Chapter Text
Lyall Lupin was no stranger to libraries. He had always been the quiet sort, more comfortable navigating the arc of a story than he was navigating the flow of conversation. It was no surprise to his parents when he had been sorted into Ravenclaw – and it had been no less than a dream come true for Lyall himself.
At his primary school, his love of reading had isolated him from his peers. They thought him strange, off-putting, boring. But in Ravenclaw, he found peers that shared his interest. The first time someone asked if they could sit next to him in the library, he instinctively wanted to say no. He didn’t like to be interrupted when he was reading, and he didn’t like having to figure out what to say to people. But, he could still hear echoes of his mother’s farewell on the train platform, a soft spoken plea. Try to make friends, love. You are much too splendid to be lonely.
So he had nodded yes to the boy with missing front teeth and freckled skin. Lyall had started to mark his page, bracing for the inevitable interruption, only to have the boy plop into the chair across from him, pull out his own book, and dive right in.
Lyall stared for a moment, sure the boy would say something. Everyone always did, even when Lyall wished they wouldn’t. When the boy seemed to have no such intention, Lyall turned back to his own book, tucking a small smile between the pages.
Lyall and the boy read in the library together every day that week. And the following week, a girl with thick-rimmed glasses and a round face joined them. The three Ravenclaw first years continued in this manner, quietly reading together, day after day, until one day, the boy approached Lyall in the common room and asked if he wanted to play chess, and the girl waved at him in the hall and called out plans for later, and Lyall realized… he had actually made friends!
Together, Lyall, Amelia, and Flynn learned the beauty of sitting in silence with another person. They learned the joy of having someone to hear their gasp of excitement when they reached a particularly thrilling passage. They learned the warmth of kindness you felt when someone let you explain your book to them, and the quiet patience of listening in return.
Whenever Lyall thought back on his time at Hogwarts, his mind almost always floated to the worn, patchy couches in the corner of the library, tucked behind a section of books no one paid any attention to. He thought of the sun streaming through the stained glass window, the sound of three sets of pages turning, quiet whispers that grew slowly to fuller conversation. He thought about how far he came, how slowly he transformed from a shy, awkward 11 year old to a - albeit still quiet - more confident, assertive 17 year old. He thought about how grateful he was to have found people that helped him get there.
Now, Lyall was long beyond his Hogwarts days. And those childhood promises to always stay close and to never leave each other's sides faded into careers and families and houses. Amelia married an American muggle soon after they left school and moved out of the country. They stayed in touch through letters that slowly became less and less frequent, until they were nothing more than annual holiday cards.
Flynn and Lyall had remained close for a while, both starting off in entry level research positions for a small department in the Ministry. But slowly their careers took them in different directions, and they saw each other less and less.
Lyall hadn’t even noticed the growing distance between him and his friend until he met a bold and brilliant Muggle girl at the local public library, and went to go tell Flynn, only to realize the two hadn’t even spoken in weeks.
Lyall’s life soon became full of moonlit dates, lessons in Muggle things, petty arguments, flowers, and love note apologies. He fell so deeply in love with Hope Howell, his heart didn’t even have room for the loneliness his mother had once cautioned him against as a boy. And soon Hope was expecting, and Lyall had felt more than he had in his entire life, emotions he didn’t even know if he could put words to.
Lyall made new friends through work and eventually he barely even thought about his first friends.
His new friends were… louder. More opinionated. More arrogant. They were all eagerly climbing the ladder, unafraid of stepping on toes as they rose into new positions. Lyall learned when to not be so quiet. He learned that sometimes he had to yell to be heard. And he learned that sometimes he had to be the one to do the hurting before he was the one that could be hurt.
Or he thought that’s what he was learning.
In the weeks following his son’s attack, Lyall spent a lot of time combing through all these so-called lessons. He went back through his life, turning the years back like pages, looking for the tear or the bend or the error. Looking for the point at which he went wrong. The point at which he became a person who’s careless actions had caused his own son such painful, irreparable damage.
Sometimes he wondered… if he had never lost touch with Flynn and Amelia, would this even have happened? Maybe if he still had them in his life, he would have remained gentle and soft. Maybe he wouldn’t have made such exaggerated, hateful comments about werewolves just to hear the praise of his peers. Maybe he wouldn’t have penned such harsh regulations simply to show his competitors that he had the power to do so.
Sometimes he wondered so harshly, he began to hate Flynn and Amelia. Blamed them for leaving him. Blamed them for not stopping him from becoming a person he did not recognize.
But that never lasted long. He knew it was misguided, even when his anger was at its peak. Yet, despite knowing this, he couldn’t help the thought from recurring in the darkest of moments. After all, it was the only bout of cold water he had to splash on the ever-burning flames of self-hatred churning in his stomach.
He wallowed in his hatred, his despair, his anger. He took a leave from work, buried himself in his room, and made excuses to stay up late, only climbing into bed once Hope was soundly asleep. And he only saw Remus in glimpses.
He couldn’t bear to look at his poor boy, covered in bandages and walking with a limp through their house. The very being Lyall loved most in the world, so visibly marked by the very worst of Lyall.
Hope indulged him for a while, let him be. She tended to Remus’ injuries, supplied him with love and comfort, held him through his nightmares and his tears. She would make small attempts to reengage Lyall – a brief glance across the kitchen, a soft prompt in conversation, an unassuming question. Hope may not have grown up with knowledge of werewolves, but she knew what it was like to be in pain. She knew what it was like to face the darkness of the world, and the darkness within oneself. So she spent the first few weeks after the attack taking care of her boys, tethering both of them to this world with every scrap of joy she had to give.
But Hope wasn’t one to sit on her hands, and there was only so long that she would stand for Lyall’s pity party.
“Time’s up.” The overhead lights in the bedroom flicked on, causing Lyall to recoil into the duvet that was promptly torn from the bed.
“Hope–”
“Don’t. You’ve had your wallowing. Now it’s time to get up.”
“But–”
“No, Lyall. You fucked up. It sucks, and now our son is paying for it.”
Lyall did sit up at this, shocked with the crudeness of his wife’s words. Defensiveness and anger swirled bitterly within him.
“I know you didn’t mean to,” she continued, giving him a look that stopped him before he even started. “I know you would do anything you could to undo it. It’s a fucking shit situation.”
Hope moved closer to the bed, putting both her hands on her husband’s face, tilting his head to face her, and looking him dead in the eye.
“Our son needs you. I am doing all I can, but I can only do so much. The first moon is on Thursday. And I have no way to protect him from that. I need help preparing him for that. He needs you. I need you.”
Hope swiped her thumb lightly across Lyall’s cheek, pushing aside the tear Lyall hadn’t even realized he had shed.
“But more than that, I will not have you hurting our son anymore than he has already been hurt. If you continue in this manner, he will feel that. He is already scared, he is already in pain. And as he gets older, he will start to feel shame. I will not have you treating him like a monster, and I will not have you hiding from him because you are too much of a coward to face him.
“You have every right to be sad and angry and in pain. But remember that as much as this sucks for you, it is worse for him. He is the one that has to live with it. And he doesn’t have the luxury of turning away from it. So it is our responsibility to do everything in our power to minimize his pain in whatever way we can. We may not be able to undo this, but we can make damn sure our son knows that he is loved. We can make sure he knows that his life doesn’t end here. We can make sure he knows that he is valuable and worthy and… and human .”
As Hope spoke, her eyes radiated power. Her hands on Lyall’s head tightened slightly, holding his head firm in her passion. Lyall loved her so fiercely in that moment, the sore of that love a welcome gasp of air.
“You’re right,” Lyall whispered. “It’s time I do better.”
“Damn straight, Lyall Lupin. Damn straight.” And she kissed him like punctuation.
***
That conversation with Remus before his first moon was the single most difficult thing Lyall had ever done. Or it was, until he had to sit outside the cellar door, listening to the bones in his baby’s body break until the beast Lyall had summoned clawed its way into the world.
And in the morning, as Lyall sat beside his sleeping boy, performing every healing spell he knew, he vowed to do everything in his power to ease this burden he had placed upon his son.
As soon as Remus was feeling well enough, Lyall took him to the library in the nearest wizarding town. When Remus was little, Lyall used to take him to the local library all the time, eager to share his love of books with his son. It was a habit he had too easily let go of as work picked up and his life became too busy, but it was one Lyall had every intention to rebuild.
Their trips to the library took on a steady routine. They would spend the first half of their visit browsing the shelves together, Lyall pointing out authors he liked, Remus pointing out books with goofy covers. Then they would split up, Lyall to the tables to pour over his research, Remus to the children’s section. Once Remus had a sizable stack of books he wanted, he would run over to where Lyall sat and together they would sort out the books Remus wanted the most. Depending on the time, Lyall would read him one book there in the library, then they would check out the rest and go home.
Remus mainly liked books about creatures – fairies and frogs and nifflers and kangaroos. Muggle or magical, it didn’t matter. Lyall focused on finding any and all information he could on werewolves – protection, healing, history, expectations. He was horrified to find most books on the subject focused on hunting rather than helping, or were potion guides for the magical uses of werewolf skin and claws and teeth. On a particularly difficult day, Lyall found a citation for one of his own policies in a hunter’s guide. He had to practically run out of there with a protesting Remus in his arms, just barely making it home and to the toilet before being sick.
They spent a week after that going only to muggle libraries before Lyall had the courage to return to his research.
Then, after five full moons had passed, at the bottom of a random page of a random book, just as Lyall’s eyes were beginning to fall over the letters, he was startled to attention. Some have speculated on the use of aconite as a potential cure for lycanthropy, though research is underdeveloped.
Lyall’s heart was pounding as he checked out any and all books he could find that even seemed to reference aconite in passing.
“This may actually be it, Hope! This might be the answer!” Lyall was pacing around the kitchen that night after Remus had gone to bed, feeling mad with the energy bubbling in his veins.
Hope did not seem to feel the same. She sat at the table, nursing a mug of tea, watching her husband skeptically.
“I thought there was no cure.”
“I thought so too! But it said there might be! There’s hope , don’t you get it? Hope!”
“Yes, but–”
“Hope, Hope. Hope! Ha, get it?”
“Lyall…” Hope sighed.
“It all might not be ruined after all. This might actually fix everything.”
“Okay, enough!” Hope slammed the book in front of her closed, the one Lyall had slid towards her earlier. Lyall stopped his pacing. “The book says it has potential . And that the research has not yet been conducted.”
“But it’s promising! It’s something! Don’t you get it?”
Hope stood up, walking towards Lyall.
“You said yourself you haven’t found anything else mentioning this plant or a cure. So even if it might be something, it’s still so so far from being anything that will help Remus.”
“I can’t believe you!” Lyall jerked away from her. “Why aren’t you more excited about this? This could be the answer, Hope. This could be the solution .”
“We don’t need a solution, Lyall. Our son is not a problem . He has a condition, and we will accommodate it.”
“Of course we will, but if there was some way that we didn’t have to–”
“We should be focusing on figuring out how to best support him now . This so-called cure is years from being anything of use. Our son is facing this now . We need to focus on helping him, not on fixing him.”
“But just think about what this could mean for his future! He could go to Hogwarts, he could make friends, he could get a job someday, he could–”
“He can do all those things just fine as he is now!” Hope shouted, before catching herself and lowering her voice so as not to disturb Remus sleeping upstairs. “You talk as though his life as it is is less valuable than if he were not a werewolf. And I will not stand for that.”
“Of course I don’t think that. You just don’t get what it’s like for werewolves in the wizarding world.”
“I may not be a wizard, Lyall, but I am fully capable of understanding prejudice. I am not so naive to think that people will always be kind to him, or that people will always understand him. But shouldn’t we be teaching him how to stand up to that, how to prove them all wrong? Shouldn’t we be teaching him to have self-worth?”
“Of course.”
“So that’s what we will do. We will focus on doing everything we can to raise our son as a werewolf . And he will go to school, and make friends, and fall in love, and get a career as a werewolf . Or, you know what, he can grow up to be a bum that doesn’t leave my couch ‘til he’s forty and we will love him anyway! Because he is our son and we will not treat him as though he is less than just because his father made a mistake when he was a child!”
Hope dropped her mug in the sink and made her way to the kitchen door, pausing briefly in the archway to look back at her husband.
“I suggest you spend less time thinking of ways to fix him, and more time learning to love him for who he is, claws and all.”
Lyall stared after her briefly before collapsing into a kitchen chair and heaving his head into his hands.
Hope was right.
Lyall knew Hope was right.
But how could he just sit back and do nothing?