Chapter Text
February 1985
Remus sits in the parlor at Grimmauld Place, pretending to read. He’s pretending to read because he can’t admit to himself he’s watching the Floo where Sirius disappeared in a mad panic hours ago, responding to a department-wide alert of a suspected magical attack.
“Explosion in central London,” he says, half-dressed and frantic, his wand in his hand and the war in his eyes. He presses a fierce kiss to Remus’s lips, and only Remus knows him well enough to feel how hard he’s trembling. “At least ten Muggles dead, and dozens injured.”
Remus feels dread prickling up his spine. It’s barely dawn, just past the full moon, and he’s barely recovered from his transformation. His bones ache, his muscles scream, every part of him hurts, and now he has to watch as Sirius runs into danger without being able to accompany him, because Remus may be a member of the Order, but he is no Auror.
“Do they think it’s—” He swallows, and he doesn’t say it. Not from fear, he tells himself, but because it’s bad luck.
“They haven’t said,” Sirius answers grimly. He kisses him again, gentler this time, his gray eyes locked on Remus’s. They’re full of steel tonight, not mist, and Remus feels relief; he knows that look means he won’t be leaving this world without one hell of a fight.
“Keep the wards up,” he instructs. “Don’t let anyone in until I’m back, apart from Lily or Ivy.” He fumbles in his pocket, presses something hard and cold into Remus’s hand and closes his fingers around it. “Keep the mirror on you. Lily’s getting closer to her due date, and she might call for help.” Something dark flickers across his face. “Due to the pregnancy, or due to something else.”
The fire, the noise, the screaming of that Halloween is so vivid in his mind for a moment, Remus marvels that he doesn’t crush the mirror in his clenched fist.
“I promise,” Remus vows, because Lily and Ivy are pack. Sirius relaxes infinitesimally, hearing the steel in his own voice. “James?” He asks, and he watches Sirius’s expression shift again, growing tortured.
“He’s already there,” he bites out, and Remus abruptly understands his urgency. He shoves him toward the Floo.
“Go,” he orders, his own panic clawing at his throat. “Stay with James.”
“I will,” Sirius vows in return, before he disappears into green flame.
It’s night again, now, and a whole day has passed without a word. Lily checks in hourly; she’s pale, but fine, and just as haunted by her fear as Remus is. Some part of him wonders if they should all just give up on pretenses and move in together. They’ve already fought to the death together and came out the other side alive; they can certainly manage household chores without killing each other, and it’s not as if any of their anxiety is getting any better.
Ivy steals the mirror more often than not, desperate for a new, higher power to appeal her sentencing to. She’s bouncing off the walls locked inside, and deeply unimpressed with the limitations on her freedom. James’s child, Remus thinks, and takes a moment to pity the Minerva McGonagall of the future. The garden, she informs Remus, has snow in it.
“That’s very nice,” he says.
“It’s not very nice,” Ivy retorts. “It has snow in it, and I can’t touch it.”
“That’s very sad,” Remus pivots.
“Thank you, uncle Moony,” Ivy says at once, looking relieved. “You get it. I should be allowed in the garden.”
“That’s … not what I said,” Remus corrects, beginning to feel hunted.
“Then what are you saying, Uncle Moony?” Her wide green eyes fill up the frame, filled with reproach. “Are you on my side or aren’t you?”
“I…I…”
“Ivy!” Lily scolds. She’s six months along and round as a Quaffle, in the final stages of her Healer training and extremely short on patience. Remus has been quietly terrified of her since November. “Stop bullying your uncle!”
“But it’s so easy,” Ivy complains, and Remus splutters until the mirror connection is abruptly shut off.
Children, he decides, would be in Azkaban if they weren’t so adorable. The combination of Lily and James’s genes has been … problematic.
It’s nearly dawn again, now, and there’s still no word, and he’s just beginning to feel the true stages of panic set in. He wishes he could pace, but his body still aches, and he can’t think of anything but the worst case scenario.
And then the fire lights up, miracle of miracles, and spits out two grubby, exhausted, and soot-stained Marauders, and Remus can finally breathe again.
“What is it?” Remus demands, once he’s asked Kreacher to bring tea and politely asked him to refrain from spitting in Sirius’s cup again. “What’s happened? Is it —” The name gets caught again. Bad luck, he reminds himself.
“No,” Sirius says, rubbing at his forehead. “It’s not him.”
Remus frowns, glancing between their forlorn expressions. “Then what aren’t you telling me?”
James hesitates for a heartbeat, glancing at Sirius; Sirius bites his lip, then nods.
“There’s a child,” James blurts out, looking sick. “Muggleborn, but magical. He was bit by … by a—”
He can’t say it. Remus can. He lived it.
“A werewolf,” he says, and James flinches.
“A werewolf,” he confirms. He sags into the armchair. “Absolutely rotten luck. What are the odds of a muggleborn kid being in exactly the wrong place on a full moon with a werewolf?”
“Low,” Remus says, because he doesn’t think luck had anything to do with it, at all. “So there wasn’t an explosion?”
Sirius slumps onto the couch, looking haunted. “There was certainly an explosion. But the magical signature that the DMLE registered was him. His accidental magic saved his life when he … detonated. Kept him from getting mauled, but—” He sighs. “Took a fair bit of the street out in the process.”
“And the werewolf?” Remus queries. “Was it—”
Prongs shakes his head, knowing where he’s going. Childhood bites are usually the specialty of one particular beast. “It wasn’t Fenrir. He’s Muggleborn, so not a known target. We found the werewolf, or what was left of him, and the remains were identifiable enough to rule out Fenrir, although we haven’t the faintest who it was. Like Sirius said, the kid tore half the street apart in the blast, and the wolf went with the pavement.”
“Powerful, then,” Remus murmurs, and feels sorry for this child who will never be able to wield that power as he should have. He’s been cursed to a half-life before he could inherit that power, revel in it and learn the joy of it, and now he will always be lesser than the rest.
And now he is a murderer, Remus realizes, intentional or not. Ten lives are more than most members of the Order took.
“Very,” says James, and he looks positively miserable. It’s a rare look on him these days, apart from Halloween, when he looks at Neville as though he wishes he could undo his past.
“Where will he go?” Remus asks, and Sirius growls into his hands. Not a promising start.
James grimaces. “We don’t know yet. They’re keeping it quiet for now while they figure that out. Official story is that a pipe burst, and he happened to be in the proximity of it. He experienced a bout of accidental magic, alerting Aurors to his presence. It explains why we responded in force, at least, and why the Obliviator Squads were sent.”
“Ah,” Remus says, setting down his teacup. “So, the plan is to lie.”
“Lie, to protect a child,” James retorts. “He didn’t mean what happened. A five-year-old protecting himself from an attack shouldn’t be made into a headline.”
Remus can find nothing to say to that. “So, they’re holding him?”
“A private room at St. Mungo’s. John Doe. No connection.” James looks weary. “He can’t go back to his family, though they’ve been obliviated. A child werewolf would wreak havoc on Muggle London. And he can’t go into the Muggle system for the same reasons.” He shakes his head. “Lily will be raging about the lack of common sense in wizard governance once I tell her. She can’t understand why we don’t have an official system for fostering magical orphans in place.”
“It does exist, but it’s usually unofficial,” Remus says to be fair, although he doesn’t disagree with Lily’s assessment. “Blood ties matter more than paperwork to wizards.”
“And for kids with no paperwork, and no blood ties?” James asks bitterly. “What’s done with them, unofficially?”
“It’s an oversight, to be sure,” Remus says dryly. “It’d be logical to fix it.”
“Ah.” James leans back and presses his palms into his eye sockets. “That means they’ll never do it.”
Remus doesn’t refute it. It’s too bitter, too raw, still, to think of his own forced bite when he was so young, solely for the transgressions of his father. But he can’t help but feel grateful for his parents, in a way he never thought to before; unlike this nameless child, he had a magical family to protect and foster him through his transformations.
“We could take him,” Sirius says abruptly.
Remus spins toward him, heart racing. “What.”
“We know how to manage werewolves,” Sirius says, doggedly determined. “And we can protect him. No one would need to know what he is.”
“They already know what he is,” Remus argues, exasperated.
“Not,” says James slowly, warming to the idea, “if the Ministry loses his file.” He looks up at them. “Amelia owes me a favor or two. And I spoke with her before we left the scene; she finds this situation just as upsetting as we do. She’d be more than amenable to his paperwork getting lost. It won’t be the first time the Ministry misplaced important documents, after all. If the magical child who was at the site of the explosion is declared dead ….” He trails off.
Sirius catches on quicker than Remus. “We can blood adopt him,” Sirius says excitedly. “It’s a tricky ritual, but doable. He’ll look like us because he’ll be us. His Hogwarts letter will come with our last name, because he’ll have our last name. Magic will recognize him as a Black.” He glances at Remus, suddenly desperate. “We can say we used a surrogate, or hid him during the war, or blame Black paranoia for why he hasn’t been seen since—”
“Only Amelia would ever know enough to suspect,” James adds, matching his enthusiasm. “And she’ll just be glad he’s getting a second chance.”
“Sirius, this is mad,” Remus says. “Not to mention illegal.” He adds that in for the official record, although something being illegal has rarely been an impetus for James and Sirius. (Rules, according to James, are man-made constructs; because mankind is flawed, rules are often flawed, and because rules were put in place by men, they are capable of being changed by men. This was all, in Remus’s opinion, a very convoluted way for James to say he didn’t much like following rules). “We don’t know the first thing about raising a child.”
“We haven’t killed Ivy yet,” Sirius insists. “Or Neville.” When Remus looks at him in disbelief, he raises his chin stubbornly. “It’s not about whether or not we know how to raise a child, Moony. It’s about if we’re going to leave a child to his fate.”
And that … Remus can’t argue with. Because when Sirius sees this child, he sees Remus, or another version of him, and the dog loyal, dog stubborn part of him will not leave him behind. Just as he refused to leave Remus behind.
He rubs at his temples, feeling the headache coming on, and knowing before he even answers that he’s in for about twenty more years of headaches. “You have a name picked out already, don’t you?”
Sirius grins, a slow, beautiful thing, and for that alone, Remus knows this will all be worth it.
“Orion,” he says, and James begins cheering.