Chapter Text
On the day Remus Lupin turned forty, he moved into a shabby apartment in a seaside town in northern England. A few spells were enough to fool the Muggle landlords into believing he could pay the rent and, once he had a local address, he quickly found a job waiting tables at a seafood restaurant. It wasn’t much, but it was better than he would be likely to find in the wizarding world. Even with everything else that had changed since the war, one age-old truth remained: nobody wanted to hire a werewolf.
This wasn’t a bad place, really. The town was small, not too crowded or busy, with plenty of fresh air. And better yet, it was entirely Muggle. As far as he could tell, there wasn’t another wizard anywhere in the area, nobody who might know who he was and try to drag him back into the world he had left behind.
There was no point in getting comfortable, though. In the two years since the war, this was the fourth city he had temporarily settled in. A few months, maybe the better part of a year - that was all he could hope for before his monthly disappearances and recurring “illness” became too suspicious.
The apartment wasn’t much to speak of. It did at least have a bedroom separate from the living area, which was more than he could say for the tiny studio apartment in London he had abandoned after a single month. The city had seemed like a good idea at the time; the idea of losing himself in a crowd had been an appealing one. But those same crowds had become overwhelming as his wolflike senses sharpened in the days leading up to the full moon. Too many sounds, too many scents, and the monster within salivating at the thought of such easy prey. He had apparated to a remote spot in the woods on the night of the full moon itself, but even the lead-up to it had been simply unbearable.
This apartment was larger than the one in London, but the building was old, with scuffed floors that creaked underfoot and kitchen appliances that looked like they hadn’t been replaced in a couple of decades. Remus unpacked quickly, unloading the shrunken furniture he carried in his suitcase and enlarging each piece until they were a normal-sized bed, armchair, wardrobe, and so on. If the Muggles noticed they hadn’t seen a moving van, they would simply assume one had been by whilst they were away. They were good at thinking of excuses like that to ignore the magic that sometimes appeared right under their noses.
He hung his shirts in the wardrobe, made the bed, and he carefully organized his books on the shelves of the large wooden bookcase he placed in the living room. Defense Against the Dark Arts texts on one shelf, ancient runes and history on another, and Muggle mystery novels on a third one. A quick concealment charm would ensure that any Muggles who happened to see his little library would find nothing unexpected, substituting Latin and Greek for runes, Muggles’ history for Wizards’, and fantasy novels for real magical texts.
It was a smaller collection than he would like to have, but his life had never involved the sort of stability needed to acquire hundreds of books. Luckily, he had seen a public library on his way into town. With his shift at the seafood restaurant still hours away and the need for new reading material on his mind, Remus stepped out into the easy warmth of early springtime and got behind the wheel of his old, worn-down car.
His mother had taught him to drive years ago, at sixteen, over his father’s protests that a wizard with apparition and Floo Powder at his disposal had no need for such backwards Muggle methods of transportation. Remus had never been more grateful for that than during the times - like now - when he found himself living among Muggles. Not everything was on the Floo Network, and apparition was all well and good if you were going to Diagon Alley, but you couldn’t simply appear out of thin air in the middle of a Muggle street.
Instead, he parked his car carefully and walked up the front steps to the library building, hesitating in the entrance as he looked around for the first time.
It was small, as public libraries went, much smaller than the one in London. But even so, the shelves beckoned to him, offering the promise of a temporary escape within the pages of their many books.
First things first: he needed a library card.
He approached the front desk, waiting patiently for the dark-haired man working there to finish scanning a stack of books for a mom with two young children running around at her feet. The scanner beeped again and again.
“These will be due back in two weeks.”
The man’s voice sounded oddly familiar. He wished the family a good rest of their day and turned to Remus with a smile.
“How can I help you?”
Remus stared at the man in shock. He knew the angles of that face and the cool gray eyes. For a moment, he thought he was by some miracle looking at Sirius back from the dead, but that wasn’t quite right. This man was shorter than Sirius, with softer facial features.
“Regulus?”
“Ah - no,” said the man, shaking his head. “Reginald. Reginald Green.”
Reginald. A bit too close, especially when paired with a face so much like Sirius’s. The surname, too: Green as in green and silver, Green as in Black. It had to be an alias.
“Oh, come on,” said Remus, crossing his arms. “You think I don’t recognize someone I went to school with for six years?”
“I’m afraid you’ve got me mixed up with someone else,” said Regulus. Reginald. Whatever his name was. “What can I do for you?”
Right.
“I’m new in town, and I want to get a library card.”
“Of course,” said the man who still looked an awful lot like Regulus Black. “Can I get your name and address? And I’ll need to see your ID as well.”
Remus complied, watching for any flicker of recognition as he gave his name. There was none.
“Hey, listen,” he said as Reginald tapped away at the keys on his computer. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude or anything. It’s just that you’re the spitting image of a guy I went to school with. The brother of a close friend, actually.”
Reginald - if that was truly his name - raised his eyebrows.
“That’s definitely not me, then,” he said. “I’m an only child.”
Huh. Maybe he really was some look-alike with a similar name, Remus thought, because the only time he had ever heard Regulus say that, it had been spoken in anger. It sounded strange on his lips in such a matter-of-fact tone.
“Well, I’ve got to get to work,” said Remus, accepting the library card that Reginald held out. “It was nice meeting you.”
He took one last glance at the man who looked too much like Sirius and hurried away before he could say or do anything else he might regret.
Reginald Green was fairly certain he had never seen Remus Lupin before in his life, and he definitely didn’t have a brother. But there was something familiar about the name the stranger had called him.
Regulus. Where had he heard that before?
As the afternoon wore on and the crowds thinned, Reginald couldn’t resist running a search on the library computer. As soon as the results came up, he smiled in recognition. Of course, it was the name of a star.
The brightest star in the constellation Leo, to be specific. Sometimes referred to as “the heart of the lion.” Reginald was a Leo, ironically enough, although he had never cared much for astrology. The scientific aspects of astronomy had always appealed more to him than the mystical implications some people attached to certain constellations.
It made sense, though, that he would recognize the name of a star. It wasn’t for nothing that he had spent his early twenties squinting through telescopes and calculating the orbits of planets and moons. He had admittedly not done much with Astronomy for many years, but after spending so much time on it, he wasn’t about to forget.
There weren’t a lot of people called Regulus, though, and what were the chances that he would be mistaken for a stranger with such an unusual name so close to his own? That was quite the alarming coincidence.
His old name, the one he was supposed to pretend he had never gone by, had started with an R as well, and his middle name had been a star. Could it be …?
No. Surely not. He had been careful. He had made it so long here, and the thought of having to start over again somewhere new was so terrifying that he immediately dismissed the idea.
No one remembered Richard Altair Bertram.
Reginald carefully adjusted the cuff of his left sleeve, pulling it down to ensure that it still covered his wrist - and, more importantly, the remains of the hideous tattoo that no removal procedure had ever been able to fully get rid of.
As Remus carried plates of fish and chips out to the tables, he couldn’t help the way his thoughts lingered on the man from the library.
Despite his protests to the contrary, he was Regulus Black, wasn’t he? There was no way he looked so similar, had such a similar name, and just happened to be around the age Regulus would be now if he had lived. Reginald Green had to be an alias, and not even a particularly creative one.
And yet, Remus was at a loss as to exactly what sort of game he was playing. Sirius had done some investigation back in the day and had been certain his brother defected from the Death Eaters, which was certainly consistent with his complete absence from the second war. But it was also a well-known fact that nobody left the Death Eaters and lived. If Regulus was indeed living in a Muggle town under an assumed name, how exactly had he made it through the final two years of the first war, not to mention the three years after Voldemort’s return? And why had he never come forward to reveal his survival, either in 1981 or 1998? Surely the heir to a family of prejudiced pure-bloods wouldn’t want to live among Muggles any longer than was strictly necessary.
Had Sirius been wrong? Was Regulus not, in fact, a traitor, but an active Death Eater on a deep cover mission? That might fit with the fact that he was still in hiding, Remus thought; there was no reason to blow his cover now if he had been loyal to the losing side. Even for someone like him, life among Muggles must still be preferable to life in Azkaban.
And yet, if he had kept up with Wizarding news, he would know that was never going to happen. Remus clearly remembered the piece printed in the Prophet, a few months after the end of the war, announcing a posthumous pardon for Regulus Black at the request of Harry Potter himself. Why, exactly, no one knew; Harry had been very vague about it, but he had absolutely insisted that Regulus died a hero and deserved to be remembered as such.
Remus wasn’t about to bother Harry about this. Not when he knew Harry would be more interested in telling him to stop running from his problems than answering his questions about a man who supposedly died two decades ago. In any case, what proof did he have that the man at the library was Regulus? Maybe he really was Reginald Green and the whole thing was just a very odd coincidence.
That sounded an awful lot like an excuse, but Remus would take it. He could keep an eye on “Reginald” on his own. If he was as harmless as Harry and Sirius seemed to think, there was nothing to worry about, and if he did turn out to be dangerous - well, Remus was a member of the Order. He could handle one Dark Wizard.