Chapter Text
Remus Lupin had never wanted a child. Or at least never thought himself worthy of one.
There had been a time, long ago, when he imagined he might one day have one. Maybe a daughter, with her mother's eyes. Just a small, ordinary future built from things men rarely appreciate until they lose the possibility of them.
But life had a habit of teaching him the difference between wanting and deserving.
By twenty-one, Remus had buried three of his closest friends.
A fourth, condemned for their murders.
And the future he might have imagined for himself had vanished so completely that he scarcely remembered its shape.
The first war ended in silence for him.
While the wizarding world celebrated, while people poured into the streets, rejoicing the Voldemort's fall, Remus remembered funerals.
He remembered standing before two graves with mud clinging to the hem of his coat and wondering how the world expected him to continue turning inside it.
James and Lily Potter had been twenty-one years old.
Twenty-one.
The number seemed absurd even now. Far too young to become memories.
And Sirius—
Remus closed his eyes. Even after all these years, that wound remained strangely unfinished.
The newspapers called him a murderer. The Ministry called him a monster. The public called him the traitor who delivered James and Lily to Voldemort.
Remus had never quite found a name for what Sirius Black had been to him. Which was perhaps why losing him felt like losing several things at once.
The days that followed blurred together. Everyone seemed determined to continue living. Remus found the idea exhausting.
The war was over. That was what the papers said. Yet everywhere he looked, all he could see were the empty spaces everyone he cared for had left behind.
And Sirius—whether dead to him or merely lost—was absent too.
For weeks, Remus drifted through it all like a ghost haunting his own life.
Then came Dumbledore.
The man had an uncanny habit of appearing precisely when one least wished to be perceived.
Remus still remembered the knock at his door.
The small cottage he'd rented sat at the edge of nowhere, hidden beneath charms and surrounded by enough woodland to discourage visitors. Dumbledore crossed it as though he had every right.
Which, infuriatingly, he usually did.
And he brought news. Not of Sirius. The world already had plenty to say about Sirius Black. Every newspaper in Britain seemed intent on turning him into main topic of every article.
No.
Dumbledore came regarding the child Sirius had left behind.
In all the chaos that had followed Halloween, in all the headlines and accusations and grief, he had nearly forgotten there had been another casualty buried beneath the tragedy.
Isolde Black had died only weeks later.
No one seems to know how. Or care enough to look into it, anyway.
There were relatives, of course.
The ancient branches of the Black family tree stretched in every direction, tangled with old names, old money, and older prejudices. Other options existed too. The Tonkses. Families better suited to raising a child than a penniless werewolf living alone at the edge of nowhere.
Remus clung to that fact. He was not the obvious choice. He was not even a sensible one. And yet Dumbledore continued to look at him with that infuriating certainty that suggested the matter had already been decided somewhere beyond the reach of ordinary logic.
The very idea felt absurd. Remus Lupin could barely care for himself. Half his life was spent searching for work. The other half was spent losing it.
Every month left him bruised, exhausted, and increasingly uncertain of what future remained available to him.
A child deserved stability.
A child deserved safety.
A child deserved someone who did not spend nights locked behind reinforced doors waiting for the moon to pass.
The thought terrified him. He feared what might happen if she trusted him. For trust implied responsibility. And responsibility implied failure.
The world was already full of people he had failed to save. The list felt long enough without adding another name to it.
Yet Dumbledore had a talent for reducing impossible questions to painfully simple truths.
A three-year-old girl had become an orphan. And whether Remus felt worthy of the task ceased to matter beside that fact.
For several nights afterward, sleep abandoned him entirely. He sat awake listening to the wind move through the trees surrounding the cottage, turning the matter over and over in his mind as though repetition might somehow produce a different answer.
It never did.
By the end of the week, the decision had already been made.
Not because he believed himself capable.
That would be ridiculous.
But because no matter how many reasons he found to refuse, he could not find a single one that belonged to her rather than himself.
That morning, he found himself standing outside a Ministry office wondering when exactly his life had stopped belonging to him.
The door stood slightly ajar.
A little girl sat cross-legged upon the floor. Far smaller than he remembered. Three years old could scarcely be called a person yet. More possibility than certainty. More questions than answers.
A coloring book rested in her lap. One page had been colored almost entirely black. She seemed deeply pleased with herself.
Remus felt something in his chest fracture just enough to make room for her.
As though sensing his presence, she looked up.
Remus remembered standing there and realizing, with a strange sort of horror, that she had his eyes.
Sirius's eyes.
The same shade of grey. The same storm-colored gaze that had once looked across a Hogwarts classroom and declared, with complete certainty, that rules existed solely to be broken.
For one dreadful second, Remus saw his friend again.
Then she grinned. And everything changed.
People often spoke of life-altering moments as though they arrived with the clarity of a prophecy. As though the world paused long enough for one to recognize the importance of what was happening.
Remus had found the opposite was usually true. The most significant moments of a life often disguised themselves as ordinary ones.
"Owl," she announced proudly.
Remus looked down. The creature on the page resembled many things. An owl was not one of them.
"I see."
She seemed pleased by this assessment.
The Ministry witch stationed nearby rose from her desk, relieved enough to be almost impolite about it.
The paperwork followed shortly after. Entire stacks of parchment dedicated to reducing a human life into administrative procedure.
Remus ignored the growing sense that he was making a terrible mistake, silently signing wherever instructed.
Orelia spent the process entirely occupied with her coloring book. Occasionally she looked up to ask questions no one had prepared answers for.
"When's Mummy comin' back?"
"Where's Daddy gone?"
"Can I 'ave a biscuit?"
The last question proved considerably easier than the first two.
Hours later, when everything had finally been completed, the Ministry witch crouched beside her.
"You're going with Remus now."
Orelia considered this information seriously. Then she looked toward him with a frown.
Remus braced himself, half expecting the little girl to start crying.
Instead, she climbed to her feet, abandoned the coloring book entirely, and walked straight toward him.
Before he could react, small hands wrapped around one of his legs. The simplicity of it nearly undid him. Remus stared down at the top of her dark head.
Merlin help him. A strange, painful tightness climbed into his throat, lodging itself there until even drawing breath became an effort.
As the years passed, Sirius began returning to him in unexpected ways. Neither in dreams nor in photographs; he had long since buried those along with his best friends.
In Orelia.
It happened so gradually that Remus scarcely noticed it at first. A familiar tilt of the head. A particular look of mischief moments before an empty bucket dropped onto his head. The way her laughter seemed too large for the room containing it.
And her eyes.
They had always been Sirius's eyes, of course, but children possessed a merciful habit of changing. For a while, Remus had convinced himself she might grow into something entirely her own.
She never did.
With every passing year, the resemblance sharpened. Her dark hair grew longer. Her smile grew wider. Her expressions became painfully familiar.
By seven, she could talk her way into almost anything. By nine, she had discovered sarcasm.
By eleven, Remus had begun experiencing the peculiar sensation of being outnumbered by a man who had been imprisoned for over a decade.
Sirius had always moved through life as though rules were nothing more than gentle suggestions intended for other people. Orelia inherited that quality with alarming enthusiasm.
She climbed trees she had been expressly forbidden to climb. Wandered where she had been told not to wander. Asked questions most children possessed the sense to keep to themselves.
And whenever Remus attempted to reprimand her, she would fix him with those storm-grey eyes and offer a smile so reminiscent of her father that he found himself fighting laughter and exasperation in equal measure.
It was profoundly unfair.
Then again, Sirius Black had always been profoundly unfair.
The worst part was that she knew it. Somewhere around the age of ten, Orelia discovered precisely how difficult it was for him to deny her anything.
Remus suspected she had been exploiting the fact ever since.
By her eleventh birthday, Remus made the foolish mistake of believing Hogwarts might help.
In his defense, it seemed a reasonable assumption. Children grew up. They matured. They discovered responsibility, discipline, and the vague notion that authority figures occasionally knew what they were talking about.
Hogwarts had accomplished it for countless witches and wizards before her. There was no reason to believe Orelia would be any different.
In hindsight, Remus considered this one of the more spectacular failures of judgment in his life.
The train had barely departed King's Cross before he missed her. The cottage felt unnaturally quiet in her absence—larger somehow, emptier.
For the first few days, he found himself listening for footsteps that never came. Waiting for questions that would not be asked. Catching sight of abandoned books and half-finished drawings and feeling the peculiar ache of missing someone who was, by all accounts, perfectly fine.
Then Christmas arrived.
And with it came Orelia.
She burst through the front door carrying a trunk, a broomstick she absolutely did not need nor supposed to have, and enough energy to power a small village.
Remus had scarcely finished greeting her before she announced:
"I got three detentions."
Not I've missed you.
Not even hello.
Three. Detentions.
Delivered with the unmistakable pride of someone discussing academic achievement.
"Am I meant to be impressed?"
"Very much so."
He was not.
Unfortunately, she continued. Her stories were nearly endless: pranks, mischief, exploding ink bottles, a mysteriously charmed suit of armor, an incident involving enchanted soap and an entire corridor.
The details varied. The common denominator did not. Orelia was always involved.
Always.
"Professor McGonagall threatened to write to you."
Remus pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Threatened?"
"Well, she did write to you."
"That's not a threat."
Orelia waved a dismissive hand. "Eh,"
It only worsened from there.
By second year, she had accumulated detentions in three separate wings of the castle.
At some point during a spring break, she had informed him—quite seriously—that if Professor McGonagall ever developed an additional wrinkle, she would likely be responsible for it.
Remus had nearly choked on his tea.
The truly unfortunate part was that he could hear Sirius saying the exact same thing.
Sometimes, late at night, after she had gone to bed and the cottage had finally fallen silent, Remus would find himself wondering how it had happened.
How a child he had never expected to raise had become so thoroughly entwined with every corner of his life.
The answer never changed.
The years had gathered quietly around them, stacking one atop another until he could scarcely remember what life had looked like before her.
And perhaps that was the strangest thing of all.
He had spent so much of his life believing himself unfit for love, for responsibility, for permanence.
Yet somehow, despite every flaw, every mistake, every certainty that he would fail her, she stayed.
Fifteen years old now—brilliant, exasperating, far too willing to throw herself in trouble.
And if Remus occasionally looked at her and felt the old fear tightening in his chest — the fear that he would lose her too,
...Well. Some fears never truly left.
The first of September was approaching once again. Another year at Hogwarts awaited.
And Remus knew, this one would be unlike any other.