Work Text:
[em]Dear Remus,
I know it’s been a while, but I hope you’re well. I was hoping you might have some old photos of Lily and James as I am putting together a photo album to give to Harry. He doesn’t know much about them or have any photos of his own and I thought it would be a nice gift.
I’m asking a few of the old crowd too, but thought you’re probably the most likely.
Let me know next time you’re in the area and we’ll go for a drink.
Hagrid[/em]
Remus stared at the letter for a few more moments, his mind oddly blank. Then, he very carefully folded it, running his nails along the crease so that it stayed neat, and laid it beside the owl.
Harry. After all these years of grief and shifting from one place to another and the endless kicks to his self esteem as jobs constructed dismissals and he was rejected and shunned and struggled to hold together some semblance of being a civilised human being, he had spared little thought to the baby he had briefly known, that James had been so proud of, that Lily had adored so fully.
He wondered what he looked like now. He remembered they had all joked, on occasion, that James could be almost certain he was his, because even when he was so small there was something in the face that was very familiar, and he’d had dark hair. Remus remembered the dark hair quite clearly, Lily’s hand brushing it back as she caressed him, the movement of it as James bounced him on his knee.
He could faintly hear the woman next door shouting at her children, thanks to the think walls of his room, and his landlady clattering about in the kitchen below as she tidied the breakfast things away. He’d have to be quick before she came up to offer him another cup of tea and saw the owl preening itself on top of his pile of boxes.
He eased himself through the cramped little room, a lifetime of belongings squeezed into the little double with an en suite he paid the equivalent of six galleons a week to exist in, until he hopefully found something more steady again.
He moved some of the boxes, pushed against the wardrobe so he could only use one door, shifting them onto the floor until he found one that had ‘books/photos/docs/cards’ written hastily on the side. He knelt beside it, rifling through and feeling oddly disconnected from his body. He might have been a ghost, pulling out these old memories, haunting them, dragging them into a time they didn’t belong.
The first one was in a frame - Remus himself had taken it at a party many years before, though he couldn’t precisely remember which one. Lily almost collapsing with giggles against James’s back, her nose wrinkling and her eyes closing as she laughed at the camera, a flush in her pale cheeks, James turning to look over his shoulder and grin down at her; confident, assured, delighted by her joy. He had probably said whatever it was that had made her laugh - Remus couldn’t remember, nor could he remember where they were or why they had been sitting like that, her behind him, the camera so close that he couldn’t even make out the background, though its shadows shifted slightly. All he could remember was laughing himself, and a hazy kind of surety that they had all been incredibly drunk, and perhaps high too, when he had taken it. Because he remembered, clearly now, as the flash of the camera exploded into his memory, Lily then playfully squealing ‘no!’ and pushing him clumsily away, so he fell sideways into Peter, who’d desperately been trying to chat up Hestia, spilling his beer into her lap.
Not that one, he decided. If Hagrid knew Harry, he had probably started Hogwarts now, but no doubt he was still quite young. He probably wanted photos of his parents as parents, not drunk, silly teenagers, no matter how much Remus himself clung to that fleeting happiness in his life.
He laid it carefully aside and continued to search through the box. Here was one where they were at school, all the boys arm in arm waving and shouting and laughing at the camera in glee. Mrs Potter had taken that one, he remembered, on the shores of the lake as they glistened, their last day in Hogwarts. She’d given a copy to each of them.
But there was Sirius, the sneer of his arrogant laugh, his arm slung possessively around the shoulders of the man he would later betray, to his death, who seperated him from the man he would shortly after murder in cold blood on a crowded street. Remus swallowed down the lurch in his stomach, the physical pain that prickled through his ribs from his heart, and he set the photo aside. Not that one. Lily wasn’t in it anyway.
He pulled out another - it was crumpled slightly at the edges, and he remembered how it had snagged as he pulled it out of a frame at Godric’s Hollow. James and Lily, posed smiling, somewhere windswept looking, in thick jumpers though the sun was shining bright and clear on their faces. He didn’t know who had taken it, perhaps Mrs Potter again or it had been on a timer, and he didn’t know where it was from, but he had always liked the movement of their hair in it, whipping around their faces as they smiled and waved, James’s usual roguish grin, Lily’s bright cheerfulness. At one point, she raised her hand to brush some of her dark red hair out of her face and he saw a ring glittering there - they were not yet married, but engaged.
Yes. That was a good one. He placed it carefully on the other side of his knees, and continued.
‘Remus!’ Mrs Edmondton called. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, dear?’
‘Er- no! Thank you, Mrs Edmonton,’ he called back distractedly, his voice hoarser than he was expecting. He did want a cup of tea, but the owl was still grooming himself on Remus’s cluttered desk, and he rather thought that Mrs Edmonton might be a little taken aback if she saw such a creature mid-morning. She was sweet, but he was sure it wouldn’t be long - no doubt when he struggled to pay his rent and seemingly spent days in bed - when she would turn on him, and his best chances of delaying that inevitability were to be an entirely quiet, normal lodger she could take no notice of.
He turned back to the box, and pulled out another photo. This was also one he had taken from a frame in Godric’s Hollow, this time with Harry in it. James holding him proudly up to the camera, a tiny, pink-faced little baby bundled up in thick clothes while Lily, in profile, smiled. Even in photo form she could not seem to drag her eyes away from her new son to look at the camera. Another one for the yes pile.
Slowly, surely, the piles grew larger as he flicked through them, the owl starting to hoot irritably. They were mingled in with photos of his own, of his own mother and father, or some with no Lily or James at all, he and Peter waving at the camera - he had thrown out most with Sirius a long time ago. A photo of Lily and James lounging in the warm grass by a large, secret lake somewhere in the east that glorious summer after they left school. In the yes pile. James flipping two fingers up at the camera, cigarette in the corner of his mouth as someone out of frame, no doubt Sirius, ruffled his hair. In the no pile. James and Lily dancing playfully in the cobbled square of Godric’s Hollow, the dead leaves swirling around them. In the yes pile. James and Lily holding up Harry to the camera once again - a little larger, a little chubbier, both of them beaming proudly as they took his little fists and encouraged him to wave too. Another yes. James and Lily at their wedding - Sirius on James’s side, laughing, classically handsome and apparently at ease with the friend - near brother - he might have already been starting to resent or detest or fear or whatever stupid emotion had led him to do what he had done. Remus’s hand moved automatically to the no pile, but hovered for a second, glancing back at it.
Lily looked so very beautiful in her ivory dress; she seemed to shine with happiness, a picture of serene elegance and joy. And James too, his smile was more relaxed and more purely happy there than Remus remembered it ever being, his hair still sticking up at the back. He remembered them all laughing the morning of the wedding, Mr Potter desperately trying to force the little bottle of potion into James’s hand. ‘I’ve tried it before,’ James had said. ‘I looked like a prat. Do you want me to look like a prat on my wedding day, Dad? Do you?’
Perhaps he could cut the photograph down, take Sirius out. He even reached for his wand to attempt it, but could see within seconds that it would be quite impossible - they were standing too close, and every now and then the photo Sirius would turn to James, laughing, and clap him on the shoulder. The photo would be all out of proportion, it would be obvious, especially with a mysterious arm reaching in from off frame. Better to hide in plain sight anyway, and he suspected Sirius didn’t even look the same anymore. If Harry asked Hagrid who it was, perhaps Hagrid would have the common sense to say that the best man was dead.
So, he placed it in the yes pile.
Eventually, he could find no more pictures of them.
He took the yes pile, and touched his wand to each photo in question, murmuring ‘geminus’ over each one, until they were perfectly copied. The package came to nearly two dozen in total, which felt like a lot but, he realised, as he wrapped them up in scrap parchment, was a rather pitiful record of their lives. They deserved hundreds, maybe thousands.
His quill hovered for a long time over his response to Hagrid. He had a million questions about the little baby he had been too nervous to hold all those years ago.
[em]Dear Hagrid,
Of course. Please find enclosed - these are all I have. I hope he is well, and you too.
Remus[/em]