Childhood had never acquainted Remus to loss; it had only provided, like a ceaseless harvest.
Remus had never learned to want for things, partially by nature and largely by design. But the small house in Cambridge and the failing roof garden, the leaking sinks and cracks and groans of ordinary existence tended to drift into nothingness when he ran his small fingers along the rich spines of books, lush with sensation. He had his mother and father, schoolteachers and avid storytellers themselves, to weave into existence menageries of life.
It was due to his upbringing that Remus remained a constant -- people needed anchors, Remus thought, and his was made of many volumes.
Even the First Night, there was only gain, the gore and blood and silvered-white teeth of the wolf as Remus ran through the dense woods behind his grandmother's cottage. How quaint, he'd reflect later, sipping willowbark tea and listening to Sirius' prattle; how very much the twisted fairytale.
And even in his worst moments his mind refused to court "loss" to the moon.
His mother reminded him every night that he had lost nothing; not one ounce of what made him human, what made him an ordinary boy.
"How can something take away what you were born with?" she'd scold him, and tell him to dry his tears. "It's not anyone's to take."
Her eyes were very blue, and not wise with years but with will. She would take hold of his hands, still small and pale from indoors and youth, and say, "Remus Lupin, you lost nothing." And after a pause, she would draw him to her chest, so close he could hear the echoing thump of her heart and feel his own answer. "You have only gained something new to control," she would whisper. "Something new -- do you understand?"
In the morning, long after he'd rolled out of his bed and pulled on his gray, primary school uniform, and knotted his tie, she'd run one hand over the crown of his head and tell him to remember.
"You must always be stronger than what is given to you, Remus," she said.
And Remus always was.
Baby wolves were mostly harmless, his parents had found, and the first years were simple, uncomplicated. Little more than sleeping in the basement with a locked door; no books, Remus mourned, but never regretted it. Torn pages would be a greater tragedy than an evening of boredom. The bruises and cuts were still there in the morning, but no more than any afternoon in the neighborhood, running wild with boys less wild than he.
It became routine to him, his terrible secret, and the healers his parents spared no expense to see. By the time he was six and a half, Remus had visited the highest slopes of the Andes, the lowest dives in Bulgaria, Paris and Milan -- a whirlwind of places that had only ever existed between the leaves of books suddenly real and bright and terrible before his eyes.
First seven then eight then nine, and the morning he did not push a stool beneath the tall wardrobe and retrieve the key to the cellar door himself. Nine, and the morning he blinked awake to the metallic smell of his own blood, and saw with detached horror a flash of bone-white through the angry red of his own flesh and drifted again into an ocean of black nothingness. Nine and the beast awoke.
He woke up three days later stinking of herbs and hearing his mother cry. It was the first time, and Remus hoped the last. He said to her the same thing that she'd said to him, and so she'd wiped away her tears and ordered him to bed; there was school in the morning.
There were times he'd resented her for it, that unshakeable strength without falter. He'd read it as coldness during his childhood, as distance and a selfishness in her love. But there was no other for her, Remus would come to see, no one else to whom she would give so endlessly and selflessly; no one else she would force to be strong with such dreadful savageness. Her little scholar, who had always been so quietly strong, would need it in greater part than she know how to give with kisses and comforting arms.
So she'd made him wipe his own tears, and taught him his times tables between letting him read her stories out of an ancient collections of King Arthur's tales. And Remus absorbed the stories of knights and ladies, of Avalon. "Is it real?" he'd asked her at nine and three-quarters, still bandaged from the last moon and limping a bit. "Is it?"
His mother had smiled and taken the book from his hands, light and strong and warm, as she always was. "It's real if you want it to be real," she'd told him. "Most things are. Remember that."
And Remus, the greedy child, had wanted many, many things.
He'd wanted books and learning and to know how his grandmother shot silver-green sparks from her teaching pointer. And why she said even he wasn't clever enough to learn it.
The letter in green ink was unexpected, and the grandmother who'd wept like her daughter wouldn't let herself after that First Night cried again. A series of numbers on a telephone dial -- so ordinary, in the face of so much magic -- and Remus was exclaiming the news to her: a wizard in the family to go with the long line of witches, a hiccup in a series of boring, academic types, and he'd heard his grandmother smile through her tears over the line.
That was magic, too, Remus knew, the first magic he'd ever learned.
"I think I'll always be a boring, academic type," Remus admitted to his father later that night.
And with twinkling gray eyes, he'd replied, "Academic types, my boy, are rarely boring at all." He had tapped his temple with a grin. "We tend to hide our mischief better, is all."
The summer before Hogwarts was a flurry of letters by bird, of unending lectures on what to do and what not, with the same fearless, reckless determination that he take hold of what he'd received. The reminders quaked in his mind, all those consequences and horrible places he'd read about: werewolf camps, Azkaban. But his father smuggled him a copy of Hogwarts, A History and Remus read it beneath his covers into the night, with a Muggle flashlight.
"I wish you wouldn't do that," his mother complained, only slightly angry. "It's costing us a fortune in batteries."
But his father always wrapped one arm around her waist and pressed a kiss to her ear, saying that their son was not the only one wasting them reading beneath his covers; that if the Lupin genes remained strong, he wouldn't be the last.
"How does Muggle genetics work?" Remus asked.
Rolling her eyes, his mother said, "I wish you wouldn't do that, either, Remus."
She said that prefixing everything with 'Muggle' made her feel ordinary, and Remus had never understood that. His mother could never be ordinary, as the Oxford English Dictionary explained it as "plain" and "unremarkable." His father frequently said his mother was beautiful; and Remus did not yet understand what "unremarkable" was, but was certain already that his mother was not. He told her often, and after she went very red about the cheeks and nose for a minute, she'd start in on how he needed to be ever-watchful at school again.
"You must remember to be careful, Remus," his mother would say. "This is your secret."
"Control is something all your own," his father would add, but more gently. "The moon is your secret, and no one else's. Be careful with that."
They fussed over his clothing and his mother clucked over the state of his hair. She would stay long into the night now, listening to him read to her and talking for hours about anything, and everything. She said that she was making memories of him, for her to keep when he was away. Sometimes, the love and terrible fearfulness that filled Remus' heart burst, and he'd crawl into her arms even though he was nearly eleven years old. He'd tell her, "Maybe I should stay."
And they would chat into morning about what he'd do if he did not go. He and his mother would plant that garden she'd always wanted, but could not keep; they would grow tulips in every color, and Remus would keep a flower book for her, even if it was sort of nancy thing to do. They would lounge in luxury and sleep until eleven every morning, and he would never again vie for attention with her students. They would take orange tea and crumpets whenever they pleased, and they would have sword fights; his mother would wear an eyepatch, but Remus called claim on the hat. His father, they decided, could have the pegleg, though they both envied it dearly.
"And you will never be unhappy," she would always say.
Remus had smiled at her then and slept that way, until they both woke up warm and comfortable, wrapped into each other like he'd been born: ever a part of her, taking what she offered like one of many gains, one of many gifts.
At the end of August, on a muggy, hot day, rain splashed down as they stuffed themselves into a cramped, smelly taxi headed toward King's Cross.
The world melted along the glass and Remus traced it with his fingers.
"I'm scared," he admitted to his father.
"That's something else you have," he whispered back. "And another thing you own."
So Remus hugged his parents and went through the brick divider between platforms nine and ten. There would be time, he decided then, for pirates and parrots and peg legs, for his mother's flower book and to have his parents’ undivided love; but patience was another gain, he lectured himself, and sat down in an empty compartment.
He did not hear the sound of his own heart beating out of his chest until someone else knocked on the compartment door.
"Hallo," the boy said.
"Hallo," he'd replied.
"My name is Sirius Black," he'd said very quickly, and stuck an owl in Remus' face. "This is Augustus."
Remus said "hallo" to the bird before Sirius decided that they could be friends. So Remus gained again, and felt the swell of his heart in his chest like a painful reminder of all the goodbyes he'd gained, too. And then later, as he pulled his knees to his chest and tried not to cry, he told himself that they were his tears, and he could do with them what he would.
Remus' increase grew over the years, from spells to friends to confusing, anticlimactic first kisses with redheaded girls behind certain greenhouses. Remus had friends now, three he liked very much, and whom he would protect fiercely, with the teeth and claws he kept hidden by day.
When James and Sirius and Peter gathered about him in the beginning of second year and asked about Remus' wolf, Remus decided that this had suddenly become his, too. That they knew his terrible secret, his horrible having, and now he had them, too; as deeply twined as any other part of his curse was their knowing it, their keeping it a secret.
So even before fifth year, when it was his job to do it three times a week, Remus found himself prowling the hallways and stairs in Gryffindor tower, restless at the sounds and sensations the wolf he'd gained was telling him to be wary of. It said that the faint groan of stones could be dangerous, that the squeaks of mice could be terrible, that his friends were just behind three curtains and could be gobbled up.
And Remus told the wolf, and himself, and everybody who knew how to ask, that the wolf, the groans, and even the squeaks of the mice were all his own, and nobody could take them and do with them what Remus would not.
It was a great weight, a still and heavy stone, but one that Remus liked to bear.
"You're not my bloody babysitter," Sirius sometimes liked to roar, as if he didn't see the Prefect's badge shiny on Remus' breast at all.
And once, in a fit, Remus had yelled, "No, but you're mine!"
So he'd had to explain to Sirius' wide, blue eyes what that had meant, and he'd unearthed his many belongings, his secret things. He'd pulled them from their hiding places one by one, and told Sirius about his wolf and his moon, about his mother and his books, of all those wonderful, horrible pieces of his life -- his. And they weren't quite so much his, anymore, Remus thought with disquietude, long after Sirius had stopped gaping at him with awe.
"Am I really?" Sirius had asked, later that night, crawling into Remus' bed and casting a Silencing spell around them. "You've always thought so?"
"Yes, always," Remus agreed.
And when Sirius had kissed him, and allowed himself to be kissed back, Remus breathed a sigh of relief to have it all back again: his secrets, his wolf, his books, and his mother. All those parts of himself which were inside of Sirius now, too. Sirius seemed like he wanted to crawl inside of Remus, that night, and it was close enough to possession.
Sirius woke later, and always would after, with a vague, belonging smile. He burrowed deeper into the fabric of Remus' heart and said, "Yours," as if it were a mantra.
Sixth year, Remus gained a scar across his heart, invisible, he realized with wonderment, for all that it ached. He did not speak to Sirius until seventh, and when he did, the scar stopped hurting so terribly badly. Sirius was still his, Remus finally realized, and would never part, no less important by will or time; Remus kept that, too, close and tight in his chest, a secret nearly as terrible as his wolf, as dangerous and strange.
Sometimes, during Hogsmeade weekends, Remus would run to the Wizarding/Muggle post and pay three sickles to use the Muggle telephone. He would wrap his money in paper and nobody ever asked why; Remus could not bear the see the silver; it hurt not to be able to touch it nearly like it hurt when it burned.
He would chatter to his mother about his lessons and his friends, and would not tell her about his most secret gains: Sirius and the scars and sores that grew by month, like a tide that returned across his skin, with craggy stones that drew dark, deep lines across the sand. They fascinated him, when they did not ache too badly: it was rare to see the product of one's ownership so clearly, in such gleaming, red lines, and sometimes he was nearly sorry to see them disappear beneath the white linen of Madam Pomfrey's excellent medical care. But those that remained, those were his.
He told his mother, once, that he had something new, and most wonderful.
And when his mother asked, "Who?" he told her the truth, a little afraid that his mother would ask Remus not to keep him. But she'd only been quiet for a long time and said, like so many years before, "And you will never be unhappy."
Too many people, he realized, took life as a series of losses, a slow erosion of what they'd been born with: happiness, luck, love. They did not understand it the way that Remus did.
Life was, Remus knew, an endless sequence of gains: from first breath to last -- one took in a thousand, million different things, different people, different scars.
It was later, much later, when Remus learned to give.
By then, he had many things, too many, overflowing with grief and love and beauty and horror, a mess of memories and images, much too much to call his own, and realized that he would have to parcel it out, present them for others, give for the taking.
And he did, carefully, to James and Lily at their wedding, his blessing and his care. To Peter, his affection and his loyalty, a subtle, slow transference. To his father, his appreciation, and all the wonderful things he'd learned. To Sirius, his devotion, exchanged skin through skin and in the way that their bodies pressed together in a mimic of their mouths, the hot, clashing way they fell to one another.
To his mother, as she'd lay sleepy with age, the same that she'd always given him: unfaltering strength, something in which to find the remarkable, the extraordinary, the beautiful. He steeped her orange tea and brought her crumpets whenever she cared for them and he read her books. He told her of the tulips that were growing underneath her window and about pirates, about the large, garish hat he owned in reality now, a gift from Sirius, who was never serious at all. And at night, after his father stopped complaining of peglegs and parrots, Remus would come to her again, and they would talk till morning. He would hold her and they would curl up together like he'd been born, ever a part of her.
And he would tell her, "And you will never be unhappy."
That same day, and many more after that, when Remus learned that giving and gain were inextricably tangled, like his and Sirius' limbs the night he'd stumbled back to London, tears he gave freely to his mother streaming down his face. Tangled like the way that Sirius' hair had been as Remus had fucked him into the mattress. Tangled like his love and fear and terrible grief that morning, when he'd curled up into Sirius like he'd chosen to be, ever a part of him, too.
Sirius told him, "You'll always have me."
Hoarse, Remus said, "What if someone takes you?"
"You can't lose what you were born with. What you were always meant to have," Sirius said, barely a whisper and into the curve of Remus' temple. "You said I was yours."
Remus rolled them over, until Sirius was broad and warm and very much alive beneath his fingertips, achingly real. He stared at him for a long time before he allowed himself to have that, too, that something he'd never allowed himself to say, never let Sirius murmur.
"You are," Remus finally said. "Mine."
"Can I say that I love you now?" Sirius asked.
"Yes," Remus said.
Sirius laughed at that, and drew Remus close, as his mother had once before. "And we will never be unhappy," he whispered.
Remus learned quickly, with wisdom from age and will that many things were not gained or given but simply gone, like time or shadows or the recession of youth, there one moment and disappeared the next. Drifted out like smoke or smog, clouds and mist from rain.
After Lily and James, after Sirius, after the Balkans, after Romania and after Remus saw the world again, through older eyes, much bereaved, he counted time in steady, staccato beats, tempo for his half-life.
Later, as the letters began to crawl in, in the claws of exhausted barn owls from Hogwarts, and once in Fawkes' beak, he kept time by Harry: first year, second, and finally the summer before third, where he was interrupted by Dumbledore's perseverance twice a day. "Mr. Lupin, I remember your academic excellence while you were still a student of mine; I shall not let such talent pass without use -- I expect you at Hogwarts on September first, by any means necessary."
At the end of August, Remus returned to Cambridge, and sat with his father for a long time as he pointed to volume after volume, recalling the stories of his students misbehavior, and how many of them had made it into books they'd written.
Remus said, "Professor Dumbledore would like me to teach at Hogwarts."
"Wasn't that always a dream of yours?" his father asked, old but never dull, always as quick and bright as quicksilver. It was in those moments Remus understood his parents, saw what they had seen in one another, and felt very much as if he'd been blessed to know it at all, however briefly.
He stirred more sugar into his tea, and ached for his mother. "I've taught before," he said finally.
"Never magic," his father said. Pausing, he added. "We never had more children, Remus. And your mother loved you more than me, all those years." He held up his hand when Remus spoke as if to argue. "I would never hold it against you, son -- we did it for your own good." He smiled, old and wise with time. "For we have raised a fine boy. One who learned to give through sacrifice as well as keep, I hope."
So Remus bid goodbye to his father and the house in Cambridge and magicked his scant belongings into his battered case. He was the first one on the train September first and fell asleep there, his face pressed into the glass.
This time, there'd be no bright-eyed boy with an owl named Augustus.
But there was a boy named Harry, when he woke up, and Remus saw him to the infirmary at school. He stayed at the closed door of the hospital ward long after Madam Pomfrey shooed him out, and stared out into all the familiar stones and steps of Hogwarts. He said, mostly to himself, "And he will never be unhappy."
It would be long, long after, after gaining and giving and learning of gone that Remus would sit in the Ministry and stare into gray wisps of veil.
In his research thereafter, and in the Order briefings where it was mentioned, there were stories, about voices just beyond it and the barest hint of an image. It was a gateway into death, they said, but Remus disagreed; death could not be harnessed into so casual an existence, to be kept behind locked doors and incompetent guards. Death lived on the battlefield on which he'd faced Voldemort before -- death lurked in the corners of the Potters' garden. Death embraced, as sweetly as Sirius had ever held him.
Remus listened carefully, but never heard anything but the quiet sound of wind on cloth, and thought the doorway less than extraordinary, unremarkable.
But his mother, in her cold strength, Sirius in his wild, reckless love, his father, had all surrendered to it, been drawn to it, and remained --
He would always be, as he'd told his father long before, a boring academic type, and research wailed to him. Knowledge called. His fingers brushed the stone arch and the gray veil did not seem so terribly boring, all at once a mystery, a sudden treasure, buried beneath many things that Remus had not expected to survive.
It was irresponsible, terrible, a waste, really, but right -- somehow.
So Remus closed his eyes and stepped through, feeling cloth on his face.
And before the darkness took him, he said, "And I will never be unhappy."