FIC: The Cycle of Reconstruction (Remus Lupin, Gen)

[shiiki]

Title: The Cycle of Reconstruction
Author: shiiki
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Remus Lupin, James Potter, Sirius Black, Peter Pettigrew, Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, Gen
Fandom: Harry Potter
Word Count: 3,831

Summary: Everything broken took time to rebuild, and even then, stronger though it might be, it was fragile and could sustain another blow, only to be painstakingly fixed up once again.
Written for hp_summergen 2007.

Notes: This is for antonia_east, who asked for the trio or the Marauders, or Remus at any age and something hopeful set in war. I tried to put all of it together, and I couldn’t stop Remus’s childhood from creeping in.

cassibill, the scale modelling guru, was kind enough to share her wealth of information with me. I am indebted to her - this story couldn’t have happened without her help!

Much thanks as well to snorkackcatcher for the great and speedy beta assistance and Brit-pick!

Post-DH edit: DH blew this fic out of the water, unfortunately, days before it was posted. An updated version of this fic, canon-compliant and expanded, can be found here.

Link to fic at hpsummergen


Remus was five when he pieced together his first model aeroplane, under the watchful eye of his grandfather. John Lupin had bought the set especially for him: a simple blue-and-white plastic model that his little five-year-old fingers could handle.

When it was finished, Remus held it out proudly to his grandfather for inspection, even though Grandpa John had been sitting there all the while, instructing and advising, helping him pop in some of the tougher joints.

'Can we go see the big ones now?' Remus asked after his tiny model was pronounced a success.

Grandpa John smiled and took Remus's hand, leading him into the study, where the collection of model aeroplanes hung like wooden dragonflies from the ceiling.

The planes fascinated Remus. They were a Muggle thing, his parents explained, and Remus wondered why wizards didn't have them, too.

'We don't need planes, Remus,' said his mother. 'We have brooms.'

He was too young to learn how to fly, but it looked like a tricky business, balancing on the handle. He'd much rather sit in the cockpit of one of Grandpa John's aeroplanes.

The Lupins visited with Grandpa John every weekend, and Remus liked nothing better than to lie on his back in the study, listening to Grandpa John tell him stories about the planes hanging overhead.

'And that there's a Spitfire -- the Supermarine Spitfire, one of the greatest fighter planes ever, hero of the Battle of Britain. Imagine, if you will, a whole flight of them, belonging to our Royal Air Force ...'

Remus reached out a hand towards the plane, though he knew it was hanging too high for him to touch. 'Did you fly one, Grandpa?'

'Aye, that I did, in that very battle ...'

And Remus listened, wide-eyed, as Grandpa John recounted a thrilling tale of fighter planes and spectacular air battles. As he spoke, the planes overhead began to move, swinging on their hangings into the formations described.

'... Oh, the Nazis came fast and furious, like a swarm of bees in those Messerschmitts and Heinkels of theirs. But they were no match for us -- sent them packing, we did. But oh, we paid our price, too --' Caught in his memories and the telling of them, Grandpa John didn't realise that his precious planes were dogfighting each other until abruptly, in the middle of his exciting rendition of how his Spitfire had veered off course and plummeted towards the English Channel, the prize model Spitfire did a nose-dive worthy of a kamikaze plane right into the edge of the study desk and splintered at the wing and tail. Parts around the body cracked off, falling to the ground with a crash. Grandpa John faltered mid-sentence and stared at Remus. The rest of the planes came to a halt, and Remus sat up guiltily. He hadn't consciously done anything, but he knew he'd somehow been responsible for the visual display.

When Remus's father learned what had happened, he didn't know whether to admonish Remus or congratulate him for his first show of magic. Torn between the two options, he settled instead for offering to fix the damage. He had his wand out, ready to swish and flick, but Grandpa John stopped him.

'No. Not all things can be fixed by magic, Daniel.' He gathered the pieces together.

'Don't worry, it's a simple spell, Da, it'll take no time at all, and the plane will be as good as new.'

Grandpa John shook his head. 'Besides, Remus broke the plane, not you.'

'I'm sorry,' said Remus in a small voice. 'I didn't mean to.'

'I know. But you'll learn to fix it, my boy.' Grandpa John smiled, and Remus relaxed. 'I'll teach you to fix it properly -- your hands will do a better job than a wand.'

He kept the broken plane for Remus. They didn't work on it straight away, though; Grandpa John started by teaching Remus the intricacies of scale modelling: what wood to use ('It's plank and spar, see, not solid wood -- sturdier this way.'); how to fit the joints ('Got to peg the heavier ones in -- get a metal rod, or a wooden dowel -- we'll cut it to fit.') Remus had to learn about glue and the right type and amount to use: Normal glue for the general joints, and epoxy at the heavy ones. Paint, polish, and varnish -- the finishing touches -- were another lesson.

They weren't simply going to fix the broken plane, Grandpa John explained, they were going to rebuild it and paint it and give it new life.

Several months later, Grandpa John deemed Remus ready to start fixing the Spitfire.

They never got round to repairing it, however. The week following Grandpa John's announcement, Remus ventured out too late one full moon night ... a mistake that he would never cease to regret.

He woke up in a bed at St Mungo's, feeling sore and battered, his arm aching beneath its thick bandage, his memory of the night before hazy. There had been a dog -- no, a monster -- and he had been running, and he'd tripped, and the monster had sunk bloody fangs into his arm, and he had screamed ...

Remus pulled the covers over his head and whimpered until his mother came to comfort him.

She was crying as she rocked him in her arms, which Remus thought strange because he was the one who was hurting.

They didn't visit Grandpa John that weekend, but he came to their house with sweets for Remus.

'Next weekend,' promised Grandpa John. 'We'll get started on that plane, eh?'

But next weekend Remus had to sit quietly at the Ministry of Magic as his parents filled in form after form at some Wolf Registry Office. He didn't know why they had to do it, or why he had to be there, and he didn't like it. The chairs were hard, and the people who passed him gave him unfriendly looks.

The week after that, his parents brought him back to St Mungo's to be poked and prodded by Healers, even though Remus insisted he wasn't sick and his arm was all healed already. There was only a faint scar where he'd been bitten. None of the adults paid any attention to his protests, however.

'He's a tough lad,' said a Healer to Remus's mother. She patted Remus on the head and gave him a Sugar Quill to suck.

'Make sure he's secure,' another Healer warned Remus's father in an undertone that wasn't quite soft enough to evade Remus's keen ears. 'You don't want him hurting you. And if you let him free and he bites someone ... the Ministry has a strict no-second-chances policy.'

'I know,' said Remus's father stiffly.

None of this made any sense to Remus -- at least, not until the next week, when his parents locked him in a dark shed without rhyme or reason. Feeling miserable and abused, he pleaded and wailed and howled ...

The morning after, his father carried him, weak and bloody with self-inflicted wounds, out of the shed. His mother put him to bed with a Dreamless Sleep potion.

Hours later, he awoke to Grandpa John's roar, 'You're telling me my grandson's a monster?'

He heard his parents' voices, low and placating. Grandpa John didn't yell again, but Remus couldn't get that word out of his head. It echoed in his ears: Monster, monster, monster ...

He couldn't be a monster, not like the one he'd met that terrifying night when he'd stupidly wandered out alone under the full moon. Remus looked at his hands. They were normal. He climbed out of bed and limped to the mirror in his room. His reflection -- an ordinary boy, if a little beaten up -- stared back at him.

But last night -- last night, he hadn't been a boy, had he? There had been the moon, huge and blood-red through the window, so scary-looking that Remus had begun to shudder uncontrollably ... and he hadn't been able to stop, and it had hurt, all his limbs on fire ... and some -- thing -- had taken over his mind and body ...

Remus crept back to bed and pulled up his covers, shaking now as he remembered

The door opened and Grandpa John entered, a falsely bright smile on his face.

'Well, how's my favourite grandson doing?' he said in a too-loud voice.

He carried on in this vein for a while, but never made eye contact with Remus, nor moved close enough to touch him.

It would be years before Remus could begin to understand why his Muggle grandfather, who could not properly comprehend the magical disease, feared that lycanthropy might be as contagious as measles. That first time, barely comprehending what had happened to himself, Remus felt completely rebuffed. They hardly visited Grandpa John's after the bite; Remus's parents were more concerned with dragging him to specialist after specialist, in a desperate search for a cure. Grandpa John's visits to the Lupins also became less and less frequent. The planes faded into an old, unimportant part of Remus's memory, eclipsed by this new nightmare that he had to face every month. Even when Grandpa John passed away and left Remus all the planes, they were simply packed in a box, deposited in a corner of his room, and neglected.

---

The model aeroplanes weren't revisited until more than ten years later, when Remus's house and family were destroyed by the Death Eaters in one fell swoop. He supposed there was no real point in sifting through the wreckage -- surely everything of use would have been destroyed in the blast, and besides, it wasn't as though he really had any place to fill with salvaged mementos of a life that now seemed aeons in the past.

Still, it was something to do, and Remus needed a mindless task that he could carry out to keep himself from imagining how his parents must have lived the last few minutes of their lives.

James, Sirius, and Peter all insisted on being there to help him. Marauder solidarity, James called it. Remus allowed himself to wonder morbidly -- once -- if James and Peter at least were there in thankful relief that it wasn't their houses or their families that they were picking up after.

He pushed the thought away guiltily. Having his friends around did help to thaw the icy numbness that had been settling over him since being told the devastating news.

Sirius was the one to discover the planes -- or at least, what was left of them. He sat in the middle of what had been Remus's room and attempted to reconstruct one, while the others continued to comb the wrecked house. It took him the better part of an hour, given that the pieces were scattered all over and mingled with other wooden debris, but he finally managed to form a decent recreation of the original plane and send it flying over to the other three with a flick of his wand.

'Blimey,' said Peter. 'That's not a Muggle airyplane, is it?'

'Aeroplane,' Sirius corrected, grinning. 'Where'd you get it from, Remus?'

Remus had to rack his brains to recall the, by then, very dim childhood memories of scale-modelling planes with his late grandfather. 'I think I must have played with them when I was really young,' he said, shrugging. 'My grandfather owned them; it was a hobby of his. He was a pilot in the Muggle war, if I remember correctly. I reckon he liked to put together models of the planes he saw then.'

'We could put these back together,' said James, holding up two pieces and scrutinising them. He laid them down next to him and drew a couple more fragments closer. Remus squinted at them; they looked familiar, laid out on the ground that way -- as though they were meant to be in that state, rather than because the Death Eater blast had wrecked it.

Then he realised just which pieces these were, and the memories came flooding back. It was the broken Spitfire.

'I broke that when I was five,' he said reminiscently, running his fingers over the painted insignia on the wing. 'Accidental magic.'

'You broke a plane?' Sirius sounded amused. 'I never would have pegged you as a destructive one, Moony.'

'There is the Shrieking Shack,' Peter reminded them.

'That doesn't count,' said James. 'It's only one night in a month when he's furry. Just because you wet your pants first time you saw him --'

Peter coloured. 'I was a rat,' he said with as much dignity as he could muster. 'I didn't have pants.'

Sirius chortled, but didn't carry on taking the mickey. He turned back to Remus and the plane. 'Why didn't you fix it?'

Remus shrugged. 'My grandfather wouldn't let my dad do it.'

'Why not?' asked James, surprised. 'It'd be easy, with a Reparo.'

Remus didn't answer right away. He thought of his grandfather, smiling as he declared that Remus would learn to fix the Spitfire. He thought of weeks and months of happy weekends, learning the elaborate craft of modelling a plane.

And he thought he understood Grandpa John's logic now. Some things, when broken, needed time and effort to repair, not just a quick fix. Reparo could have returned the plane to its original state, but it wouldn't have built it up stronger, more resilient. A thread of damage in a relationship might be snipped off, but the possibility of unravelling the fabric would still be there if it wasn't stitched back.

Wounds, whether physical or emotional, needed time to heal and scar, for the injured victim to accept them and grow stronger.

Grandpa John had fought in a war; he must have known all this. Now Remus, embroiled in one himself, found himself realising the lessons his grandfather had once tried to pass on, long ago.

'If you destroy something,' he said to his friends, 'you can't just put it back together so easily. But if you take time over it, you can remake it into something stronger.'

James seized on that last sentence. 'Like friendship,' he said firmly, and the others were silent, possibly thinking, like Remus, of a friendship that had almost been broken in their sixth year.

Sirius raised the plane he'd roughly cobbled together. 'To us,' he said solemnly, and sent the plane flying into the sky, like a rising symbol of hope.

Remus let Sirius take back all the fragments of the other planes that he could find, but he kept the Spitfire pieces himself, as a reminder.

---

The Spitfire stayed broken as the war with Voldemort dragged on, and more things broke all over Britain. The war ended -- or paused, at least -- with the irreparable shattering of one friendship.

Remus tried to fix the plane then; it was all he did for a month after Lily and James's funeral and Peter's memorial. He threw his heart and soul into the project, visiting modelling shops to re-learn all he had forgotten about wood, joints, and paint. He spent whatever money he had on fresh tools and materials, ignoring the growling of his stomach as he passed bakeries and delis on his way to the DIY stores.

Fix the plane, he thought, and maybe everything else will be repaired as well. His friends. His life. He clung to the irrational idea that things would return to the status quo if only the Spitfire stood proud again.

He got five minutes of satisfaction and pride out of the plane when it was at last completed. Then he put it down and wondered what he had been thinking.

Not everything could be rebuilt so neatly. And he'd be a fool to truly believe that. James and Lily were dead. Peter was dead. Sirius was worse than dead. And Harry was unreachable. Everything of value to him was gone, and there was no way of bringing them back.

He stared at the plane, with its bright new finish and replaced parts, for a long while before wondering if the lesson meant to be learnt was, instead, fix what is broken with something newer and better.

Maybe it was time to move on -- replace his old life with a new.

---

The repaired Spitfire stayed with Remus, following him in his globe-trotting years as he searched for that new life post-war. It returned to occupy a place on the shelf of his home when he returned to Britain for good. It was nearly twenty years before it was noticed again, when a certain three seventeen-year-olds paid Remus a visit.

Dumbledore had left Remus his Pensieve. Harry would need it -- or more specifically, the memories that Dumbledore had left in it. Remus wasn't sure exactly why Dumbledore hadn't charged another member of the Order that Harry was closer to -- Arthur Weasley, for example -- with holding the Pensieve for him, but he supposed Dumbledore must have known what he was doing. Reading the letter that Dumbledore had left him, Remus could almost see the late Headmaster's eyes twinkling as he said, 'I expect you could find some uses for it as well, Remus.'

Harry, Ron, and Hermione had spent the entire morning reliving memory after memory in the Pensieve. Remus offered them lunch when they paused, looking weary. They gladly agreed to it, but ate in silence. Harry seemed to be mulling over whatever information he'd gleaned from his excursion down memory lane, and Ron and Hermione must have taken their cues from him, refraining from discussion until Harry was ready. They took their first real looks around the study as they ate.

It was Ron who noticed the plane hanging in the corner of the study.

'Hey, is that one of those airyplane things?' He pointed at it, grinning. 'Dad's got one like it; he makes it fly with this little box with knobs on it.'

'It's an aeroplane, Ron,' Hermione corrected automatically, sounding as though she'd said it a million times before. Remus had to suppress a grin. 'Your dad has a remote-controlled one.'

'I didn't know you collected Muggle stuff too, Professor,' said Ron.

'Not really. This was my grandfather's. Model aeroplanes were a hobby of his.'

Hermione came closer to the Spitfire, looking interested. 'This is a World War II plane, isn't it?

'World War?'

'She means the Muggle World War, Ron. Yes it is, Hermione.' Remus levitated the plane down to the study table so they could get a better look. Even Harry seemed to be jolted out of whatever memory he was lost in, and reached out to touch the plane thoughtfully. 'My grandfather flew one of these in the Battle of Britain.'

'What? You don't mean --' Ron looked disbelieving.

'No, this is just a scale model of the actual planes they used in the war.'

'Blimey,' said Ron. 'They fought with these -- plane things? That's like --' he scrutinised the cockpit, 'duelling on brooms with a permanent Shield Charm.'

'Except these "Shield Charms" aren't quite as strong as magic. The pilots had to be very careful not to be hit; if they were, their planes could explode, or lose their flying capability and crash.'

It was sad that all three teenagers could appreciate the severity of this, all of them having experienced the very real danger of being in an actual battle before. But that was war, wasn't it? It didn't discriminate by age. Remus himself hadn't been much older than them when he'd been thrust into his first battle.

'A lot of fighter pilots gave their lives to defend Britain,' said Hermione solemnly. 'It's a very important event in Muggle history. I'm surprised that the wizarding world hardly seems to know about it.'

'Probably had a Dark wizard to worry about instead,' said Ron. 'Was it Grindelwald's time? I did listen in History of Magic sometimes, Hermione.'

'Yes -- there's some speculation that Grindelwald may have had a hand in the Muggle war as well, but that's never been proven ...'

Harry, who had been silent all this while, fingering the planes and only appearing to be half-listening, finally spoke. 'Well, but we won, didn't we? Both wars.' There was a hard edge to his voice that suggested that he was thinking of this current war, too.

'Yes,' said Remus. 'We paid a price for it, but yes, we won.'

Harry's eyes darkened -- was he thinking of the prices his parents and Sirius had paid in this war and the last? But then his expression cleared and he smiled, briefly. 'Good.'

He turned serious again very quickly. 'Thanks, Professor Lupin,' he said. 'For the Pensieve and for lunch. I think we'll need to be getting on now, though. There are ... things we need to do.' He looked slightly apologetic, though whether it was for leaving so quickly or not being able to elaborate on these 'things', Remus couldn't tell.

'It's all right, Harry.' Remus clapped a hand on his shoulder. 'Take care, all three of you.'

'Oh, we will,' Hermione assured him.

'Come back again, any time.' He glanced at the Pensieve. I expect you could find some uses for it as well, Remus. Suddenly he thought he understood why Dumbledore had left it with him. 'Maybe I could -- well, I'd like to share some of my memories with you as well ...'

Harry's expression became wistful. He hesitated, no doubt remembering the last time he'd watched his parents in a Pensieve memory.

'These are good ones,' Remus promised.

Harry smiled, a real one this time that met his eyes. 'I'd like that, thanks.'

After the trio left, Remus extracted the memory of his friends with the Spitfire and watched it swirl in the Pensieve. He toyed with the idea of dropping in to revisit it. Why not? Shouldn't good memories be worth reliving?

So he did. He delved into his own memories for the rest of the afternoon, taking from each of them shards of hope and strength which he would fit together like a jigsaw of life.

Not all things can be fixed by magic ... If you take time over it, you can remake it into something stronger ... Like friendship ...

He began to notice a pattern. Everything broken took time to rebuild, and even then, stronger though it might be, it was fragile and could sustain another blow, only to be painstakingly fixed up once again.

His life, fractured time and again -- when he was bitten, when he'd lost his family, his friends -- still carried on, stronger after each blow, even though it took a while to heal and find hope to continue every time.

Their world, shattered once the first time Voldemort rose, only to be fixed and broken again now -- but they would defeat him and rebuild, adding new, better, stronger materials to the original fabric.

It would take time -- months, even years. In the end, though, the cycle of change, of destruction and reconstruction, would complete.

~Fin~