Showdown Fic - Coniston Water (1/3)
Title - Coniston Water (1/3)
Author - joely_jo
Rating - R for adult sexual content in the final part.
Characters - Remus/Tonks, plus a couple of minor OCs, but please don’t run screaming, none of them are called Mary.
Warnings - Sex. I should probably warn for an initial dose of angst, as well.
Prompt - Grey
Word Count - This part weighs in at 4,426 words.
Summary - Remus returns to his family home to scatter his father’s ashes. Tonks accompanies him and together, they lay to rest some other ghosts.
Author’s Notes - The prompt 'grey' made me think instantly of particular place and a metaphor and, well, I’ve always wanted to write this idea, and I figured I ought to do it before Book Seven came out. I decided to punctuate this piece with one or two photographs, to sort of give everyone the feel of the place I’m talking about. I hope this is okay. The entire piece is set sometime around the final events of OotP.
Many thanks also to gloryforever and writermerrin for convincing me this was all right.
He is a ghost as he stands on the edge of the jetty looking out across a scene painted in shades of grey. His figure is lean and slightly sagging, like a man a little sick of his skin or a soldier too tired to march on. It has been a long day, she thinks, as she watches the curve of his shoulders rise and fall in a leaden sigh. Train journeys are rarely comfortable affairs and this has been one fraught with bad weather and signal failures. When she’d questioned him about the unwizardly method of transport, he’d replied that this was the way it had always been and this was the way it would be now. After that, he’d been utterly silent for most of the way, his head leaning against the pane of window glass, eyes fixed on a lonely spot just beyond natural sight. She hadn’t known what to say to him.
He seems unaffected by the blustering northerly wind that courses across the expanse of water. His coat flaps against his sides. There is no sound to speak of, just the haunting cry of a hawk somewhere in the rim of trees behind them. He stares out towards the opposite bank, eyes trailing along the point where brown hillside meets iron-grey water. Occasionally, he looks down through the slats in the jetty, into the lake’s darkness, before returning his gaze to the horizon.
She wonders if she should go to him. He seems quite lost and alone there on the jetty, as if he could really use her arms around him, but she pauses. Something in her holds her back. She was shocked when he asked her to accompany him to his childhood home. She knew Remus as a friend, a good friend, but this spoke of something else, something deeper and more reliant than simple friendship, and she considers the nature of her role in all of this. What does he want her with him for?
The sky above her is the colour of slate, threatening yet another storm, the sun blinded by thick, layered clouds. It is the kind of place where it would be possible to imagine that the rest of the world has drifted away. All of a sudden, she knows why he has returned here. It is not the presence of the small low-roofed cottage hidden back in the trees behind them, or even the hanging memories of more innocent times this place must bring. No, it is something else. It is a sense of duty and a desire for peace.
Back in the cottage, past their hastily dropped suitcases, on the oak table in front of the window seat, sits a precious piece of cargo. An urn, filled with the ashes of his father. In his pocket, she knows there is a piece of paper signed with the name John Lupin; a last will and testament of a man who lived his life according to rules and regulations.
She hates the silence of him. He’s barely spoken a dozen sentences since he asked for leave of absence from the Order a week ago to execute his father’s last wishes. Dumbledore had, of course, granted Remus the time without question, his eyes filled with concern. He’d spoken to Tonks after Remus had left, asked her to keep her eye on him in the next days, and she’d done just that, even in the face of his stony silence. She’s always seen Remus as a man who hid his colour beneath the surface, secreted away for others to find only if they wished to do a little digging, but now she senses him turning to grey right in front of her eyes.
These last few days he’s hidden so much she’s worried if he’ll be able to find himself again. She wraps her arms around herself as the wind picks up and forbids the cold from entering.
****
Remus’s eyes pick out the familiar shores of the southern end of the lake. The banks are stony and rise up towards the rough farmland that patterns the other side. Grey stone cottages dot the dry-stone walls. He hasn’t been here in years, over a decade, now that he thinks about it. It is a place of a million memories, ranging from Christmas and New Year celebrations spent here with his family to the night when his parents left him alone in the house while they visited friends in the village. The night he was bitten.
A lump of surprise turns over in his stomach as he realises that this place has been a milestone for events in his life so far and he had almost forgotten the way it looked.
****
Hours later, when the wind has dropped a little, she watches him tug the rowing boat from the shed and push it into the icy water. Pulling leather gloves on to protect himself from the chafe of the oars, he invites her to step aboard with him, one hand held out in welcome. “It’s safe,” he assures her. “I’m quite good, actually.”
She nods and takes his hand, stepping over the prow of the boat. She wobbles as the boat shifts with the weight of her, but his hands reach out to steady her, looping around her waist. His confident touch makes her look down at him in surprise. He tugs her down onto the plank seat opposite him, smiles and then takes up the oars. He turns them over his hands, testing their comfort.
“Lean over the side and give us a push off, then,” he tells her.
Soon, they are skimming away across the surface. She watches the shoreline slip further away, then glances down at the darkness of the water. A small shiver of a childhood fear skitters up her spine. He notices. “Are you all right?”
“Mm. Just never felt that comfortable on the water.”
“Oh…” He pauses. “I’m sorry, I should have asked. It never occurred to me that you might have a phobia.”
“I don’t, really,” she says, looking back up at him. His eyes are liquid in the low light. “I’m just a land lover, I suppose.”
He nods. “Fair enough,” he says.
No more words pass as he heads towards the opposite shore. After a few moments, he slows their pace and pulls them alongside another jetty, this one newer and in better condition than the one they have just left. He brings the oars in and then loops the mooring rope around a hook.
“Remus.”
The voice stirs her. Remus’ face splits in a sudden smile. She turns to see a tall man, sixty, possibly sixty-five-years-old, slim but athletic, dressed in corduroy trousers and a military-style green jumper. Red hair curls from underneath a tweed flat cap. “Oliver,” Remus greets and the two men embrace, Oliver’s hand slapping Remus’ back. His skin is Celtic pale and freckled and there is a ruggedness about him born of years of work on the land.
“Remus Lupin,” he says again, his voice accented with surprise and pleasure. “It’s been too long.” She can see his watery grey eyes light from within.
****
The low-slung farmhouse peeks through the trees as they follow Oliver up the hardened mud track. The vegetation that lines the route is familiar but changed, the rhododendrons grown well above head height. A smell of dampness and rotting leaf litter subverts his senses as they pass between them. It is a place he has been a thousand times before, yet too many years have passed since he last travelled up this track.
Gradually, the track opens out and the farmhouse shifts into full view. The house sign is the same, weathered but still marking the gatepost and declaring this place as ‘Hanson’s Farm’. Oliver smiles and beckons them onwards, but Remus turns to watch as she stumbles over the uneven ground a few paces behind him. She looks confused, he notes, childish and uncertain in what is, to her, a new and alien environment. He pauses and then holds out his hand to her, smiling when she takes it and slides her arm through his.
****
She notices a woman standing on the porch of the farmhouse as they approach. She is about the same age as Oliver, but small and slight, with a wild mane of light brown hair partly tamed into a loose braid. “Ah, you’re here. I was starting to get worried,” she says with a broad smile.
“Told you they wouldn’t be long,” Oliver assures her. His hand rests momentarily on the woman’s shoulder.
She looks at Remus and the smile spreads. “Remus, it’s good to see you.” Her hand reaches up and she cups the curve of his face, fingers briefly slipping through his fringe. The gesture is friendly, perhaps a little more than that, and she realises that this woman has known Remus since long before she first met him. They embrace. “And you must be Tonks,” she greets, turning towards her. For the first time, she realises that the smile on the woman’s face touches her eyes, genuine. “I’m Alice Hanson. I’ve known Remus since he was this high…” She makes an appropriate movement with her hand, measuring about two feet off the ground.
Tonks struggles with the friendly tone for a moment. These people are clearly Muggles - it is obvious from their dress and mannerisms - and yet they treat Remus as if he were nothing unusual.
She nods an affirmative to the statement and Alice continues, “Remus spoke of you when he wrote last week. Said you’d be coming with him.” She lays a gentle hand on Tonks’ shoulder. “And you’re quite welcome.”
For a moment, Tonks pauses. She hadn’t told Remus she was accepting his request to accompany him until two nights ago. She glances at him and notices that he is looking down, smiling at his shoes.
For her part, Alice does not notice, or chooses not to comment on, the silent conversation just passed between Remus and Tonks. Instead, she half-turns back to the farmhouse and swings open the heavy wooden door. Oliver moves past them, followed by Remus, into a warm and low-lit kitchen, filled with the homely scents of cooking food and warm tea. Tonks hangs back a moment, a little ill at ease with the situation; she, after all, is just a guest here, and Remus clearly so much more than that. “Judging by your expression,” Alice says, “you’ve never been to Coniston before?”
“I’ve visited the Lake District,” Tonks replies. She notices the reed doormat beneath her feet and brushes her boots on it.
“But not Coniston…” Alice’s eyes smile at her. “It’s not the same as the others. And certainly not around here. You won’t find tourists around here. In fact, you’ll be lucky to find much in the way of normal human life. But that’s what we like about it.”
She casts a sly wink and Tonks finds herself suddenly wondering how much these people know about Remus and how much they actually understand.
“Come on in,” Alice says in a quiet voice. “Remus will be glad to have you here.”
****
Conversation is steady over lunch - a two course meal of beef stew and vegetables followed by apple crumble - and Remus relaxes into the company. Alice has not changed since he last saw her, and her probing questions at times leave him lost for words or blushing faintly. Tonks puts on a great show. She’s doing well to seem at ease in the situation, he thinks, but then wonders if she actually is. Oliver, after all, is treating her mild clumsiness with good-humour.
After they have eaten, Alice takes his hand and leads him outside onto the front porch. She pushes a cup of coffee into his other hand as she does so and he smiles at the realisation that she has remembered how he likes it.
He goes to stand in front of the low stone wall that marks the boundary of the front garden, and Alice follows him. He hums in his throat as he looks out across the greenery towards the steel-grey of the lake. Clouds still hang above the scene, and he spends a moment considering if the weather is a good thing or a bad thing. Part of him had hoped for a sunny afternoon for this sad task, but another part of him thinks that the layered dullness and threatening rain is somehow more appropriate.
“You are troubled,” Alice observes as he takes a deep drink of his coffee.
At first, he does not respond, and then slowly, he nods. “I never expected to be doing this,” he says, his voice soft. “I never expected that my father would want me to do this.”
“Your father was a good man, Remus. And despite your differences, he loved you very much.”
“It has taken me years to come to the point where I can believe you, Alice,” murmurs Remus, his gaze drifting down to the floor near his feet. He fidgets with the handle of the coffee cup. “It is a terrible thing to know that you are a disappointment to your own father.”
“I know, I know.”
There is a stilted pause. Remus thinks back to the turbulent years of his adolescence. After his mother died so young, he was left alone with his father. Grief had gripped them both in different ways, but John Lupin’s way of dealing with the trauma had been to allow his emotions to get in the way of his dealings with his son. Remus had always known that his condition was a disappointment for his father, a tangible reminder of his father’s own faults and flaws - after all, it had been John Lupin’s controversial nature that had led to Remus being bitten in the first place - but with his mother no longer there to temper things, Remus realised the full force of his father’s disillusionment.
“But there is something you should know,” Alice adds after a moment. Remus looks up. “Before he died, your father made it very clear to me that he regretted the way he’d treated you. He told me that it was a great comfort to him that you were fighting for what was right. He told me you’d know what he meant by that.”
Nodding, Remus feels a small smile creep onto his face. Even on his death bed, his father was mindful of the importance of secrecy. “Yes, I do,” he replies.
“Then perhaps it is time to let some of the ghosts rest between you.”
He looks up and out towards the lake, a place of so many family moments, a place of such mixed blessings. And yet, he realises as he stares at the starkness of the landscape, it is home.
“It is time,” he agrees.
Alice nods. Her hand lays itself on the rise of his shoulders, lingers there a moment. “I’ll get Oliver and Tonks.”
****
Tonks had never really been touched by a place’s beauty before. But, as the light began to fade over Lake Coniston, she realised that she had been stunned to silence by this place. The wind had dropped and so the water lapped gentler against the jetty. They were back at Low Water End, the Lupin’s cottage, having rowed out onto the middle of the lake to scatter the ashes of John Lupin to the wind. She had not cried, but Remus had shed a tear or two, though it was apparent that his grief was tinged with other emotions, other emotions that were getting in the way of a clearer expression of loss. When the first tear crept down his cheek, she had thought that this was the moment when the barrier would be broken and the calm control he’d exhibited over the last fortnight would crumble. But it was not to be.
They returned to the cottage afterwards, Remus pouring measures of firewhisky for all, then drinking them with a toast to his father’s memory. Tonks wandered around the square living room, her eyes taking in the antique furniture, heavy velvet drapes and overfilled bookcases. Photographs in oxidised silver frames clustered on the top of a battered Steinway piano, a mixture of the magical and the still, Muggle kind. It was odd to see Remus’ youthful face gazing out of the pictures, the faces of his father and mother. Oliver and Alice, too, younger and laughing.
Alice approached her as she ran a thoughtful finger over the image of Remus as a nine or ten-year-old boy in one of the photographs. Even at that age, Remus seemed older than his physical age, carrying a burden no child should have to carry. She figured she knew what it was. “He was a troubled boy, but a good boy, nonetheless,” Alice told her. “The image of his mother, I might add, both physically and emotionally.”
“Not his father, then.”
“No… John Lupin was a unique individual.” She paused. “I’m sure you know something of Remus’ relationship with his father, though perhaps not all. If you’d known John Lupin as well as Remus, you would have wondered where Remus came from. But, if you’d met his mother, you would have understood.”
“Remus carried with him a tremendous weight,” she continued, and Tonks had the feeling she knew to what Alice was referring to. “He was not like the other boys his age.”
“You mean there were other children here too? I always thought…”
“That the Lupins were loners.” Alice smiled as she finished Tonks’ sentence. “In a lot of respects, they were, but you forget that Remus’ mother was not like his father.” Her eyes sparkled for a moment as Tonks realised what she meant. “To many of John’s friends, Sarah was not tolerated. But she loved John too much to allow that to stand in the way of their relationship. When Remus was bitten, their lives had to change. It was just unfortunate that Sarah adapted better than John did.”
A smile passed across Alice’s face, then. “It is interesting to see Remus now, after all these years. He is still the same boy, inside. Lost and a little bit alone, carrying a terrible burden.” She shook her head, turning slightly to look at Remus, sitting now on the sofa with Oliver, nodding in deep conversation. “The first time I saw Remus, he was about four-years-old. He was trapping field mice in the undergrowth down by the shoreline, and I could see nothing but his hair above the brambles and grass. I knew who he was, that he was the son of Sarah and John, but I did not know his name. When he saw me, he sunk deeper into the brush and disappeared from sight. I walked over to where he was, but he was not there. Gone. I looked around, and he was nowhere to be seen. The next thing I knew, I heard a voice behind me. It was Remus.” She grinned at the memory. “He’d stalked me.”
Tonks found herself laughing then, at the irony of the situation. Alice nodded. “That moment happened just eighteen months before Remus was bitten. And it was not the only such example.” She paused. “It is interesting that some things happen for a reason. Some things, whether they are good or bad, happen because they are necessary. Remus has often believed that his bite was a curse, but I would say that perhaps it was not. Perhaps it was destiny.”
Tonks turned to Alice, the gravity of her statement sinking in with the force of lead. Alice continued, “Remus has lived with the burden of his father’s disappointment in him for too long, believing that his bite was punishment for something he was not. Something he failed to be. Smarter, faster, braver. He needs to understand that it was none of those things. It was nature fulfilling prophecy.”
The memory fades as Remus shifts next to her, moving his legs out in front of him. He leans forward, still, silent and blank, placing his elbows on his knees, and stares out across the lake, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the near distance.
All of a sudden, Tonks feels vulnerability roll off him. It is a strange condition to ascribe to this man who has made an art out of seeming in control, of turning the other cheek when life kicks him in the face. She thinks that, despite what he thinks of himself, he is the strongest person she knows.
****
Dusk is beginning to gather on the horizon. Clouds are curling up like slumbering cats, grey and monolithic, and the light is fading. There is a chill in the air, even though it is June, and Remus feels the air becoming heavy with dew and the ground beneath them growing cold. She is quiet beside him, and he realises that he can hear the soft hush-rush of her breathing. It is an intimate sound. Not for the first time he finds his mind wandering towards the woman next to him. She has stood beside him today on what could have been the hardest day of his life so far and done everything he needed her to do, even when that was just to do nothing.
He turns slightly to look at her. She is staring off towards the lake, as if frozen in thought, her knees pulled up underneath her pointed chin and her heavy Doc Martens a little incongruous beneath the knee-length black skirt she wears. Her face is unlined and youthful and he wonders what a pair they present, she looking not a moment older than her twenty-three years, him apparently much more than that. He wonders what Alice and Oliver have thought about him bringing this strange girl with him to his father’s home.
She draws in a deep breath and turns to smile at him, her hand flipping out towards him. He takes it in his fingers and marvels a moment at the thin and fragile skin, so pale. “It’s getting late,” she says, as if feeling there is a need for talk. He nods, maintaining the silence. “We should go back in or we’ll freeze our arses off.”
A smile crosses his lips, involuntary. Trust Tonks to add a dose of realism to a moment of emotion. After a minute, he nods. “You’re probably right,” he agrees.
****
Back in the cottage, Remus disappears to the kitchen to make cups of hot chocolate while Tonks kicks off her boots and sheds her coat and pads around the living room. She takes in the over-stuffed floral sofa, the rag rug in front of the hearth, and the ancient, faded wallpaper. The place seems right out of a book from the 1950s, as if time has stood still behind these walls while the rest of the world moved on unaware. There are hints of recent occupation here and there: a book resting open on one of the side tables, several pieces of sheet music on the piano, and a little tobacco spilt on the arm of the sofa. Although this is a house that seems, on the outside, to have been somewhat forgotten, the inside tells a different story. She wonders if, perhaps, that is what John Lupin wanted.
Her eyes fall again on the photographs on the top of the piano. One in particular catches her eye; a still Muggle picture, taken down by the edge of the lake on a summer’s day, the sun high in the sky behind a smiling Remus and his mother. The picture is black and white, yet it is still possible to see the water sparkling, as if lit from below, and the light in their eyes.
She picks up another, this one taken in winter. Remus is wrapped up in thick clothes, a fur-lined parka half-obscuring his face, snow on the ground behind him. Another features a sullen looking teenaged Remus sitting on the trunk of a fallen birch tree. Her eyes drift over the pictures, falling after a moment on one in particular. Sarah Lupin, dressed in a white sun-dress, hands on hips, grins up at the magical camera and swings side to side. She looks girlish and full of laughter and it is easy to see Remus in her sandy-coloured hair and prominent nose.
Not for the first time today, she realises that Remus Lupin has kept a whole side of himself hidden away. She has told him information so freely, informed him of the tensions and fractures in her own family life, the difficulties of being daughter to an outcast and a Muggle-born, of being a Metamorphmagus, and yet, she realises, she knows hardly anything about him.
She hears him charming the kettle in the kitchen and setting out cups with soft clinks of china. Pulling her wand from the sleeve of her jumper, she moves towards the huge stone fireplace and conjures a fire in the grate. She stands back and watches it catch the tinder sticks, then shovels a few lumps of coal onto the flames.
Her eyes fall on the book lying upside down on the side table. It is a book about the ill-fated Donald Campbell and the Bluebird water speed records. She picks it up and, as she flicks absently through the pages, notices one of the central photograph pages. It is a photograph of the moment when Campbell set off for his final water speed record, dated January 4th 1967, and there, standing on the jetty waving the boat off, is a young Remus, grinning madly.
The door to the kitchen snicks open and Remus appears in the doorway with two steaming mugs of hot chocolate. Guiltily, she replaces the book and steps backwards. “This is a beautiful place,” she murmurs, covering her shame at being caught looking at his father’s personal items.
Remus looks at the book, then around the room, as if noticing where they are for the first time. “Yes, I suppose it is,” he says, his voice drifting. “Though it’s just home to me.”
Sometime later, she trips off to the bedroom he has prepared for her, a small L-shaped guest room next to the old-fashioned bathroom and slips beneath the eiderdown worn soft and shapeless by overuse. As she settles into a sleepy curl, she allows her mind to play back the events of the day, and wonders what the morning will bring.
To be continued...
Author - joely_jo
Rating - R for adult sexual content in the final part.
Characters - Remus/Tonks, plus a couple of minor OCs, but please don’t run screaming, none of them are called Mary.
Warnings - Sex. I should probably warn for an initial dose of angst, as well.
Prompt - Grey
Word Count - This part weighs in at 4,426 words.
Summary - Remus returns to his family home to scatter his father’s ashes. Tonks accompanies him and together, they lay to rest some other ghosts.
Author’s Notes - The prompt 'grey' made me think instantly of particular place and a metaphor and, well, I’ve always wanted to write this idea, and I figured I ought to do it before Book Seven came out. I decided to punctuate this piece with one or two photographs, to sort of give everyone the feel of the place I’m talking about. I hope this is okay. The entire piece is set sometime around the final events of OotP.
Many thanks also to gloryforever and writermerrin for convincing me this was all right.
He is a ghost as he stands on the edge of the jetty looking out across a scene painted in shades of grey. His figure is lean and slightly sagging, like a man a little sick of his skin or a soldier too tired to march on. It has been a long day, she thinks, as she watches the curve of his shoulders rise and fall in a leaden sigh. Train journeys are rarely comfortable affairs and this has been one fraught with bad weather and signal failures. When she’d questioned him about the unwizardly method of transport, he’d replied that this was the way it had always been and this was the way it would be now. After that, he’d been utterly silent for most of the way, his head leaning against the pane of window glass, eyes fixed on a lonely spot just beyond natural sight. She hadn’t known what to say to him.
He seems unaffected by the blustering northerly wind that courses across the expanse of water. His coat flaps against his sides. There is no sound to speak of, just the haunting cry of a hawk somewhere in the rim of trees behind them. He stares out towards the opposite bank, eyes trailing along the point where brown hillside meets iron-grey water. Occasionally, he looks down through the slats in the jetty, into the lake’s darkness, before returning his gaze to the horizon.
She wonders if she should go to him. He seems quite lost and alone there on the jetty, as if he could really use her arms around him, but she pauses. Something in her holds her back. She was shocked when he asked her to accompany him to his childhood home. She knew Remus as a friend, a good friend, but this spoke of something else, something deeper and more reliant than simple friendship, and she considers the nature of her role in all of this. What does he want her with him for?
The sky above her is the colour of slate, threatening yet another storm, the sun blinded by thick, layered clouds. It is the kind of place where it would be possible to imagine that the rest of the world has drifted away. All of a sudden, she knows why he has returned here. It is not the presence of the small low-roofed cottage hidden back in the trees behind them, or even the hanging memories of more innocent times this place must bring. No, it is something else. It is a sense of duty and a desire for peace.
Back in the cottage, past their hastily dropped suitcases, on the oak table in front of the window seat, sits a precious piece of cargo. An urn, filled with the ashes of his father. In his pocket, she knows there is a piece of paper signed with the name John Lupin; a last will and testament of a man who lived his life according to rules and regulations.
She hates the silence of him. He’s barely spoken a dozen sentences since he asked for leave of absence from the Order a week ago to execute his father’s last wishes. Dumbledore had, of course, granted Remus the time without question, his eyes filled with concern. He’d spoken to Tonks after Remus had left, asked her to keep her eye on him in the next days, and she’d done just that, even in the face of his stony silence. She’s always seen Remus as a man who hid his colour beneath the surface, secreted away for others to find only if they wished to do a little digging, but now she senses him turning to grey right in front of her eyes.
These last few days he’s hidden so much she’s worried if he’ll be able to find himself again. She wraps her arms around herself as the wind picks up and forbids the cold from entering.
****
Remus’s eyes pick out the familiar shores of the southern end of the lake. The banks are stony and rise up towards the rough farmland that patterns the other side. Grey stone cottages dot the dry-stone walls. He hasn’t been here in years, over a decade, now that he thinks about it. It is a place of a million memories, ranging from Christmas and New Year celebrations spent here with his family to the night when his parents left him alone in the house while they visited friends in the village. The night he was bitten.
A lump of surprise turns over in his stomach as he realises that this place has been a milestone for events in his life so far and he had almost forgotten the way it looked.
****
Hours later, when the wind has dropped a little, she watches him tug the rowing boat from the shed and push it into the icy water. Pulling leather gloves on to protect himself from the chafe of the oars, he invites her to step aboard with him, one hand held out in welcome. “It’s safe,” he assures her. “I’m quite good, actually.”
She nods and takes his hand, stepping over the prow of the boat. She wobbles as the boat shifts with the weight of her, but his hands reach out to steady her, looping around her waist. His confident touch makes her look down at him in surprise. He tugs her down onto the plank seat opposite him, smiles and then takes up the oars. He turns them over his hands, testing their comfort.
“Lean over the side and give us a push off, then,” he tells her.
Soon, they are skimming away across the surface. She watches the shoreline slip further away, then glances down at the darkness of the water. A small shiver of a childhood fear skitters up her spine. He notices. “Are you all right?”
“Mm. Just never felt that comfortable on the water.”
“Oh…” He pauses. “I’m sorry, I should have asked. It never occurred to me that you might have a phobia.”
“I don’t, really,” she says, looking back up at him. His eyes are liquid in the low light. “I’m just a land lover, I suppose.”
He nods. “Fair enough,” he says.
No more words pass as he heads towards the opposite shore. After a few moments, he slows their pace and pulls them alongside another jetty, this one newer and in better condition than the one they have just left. He brings the oars in and then loops the mooring rope around a hook.
“Remus.”
The voice stirs her. Remus’ face splits in a sudden smile. She turns to see a tall man, sixty, possibly sixty-five-years-old, slim but athletic, dressed in corduroy trousers and a military-style green jumper. Red hair curls from underneath a tweed flat cap. “Oliver,” Remus greets and the two men embrace, Oliver’s hand slapping Remus’ back. His skin is Celtic pale and freckled and there is a ruggedness about him born of years of work on the land.
“Remus Lupin,” he says again, his voice accented with surprise and pleasure. “It’s been too long.” She can see his watery grey eyes light from within.
****
The low-slung farmhouse peeks through the trees as they follow Oliver up the hardened mud track. The vegetation that lines the route is familiar but changed, the rhododendrons grown well above head height. A smell of dampness and rotting leaf litter subverts his senses as they pass between them. It is a place he has been a thousand times before, yet too many years have passed since he last travelled up this track.
Gradually, the track opens out and the farmhouse shifts into full view. The house sign is the same, weathered but still marking the gatepost and declaring this place as ‘Hanson’s Farm’. Oliver smiles and beckons them onwards, but Remus turns to watch as she stumbles over the uneven ground a few paces behind him. She looks confused, he notes, childish and uncertain in what is, to her, a new and alien environment. He pauses and then holds out his hand to her, smiling when she takes it and slides her arm through his.
****
She notices a woman standing on the porch of the farmhouse as they approach. She is about the same age as Oliver, but small and slight, with a wild mane of light brown hair partly tamed into a loose braid. “Ah, you’re here. I was starting to get worried,” she says with a broad smile.
“Told you they wouldn’t be long,” Oliver assures her. His hand rests momentarily on the woman’s shoulder.
She looks at Remus and the smile spreads. “Remus, it’s good to see you.” Her hand reaches up and she cups the curve of his face, fingers briefly slipping through his fringe. The gesture is friendly, perhaps a little more than that, and she realises that this woman has known Remus since long before she first met him. They embrace. “And you must be Tonks,” she greets, turning towards her. For the first time, she realises that the smile on the woman’s face touches her eyes, genuine. “I’m Alice Hanson. I’ve known Remus since he was this high…” She makes an appropriate movement with her hand, measuring about two feet off the ground.
Tonks struggles with the friendly tone for a moment. These people are clearly Muggles - it is obvious from their dress and mannerisms - and yet they treat Remus as if he were nothing unusual.
She nods an affirmative to the statement and Alice continues, “Remus spoke of you when he wrote last week. Said you’d be coming with him.” She lays a gentle hand on Tonks’ shoulder. “And you’re quite welcome.”
For a moment, Tonks pauses. She hadn’t told Remus she was accepting his request to accompany him until two nights ago. She glances at him and notices that he is looking down, smiling at his shoes.
For her part, Alice does not notice, or chooses not to comment on, the silent conversation just passed between Remus and Tonks. Instead, she half-turns back to the farmhouse and swings open the heavy wooden door. Oliver moves past them, followed by Remus, into a warm and low-lit kitchen, filled with the homely scents of cooking food and warm tea. Tonks hangs back a moment, a little ill at ease with the situation; she, after all, is just a guest here, and Remus clearly so much more than that. “Judging by your expression,” Alice says, “you’ve never been to Coniston before?”
“I’ve visited the Lake District,” Tonks replies. She notices the reed doormat beneath her feet and brushes her boots on it.
“But not Coniston…” Alice’s eyes smile at her. “It’s not the same as the others. And certainly not around here. You won’t find tourists around here. In fact, you’ll be lucky to find much in the way of normal human life. But that’s what we like about it.”
She casts a sly wink and Tonks finds herself suddenly wondering how much these people know about Remus and how much they actually understand.
“Come on in,” Alice says in a quiet voice. “Remus will be glad to have you here.”
****
Conversation is steady over lunch - a two course meal of beef stew and vegetables followed by apple crumble - and Remus relaxes into the company. Alice has not changed since he last saw her, and her probing questions at times leave him lost for words or blushing faintly. Tonks puts on a great show. She’s doing well to seem at ease in the situation, he thinks, but then wonders if she actually is. Oliver, after all, is treating her mild clumsiness with good-humour.
After they have eaten, Alice takes his hand and leads him outside onto the front porch. She pushes a cup of coffee into his other hand as she does so and he smiles at the realisation that she has remembered how he likes it.
He goes to stand in front of the low stone wall that marks the boundary of the front garden, and Alice follows him. He hums in his throat as he looks out across the greenery towards the steel-grey of the lake. Clouds still hang above the scene, and he spends a moment considering if the weather is a good thing or a bad thing. Part of him had hoped for a sunny afternoon for this sad task, but another part of him thinks that the layered dullness and threatening rain is somehow more appropriate.
“You are troubled,” Alice observes as he takes a deep drink of his coffee.
At first, he does not respond, and then slowly, he nods. “I never expected to be doing this,” he says, his voice soft. “I never expected that my father would want me to do this.”
“Your father was a good man, Remus. And despite your differences, he loved you very much.”
“It has taken me years to come to the point where I can believe you, Alice,” murmurs Remus, his gaze drifting down to the floor near his feet. He fidgets with the handle of the coffee cup. “It is a terrible thing to know that you are a disappointment to your own father.”
“I know, I know.”
There is a stilted pause. Remus thinks back to the turbulent years of his adolescence. After his mother died so young, he was left alone with his father. Grief had gripped them both in different ways, but John Lupin’s way of dealing with the trauma had been to allow his emotions to get in the way of his dealings with his son. Remus had always known that his condition was a disappointment for his father, a tangible reminder of his father’s own faults and flaws - after all, it had been John Lupin’s controversial nature that had led to Remus being bitten in the first place - but with his mother no longer there to temper things, Remus realised the full force of his father’s disillusionment.
“But there is something you should know,” Alice adds after a moment. Remus looks up. “Before he died, your father made it very clear to me that he regretted the way he’d treated you. He told me that it was a great comfort to him that you were fighting for what was right. He told me you’d know what he meant by that.”
Nodding, Remus feels a small smile creep onto his face. Even on his death bed, his father was mindful of the importance of secrecy. “Yes, I do,” he replies.
“Then perhaps it is time to let some of the ghosts rest between you.”
He looks up and out towards the lake, a place of so many family moments, a place of such mixed blessings. And yet, he realises as he stares at the starkness of the landscape, it is home.
“It is time,” he agrees.
Alice nods. Her hand lays itself on the rise of his shoulders, lingers there a moment. “I’ll get Oliver and Tonks.”
****
Tonks had never really been touched by a place’s beauty before. But, as the light began to fade over Lake Coniston, she realised that she had been stunned to silence by this place. The wind had dropped and so the water lapped gentler against the jetty. They were back at Low Water End, the Lupin’s cottage, having rowed out onto the middle of the lake to scatter the ashes of John Lupin to the wind. She had not cried, but Remus had shed a tear or two, though it was apparent that his grief was tinged with other emotions, other emotions that were getting in the way of a clearer expression of loss. When the first tear crept down his cheek, she had thought that this was the moment when the barrier would be broken and the calm control he’d exhibited over the last fortnight would crumble. But it was not to be.
They returned to the cottage afterwards, Remus pouring measures of firewhisky for all, then drinking them with a toast to his father’s memory. Tonks wandered around the square living room, her eyes taking in the antique furniture, heavy velvet drapes and overfilled bookcases. Photographs in oxidised silver frames clustered on the top of a battered Steinway piano, a mixture of the magical and the still, Muggle kind. It was odd to see Remus’ youthful face gazing out of the pictures, the faces of his father and mother. Oliver and Alice, too, younger and laughing.
Alice approached her as she ran a thoughtful finger over the image of Remus as a nine or ten-year-old boy in one of the photographs. Even at that age, Remus seemed older than his physical age, carrying a burden no child should have to carry. She figured she knew what it was. “He was a troubled boy, but a good boy, nonetheless,” Alice told her. “The image of his mother, I might add, both physically and emotionally.”
“Not his father, then.”
“No… John Lupin was a unique individual.” She paused. “I’m sure you know something of Remus’ relationship with his father, though perhaps not all. If you’d known John Lupin as well as Remus, you would have wondered where Remus came from. But, if you’d met his mother, you would have understood.”
“Remus carried with him a tremendous weight,” she continued, and Tonks had the feeling she knew to what Alice was referring to. “He was not like the other boys his age.”
“You mean there were other children here too? I always thought…”
“That the Lupins were loners.” Alice smiled as she finished Tonks’ sentence. “In a lot of respects, they were, but you forget that Remus’ mother was not like his father.” Her eyes sparkled for a moment as Tonks realised what she meant. “To many of John’s friends, Sarah was not tolerated. But she loved John too much to allow that to stand in the way of their relationship. When Remus was bitten, their lives had to change. It was just unfortunate that Sarah adapted better than John did.”
A smile passed across Alice’s face, then. “It is interesting to see Remus now, after all these years. He is still the same boy, inside. Lost and a little bit alone, carrying a terrible burden.” She shook her head, turning slightly to look at Remus, sitting now on the sofa with Oliver, nodding in deep conversation. “The first time I saw Remus, he was about four-years-old. He was trapping field mice in the undergrowth down by the shoreline, and I could see nothing but his hair above the brambles and grass. I knew who he was, that he was the son of Sarah and John, but I did not know his name. When he saw me, he sunk deeper into the brush and disappeared from sight. I walked over to where he was, but he was not there. Gone. I looked around, and he was nowhere to be seen. The next thing I knew, I heard a voice behind me. It was Remus.” She grinned at the memory. “He’d stalked me.”
Tonks found herself laughing then, at the irony of the situation. Alice nodded. “That moment happened just eighteen months before Remus was bitten. And it was not the only such example.” She paused. “It is interesting that some things happen for a reason. Some things, whether they are good or bad, happen because they are necessary. Remus has often believed that his bite was a curse, but I would say that perhaps it was not. Perhaps it was destiny.”
Tonks turned to Alice, the gravity of her statement sinking in with the force of lead. Alice continued, “Remus has lived with the burden of his father’s disappointment in him for too long, believing that his bite was punishment for something he was not. Something he failed to be. Smarter, faster, braver. He needs to understand that it was none of those things. It was nature fulfilling prophecy.”
The memory fades as Remus shifts next to her, moving his legs out in front of him. He leans forward, still, silent and blank, placing his elbows on his knees, and stares out across the lake, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the near distance.
All of a sudden, Tonks feels vulnerability roll off him. It is a strange condition to ascribe to this man who has made an art out of seeming in control, of turning the other cheek when life kicks him in the face. She thinks that, despite what he thinks of himself, he is the strongest person she knows.
****
Dusk is beginning to gather on the horizon. Clouds are curling up like slumbering cats, grey and monolithic, and the light is fading. There is a chill in the air, even though it is June, and Remus feels the air becoming heavy with dew and the ground beneath them growing cold. She is quiet beside him, and he realises that he can hear the soft hush-rush of her breathing. It is an intimate sound. Not for the first time he finds his mind wandering towards the woman next to him. She has stood beside him today on what could have been the hardest day of his life so far and done everything he needed her to do, even when that was just to do nothing.
He turns slightly to look at her. She is staring off towards the lake, as if frozen in thought, her knees pulled up underneath her pointed chin and her heavy Doc Martens a little incongruous beneath the knee-length black skirt she wears. Her face is unlined and youthful and he wonders what a pair they present, she looking not a moment older than her twenty-three years, him apparently much more than that. He wonders what Alice and Oliver have thought about him bringing this strange girl with him to his father’s home.
She draws in a deep breath and turns to smile at him, her hand flipping out towards him. He takes it in his fingers and marvels a moment at the thin and fragile skin, so pale. “It’s getting late,” she says, as if feeling there is a need for talk. He nods, maintaining the silence. “We should go back in or we’ll freeze our arses off.”
A smile crosses his lips, involuntary. Trust Tonks to add a dose of realism to a moment of emotion. After a minute, he nods. “You’re probably right,” he agrees.
****
Back in the cottage, Remus disappears to the kitchen to make cups of hot chocolate while Tonks kicks off her boots and sheds her coat and pads around the living room. She takes in the over-stuffed floral sofa, the rag rug in front of the hearth, and the ancient, faded wallpaper. The place seems right out of a book from the 1950s, as if time has stood still behind these walls while the rest of the world moved on unaware. There are hints of recent occupation here and there: a book resting open on one of the side tables, several pieces of sheet music on the piano, and a little tobacco spilt on the arm of the sofa. Although this is a house that seems, on the outside, to have been somewhat forgotten, the inside tells a different story. She wonders if, perhaps, that is what John Lupin wanted.
Her eyes fall again on the photographs on the top of the piano. One in particular catches her eye; a still Muggle picture, taken down by the edge of the lake on a summer’s day, the sun high in the sky behind a smiling Remus and his mother. The picture is black and white, yet it is still possible to see the water sparkling, as if lit from below, and the light in their eyes.
She picks up another, this one taken in winter. Remus is wrapped up in thick clothes, a fur-lined parka half-obscuring his face, snow on the ground behind him. Another features a sullen looking teenaged Remus sitting on the trunk of a fallen birch tree. Her eyes drift over the pictures, falling after a moment on one in particular. Sarah Lupin, dressed in a white sun-dress, hands on hips, grins up at the magical camera and swings side to side. She looks girlish and full of laughter and it is easy to see Remus in her sandy-coloured hair and prominent nose.
Not for the first time today, she realises that Remus Lupin has kept a whole side of himself hidden away. She has told him information so freely, informed him of the tensions and fractures in her own family life, the difficulties of being daughter to an outcast and a Muggle-born, of being a Metamorphmagus, and yet, she realises, she knows hardly anything about him.
She hears him charming the kettle in the kitchen and setting out cups with soft clinks of china. Pulling her wand from the sleeve of her jumper, she moves towards the huge stone fireplace and conjures a fire in the grate. She stands back and watches it catch the tinder sticks, then shovels a few lumps of coal onto the flames.
Her eyes fall on the book lying upside down on the side table. It is a book about the ill-fated Donald Campbell and the Bluebird water speed records. She picks it up and, as she flicks absently through the pages, notices one of the central photograph pages. It is a photograph of the moment when Campbell set off for his final water speed record, dated January 4th 1967, and there, standing on the jetty waving the boat off, is a young Remus, grinning madly.
The door to the kitchen snicks open and Remus appears in the doorway with two steaming mugs of hot chocolate. Guiltily, she replaces the book and steps backwards. “This is a beautiful place,” she murmurs, covering her shame at being caught looking at his father’s personal items.
Remus looks at the book, then around the room, as if noticing where they are for the first time. “Yes, I suppose it is,” he says, his voice drifting. “Though it’s just home to me.”
Sometime later, she trips off to the bedroom he has prepared for her, a small L-shaped guest room next to the old-fashioned bathroom and slips beneath the eiderdown worn soft and shapeless by overuse. As she settles into a sleepy curl, she allows her mind to play back the events of the day, and wonders what the morning will bring.
To be continued...