Work Text:
I:
Remus sees the trainwreck before it happens.
He isn’t sure when it starts. Maybe when the kids are three, or maybe even earlier. Maybe as early as Halloween 1981, when the SOW Party passed its package of laws banning halfbloods from voting, from taking jobs in government, from participating in so many areas of life. Maybe it’s when Hogwarts passes the decrees that halfbloods are no longer welcome to study in its halls. Remus doesn’t know, but it’s a damn good guess.
Remus is a halfblood too. It’s just that, for him, his halfblood status has always been subsumed by something else. Remus is a werewolf, and for him, being a werewolf has always predominated.
He can see the impact that the laws have on Muggleborns and halfbloods. He lives a stricter version of those same laws himself as a werewolf. He knows, in the most intimate of ways, exactly what they mean, and he understands why Lily is worried. Lily should be worried, both for herself and for Harry.
James doesn’t. He knows about the laws, but they don’t mean anything to him. And that’s the problem.
Remus catches the looks that Lily hides around their family. The subtle pressing of her lips together when he, James and Sirius start reminiscing about Hogwarts; the flicker of a suppressed eyeroll when James and Sirius play an inappropriate prank. There are dozens of other expressions, slight twitches of muscle and glances of disapproval, that all disappear under a smooth, placid smile.
It’s not a surprise when she tries to talk to him about it. Indeed, the only surprise is how long she’s taken to do it.
“Why is James having us do this?” she asks, dropping her quill and burying her head in her hands. “Harry could be in school, real school. She could be learning to read and write and make friends, not cooped up all day with only one other kid her age for company. I’ve told him over and over that we need to leave, but he just can’t get it through his thick head that it is beyond time for us to get out.”
Remus sighs, wondering how he’s supposed to respond to this. It isn’t that he disagrees. He’s a halfblood too. But at the same time…
James is his friend. James befriended him, brought him right into the most popular group at school, and Remus owes it to him to stand with him.
“James and Sirius are good people, Lily,” he says slowly, knowing perfectly well how useless he sounds. “Maybe they don’t understand what it’s like to be us, but they’re good people.”
“I know they’re good people, Remus – and I love James. I really do,” Lily replies, as if that was ever in question. Remus knows it was never in question. “But I just don’t know how to make him see sense. The SOW Party's gaining more and more power by the day, the Light Faction doesn’t seem to be doing anything but making speeches, and James seems to be more worried about getting into a pie fight with Sirius and reminiscing about Hogwarts than making sure that Harry will have a future.”
Remus can’t argue with that. He’s there too, watching as James and Sirius get into it again and again, pie fights and pranks and laughter instead of anything serious. He knows this about them—this has always been one of their traits. He even likes it, most of the time, because as a werewolf he has precious little else to laugh about.
He looks down at the table, drumming his fingers a little, and picking his words. “You’re not wrong,” he says slowly. “You have a point. But… James and Sirius befriended me when I was a werewolf. By all rights, they could have—they should have—gone straight to the Daily Prophet when they discovered my secret. Proclaimed to the entire world that Dumbledore was harboring a werewolf at Hogwarts right under everyone’s noses and endangering every student there. But they didn’t. James even kept my furry little problem a secret from his own parents for my sake. I’ll owe him for the rest of my life for that, for being my friend when everything he had been raised to believe told him not to be.”
He looks up at Lily, pleading for her to understand. He does understand her worries, but he can’t ever go against his friends.
He knows from the slightest flicker of her expression, the change in subject back to the children’s schoolwork, that she doesn’t.
II:
“James, please!” Remus says, holding his hands up to try to slow the action happening around him. It’s futile, and he knows it even as he tries. “Think this through!”
Sirius is putting his wand in his holster, his expression terrifying in its anger; James is little different, snapping orders at the small group of Aurors who are accompanying him by International Portkey to Washington, DC, where they’ve learned that Lily has gone with Harry. James is going to bring his wife back, that is the plan, and Remus doesn’t even know where to start with how wrong this is.
It’s wrong from a political perspective; it’s wrong from a personal one. The invasion of one country by another country’s Aurors, even on a personal matter, is a declaration of war. The invasion of Lily’s choice, forcing her to return back to Wizarding Britain when she so clearly does not want to, is the end of the relationship.
Not that it hasn’t already ended, Remus thinks distantly. Divorce papers served, a dozen charges against Lily by the Wizengamot… he doesn’t know how he can save this.
He doesn’t know how he can keep this from getting worse.
“Think what through?” James roars at him, and werewolf or not, Remus shrinks back.
“You’re invading another country,” Remus replies, trying to sound firm, reasonable, convincing. He worries he sounds whiny. “They’re in America—America has its own Aurors. Please, James, just calm down. Call your solicitor, he’ll have ideas—”
Sirius snorts, a loud and derisive noise. “Americans,” he says darkly. “It’s a personal matter—if they know what’s good for them, they’ll stay out of it.”
“I’m going to get my wife and my daughter back,” James informs Remus, his voice colder than Remus has ever heard from him before. Some part of him, the part of Remus that tells him that he owes everything to James, the part of Remus that whispers to him that these are his friends, that he needs to be grateful to them for befriending him when he’s a werewolf, quails. “Is that a problem?”
“It will be to the Americans,” Remus protests. “Do you honestly think they’ll let you? You’ll cause an international incident—”
“Who cares?” Sirius says, rolling his eyes. “They’re just Americans.”
Remus shoots him a look, but he can’t afford to give up this narrow window to stop James. “Think about Lily and Harry, James!”
“I am thinking about them.”
“Do you think they’ll react well to you forcing them back here?” Remus asks. “To going there with a half-dozen Aurors, armed with an arrest warrant, to drag them back fighting tooth and nail?”
“Lily loves me,” James says, with a shake of his head. “She’ll forgive me. She just needs to be made to see sense, that’s all. See you later.”
And with that, he gestures to the half-dozen Aurors behind him and to Sirius, and they head out the door.
III:
There are so many things that Remus wishes he could say.
He wishes he could tell James I told you so, when he returns empty-handed to England. He hears the story, coloured as it is by anger and resentment. Lily had fought—Lily had bought time for the American Aurors to come, and then the damned Americans had decided to interfere in a private matter and take the entire lot of them to prison. Even after the Ministry of Magic became involved, they hadn’t handed Lily and Harry over to them. Instead, the Americans had escorted them to an International Portkey and told them, in no uncertain terms, that they were personae non grata and not permitted within the borders of Wizarding America without express permission.
Remus wishes he could contact Lily. He wishes that he could write to her, tell her that even if James and Sirius are furious, that he isn’t. He wishes he could ask her about Harry—ask her about the school that she’s no doubt enrolled Harry in already, ask her if he can write to Harry, ask her what she and Harry have been doing and where they’ve been living and so many other things. Remus had liked Lily, and he had loved Harry, and wishes he could know that they’re well.
More than that, Remus wishes he could defend Lily. He wishes he could stop James and Sirius from vilifying her at the dinner table, that he could tell them that Lily just didn’t want Harry to suffer under the discriminatory laws of their country, that this was about politics and not about love. He wishes he could tell them that Lily was right to leave—the laws against halfbloods and Muggleborns are wrong, and they aren’t doing near enough to repeal them.
But he can’t.
James and Sirius are his friends—his only friends, the only people who have ever learned that he is a werewolf and remained his friends. They and the Marauders pranking business are his only source of income, the only way that he can get the money he needs to buy Wolfsbane, and he owes them.
Remus owes them for everything he has in his life, and he can never, ever say anything against them.
IV:
Remus doesn’t know how it comes about. It’s after the trial, after the decision of the American court granting the divorce and full custody of Harry to Lily. James and Sirius find it shocking, but Remus doesn’t find it surprising at all.
Not with the laws the way they are in Britain. Not with James’ own actions in going to American to force Lily and Harry back with him. Not with the way things are.
But it’s Archie that really brings it home to him.
They’re sitting outside at a table set in the backyard of Grimmauld Place. It’s warm, too warm with the humidity soaked in the air, and Archie is working through his sums under Remus’ careful eye while Sirius takes Diana to an appointment at St. Mungo’s.
“I’m sorry. What did you say?” Remus asks, sure that he’s misheard. He must have misheard, after all—how can Archie be saying what he is hearing?
“She wasn’t grateful,” Archie says, enunciating his words clearly. “Aunt Lily, I mean, though Dad says she’s not my aunt anymore. I miss her, and Harry, but Dad says I shouldn’t. She should have been more grateful.”
Remus swallows. It’s harder than he expects because his throat has gone dry. He knows what Sirius is saying, what James is saying, what the Daily Prophet is saying. He and Diana have said nothing in response, just doing their best to shield Archie from the worst of it. They haven’t said anything contrary, for all that their exchanged, solemn glances say that they are on the same page. They don’t agree, but they say nothing.
They should say something.
“Archie…” Remus begins, wondering where he even begins with this. “Why does your dad say she should have been more grateful?”
“Because Uncle James gave her everything,” Archie replies, looking up at him. “Because without him, Lily would have just been another Muggleborn. She would have had a hard time in Britain without him, being a Muggleborn.”
Remus nods. “But why should she have a hard time? Just because she’s a Muggleborn?”
“I don’t know.” Archie shrugs, looking back down at his sums with a sigh. “She just should. Being a Muggleborn is bad, and she should have been grateful to Uncle James for marrying her.”
“Right,” Remus says, his head spinning a little. “Well, what if I told you that Aunt Lily is somewhere where being a Muggleborn isn’t bad? Where being a Muggleborn is just like being you, like being your Dad and Uncle James? Where she doesn’t need to feel bad for being a Muggleborn?”
Archie blinks. The end of his quill touches his bottom lip as he screws up his eyebrows in thought.
“I don’t know,” he declares finally. “I need to think about it.”
“You should do that,” Remus says with a nod, then he reaches over and taps the paper with Archie’s sums on it. “Back to it, pup.”
Archie sighs, his quill going back to parchment, while Remus looks out over the backyard.
Remus is grateful. He is grateful to James, and to Sirius, and to Diana for all the good that is in his life. He is grateful that, even as a werewolf, they find it in themselves to love him and befriend him and to help him.
But he wishes he didn’t need to be.