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Lupin, who shaped himself as a caretaker, who had rage and shame running under his skin, but held his hands out, palms open and out, who spoke gently to frightened children.
Lupin, who was left with no one to look after but himself. Sirius had been the wildness Lupin wouldn’t allow himself to be, James the noble arrogance he couldn’t afford, Peter the sharp teeth.
Remus and Lily both knew about falling in love with big hearts, rough hands, and potential, about loving these brave boys who had so much growing up to do.
Lupin, who got furious about it all sometimes—furious at Sirius for his betrayal, at Peter for his stupid bravery (later: those blames switched), but at Lily, too, at James, for dying, for leaving him here alone. Brave, brave children, that’s what they were. Lupin grew older, got wearier, and knew in every aching bone that they were too young to die.
When Harry met the ghosts of his parents and the Marauders in the Forbidden Forest, on his way to his own willing death, they were almost the same age.
Harry stood before his ghosts and they could see eye to eye without anyone stooping down. He had his father’s hair and his mother’s bright eyes and they all had this war heavy on their shoulders.
He had come so far, so well, so bravely. He had so far to go. It broke Lupin’s unbeating heart.
—
Lupin lived his whole life blindingly aware of his scars—the way the ones on his face made people stare, the way they were the handwriting of his curse, the way the ones on his heart pinched and pulled if he didn’t move carefully.
Lupin was as patched as his clothes, as battered as his luggage. The world tore him apart—at four, leaving clawed scars and a curse in his veins; every full moon, his very body tearing him apart and a making a monster in his image; the moment, repeated over and over, when realization brimmed in another person’s eyes and he was booted out of a job, a lodging, a friendship, a life; every sneer in their eyes, every lowered voice and shudder.
The world tore him apart and he put himself back together.
When they told him the news about Lily and James, Lupin finished the mission he was on before he went to Godric’s Hollow. He stood in front of the Potters’ ruined home and fell apart in the cold streets. He picked the pieces up, slowly, over years and years.
In the first half hour, he remembered how to breathe. He picked up his composure sometime the next week. He patched together nights of sleep. Sometimes the stitching couldn’t hold; sometimes he couldn’t pull himself out of bed in the morning.
Remus kept picking himself up and patching himself together. Today, he walked by a beautiful woman with long red hair and when she laughed he didn’t flinch with sorrow. Today, he made a joke, the kind James would have collapsed at and Sirius would have smirked at. Remus patched himself together, scars and sorrows, kindnesses and chocolate.
We are the ways we rebuild ourselves.
Remus grew up. He didn’t leave flowers at their graves, but only because he knew Lily would have scolded him if he went without food in order to buy them.
He was the last Marauder. When Remus Lupin died, on that Hogwarts stone, did an era end?
Or did it end the day James died, the day Lily died, the day Peter scurried into darknesses and Sirius was locked away in dark places?
An era ended and Lupin was left standing in its wreckage.
An era ended; a childhood burned to the ground.
—
Yes, let’s talk about Lupin, who got to grow older than any of them, but still not old enough.
Lupin who thought, decades’ distance from it, that James had been a child when he died.
Lupin, cradling his newborn, realizing that whatever else James had been when he faced Voldemort alone, he had been a father first.
After years of growing apart from James Potter, Remus suddenly felt like he’d met his friend again.
—
Lupin learning Tonks’s sharp edges; Lupin, who thought he needed brash, violent boys, bold souls, animals, playful and fierce, to rally around him. He was not harmless, this boy with the wolf’s snarl, this kind and terrible soul. The Marauders had been brave and bright, valiant, but they had only brushed the very edges of good. Older but not much wiser, Lupin looked at Tonks and was afraid of breaking her.
Did he not remember Lily? Iron nerve and bold hair, pulling James into her vibrant orbit, loving hard, loving so hard it killed her.
Tonks was made of stuff just as fierce. She turned her nose to colorful jokes and her smile to battle armor. Lupin looked at her across the Hogwarts hall, in that last battle, and knew with everything in him that if she died tonight it was under no power of his.
He had thought there would never again be anyone in the world like Sirius, like James and Peter and Lily. And there wasn’t.
Tonks was nothing like them, except that in the end she made him feel like he should never have been scared about loving her.
—
I like to think that when Neville Longbottom became a Hogwarts professor, when he stood in front of a classroom of those bluffing, frightened, growing children, he had McGonagall’s backbone and Lupin’s kindnesses.
Feet planted, quiet manner, generous heart. He taught them herbology, and he also taught them to make their fears ridiculous, to dress them in their grandmother’s clothes and banish them.
—
Lupin was the only one who looked at Harry and saw Harry. Sirius saw James, Dumbledore saw an acceptable loss, and so did Peter Pettigrew.
But Lupin wasn’t an aching teenager trapped in a grown man’s ragged body, mourning old betrayals and the things he failed to save.
Sirius had been trapped in the darkness for years. Dumbledore would never forgive himself for loving Grindelwald. This time, the old man promised himself, he would save the world. This time, he would not listen to his heart. This time, he would make the sacrifice.
But Lupin had spent more than a decade growing into his scars. He missed Lily and he mourned James, but he had put his ghosts to rest.
He was not living in his old wars, dwelling on his losses in a high Hogwarts tower or little Azkaban cell, because Lupin had new wars to fight every day: fighting for respect, for rent, fighting his body, fighting for breath against all the weight of his struggles and griefs. Lupin had both battered, patched shoes firmly on the ground.
When Lupin woke up on the Hogwarts Express with a dementor and gasping, frightened children, he was in a familiar nostalgic space, all his worst griefs pulled up the front of his mind. But when Remus looked at a a stark terrified boy with his father’s rumpled hair and his mother’s green eyes, Remus did not see James. He saw a scared child and he handed him some chocolate.
Lupin understood what it was to have people care more about the incidentals of your body than your name.