Work Text:
On Monday, 12 August 1985, Remus Lupin arrived home in London after nearly six weeks out of the country, put his increasingly battered briefcase down on the kitchen table, and staggered off to bed. On Tuesday, he got up, regarded woefully his bare cupboards and cursed his past self’s failure to obtain groceries. Then he took the latest of the series of battered notebooks which he self-consciously called the household books and decamped to the undistinguished corner restaurant, where he could have tea and breakfast while he determined how broke he was.
The flat was in a shabbier sort of neighborhood, but one which contained a great deal of people who were not quite wizards and witches, or at any rate not very good ones, mixed in with the muggles. There were squibs and part-veela and hags and half-feral Animagi who had never been near the Ministry’s registration books, and uneducated types with one magical grandparent who would never see a wand but could give you better than even odds at predicting the weather with a deck of cards, and also a scanty handful of werewolves.
This meant that Remus did not have to worry about being evicted or run out if people put together his pattern of illnesses. The landlord had seen just about everything, and on spotting the reinforced dog crate Remus had installed in the bedroom and heavily enchanted, had merely squinted and said if it was a sex thing Remus had better not leave anyone locked in there unattended and if it wasn’t, he had best clean up the bloodstains if he wanted his deposit back.
“Right,” Remus had said, mouth dry. “I’ll do that, then,” and the conversation had moved on.
Remus was fairly sure he was the only Hogwarts graduate who regularly came within a mile of the center of the neighborhood, which converged on Millefleur Street. He had a steady business in odd jobs for his magical neighbors, fixing things, expelling magical pests, magically duplicating the beer at parties and so forth. He also worked weekends at the local pub when he was in residence, which bore the ill-omened name of the Half Moon. (At least the moon in the name and on the painfully neon sign wasn’t full.)
In short, the neighborhood was safe, or at least as safe as a place could be for someone like Remus Lupin, illegally unregistered werewolf with too many academic qualifications and far too few social ties. Coming on four years after the war had ended and taken away everything Remus had had left in one neat fell swoop, that was as much as Remus expected out of life. Or so he tried to tell himself.
Tea, eggs and sausage acquired, he positioned his account books and papers around him and began to read up. On the plus side, the rent had been paid up through August before he left. Brighter still, he had received two separate payments on the trip, one for a series of guest lectures on the topic of the Dark Arts at the magical University of Damascus - the students there regarded him somewhat the way he had once looked on advanced Aurors like Alastor Moody, as a genuine veteran of the British Magical Civil War - and one for the combating thereof, specifically his participation in removing a dangerous American Lethifold which had escaped from an illegal private collection and holed itself up in a section of the souk. Several people had vanished before anyone had passed the account of moving shadows eating people to the magical authorities. They had paid him pretty well for it.
All in all, Remus should have expenses paid for several months, he concluded looking through the books. This was good because, on a less positive note, nearly the first piece of mail he opened from the stockpile in his flat informed him that the Viridian Day School for Young Witches where he had taught for the last two years when term was in session was closing down due to reduced enrollment numbers following the war. The headmistress wished him luck finding work elsewhere and offered her recommendation cheerily.
Remus put his head in his hands. Janice Aubrey was a lovely woman who did not deserve his enmity, and would be, if not direly impoverished like him, seriously inconvenienced and personally devastated by the loss of her school. Reading the closing still made him want to wring her neck. The Viridian School for Young Witches had an unusual policy regarding nonhuman students and professors alike, and Janice had been well aware of his condition.
Remus turned to the briefcase next to him, and regarded sadly the embossed inscription, Professor R. J. Lupin, paid for in celebration of his first trip guest lecturing when he was still drinking in memory of James and Lily and Peter nearly every night. Then he had some tea and tried to find it funny instead of merely depressing. Here he was, twenty-five years old, money for several months in the bank, a respected young scholar in his field, if one who couldn’t take a regular teaching job anywhere that might notice and care he was a werewolf. Things could be worse.
“Lupin!” said a jovial voice from the door of the shop.
Telling himself off severely for falling prey to optimism, Remus looked up into the eyes of one Mr. William Blake, landlord of the restaurant he was in, the pub down the street, and a number of the retail businesses on it.
“Mr. Blake,” he said, curtly.
Mr. Blake feigned not to notice. “Back from Syria already, are you?” he said cheerily. “Elsie was telling me you had a gig taking some creature out of the muggle market while you were there. I said to her, what’s the point, shouldn’t we be cheering on if it’s eating the muggles, but I guess they pay you for that, do they?”
“They do,” Remus said, clipped.
Mr. Blake was well aware Remus had fought on the side of the Ministry and Dumbledore in the war, and many of Elsie’s forever-rotating staff were muggles, but all of this was no obstacle to half the street coming out for the Death Eaters and the other half belligerently denying the war had anything to do with them. Remus had long ago realized that denizens of the fringes of magical society like this street had a proprietary attitude towards “their” muggles, who rented to and from them, worked with them, and often married them. All other muggles were lumped in with the Ministry who insisted they be left unharmed, and who used muggles as a justification for many of the more stringent restrictions on non-humans. They were therefore treated as gullible marks to be swindled at best, and at worst, prey. Remus wasn’t even entirely sure what Mr. Blake was, except that Remus had never seen him do a spell, and he was regularly seen in public on the full moon, and certainly he wasn’t part-veela.
“I hope it’s good money, then!” Mr. Blake said, cheerfully. “Now, I heard that school you’ve been working for is shutting down finally--”
Evidently Remus had been the last to know, although he supposed he couldn’t expect much else being in Syria when the news broke.
“--So you’ll be looking for work at the pub again?”
“It’s possible,” Remus said.
“Well, Elsie’s day time girl just went and quit, so she’s got a full time job open if you ask after it quick enough.”
“Thanks,” Remus said, ungratefully, but this was the reason he put up with the people here, Voldemort-sympathizers and feeders on humans alike, and it was the reason he put up with another three or four minutes of excruciating small talk before Mr. Blake wandered off to say hello to another customer. The fringes took after one another, looking at it as a fight against the rest of the world, and Remus, like it or not, was one of them. His claims to be anything else had died in Godric’s Hollow.
Remus only worked weekends at the Half Moon because he was an awful barkeep and he knew it. He had a terrible tendency to get lost daydreaming, he knew nothing about beer, and since he often hurt himself during full moons, he was frequently forced to work one-armed or limping for weeks. The only parts of the job he was actually any good at were remembering customers’ names and listening to their troubles, two things he had learned to do years before as a Hogwarts Prefect.
But he supposed he was going to need to do something to pay the bills when the three months of cash were up, and he could never count on when another opportunity to Curse-Break, lecture or Defend Against the Dark Arts would arise. So when he was finished with his breakfast he paid his bill and went on down the street to ask Elsie if the rumors were true and the job was still open.
They were, and it was, and he could start Thursday. Damn it.
The next two days were uneventful, as most days in Remus’s life were these days. He went to the grocer’s and, while he had money to spend, to the magical cobbler’s to put new soles on his boots, and a secondhand clothing shop in the muggle world. He finished catching up on his depressingly impersonal mail. He wrote to the parents of several of his usual pupils at Viridian Day School, the ones who he knew would have trouble placing their children elsewhere and might be interested in a tutor. There was Blanchefleur the veela, and Frieda the centaur whose parents had an unusual outlook on human education, and Pamela, another werewolf.
He went to bed, woke up, and took most of his meals in the empty one-room flat. For all he had lived there nearly since the war ended, it was an impersonal space. He had moved out of the last place - the one he had shared with Sirius - the moment he’d found a job, and he’d hated himself for leaving it that long, but it had been paid for. He hadn’t had the work for the Order anymore, and he hadn’t had James around to lend him money - or Sirius himself - and... It had bought him time. There were no photos up in this flat, because nearly all of Remus’s were cut in half, or scribbled on, or just shut away at the bottom of boxes where he couldn’t see them. There was precious little furniture and none of it good, because he hadn’t taken the real stuff at their old place, bought with Sirius’s money. And there was no flatmate and absolutely no boyfriend.
But - Remus told himself - there were upsides to this situation, grim at it seemed. He could prance around the kitchen in his pants at two in the morning if he liked without anyone laughing at him or leave dishes in the sink for days. Sirius had been ridiculous fastidious for a teenage boy. Sirius had--
Remus always had to stop this line of thinking quickly, lest he end up doing a considerable dent to the bottle of Ogden’s in an upper cupboard.
On Thursday morning, then, he rose alone and he dressed alone and he made breakfast for one and ate it alone sitting at the little rickety card table in the kitchen, with the latest issue of Curse-Breaker’s Monthly propped up against the fruit bowl. He had agreed to take the day shift - Elsie knew better than to put him on nights except in cases of dire necessity - and it was, supposedly, a muggle pub, so he put on his darkest and least-worn jeans and a black shirt and went along to work at nine o’clock.
The Half Moon hadn’t changed much since Remus’s last stint working there earlier in the summer. The glasses on the counter in particular didn’t appear to have been washed in that time. The other dishes, put away now, did not bear thinking about. Remus sighed and waved his wand over the lot on his way in, knowing from experience that this was the only method that would do any good and it would have to be repeated several times. He went to repair the patch in the roof where water tended to leak in and run down the side wall while he was at it.
“Get the stools while you’re fixing things, would you?” Elsie yelled from the back.
Elsie was a part-veela witch of the timeless middle aged appearance that could put a magical type anywhere between thirty and eighty, if not older still with part-human bloodlines. She had the veela glamour in full, and Remus had seen her unleash it in order to distract participants from contentious political arguments and fistfights alike, but her parents’ features meshed oddly. If she wasn’t using the glamour, or you were resistant to it as Remus had learned to be, she had a strange looking face: features too delicate and small for her broad jaw and square forehead, and baby fine, silvery hair that did not match the rest of it.
She usually kept the hair tied up under a kerchief, and she usually was in the back, because Elsie liked baking far better than beer, and hired a succession of mostly indifferent staff to run the front for her. Why she had opened a pub was a mystery to Remus, and to all of the other staff, because she barely drank the stuff. Several years ago other employees had revolted and made her agree to serve something besides Budweiser, but she had only agreed to add the additional, not notably better option of Foster’s. Probably for this reason the only full time staff member who had stayed since Remus’s move to Millefleur Street was a vampire.
Remus fixed the bar stool with the wiggly leg again, and a second one that seemed to have been used in a bar fight at some point while he was away and had a substantial chunk taken out of the seat. He charmed a terrifying sticky spot on the floor clean and fixed the deep grooves someone with claws had worn into a table top in a temper. He contemplated, briefly, cleaning the windows with the magic that would be required to allow more than foggy light through them, but he decided that was a step too far. Most of the street’s residents preferred not to be too clearly identifiable while they drank, and anyway the patrons might revolt if they were actually able to see their surroundings. (On second thought he went back to the damp patch on the wall and tried to remove some of the mold instead of trying to clean the window.)
All of this needed to be done - or at least, no one else would do it - but by now Remus was procrastinating and he knew it. He could clean perfectly well. It was minding the bar he was bad at. He took a deep breath, and he rolled up his sleeves, and he went behind the bar.
He knew the moment he stepped past the solid wood that something was wrong. Something new, that was. Because Remus was a terrible barkeep but a pretty good Curse-Breaker, he froze when the sensation hit and pulled his foot back. Then he stepped forward again, slowly, paying attention to the way dread crept up the back of his neck when he crossed a certain line. Where was it that the sensation hit? There, even with the back edge of the bar.
He crouched, staying carefully on the good side of whatever it was, and investigated the bar, lighting his wand. A cursory inspection revealed nothing except that his eyes slid over the thing in record time. Ah. He tilted his head back and looked from the corner, out of focus, and yes, there was a an odd, clean rectangle very near the floor, nearly flush with it. It was somewhere people would tend to overlook even without any added magic, which this clearly had. He tried to focus on the rectangle, now that he knew where to look, but the charms or whatever it was were strong and he only received a headache for his trouble. He closed his eyes and rubbed his nose.
“Where the hell did you get to?” Elsie called from quite near, at the door between the back of the bar and the kitchen.
“Here,” Remus said. “Elsie, did you notice somebody’s cursed the place?”
“What?” Elsie came around the bar and squinted at him, crouched there. “With what?”
“I don’t know yet.” Remus frowned at the clean patch and tried several general cancellation spells. The second worked, and he was able to focus on a row of neat, tiny runes carved into about three inches of space. “Looks like... general misfortune, clumsiness, discomfort... Have you had a lot of broken dishes? Bad business?”
“I thought it was because the last girl was awful at it - worse than you,” Elsie said crossly. “Well, take it off then.”
“It might be a bit. Could you pass me some salt, and a knife you don’t mind losing, please?” Remus said. He was being paid nowhere near enough for Curse-Breaking, but on the other hand Elsie overlooked his total unsuitability for his actual role, so he decided not to say anything about that.
Remus Curse-Broke. Elsie stomped around behind the bar and muttered. Remus wished she would stop that but knew better than to say so. He also wished he could go back to his flat and get his rune dictionary and the reference on common curses, but this also was a poor plan when working. On the bright side whoever had put this curse on had been uncreative and frankly not particularly talented. Forty minutes later, Remus gave a counter charm out loud, neatly scored a line through the runes, and salted the whole thing for good measure, and after a couple of tests pronounced it done.
“Good,” Elsie said darkly. “You can trace it, can’t you? --Pity you’re not one of those hulking werewolves like Bobbie down the street. You’re no good at threatening people.”
“Threatening who?” Remus said, feeling mildly insulted. He had been very accomplished at threatening people once. It was true that usually he had had backup then. Also everyone on Millefleur Street thought of him as a tame werewolf. But it was probably for the best Elsie wasn’t going to try to make him do that, too.
“I know who did this,” Elsie said with great and inexplicable certainty. “It was Apollo.”
Remus considered this. He went and put the knife in the trash, and so that nothing hit the now curse-tainted knife and made it explode he took the trash out back and put a new bag in before he said, “Are you behind on your protection payments?”
“No!” Elsie said angrily. “Which is why he’s going to pay me back for all that missed business! I’ll go around and have a word with him later.”
“...Please let me try to trace the curse first,” Remus said, carefully. “I mean, you’ll have proof, then,” he added when Elsie stomped alarmingly on her way to flip the sign to open.
“I suppose that’s so. Do it tonight,” she said.
Remus supposed he would be doing that after his shift, too, but it did not come to pass. Elsie stayed in the front for once and complained about the curse to practically everyone who came in, which meant Remus had a steady stream of people who came over to the edge of the bar and ogled at the struck-through runes all day. He spent much of this time hoping the Ministry didn’t choose now to send inspectors for the Statute. (To be fair, if they had, they’d likely have had more to say about Ernie in the corner with the permanently-affixed rabbit ears, or the trio of hags in the front window.) This meant that very soon everyone on the street knew that the Half Moon had been cursed, temporarily, and rushed down to have a look themselves, recouping some of Elsie’s financial losses in the process and proving James’s long ago point about most people being bleeding idiots.
Among those who came down to have a look was Apollo himself.
Apollo was a vampire, as you might expect from someone who went around calling himself Apollo (as Remus had once muttered drunkenly into a pint). He was the closest thing Millefleur Street had to an authority, mostly because he was the one who dealt with the Ministry when it was totally unavoidable. He owned about half of the real estate in the entire neighborhood. He was also the provider of emergency loans, settler of disputes, and dispenser of vigilante justice, which meant he was the one who sent someone around with a baseball bat to break your knees if you got behind on your rent, or on the money you gave him to keep on dealing with the Ministry on your behalf.
Curses really weren’t his style in Remus’s experience, but maybe he had branched out. Or maybe he had hired a new enforcer.
“Here now, Elsie,” he said when he had crouched at the end of the bar, examining the runes and running his tongue over his pointy teeth. “Looks like you were right about something funny going on. I’ll give you a month’s discount, alright? Never say I’m not reasonable,” he said, flipping a hunk of silky, long black hair over his shoulder. Remus reflected as he often did that Apollo seemed to have gotten mixed up about what genre of movie he had walked out of.
“You’ll do more than that!” Elsie said angrily. “If you’re going to go around cursing businesses that are paying their due--”
“No call to go around throwing out blame--”
“--stuck up--”
“--unreasonable--”
“--vampire--”
“Excuse me,” Remus said, loudly, and they both looked up. He felt rather like a werewolf cub cowering on the carpet instead of a full grown wizard, but he knew he had to say something before his workplace - and only available source of income - ended up torched in the night. “If Apollo says he isn’t responsible for the curse-” He inclined his head, and hoped he wasn’t about to get his own building torched instead, “I could perform a spell to verify it? Just to ease Elsie’s peace of mind,” he said, and smiled at Apollo in what he hoped was an appealing, isn’t-she-unreasonable-but-she’s-my-boss sort of way.
Apollo looked considering. Elsie looked furious. Remus added to his hopes the desire not to be fired for this stunt instead.
“By all means,” Apollo said, graciously extending a hand and rising to his feet.
“Go ahead,” Elsie said, crossing her arms angrily.
Remus carefully knelt, although the absolute last thing he wanted to do was turn his back to either of them. “If the person who cast the spell is in this room, the spell will make them glow,” he said. He took his wand out of his jeans pocket and touched it to the runes and muttered an incantation.
Apollo conspicuously failed to glow. So did the rest of the crowd.
“Maybe it didn’t work,” Elsie said crossly.
Remus sighed mentally, and cast another spell, after which fifty percent of the customers suddenly glowed, and jumped, exclaimed or swore in alarm.
“What, all of them?” said Apollo, looking disconcerted.
“No, it’s - I cast a spell based on species identification,” Remus said. “Sort of. A human did it.” Or a wizard, or a human with a disease like Remus, but the point was, it couldn’t have been Apollo. Or Elsie, for that matter, most likely. Species detection magic didn’t always interact with hybrids normally, but he wasn’t going to point that out at the moment.
“Well, I’m glad that’s settled then,” Apollo said, smugly gracious again. “I’ll see my way out.”
“Humph,” said Elsie, but she went back to the bar and complaining very shortly, leaving Remus to return to serving drinks.
Remus was nervous for several days, but neither the pub nor his building went up in flames, were suddenly condemned, or underwent any other sudden mysterious misfortune. The pub continued to be rather crowded in excitement over the curse, and Remus was sure he was mixing up more orders and breaking more dishes, but on the bright side, Elsie had somebody else to take nights.
Speculation over which human denizen had laid the curse and why was a topic of great interest among the regulars, all of whom now insisted they had known something was off about the rate of accidents and food spoilage over the past month. (Remus thought this was unlikely but then he wouldn’t have expected a misfortune curse could make the place much worse, and obviously it had.) The trouble was that it had been laid out, if uncreatively, in formal runes, and not many of the locals who could cast magic were actually educated enough to do this.
“Squibs can use runes, though,” said Mary, a pure veela who lived in the flat downstairs from Remus, one afternoon. She liked Remus better than many of the regulars, perhaps because she expressed a preference for clean glasses. “Or some of them can, anyway. What was her name, Demetria used to do repairs on people’s houses and cold cabinets and everything with ‘em? And Demetria couldn’t have cast sparks with a wand.”
“Really?” Remus asked, curious despite himself. He had only moved to the street comparatively recently, theirs might he be, and was not familiar with as many of the residents as some. Also, he couldn’t help wishing for someone really educated about magic to talk to. Most of the locals were suspicious of anyone with too much knowledge of Wizardry, convenient as it was. “Where did she learn?”
“From her family, I always assumed,” Mary said with a small shrug. “She was from one of those stuck up pureblood families, originally - she never said but you could tell, she had the accent. And the manners, and the glare. They must have kept her around long enough to raise her and teach her theory before throwing her out - she showed up on the street when she was maybe sixteen. That was... Merlin, fifty or sixty years ago, I think, now, before my time anyway, but I heard about it. She didn’t get the magic aging genes, she retired a few years back. Lives in a room over on Willow Avenue now. Apollo fixed her up with muggle papers eventually, years back. She gets the state pension now.”
“Interesting,” Remus said slowly. Mary was one of the less-vindictive residents about muggles so it wasn’t too surprising she knew about muggle identity papers and pensions, but... “Did she have anything against Elsie?” he asked.
Mary raised her eyebrows and turned her head to the door between the bar and the kitchen behind Remus, then said, “As a matter of fact, yes. They had some long running argument. I don’t know what started it, something to do with a cat, maybe. But Demetria always wanted to hear something bad about Elsie, and Elsie was positively gleeful when Demetria was obviously getting older like a muggle.”
Remus wasn’t all that sure whose side he would take if so, but he said, “Do you happen to know the address she lives at, now?”
It happened that Mary did. Remus didn’t take it down out of the goodness of his heart, though. It had occurred to him that he was currently about the only person regularly at the bar who could have written that curse - even if he had been in Damascus when it started. This might or might not have occurred to Elsie. He thought she had been shorter-tempered with him than usual lately, but it was always hard to tell.
Remus went home after his shift and had dinner alone, and enjoyed the quiet in his flat after the echoing noise of the crowded pub all afternoon. His head ached. He thought about how loud his and Sirius’s kitchen had been, especially when James and Peter and Lily were all over at once, and wanted badly to get drunk.
Instead he went through his mail. Frieda’s parents had changed their mind about the value of human education, and Blanchefleur’s had not yet replied, but Pamela the werewolf’s mother would be very grateful indeed for a tutor willing to work with her daughter, and could he come over to discuss it? Remus checked his schedule at the pub and wrote back. Maybe if he was lucky and they paid him full time he could quit working at the pub and it wouldn’t matter. It wasn’t like anyone would tar and feather him if they decided he had cursed Elsie’s pub. Actually, someone would probably ask him to do it again. Apollo was said to be unhappy about Elsie jumping to conclusions and blaming him, for a start.
The next day was Saturday, and he had it off. Remus got up early in the morning and drank most of a pot of tea while he finished reading that last issue of Curse-Breaker’s Monthly. Then he went off to his wardrobe and dressed respectably in slacks and a tie to go visit a stuck up pureblood squib who lived in a muggle rented room.
Demetria No-Last-Name-Given now lived on a rather nicer street than Millefleur, if still on the outskirts of the neighborhood. The houses were still old and crumbling and a few windows were boarded over, but many had flowers in pots outside and a few, front gardens with flowers and herbs. Cautiously he rang the doorbell, and told the woman who answered he was calling for Demetria if she was in.
Demetria’s room was at the back of the house, down a long, dim passage. Remus knew immediately that Mary had been right about her family origins: seeping heavily from under the door was exactly the same floral and musk perfume brand that Sirius’s runaway cousin Andromeda wore. Apparently it smelled exactly like some fashionable pureblood women’s blend. It made Remus’s nose itch. He concentrated hard on not sneezing, and knocked.
“Who is it?” an elderly woman called, and shuffled over some length of time to the door.
Demetria was small and bent, and had heavy silver hair in a bun and a long velvet dress that was almost but not quite a witch’s robe. She ushered him in immediately, obviously unaccustomed to having visitors and greatly pleased. Remus felt mildly guilty. He had thought of a few cover stories to explain why Mary had given him her address but none was necessary. Demetria immediately pulled out the single chair for him and began making tea on a hot plate before seating herself on top of the quilted bedspread at the end of the bed. The room was small, and crowded with dark antique furniture, but immaculately neat. Remus, looking around, saw two glowing eyes staring at him from the darkness under the vanity and jumped before they moved and he realized they were attached to a small black cat.
The cat crept over and sniffed the hem of his slacks. Remus thought that he should probably let the hems out, since more of his sock was showing than he would have liked. The cat did not seem to mind.
“Theodosia, don’t bother the nice man,” Demetria said to the cat (presumably Theodosia). She shuffled back over with the tea, and a box of biscuits, which she lovingly placed on the small tea table before sitting herself on the end of the bed. “Well!” she said, “What’s Elsie done now?”
“Er,” Remus said.
“You are that nice young werewolf she has staffing the bar for her during the day, aren’t you?” Demetria peered at him over her reading glasses. “I thought I remembered his name was Remus Lupin.”
Remus contemplated the words ‘nice young werewolf’ coming out in that particular pureblood accent with that particular tone briefly and quickly stopped before he lost his mind. “Yes, I am that Remus Lupin,” he conceded, and also conceded to scratch Theodosia’s ears. (She purred.) “I heard you and Elsie, er, know each other?”
“That’s a way of putting it,” Demetria said and sipped from her tea. “She’s never forgiven me for cursing that good for nothing man she married--”
Remus choked on his tea.
“--Which, I was young, and he was difficult about paying us,” Demetria said. “He owned the pub, you see. Back then it was called the Black Cat. Like Theodosia. Though not after her. There was another cat then.”
“I see,” Remus said.
“Why Elsie stayed married to him I’ll never guess. Terrible drinker, and a gambler too,” Demetria said darkly. “And she hates the place, but I guess she’s still there.”
“She is,” Remus agreed.
Demetria promptly launched into a list of the pub’s faults as recalled from her last visit twenty years ago, none of which Remus could honestly disagree with, ranging from the quality of the beer (abysmal) to the hygiene standards of Elsie (worse). Periodically she would assure him she didn’t blame him for any of that. Periodically he would make vague noises of agreement in between sips of tea.
Before coming, he had carefully sliced off with magic a sliver of wood from the runes so that he could detect if Demetria had cast the curse when he visited. He was not sure if her open admission to having cursed the pub’s owner before was a good or a bad sign. But he had to be able to get the chip of wood out to check, and instead he found himself sitting and listening, now, to a rambling list of complaints about Elsie’s late husband’s management practices a few more decades in the past. (He was unable to determine from this rant if Demetria’s curse had killed him or not. Given that she eventually mentioned having quit, he supposed probably not. At least he hoped not. She was worryingly vague on what the curse had done.)
Finally, Demetria got up to heat water to refill the tea pot, and took her eyes off of him. Remus took his chance while her back was turned. He eased the chip of wood out of his pocket, pointed his wand at her, and muttered the tracing spell.
Demetria conspicuously failed to glow blue.
Remus put the wood away, not without disappointment, and attempted to come up with a means of making good his escape. Just in case it proved helpful, he asked Demetria if she could think of anyone else who might have wanted to curse the pub. If he had had any doubts about his own conclusions on that front earlier, she proceeded to list nearly every resident of Millefleur Street from the time of her retirement, including several people who had moved away, been put in Azkaban or subsequently died. The list, in sum total, reached nearly four dozen suspects, every one with a quarrel with Elsie stretching back years. Undoubtedly, Remus reflected, this was why she had to resort to hiring muggles and newcomers like him.
Back at the flat, Pamela’s parents had replied to his owl, inviting him over for tea that afternoon to talk about arrangements. He had a quick lunch, changed into his teaching robes - sensible navy wool, with only a few inconspicuous darned spots - and went out again. The Apparition point was a dim trail head in an old-growth forest protected from muggle entrance, with sunlight filtering only thinly through the branches overhead.
Remus set off at a walk, thinking about his problems and how serious they were or weren’t. He really should look into another teaching job either way, so it might not matter. But on the other hand Elsie could be a nasty enemy - the reason so many people would be jubilant if somebody else had cursed the pub and earned her ire instead - and there weren’t so many teaching positions open to werewolves. Remus was often able to evade detection for longer than average, looking so very un-werewolf-like, but it never lasted in the magical world. Eventually people worked out that you were missing full moons. Working or living among muggles officially required any wizard to register with the Ministry, and that meant the risk that they would notice the absences instead...
Pamela’s family, the Whitbys, lived in a small cottage buried deep in the forest. Smoke straggled out of the chimney, and chickens - with some patterns and colors that absolutely would not be found on their non-magical kin - ran about in the yard, and so, at the moment, did Pamela.
Pamela was about twelve and would have been going into her second year at Hogwarts if it weren’t for her being a werewolf. Remus wasn’t sure if Dumbledore had let other children in. He had certainly wanted to, but it was relatively rare that children were bitten and survived and rarer that they were not promptly registered by well-meaning parents with the Ministry, meaning that everyone knew that they had been infected and they were not likely to be allowed around other people’s children. Pamela had been attacked in public during the war, and taken to St. Mungo’s by bystanders, when she was only six years old. She had honey blond hair and a hand-me-down wand from her great aunt, which she was currently using to levitate chickens back into the coop. It was slow going work; they kept escaping.
“Good job, Pamela, excellent Hover Charm,” Remus said when she had just finished the recapture of a particularly vivid paisley-patterned magenta hen. She jumped. “Are your parents home?”
“They’re inside, Professor Lupin,” Pamela said, lunging for another chicken and just barely missing. “Are you going to teach me again?”
“That’s what I’m here to talk to them about,” Remus said, and because watching her with the chickens was moderately painful, “Would you like me to teach you a better spell for that before I go in?”
Remus did not know any specific chicken-containment charms, but there was a lassoing hex that they had used occasionally against weaker Death Eaters who were unable to break it. An under powered version - something a twelve year-old could learn - turned out to be perfectly good at herding chickens.
“Thanks, Professor!” said Pamela, much more cheerily, as he went inside and she went to close up the coop. “They broke out earlier. I’ll be inside in a second, yeah?”
“I’ll tell them,” Remus said, and knocked on the door.
His heart sank a bit seeing the inside of the cottage. It was neatly kept up and friendly enough, but it was very obvious coming in that the Whitbys did not have enough money to employ a full time tutor. Conversation with them, and the careful way they hedged around the question of money, confirmed this impression.
He still agreed to take the job, at about half the going rate per hour for a few afternoons of tutoring a week. He liked Pamela, who was not overly fond of reading but good at Charms work and had an incredible ability to memorize facts about animals, and she deserved an education. Walking back down the trail, Remus found himself daydreaming about putting together some sort of home school for werewolves - and the numerous other children who found themselves unacceptable for admission to most magical schools in Britain - but of course the Ministry would shut him down the instant they found out about it even if he had a more suitable location than a terrible one bedroom flat. Madam Aubrey at the Viridian School for Young Witches had been able to afford excellent facilities, including the various pointless Ministry requirements for a school which accepted nonhumans, and also the bribes to the relevant officials - at least until the school had closed.
He was going to have to keep his job at the pub after all, damn it.
Sunday morning just after opening, Remus was enjoying Elsie’s desire to sleep in on Sundays. It gave him a break from the way she had been eyeing him lately, which he swore was more suspicious than usual. He was reading in the back corner of the bar where it was difficult to see him from the doorway, hoping against hope any early customers would poke their heads in, see he was gone and leave again, when the thought came to him that he was going about this the wrong way. Yes, any number of people wanted to curse Elsie at a given time, but they generally didn’t. So what had changed?
He was mostly caught up on recent gossip by now, the largest piece of which before the curse had been Dennis the fortune teller Kate’s son declaring his absolute lack of interest in fortune telling, or indeed magic in general, and that in fact he had just gotten into a program that taught accounting, to her horror. Kate had been appalled, as was most of the street. Remus couldn’t honestly bring himself to judge Dennis for wanting financial stability but knew better than to say so. But as far as he knew nobody was currently especially mad at Else (or well, not until she’d accused Apollo), and no unusual fights had occurred at the bar. Morwenna the vampire who worked nights got along with everybody, an unusual trait for her kind, and certainly hadn’t had any public quarrels.
Had they been after the business? Remus wondered. There were a limited number of magical pubs in Britain, even if there were no others on the street itself. Even fewer catered to the sort who came here. Someone might have wanted to divert business from the Half Moon, perhaps to the Hangman or the Knucklebones. He could always go and cast the same tracing charm there, although he’d have to be lucky to get the owner in the room... He had the feeling he was missing something...
The door opened and shut. Remus stood very still, hoping that the customer would go away again. Footsteps approached the bar, and reluctantly he shoved his book onto a shelf and stepped out. “Morning, Mr. Blake,” he said, and did not sigh in disappointment, consciously. He endured several minutes of chat about how obnoxious the Ministry was (true, but not, in Remus’s view, because it went around prosecuting people for silly things like grievously injuring muggles for “a bit of sport”), mused at the sort of brain it took to drink lager at eight o’clock in the morning and wondered if Mr. Blake was something nocturnal after all, and went dubiously, on request, back into the kitchen to attempt to make breakfast.
He did not often cook at the pub, as this was normally Elsie’s domain for the eighteen or so hours a day the pub was open, but when she was not present he was obliged to try. Morwenna’s idea of human food was even worse, and most of the customers had learned better than to ask her for it if Elsie wasn’t in. He supposed, without much optimism, that he probably couldn’t do that badly at a sandwich.
After Mr. Blake came a couple of Apollo’s vampire flunkies for a drink from the black bottle in the cold cabinet before they went home to bed, and after them a couple of muggles who had obviously wandered in without knowing where they were. (Remus made small talk about the news with relief and watched them anxiously until they left an hour later.) Then there were more locals, and then he knocked over a full pint on the bar, and all in all it was nearly eleven before he had a chance to go back to his thoughts.
He was missing something, that was it, wasn’t it? Something different... Probably it wasn’t that Dennis the aspiring accountant had decided to take vengeance on them all by cursing the local pub. Especially since Remus was fairly sure Dennis had no magical education in anything but Divination...
Remus went out to wipe down a few dirtier tables, musing that even if he broke things and was slow with the drinks it didn’t seem like anybody else Elsie had ever employed bothered to clean, when it came to him: the serving girl he’d replaced, the one who had been even worse than him, supposedly. Nobody had actually told him her name. That was unusual. She must not have been from Millefleur Street.
Elsie showed up around noon but stomped straight into the kitchens, and Remus knew better than to disturb her when she was in the mood to work. So he had to wait until Morwenna arrived in the late afternoon, yawning prodigiously and displaying sharp, pale fangs, to ask after the last serving girl.
“What, the girl who quit right before you came back?” Morwenna asked.
“I thought Elsie fired her,” said Remus. He was washing glasses with his wand again. Morwenna was checking that the bar was stocked, something Remus nearly always forgot to do until he realized he was out of something. “She said she was worse than me.”
“Has Elsie ever fired anyone?” Morwenna said. “She knows we’re a captive audience... And I think she kind of wishes the pub would go out of business and she could sell it without the entire street being furious.”
“I heard she inherited the place from her husband?” Remus asked. Vampires were even worse understood outside their own communities than werewolves and veela. Remus knew very little about them aside from how to treat their bite wounds and how to more or less reliably make one stop attacking you, a Defense lesson he had never actually needed. It was unclear whether vampires were unaging or merely long-lived even by the standards of witches and wizards. He had no idea how old Morwenna actually was, except that every so often she would reference something that had happened decades before he was born, despite looking no older (and quite a bit less worn) than him.
“Old Jake,” Morwenna said. “Nice enough guy as long as he had a pint in hand, downright nasty when there wasn’t anything to drink. Awful with the books, though, Elsie had to take his checkbook away from home. He took that great.” She rolled her eyes. “He went and keeled over in this place - over in that corner,” she jerked her thumb at the spot with the leak and the mold, “About forty years ago now. Heart attack, apparently. I didn’t work here then - I wasn’t stupid enough to take a job from Jack, for a start - but I lived down the street. Elsie had hysterics... Privately I think it was out of relief.”
“I heard they didn’t get on very well,” Remus said, carefully. “Did someone curse him?”
Morwenna looked at him and snorted, hard. “Yeah,” she said. “Demetria did it - you know her, the squib? She cursed him so anything he ate would taste like oatmeal. I don’t think he even noticed. His taste buds died years before him. Elsie swears that’s when he fell out of love, though, because he couldn’t appreciate her baking anymore.”
“Right,” Remus said, and went back to washing the pint glasses. “But you were telling me about the girl who was working here last summer?”
“I was,” Morwenna said. “Her name was, um, Hannah, I think, don’t remember the last name. She was a muggle, but related to somebody on the street...” Morwenna paused, “Maybe Kate, actually? Yeah, it was either Kate or it was Theodosia, but I think it was Kate.”
“Theodosia the cat?” said Remus.
Morwenna gave him a patient look. “Theodosia the Animagus,” she said.
You would think, Remus thought, annoyed, that he would recognize one when he saw one considering his teen years. One of these days Sirius would escape Azkaban and stroll up Millefleur Street and Remus would probably mistake him for a lovable stray. “Do you know Hannah’s number?” he said instead. “I want to ask her about the curse.”
Morwenna shrugged. “No, but it’s probably written on the board in the kitchen if you go check, Elsie never cleans the thing.”
Remus ventured into the kitchens when Elsie was in the loo later and checked. It was not surprising he had not noticed the addition of a singular phone number to the board in the kitchen, which was a three by three cork board absolutely covered in recipes, phone numbers and schedules from employees long past, suppliers who had long since closed and a few that were still open, and even, plastered on top, the most recent employee schedule. After an inspection of some minutes he finally located a scrap of blue-lined notebook paper, muggle-produced, with the words ‘Hannah Armstrong’ and a phone number with a London area code scribbled on it. He tapped his wand to the scrap to copy it, then shoved the copy in his pocket for later.
By the time Remus got off he was too exhausted to navigate a conversation with a stranger, and since he worked Mondays he didn’t call the next morning either. He had a break for lunch, which he normally took in the pub because it was better than going home to an empty flat for an hour or so, but today he left the pub and went up the street to use the payphone in the grocer’s. He wasn’t sure why he left, except that Elsie had been muttering about the pint glasses he’d broken the other day again. (Reparo had been used on most of them one too many times. Remus had given up and thrown out most of the overly-magicked shards, lest they burst when filled next time.)
“Hello,” said a surprisingly young sounding girl on the phone.
“Hello,” Remus said, leaning against the grocer’s noticeboard. “My name is Remus Lupin, I work at the Half Moon. I’m calling for Hannah Armstrong?”
There was a noticeable pause before she said, “This is Hannah. Did I forget something there?”
“Not exactly,” Remus said. “Look, can I get you lunch, or tea or something? I’d like to talk to you about the pub.”
“Look,” Hannah said, voice extremely tired, “Whatever Gary did, I’m sorry about it, but I can’t stop him.”
“Gary?” said Remus.
“My ex,” Hannah said. “If he’s - shown up and started a fight, or - broken the windows, or - whatever, I can’t stop him and I chucked him last winter, so--”
“Hannah,” Remus said cautiously, “Does Gary know how to use magic?”
“Maybe,” Hannah said, voice small and frightened.
“It’s fine,” Remus said. “I took the curse off. Can we talk?”
“Yeah,” Hannah said, finally. “Yeah, sure. Where do you want to meet?”
Remus had another forty minutes left in his break, which was just about enough time to Apparate to Hannah’s street and buy her a quick lunch. She admitted that she hadn’t found another job, so Remus did not object to paying.
“It’s Gary,” she said, staring miserably into her soggy chips. “He finds out where I’m working - I don’t know how he does it - and he shows up and gets into a fight and then I can’t manage to - I start making mistakes, I think about it all the time and I’ll worry he’ll show up again, and--”
She was close to tears. Remus patted her shoulder and made appropriate soothing noises and thought vaguely about being a Prefect again.
“So you believe me,” she said at last, after blowing her nose loudly.
“I do,” Remus said. “I found the curse. Elsie will be glad to know who did it.” Actually she would probably be immensely annoyed, as a muggle ex-barkeep’s boyfriend would not provide her with any useful fodder for grudges or social welfare, but he did not mention this. “You aren’t just making mistakes. I can probably give you something to protect against it,” he said.
“Can you?” Hannah’s eyes lit up. “I can pay, I mean - once I get another job, but...”
“I think Elsie’s still looking for someone to help nights,” Remus said. “She knows you were cursed now, if you want the job back. And I heard you quit?”
“I was making too many mistakes,” Hannah said. “I was sure - sure she was going to fire me again...”
“Elsie never fires anyone,” Remus said. “She hasn’t fired me.” He hesitated. “Could you give me Gary’s address?”
If he had expected some reluctance here, Hannah showed none. She fished out a sparkly blue gel pen from her pocket and willingly wrote down a name, address and phone number, “--Don’t tell him I sent you?” was her only request, passing it over.
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Remus said, and wondered, taking the paper, just what he thought he was doing.
He went back to the pub and let Elsie know Hannah might be interested in her job back, and that she was pretty sure her ex-boyfriend had actually been cursing the pub (and all of her other workplaces). Elsie grunted, and Remus wasn’t sure she had noticed for a moment, before she said, “So you can stop him from doing it again, then?”
“Yes,” Remus said.
“Good. Thought it might have been you, you know.”
“It wasn’t,” Remus said, heart sinking.
“But I figured you’d have asked for money for uncursing it by now if you were going to. Didn’t make sense otherwise. Then I thought Demetria, but Mary said you went and checked.” Elsie shook her head. “Stupid girl, dating a boy like that.”
“It sounds like she already got rid of him,” Remus pointed out, then was grateful, for once, to hear a customer come in. “--I’d better go,” he said, and hightailed it out of the kitchen.
That night after work, he looked at the address written in sparkly ink and wondered again just what he thought he was going to do. Then he got dressed in a clean pair of dark jeans and dark shirt and went out to Gary Cole’s place. Trying not to think about the fact that this might be, depending on Gary Cole’s exact status, technically muggle baiting, Remus cast a few charms to discourage notice and opened the building door with a simple Alohomora.
Gary Cole lived in a fairly awful student flat, the common areas of which were strewn with beer bottles and the remnants of takeaway dinners long past. Remus made a face; this was worse than the bar. Several flatmates were also strewn unconscious around the couch. Remus took out the chip of wood from the bar and cast his tracing charm one last time, and finally an eerie blue glow gathered around one particular boy sprawled on the couch with his head hanging off the back.
So this was the ex-boyfriend.
Elsie was fairly clearly expecting him to kill the boy or at least terrorize him, but then most of the street residents would think nothing of disposing of an inconvenient muggle. Remus might have sunk very low from the version of himself from school - not so low as Sirius - but he had some standards. He was not going to do that. But then he didn’t think he needed to.
Remus looked into the bedrooms, silently. It wasn’t hard to find Gary’s: the second room was plastered not just with food garbage, but with spell books. None of them were the legitimate sort that were sold at Flourish and Blotts: there was one that proclaimed to teach you about using astrology to commune with aliens, for example. But several were the nastier sort of Dark Arts books. What there wasn’t, Remus assured himself after casting a couple more spells, was a wand, or any other artifact with much power behind it. Gary Cole was likely limited to runes, and he didn’t seem to have many good books on the subject. That would make preventing him from cursing Hannah again much easier, and Remus thought he knew how. He went back to the sitting room to start.
One spell Remus had already planned involved a piece of paper he had prepared during a slow hour at the pub, which properly charmed would give the distance and direction of a certain person. He had promised to give this to Hannah once it was cast so that she could more easily avoid her ex-boyfriend. This accomplished, Remus drifted closer to the unconscious Gary Cole, wrinkling his nose at the smell of unwashed college student, and carefully summoned a few hairs from his head, before Disapparating safely away.
The rest could wait for tomorrow.
Remus had Tuesday off and an appointment with Pamela in the afternoon, but he had business to accomplish first. In the weak morning sunlight, it seemed unlikely that he had really gone and broken into a muggle flat last night, but the proof lay on his desk: several strands of coppery hair laid out on a piece of fabric and weighted down with glass.
Here, the actual work began.
A lot of nonsense had gone into witch bottles and balls over the centuries, but the basic concept was sound. Remus had acquired two blown glass balls from Kate yesterday, and the rest of the ingredients would come from his Curse-Breaking stores. Several could have been purchased in any muggle store. First, he took out lavender, salt, and an assortment of pins and dropped them bit by bit into the mouth of each bottle. Then came the hair, two strands in each, and finally he took out his quill, dipped it in ink, and wrote out two inscriptions, each with a runic formula on the back: “Gary Cole and all his power is banished from this place,” in his neatest handwriting.
This was nothing he had been taught at Hogwarts, but it was worth knowing anyway. Sometimes being a Curse-Breaker was not about being extremely powerful or intelligent or educated. Sometimes it was just having a very good memory and knowing a lot of tricks. And there were fewer books that explained how to undo a simple spell in English with a formula.
He sealed each ball with wax, then tapped his wand to them in turn. This was not strictly necessary but it would make them more effective. He didn’t cast a spell, only focused his power and magic the way he would have sent sparks up, and sent that power into the glass, making it flash and sparkle. When he withdrew his wand, each ball glowed softly from inside.
One of the witch balls, he delivered with the paper to Hannah’s mailbox. He went home and read the post that had come in his absence, and finally he took the second witch ball to the pub and hung it in the window.
“That’s to stop the girl’s ex from coming back and cursing us again?” Elsie said.
“It is,” Remus said.
“And she wants her job back now she’s protected.”
“That’s right,” Remus said.
Elsie paused. “ She was perfectly fine at first, you know. She can even cook. Knows beer, and Merlin knows I don’t, and Morwenna doesn’t drink anything unless it comes out of a vein. Not even that mix I do for vampires.”
“It’s quite all right,” said Remus, who could guess. Elsie never fired anyone, after all. “I got a letter from another of my tutoring clients today, and they want me back.” Blanchefleur’s parents were quite a bit wealthier than Pamela’s, and they could afford to make up the rest of his pay.
“Oh, thank Merlin,” said Elsie. “Do you know how many dishes you’ve broken in the last week? And you haven’t even had a full moon and broken your arm, or whatever it’ll be this month.”
“I’m quite happy not to,” said Remus. “I quit,” he said cheerfully, and got down from the step stool. “Hannah says she can start tomorrow.”
He went back up the street to his flat, and changed into his teaching robes again. Then he went to pack his briefcase. Pamela was ahead of her grade in Charms, Herbology, and Care of Magical Creatures, all of which had been taught at the School For Young Witches. Defense per se was not, but she knew some of the relevant curriculum from Creatures and Charms. He would go over some of the gaps left with her. She didn’t have the equipment to study Potions at home, but he could work on Transfiguration, which it was notoriously tricky to acquire qualified teaches for...
He went to the bookshelves and took down The Standard Book of Spells, grades 2 and 3. Pamela had a copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them at home, along with the usual references on magical herbs, but he found a book about a magical biologist’s travels in the Apennines he thought might persuade her to have a go at reading something lengthier. Minerva McGonagall was the preeminent expert on teaching Transfiguration but he didn’t particularly like the series of transfiguration books she used, which were not really on a child’s reading level. He found his usual beginner’s Transfiguration text instead and then spent a longer time sorting between his range of Defense textbooks for something that he thought Pamela would like.
The ten year-old Blanchefleur would require a different approach, as she was extremely smart and had a lot of magical power but absolutely would not sit still and focus for an entire lesson, not to mention that as a non-human she wasn’t allowed to carry a wand. Remus sorted through books and lesson plans, drawing up a plan of attack for each student, until his alarm went off and he realized he was nearly going to be late. He seized the books for Pamela in a hurry. Quickly, he piled them into his briefcase along with a supply of parchment and paper - for the magical world it was best Pamela practiced with both - and ink, before he snapped it shut and fastened the buckles.
The afternoon sun shone through the dusty windows into the empty flat. Remus swung his traveling cloak on, and picked up the case, looking for a moment at the gilded letters: Professor R. J. Lupin.
He had graduated Hogwarts, something that quite possibly no werewolf before him had ever done. (He hoped there would be some after.) He had his N.E.W.T.s, a full eight, which qualified him for the rank of Professor even if he would never teach at Hogwarts, or any of the other elite institutions he had once fantasized about working for. He had tutoring students, and the occasional guest lecture, and his Curse-Breaking work. And he didn’t have to work at that damn pub just now.
Some day, Remus thought wearily, if he was lucky, he’d have something else he’d never expected to lose: he’d have friends again.
Remus went to the entrance of the flat. He Disapparated to the trail that led to Pamela Whitby.