
Without thinking, Lyall raised his wand and shot out every curse he had ever learned. He would never remember what the final one was that had managed to drive the best away, but he would always remember dropping to his knees on the blood-soaked floor in front of his five-year-old son's lifeless body and believing that the boy was dead.
Desperately he searched for the boy's pulse and cried out when finally he felt a dull, but steady heartbeat.
"REMUS!" Hope screamed from the doorway, not being able to sit and hide while her husband and son may be in danger. She stumbled into the room, looking horrified at her husband cradling the pale and bloody body of their son. "Remus! No. No. Lyall, he's not… he… please, is he-?!"
"He's alive," Lyall said. "Barely. Hope, go get some clean towels–"
"Shouldn't we bring him to see your doctors? Haven't you got a hospital?!"
"No." Lyall shook his head, already starting to perform healing spells on the boy in his arms. "No hospitals. No Healers. He's… Oh Merlin, Hope. He was bitten by a werewolf."
"But–"
"Hope, towels. Now!"
He heard his wide hurry away. With great care, he stood up, holding Remus carefully against him and carrying him into the bathroom where he laid him on the counter and continued to use every bit of healing magic he knew.
"Will he live?" Hope asked weakly, standing in the doorway of the bathroom with her arms full of fresh towels and linens as well.
Lyall looked down at the broken boy on the counter. He had managed to stop his son from bleeding out and yes, his heart continued to beat, but Lyall wasn't sure that that meant his son, his Remus, wasn't dead. The body laid out before him was no longer that of a boy, but that of a cursed, dangerous creature. His son was barely five years old and now he was a werewolf.
"I still think we should take him to a hospital." Hope repeated for the fifth time, hours later as she sat on the edge of the bed, which was not clean and showed no sign of the blood that had covered the room before. She gently stroked her sleeping son's hair.
Again, Lyall refused. "We can't. They'll take him from us."
"What?"
"He's been infected. They'll keep him for months to observe his behavior and see if he can even be released back into the world at all. If they deem him too dangerous and unable to be rehabilitated they'll…" He trailed off and shook himself, not wanting to finish that sentence. They'll put him down.
Hope choked back a sob and shook her head. "No. Not my boy." She said firmly. "Not my Remus. He…He could never be dangerous, Lyall. You know that!"
"We don't know that, Hope. We won't know anything until he wakes up. For all we know, he may not be anything like our son anymore."
"Of course, he's still our son!" Hope shouted, looking at Lyall with hurt and disbelief.
Lyall sighed tiredly, leaning against the doorframe to keep himself from collapsing. "I…I really want to believe that, love. I do. But–"
"He's stronger than this, Lyall. I know he is." Hope insisted, not taking her eyes off of her son.
Lyall didn't say anything. He just stared at the tiny, pale boy all bandaged up and broken, lying in the bed. He was too young. He was too small, no matter how strong he may be, to withstand the violent transformations month after month.
"He's still my baby…" Hope whispered tearfully, leaning in to kiss Remus' forehead. "He's going to be okay."
Lyall didn't have it in him to argue with his wife any further. Hope was a muggle and she didn't know about dark creatures and the cursed magic that now infected their boy. She saw the same, human child lying before her that he had been when she picked out his pajamas earlier that evening and kissed him goodnight. She didn't know that he had been changed, magically. Yes, she knew what a werewolf was and she knew what happened during a full moon, but she didn't know what Lyall knew – or rather what he thought he knew. She didn't know that once bitting, no matter what phase the moon was in, a werewolf was a soulless, evil beast…
As it turned out, it had been Lyall who had been wrong.
Remus made a full recovery after a few short days and once he did, it was plain to see that he was still the same, sweet, funny, intelligent child he had always been.
There were subtle differences, of course. His eyes, which had been the same deep chocolate as his mother's, were now a bright amber with an animalistic glow that was just slightly unsettling. He complained at dinner if his meat was cooked for too long, and sometimes if it was cooked at all. Hope had caught him sneaking bits of raw chopped meat to snack on so many times she had to put a child lock on the icebox. His reflexes had gotten much quicker and he had inhumanly strong senses of smell and hearing. Although he had always been and still usually remained a calm, mild-mannered child, he did tend to get cranky and fussy around certain times of the month.
But he was still Remus.
He was still their son,
He always would be.
Again, Remus did not respond right away. There were a few times that he seemed as though he may say something, but he didn't. Until…
"What would you have done," Remus began softly, "if I had behaved differently than I did? Would you have surrendered me to the Ministry for observation? Let them decide if I was safe enough. Or would you have done me in yourself? Can't imagine it would have been good for one of the heads of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures to turn their own son in… probably easier just to take me out back and–"
"Remus John Lupin, don't you ever speak to me like that again, do you understand?" Lyall's voice was gentle but unshakably firm and it stopped Remus in his tracks. His mouth snapped closed and he looked away from his father, clearly ashamed.
Lyall shook his head. "I don't know what we would have done, but it doesn't matter because that's thankfully not what happened. You were our son, Remus. With or without the curse you were and still are our child and there was never a single day that went by that I would have changed anything about you. I only wished I could take that damn curse away from you because it wasn't yours. It was mine. I should have been me. You didn't deserve any of this, Remus, and it's entirely my fault. I'm so sorry for that and for taking so long to tell you the truth. I… Merlin, Remus, I was just so afraid of losing you. I thought if you knew… though I suppose I don't blame you if you do hate me for it."
"I promised Mum I wouldn't," Remus said, his voice flat and void of any emotion. Then he sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. "And… I don't. Not just because of her."
Lyall let out a breath of relief. "That… that makes me very happy, Remus. Thank you."
"I'm still…" Remus hesitated, trying to figure out the right words, and the right emotion. "I…I don't know. I don't know what I'm feeling, really."
"You don't have to know how you feel about any of this. To this day I don't know how I feel about all of it. Just know that you're allowed to be angry, Remus. About all of it. About what I did about all the lies and the things I've kept from you. If you need to be angry, don't hold that in or it will eat away at you."
Remus nodded, considering. Perhaps he would be angry eventually, once he gave himself a moment to feel anything at all and the aftershock of everything that had happened in the last few days wore off. Maybe he would want to scream and yell and throw things the way that Sirius used to when his parents angered him. Right now though, he wasn't so sure he remembered how to feel anything. He was tired. Moreso even than after a full moon. "Thank you for telling me, dad." He said quietly. He pushed the chair back and stood.
"Of course," Lyall replied, standing as well.
"I'm going to bed," Remus said. "But I…" He cleared his throat and shifted awkwardly. "I do love you, dad… just… so you know."
"I love you too, son."
—-
Remus returned to Hogwarts late the following night. As much as he had wanted to get out of his house where he was surrounded by the constant reminder that his mother was gone and all that his father had told him, he wanted to avoid being bombarded by sympathetic classmates.
He was relieved to see that no one was in the common room when he got there and the burning embers in the fireplace meant that everyone had gone up to bed some time ago. He climbed up the stairs to the seventh years boy's dormitory which now felt even more like a safe haven than ever before.
James' bed was empty, Remus assumed because of Head Boy duties. The curtains were closed around Peter's and Remus could hear him snoring, deeply asleep. Sirius' bed was empty and still neatly made, but the curtains around his own bed were drawn, which could only mean…
He made his way slowly over to his bed and pulled the curtain back. There was no beautiful, dark-haired boy asleep in his bed as he thought there would be, but rather a large, familiarly shaped lump under his covers. Then a black nose peeked out, twitching as it sniffed him out. Remus shut the curtains, then peeled back the blanket to reveal the shaggy black dog beneath.
"Hi, Padfoot."
The dog stretched, shook out his fur, and sat up, cocking his head to the side, stormy grey eyes full of concern. Remus' chest tightened and he scratched behind Padfoot's ear, forcing a laugh. "Y-you silly mut." He sniffled. "You'll get dog hair a-all over the.." He choked on his words, throat contracting and his vision blurring with sudden wetness. He sniffled again and Padfoot shifted closer, resting his giant head on Remus' shoulder. With a violent shudder, Remus collapsed against the dog, throwing his arms around him, fingers clutching at his thick fur. He buried his face in the soft fur of his neck and finally let out a long, anguished cry.
Remus couldn't remember the last time he really cried. He couldn't recall a time when he had sobbed so hard that his whole body shook and his chest hurt. He just never liked to let anyone see him cry. He never wanted to upset anyone – his parents, his friends – and maybe if it had been Sirius in human form waiting in his bed, it wouldn't have happened but something about the dog just broke whatever wall Remus had so carefully built.
Tears were soaking Padfoot's fur, but the dog sat dutifully still and silent for an amount of time Remus wasn't entirely sure of. It could have been minutes or hours before he finally stopped and Remus thought he must not have any tears left at all. When the sobbing turned into shuddering breaths, Padfoot pulled away just enough to lick Remus' face and eventually, they both laid down and Remus, his fingers still buried in Padfoot's fur, fell asleep.
In the morning he woke up tangled in a gangly 18-year-old boy's limbs and a mouth full of his boyfriend's hair as per usual. He grumbled, rolling over and muttering something about how Sirius should remember to tie it back before bed. Sirius, still half asleep, suggested something rude in response but he shuffled up closer, throwing an arm over Remus' waist and spooning him from behind. He nuzzled the back of Remus' neck and began to snore gently again.
As Remus began to doze back off himself, he realized that he did feel a lot better.
