July 1st, 1996

Remus Lupin

Tonks had been sleeping with her bedroom door open. Actually, she had been doing everything with her door open, Remus discovered quickly. It was not an act of voyeurism, but rather it seemed a means to show how comfortable she was with him and how she hadn't meant to make things strange between them. He found himself avoiding looking down the hall when the light was on, though, nonetheless afraid of overstepping any boundaries. He'd caught a glimpse of her in the mirror: taking off her shirt, he saw her ribs and bare back and just the curve of her breast before he almost hit his head on the bathroom doorway. He shut the door, but had to take a moment to catch his breath.

What sort of fool am I being right now?

He had found some hydrocortisone cream for his hands, which helped a bit. Surely it was stress, flaring up when he was alone and his mind had started spiralling. The terror that lingered in the back of his mind kept poking its head forward. He couldn't stand to be alone, he couldn't stand to put his friend in danger. He wanted to have someone in his life, he couldn't stand to be a burden to her.

The only way he could justify this was how Tonks had been having horrible nightmares.

That was the real reason she left the door open. He could hear her sometimes, tossing and turning as she woke herself up, crying in her sleep. He always got up when he heard her. He'd often sit on the bed with her, sometimes climb under the covers if she asked. He tried to make it up to her by making her breakfast as a sort of unofficial "rent" for staying there. Her room had a bit of a draft, he thought, and she was always so cold when she accidentally kicked him under the blankets or tried to curl up in his arms like a cat. Not that he would have minded; he was sweating, despite having at one point or another tossing the blanket off of himself and into the floor.

Two nights ago, she started shutting her door.

Remus had been having trouble falling asleep. He tended to struggle more as it got closer to the full moon and his bones and muscles aching so severely he couldn't lie still. He expected, after a while, Tonks would call for him, asking him to come to bed. Part of him hoped for purely selfish reasons, giving how the couch was growing more and more uncomfortable.

He'd gotten up to go to the bathroom when he heard her having a nightmare. He was acutely aware of how stiff his joints felt as he tried to sit up on the couch and it was just a bit past midnight, but they had both turned in hours ago so that they could get up early to ensure they could meet Harry's aunt and uncle at the train station.

Remus swore he could hear some noise coming from inside her bedroom. Murmuring, groaning, it sounded like. He was growing familiar with such night terrors and knew she would wake herself up in a few moments with a startle. This was when she would unintentionally kick and hit him several times and it was all he could do to make sure her immediate instinct upon waking and seeing a strange man in her bed was to not grab her wand.

He knocked on the door, loud enough to hopefully rouse her. "Tonks? Are you alright?"
Not but a few seconds later, the sound stopped. A few moments later, a bright blue light flooded beneath the door, and there was a struggle as she freed herself from the covers and footsteps approached.

The light from her wand was blinding, but once his eyes adjusted to the light, he could faintly make out the fact that her hair had turned a strange burnt orange colour like she had tried to bleach it herself and it had gone horribly wrong. She had fallen asleep in a large t-shirt that hung past her waist and not much else as the light reflected harshly off her pale legs and she looked disheveled. Looking to the bed, her pillow had been dragged or tossed astray, her sheets in a tangle that threatened to fall into the floor. "Sorry, did you need something? Is everything okay?" He could pick up that she smelled a bit like firewhiskey and sweat, but Remus found it almost… endearing in a sort of way, like he was worried
"I was just going to use the bathroom, but it… sounded like you were having a nightmare."
Faintly, he saw her turn her face down with what must have been shame. Her eyebrows raised. "I… don't worry too much about it, I'm okay." If anything, she sounded annoyed at him for awakening her.
"Your hair. It's turning red. It… hasn't done that since you left the hospital, other than when you were angry and when we…" The silence grew quickly and awkwardly and her orange hair became more of an embarrassed maroon. "Sorry, it must have been a terrible dream. Do you want to–"
She grabbed a fistful of her hair, examining it carefully, then massaged her fingers over her scalp as if it hurt. "Yeah, it–Honestly, don't worry about it, it's just… a… it's nothing serious. Stop looking at me like that, it's not like I can't morph, it's just hard to keep it up nowadays. It'll come back naturally."

"I know. I suppose… are you sure you're okay?"
Tonks nodded quickly. "Of course, of course. You can go back to sleep. I'll be fine." She practically slammed the door in his face without waiting for an answer.

Yesterday morning, bright and early, Tonks was in the kitchen burning scrambled eggs to the bottom of a pan. The living room was lit up with bright purple sunshine.

"Hey! Morning!" Her voice cut through his dream. He couldn't remember what he was even dreaming of, other than it was warm and comfortable and he didn't want to come out of it.

Her hair was bright, bubblegum pink.

She looked how she had: tired, almost sick. Her skin was still dull, her lips painted with a purple lipstick to make herself seem more lifelike, but her black eyeliner almost made her eyes look smaller, more tired and wrinkled, like she was so tired she couldn't hold them open. Remus rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, stood up to stretch his back, and yes, her hair was still bright pink. "Nice… to see you too, Nymphadora."
She shot him an annoyed look. "Ha ha, come on, I tried to wake you twice, but you were snoring too damn loud. Now, you better hurry before there's no hot water left."
She had pink hair yesterday.

It was the first time since Sirius had died that her hair had fully gone back to the way it was. It was freshly washed and dried, soft and beautifully, happily pink. It was like he had finally woken up from his nightmare and was back where he was supposed to be. Except, if he was back where he had been, they wouldn't be in the cramped flat, with purple curtains and plants that had started to wilt. She wouldn't be cooking eggs because surely Sirius would insist on it himself, but Remus would end up with the task because Sirius would always get distracted.

"Your hair," He gestured to it. "It… suits you."
"Aw, Merls, you're the sweetest." She feigned amusement, untouched, unwavering. She wasn't in a better mood, but she moved more frantically, knocking over a salt shaker in her rapid motions.

"Are you going to be able to keep it that way?" He asked. His shoulder made a concerning popping noise.
Once she had finished scraping the eggs onto respective plates. She grabbed a small vial of what looked like a potion for pain and a few tablets from a plastic bottle, drinking down the pills with a highly uncomfortable face. "I sure hope so." She coughed. "Come on now, I don't want to be late."
It wasn't until Remus had gone to shower that he had time to process the night before. It wasn't usual for her to be so shifty and off putting and he couldn't push past how strange it was that her hair reverted back to how it had been so quickly when prior she had complained so frequently of headaches associated with her morphing.

It wasn't until he was standing under the hot water and his body started to relax that it occurred to Remus that perhaps she had not been asleep when he knocked on the door the night before, not like he had previously thought.

It would've made a bit more sense, he supposed, but that alternative was mortifying and he tried to ignore it. But it didn't seem to want to escape his mind as he was washing himself. He couldn't stop thinking about her soft, pale legs under the light, the way her shoulder poked out of the neck of her t-shirt, her chipped nail polish, the messy red-orange-blonde hair that she had. It wasn't like had been sleeping in a bra, which left very little up to his imagination. The images were intrusive, ballistic, and yet she sat comfortably in the forefront of his mind. Quite comfortably, in fact.

Remus turned the water towards cold and scrubbed harder at his arms, examining the different bumps and scars. Usually when he bathed, he found himself staring at the walls or the ceiling or the faucet. He thought of how he held her in his arms, how she let out a soft moan when her lips touched his neck, how all he could hear were the sounds of her lips and the pounding of his heart. Her nose brushed against his jaw. Her fingers grazed the back of his neck. He scrubbed harder. These things were always worse during the full moon. It would pass.

But right now, it was all he could think of.

How long had it been since he had been kissed? That wasn't something he did. He didn't like the idea of bringing strangers into the previous places he lived. In what world would someone want to have a relationship, regardless of brevity, if they had seen the small, cheap, mouldy places he'd lived in the past? He couldn't even sufficiently answer, "what do you do for work?" He couldn't even look at his own body when he showered. How could he ever please someone?

But that moment that he had with Tonks felt strange and allowed him to indulge. It was over. It was unfixable. All he could do was dwell on it, alone, and purge the shame from himself and come out cleaner, with the strangeness of grief behind them.

Harry was not well. He looked sleepless and a bit sickly, his shoulders were completely slumped over and the poor kid could barely lift his owl's cage. His aunt and uncle seemed vile, but Remus had known that long before they met.

The aunt in particular, Petunia, was particularly jarring to Remus. She was nothing like her sister. Actually, she reminded Remus a bit of his own mother. She was blonde and plucky and she smelled like the large amount of hairspray it took to keep her blonde hair in place in the sweltering heat. Petunia had a sort of performance about her, a stiffness in her back that she likely thought helped her assert herself as an authority figure over her husband. From what he'd heard, though, Petunia had more of a spine. A spine she used for horrible things, but a spine nonetheless.

She was seething at Tonks's hair, her fingers wrapped tightly around the straps of her purse. Remus tried to hide his smile. Tonks had her usual sort of cocky air about her and she'd made a point to dress as obnoxiously as she could. She had a Weird Sisters t-shirt that was tight around her chest (Remus thought of how he had once overheard Sirius chastising her and said something along the lines of, "Am I going to have to give you money to buy underwear? Do you not own any underwear?", which, her feminist streak did make an appearance here to Mrs. Dursley's notice and discomfort) and her jeans were just as form fitting. There was a strip of skin around her stomach and hips visible, showing off both a piece of jewelry she had in her belly-button and a tattoo on her lower back was visible but Remus couldn't bring himself to look at it long enough to discern its pattern. She looked very little like an auror, but very much like someone that Vernon and Petunia Dursley would be terrified of.

The longer he stood in the dirty, stuffy train station, the worse he felt. His legs were growing heavier, threatening to collapse and he'd just wanted to rest once he and Tonks returned to her flat. Tonks shot him a crooked half-smile that quickly became a concern for him.

The last twenty-four hours before the moon were the worst of the pain and sickness. He could tell even before they left the station that he was beginning to run a fever. He had tried to sleep it off for the rest of the afternoon, much to Tonks's displeasure, as she'd have preferred to fuss over him. He knew she was a restless woman, but to have her hover over him for hours out of boredom, checking on him whenever she thought to felt overwhelming, but he'd appreciated that she had made sure he was well-fed. She wasn't a half bad cook if only her fingers would better allow her to hold things.

"You're not sleeping out there tonight," Tonks had said firmly. Her hair had returned to a sort of brown colour, but it appeared a deep mauve when the sunlight struck it. Remus had tried to insist upon helping her with making her bed back up with clean sheets, which she insisted upon doing by hand. "You look like shit and you can barely stand on your own two feet. If you don't rest tonight and tomorrow, you're going to hurt yourself! You need to save your energy!"

"I have done this dozens of times, Nymphadora—"

"Would you please stop calling me that!" She exclaimed, shaking a pillow into its case. "This is not a favour, you will be sleeping in here tonight for your own good! I don't mind sleeping on the couch if you'd prefer, but you do not get to pretend that it is that comfortable when I hear you tossing and turning at night!"

"I'm not going to kick you out of your own bed." Remus said quietly.

She shot him a patronising look.

Her bed was awfully comfortable, Remus realised, at least, in the sense that he could turn from one shoulder to the other without falling on the floor. On the downside, however, it had taken him quite a long time to fall asleep because of how his mind was racing. He was so acutely aware of the other person less than an arm's length away. Her hair had turned completely brown again and he could hear her softly breathing. He'd laid there for a while, watching as her chest rose and fell. She twitched, but stayed asleep. After a while, once she was surely deeply asleep, she rolled completely over to face him. Remus was as still as he could have possibly been, watching, as she let out a small whimper noise and actually inched closer to him for warmth. Her feet was freezing cold and he made a note that he'd buy her socks for her birthday, or whatever other occasion he could imagine up to justify buying her socks.

When he'd woken up this morning, she had gone back to her side of the bed, the blanket strewn about and her arms in an awkward splayed out position. He was up before she was and for a few minutes, he stayed there, watching her. Slowly, Remus reached out and grabbed the corner of the blanket, pulling it over her chest and one of her stray arms. She squirmed for a moment, then relaxed, her head rolling to the side towards the window. Tonks would be up soon for work and he didn't want to wake her sooner than he needed to.

He left her a brief note. It wasn't ideal, but it had been what he preferred. He didn't want to have her worry more when she saw him that morning, fussing over him and dragging out his departure.
"Nymphadora,

I'll likely be gone until tomorrow night, possibly through tomorrow night as well. It's been incredibly gracious that you've allowed me to stay as long as you have. If you'll have me, I will try to be back by Wednesday morning. If I'm not, sooner assume that I'm tired.
Please don't spend the next day worrying about me. I will be safe, among my own kind, and should I be in any danger I know that there will be others that can help me. You needn't make yourself sick over this. I will be fine.

-Your friend, Remus."

He felt awfully narcissistic assuming she'd be making herself sick over his absence. However, he did know how sensitive she could be about these things and she'd already gotten herself worked up over the idea of being around potentially dangerous werewolves.

The place in the woods that he had apperated to were quiet. There were no sounds of distant cars on roads, only animals, spatterings of raindrops, and the rustling of leaves in the wind. There was a dirt path that led to a small hunting cabin, long forgotten by its previous owners a good many years ago.

There was a new message carved on a sign beside the door: NO MAGIC! MUGGLES!

A boy answered the door. He couldn't have been older than ten, with messy blonde curls and big brown eyes. He was dirty, and so were his clothes, which were a bit ragged from playing outside. He wore no shoes. A fresh pink scar crossed the bridge of his nose.

Remus tried to smile politely. "Hello. How are you?"

The boy didn't smile back. He stared intently on Remus for a moment until a woman came to the door, shooing him off.

"What have I told you about opening the door!" She shouted, her voice thick with a Slavic accent.

She was tall, and looked roughly the same age as Remus, which was to say a lot about both of their conditions; her skin was almost leathery from spending time in the sun, wrinkles staking their claim around her eyes, mouth, and forehead beneath the heavy scar that marred the right side of her face. It matched quite succinctly with the deep red scar that sliced across the bottom of her throat. Her eyes were narrowed at him, lips tightly pursed and she wore a thick green jacket and the collar of a flannel shirt poked out from beneath. Her hair was long, black, neatly kept tied back at the nape of her neck. She didn't look at all as sickly as he currently felt.

"Hello, Kat." Remus gave her a nod.

She didn't say anything, just nodded her head inside. The blonde boy went to join a girl of about the same age, sitting on a bed in the corner of the room, reading a book that the girl had in her lap. She had dark hair and skin, and wore a tattered yellow sundress and the bottoms of her feet were dirty. There was a third child, half their size and very pale, dressed only in a pair of shorts, playing with a stuffed toy in the girl's lap.

The place was cramped, with two metal framed beds and an extra mattress in the corner of the room, a stove and table with two chairs, and another table that was being used as a countertop, filled with all sorts of clutter, half for cooking and half for various medical supplies. Makeshift clotheslines hung on the walls and created a sort of screen between the beds.

"Coffee?" Katerina offered, already pouring two cups from a kettle on the wood fire stove.

"Please," Remus said quietly. He tried not to stare at the children, who stared back at him.

Katerina gestured for him to sit at the table littered with sewing and he did, being handed a cup of the coffee with nothing else in it. It smelled incredibly strong. She didn't say anything for a moment, drinking from her own cup. "Imogen, why don't you and your brothers go play outside for a bit? The weather should be nice for the rest of today. Get your energy out."

The girl didn't say anything, but shut her book, peeking hesitantly out behind some laundry. Remus now noticed a white bandage that was tightly bound around her arm. The smaller child raced the elders to the door, and the three bickered as they wrestled each other outside, laughing. The blonde boy stopped only briefly to hug Katerina before running outside.

As the door slammed, Remus spoke up. "There were only the two the last time we met up here."

"Paul came to me a few months ago," Katerina explained. She looked out the window, watching the children chase each other in a game of tag. "He has adjusted nicely to this life. He is one of your kind so his bite has healed quite nicely."

He pressed further. "And the rest of his family?"

Katerina pressed her lips together thoughtfully. "If it is to be believed, both of his parents were killed. I wasn't there. I wake up, the sun is up, and I have a screaming child in my lap. I had barely enough dittany to get him closed up and he's been here ever since."

"He's quite small. Has he handled his transformations well?" Remus also turned to pull back the curtain, watching the children. The shirtless boy, Paul, must've been close in age to Remus when he was bitten. He could hardly keep up with the larger two children, but his shoes were too big and he was tripping over them.

"Like I said, he's only been here for a few months, but he is strong. He eats well." Katerina shifted uneasily in her chair. "He misses his mother. But he is well."

Remus could remember being bitten, though the healers told his parents that he wouldn't. He remembered the searing pain that shot through his left arm, how he'd screamed until he couldn't any longer and his throat was raw and he couldn't breathe. He remembered getting stuck with needles and having molten metal poured into his wounds. He begged for his mother. Over and over and over, he begged for his mother to come to him, just to hold him, to tell him that he would be alright, that he would survive. The healers had kept her away for her own sake.

He could easily imagine a child that small, out in the woods somewhere, screaming and crying with such fervent pain and distress. Muddy, bleeding, and begging for his mother, with no idea of what was going to happen to him. He wasn't the first, and he would certainly not be the last.

"I hadn't heard anything in the papers about a man and wife killed, their child taken away by werewolves," Remus said pointedly. "I think it'd have been on the front page if word got out."

"His mother was like you, his father was like me… if that makes any sort of difference. It was, ah… I suppose someone had asked Fenrir to do it. He doesn't involve me in such things."

"It might," Thinking back, he was sure it was possible he had seen something about a woman dying at the hands of Greyback. But Sirius was very particular about making sure that Remus didn't let himself spiral reading the news. That felt like an entirely different lifetime ago where everything was easier, lighter. Besides, a witch and her muggle husband would likely not make the front cover, especially if that witch herself was half, or even muggleborn herself, he thought. Remus—or rather, his father—had gotten roughly a paragraph when Remus was bitten and even then, the ordeal had not been a public scandal but one that solely affected his father's work. "I suspect things are only going to get worse with the new minister."

"Oh? Well, I could have told you that," Katerina laughed. "Fenrir has been ignoring me for weeks, that bastard. The next time he strolls in he's going to be drunk or leave me another child, you mark my words. Anyways, the others that have come by… ah, you've met the others, yes? Hm. Well, I had to put the fucking sign up to stop any of those idiots from doing something stupid and letting a bunch of your politziya coming to take my children away."
"My children" made his stomach start to turn. None of her children were hers, that was plain enough to see. All three of them had been bitten, dragged here on the command of Greyback, and dropped off, their parents likely dead, and everyone else believing they were too. He could've ended up in a place like this, had his circumstances been different.

Katerina's voice cut through the silence. "You still stink like that girl, don't you know that? Don't you ever bathe?"

"I did bathe. But we've been living together for a bit and—"

Katerina let out a loud laugh. "Living together! I thought you said she was your friend!"

"We're living together out of necessity, that's all." Remus felt a knot growing in his throat.

"Necessity, hmm?" Katerina looked incredibly smug. "Well, don't worry. He's not coming around this week so you'll have plenty of time to get that stink off of you."

"Right." He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He'd happened to turn in such a way that he could more clearly see the knife she had concealed in her jacket. "I'm not staying long."
"Running back to your girlfriend, are you?"

"I–No, I just meant that–" He sighed. "I'd like to be long gone before Greyback returns."
"Well, don't worry too much. Like I said! He's busy this time of the month." She sighed. "He should be far, far from here. Nothing newsworthy to happen this month. I can't promise he won't know you were here, but you didn't come on foot so I doubt you're very traceable." There was a beat. "And sorry about your face, by the way."
Remus couldn't help but smile, staring at his coffee. "No, you aren't."
Katerina matched him, chuckling. "No, I'm not. I think with my muscles and I don't trust strangers. Or rats. And apologies, but you've been starting to grow whiskers."

"Believe me, the Ministry of magic wants nothing to do with me, regardless of what anyone told you. I'm purely a third party in this matter." Remus tried to say this confidently, neglecting both the Order and the auror whose bed he had slept in the night before. "I am just trying to survive."