Lupin begins
People said time healed all wounds. Remus Lupin didn’t believe that.
Time didn’t heal. It just taught you how to hide the scars better.
The first one he couldn’t hide — the one curling along the left side of his face, twisting slightly at his cheekbone and ending just under his ear — was the only one anyone ever noticed. Strangers sometimes glanced at it too long, kids asked questions, and adults pretended not to.
He’d been twelve when it happened.
A single night. One spark. The world gone red and smoke-thick.
He remembered the sound before anything else — the crackling of flames, the roar of it. His mother’s voice screaming his name. His father trying to force the window open. The heat swallowing everything.
Remus remembered the weight of his mother’s arms around him. He remembered the smell of burnt wood and cloth and skin.
And then — black.
He woke up in a hospital three days later.
Burn unit. Second and third degree injuries along the side of his face, shoulder, and back.
His parents were gone.
They said it was an electrical fault. A wire that had been frayed for months. A fire that spread too fast for help to arrive in time. He’d lived. They hadn’t.
He didn't speak for two weeks.
No amount of therapy could make him forget the way the air had tasted like smoke, or how the silence afterward had been louder than the fire itself.
He bounced through the system for a while. Group homes, foster placements. Some good, some not. None permanent.
Grief made people uncomfortable. Burn scars even more so.
He learned how to keep to himself. Learned that books didn’t leave, and fire drills made his hands shake, and most people only asked about his face because they were too scared to ask about the rest of him.
By sixteen, he knew three things for sure:
He hated pity.
He hated fire.
He couldn’t let it win.
So he did the one thing no one expected.
He signed up for the academy.
It was stupid, maybe. Some reckless, self-destructive idea born from stubbornness and a need to prove something. Maybe to the world. Maybe just to himself. That fire hadn’t taken everything.
The instructors tried to talk him out of it. Told him it was hard. Dangerous. Traumatizing. They didn’t say the second part out loud, but he saw it in their eyes. You’ve already been through enough.
He didn’t care.
He worked harder than anyone else. Studied longer. Ran faster. Trained until his hands were raw and his body ached. Every time the flames roared in training drills, he saw his past. Every time he walked through them, he took it back.
The day he graduated, he didn’t smile. But he felt something close.
Station 81 wasn’t his first assignment.
His first two years were spent in smaller stations across the city — bouncing from one shift to another, working under captains who didn’t learn his name until month three. But he got the job done. Quietly. Reliably.
Frank Longbottom noticed.
Remus didn’t know what the man had seen in his transfer file that made him request him specifically, but he showed up at Station 81 a few weeks later with a duffel bag and no expectations.
And it surprised him — how quickly it felt like something close to home.
James was chaos and heart, Marlene was all edges and loyalty, and Frank was steady, always. The kind of captain who noticed when someone hadn’t slept and never asked why.
Station 81 was loud, messy, demanding. But it gave Remus structure. A purpose.
And for the first time in years, something started to settle in his chest.
He still carried it with him — the past. It clung to him in ways he didn’t always understand. In the way he double-checked every stove. In the way he kept a lighter in his pocket but never used it. In the way he flinched, sometimes, at the sound of sirens — even if they weren’t theirs
He never told the team the full story. Not really.
James knew bits. Enough to understand when not to push.
But no one asked directly. And Remus didn’t offer. It was easier that way. The fire had taken enough. It didn’t need to define him, too.
Still, every now and then, when he walked into a burning building, he felt it — that pulse of something old and sharp in his chest.
Fear, maybe.
Grief, definitely.
But not weakness.
Not anymore.
Sometimes, in the quiet moments — between calls, between chaos — he’d catch his reflection in the mirror.
The scar. The tired eyes. The boy who made it out.
And he’d think:
You're still here. You’re still standing.
And that counted for something.