Chapter Nine
My one dream, my only master
Too long I roam in the night
I’m coming back to his side to put it right
On the morning of September 1st, they both woke up late. Remus hadn’t been sleeping well. Guilt nagged away at him, and he felt fear too, for Harry. Every day he worried something bad would happen.
Harry, on the other hand, was hardly worried about anything. Perhaps Remus should have urged more caution into him, but every time Harry put his feet up on the coffee table, or helped himself to more food without asking, Remus felt him relaxing into the flat as a home, and he couldn’t bear to disrupt it. So while anxiety had messed up Remus’s sleep pattern, Harry had slept too deeply, and now they were late.
They made it to the train just in time. Remus handed Harry his bag, and went off to sit at the front of the train. Harry needed time with his friends, his very loud and excitable friends, and Remus needed to sleep.
He’d been dozing peacefully for a couple of hours, when the nightmares found him again. He was on the street; wizards were celebrating all around him, but they were too loud and the colours were all too bright… Voldemort was gone, but so was Remus’s entire world. James was dead. Lily was dead. Peter was dead. And Sirius was -
Remus woke suddenly. The dream hung around him still, and the cold feeling did not dissipate. In the corridor outside his carriage, a dark shape floated past. Fear crept up his spine. He knew what that was, and he had to find Harry. Now.
By the time he reached Harry’s carriage, the Dementor was already half way inside. Remus had been right to suspect that it would be drawn to him; Harry’s trauma was like a feast. But Remus’s past could give Harry’s a run for its money, and sure enough, the Dementor turned to face him instead. Remus looked at Harry and thought about how he’d looked when Remus had offered to let him move in. His wolf patronus pounced on the Dementor, chasing it away, but as it did Harry slid to the floor.
Remus looked at his pale body on the floor - with his eyes closed he was all James, and suddenly all the air left his body. He staggered, his vision blurred, but then Harry coughed, once, and his eyes opened. Lily’s eyes brought Remus back to the present. He wasn’t a child anymore, and he had to take responsibility here.
“What - what happened?” Harry was asking. “Who screamed?”
“No one screamed.” Replied Ron.
“But I heard screaming - ”
Remus broke up the scene with slabs of chocolate. Rowan’s gift had finally come into its own. Remus vowed never to tell him.
“Here” he said to Harry, echoing Rowan’s words to him. “Eat it. It’ll help.”
Remus tried to arrange his features in a way he hoped made him look calm, and not like Harry had just taken years off his life.
“What was that thing?” Harry asked.
Remus sighed, yet more monsters he was tasked with explaining to a teenager. There should have been no place for them on the Hogwarts train.
“A Dementor.” Said Remus. He remembered there were other kids in the carriage he was meant to also be responsible for, and started handing them chocolate too. “One of the Dementors of Azkaban.”
Harry opened his mouth, and Remus knew what he was going to ask, and who Harry was thinking about at that moment. But he didn’t want to answer questions about Sirius Black, so instead he said
“I need to speak to the driver, excuse me…”
By the time Remus had made it to the front of the train, his icy fear had boiled over into anger. Yelling at the train driver was not enough. He sent a rather short owl to Professor McGonagall to let her know what had happened. As soon as he arrived at the castle, he was ready to fight Dumbledore too, but Dumbledore seemed to be mirroring his own fury.
That was a first, from the man made of ice.
It turned out that Dumbledore was as against the Dementors’ presence as he was. The two men appraised each other, and mentally he added it to their very short list of common ground. Dumbledore had also made good on his promise to employ Hagrid, so begrudgingly Remus added that, too.
*
Rowan had tasked Remus with giving lessons to Hagrid. He’d already arranged getting Hagrid a new wand, and Remus had drawn out some lesson plans. The Ministry didn’t have any adult-learning courses in place, so Remus was going to have to make it up as he went along. It didn’t help that Hagrid lost nearly all his confidence after the hippogriff incident. Remus pushed through.
“I just don’t know if I’m ready to give up the umbrella” Hagrid admitted.
In the end, they decided to hang it from the roof of the greenhouse Hagrid had set up to grow tomatoes. Remus taught him a misting charm, and the umbrella served its duty, gently hydrating the plants. He found Hagrid was more able to concentrate on a spell if it was rooted in nature. The man didn’t have an aggressive bone in his body, so duelling lessons were out. He already knew more than Remus about the creatures that lived in the forest, and in fact was teaching Remus about centaurs. It would be helpful for his next meeting with The Unicorn. Remus asked how Hagrid had managed all these years, heading into the forest without a wand.
“Yeh looking at it the wrong way.” Hagrid was getting the fire on his hearth going as he spoke, using a muggle method despite having just been taught how to start a flame by Remus.
“Wizards are always calling their wands ‘protection’, but they’re weapons. And tha’s how the rest of us lot see ‘em. Now, I’m not saying they’re not useful,” he glanced at Remus. “But you don’t go onto someone’s territory, armed like that, an’ expect them to see you as anything but an extension of that weapon.”
It surprised Remus to hear Hagrid separate himself from wizards. It reminded him of the werewolves he’d lived with in a pack, and in a way, they had a point.
He thought about it as he left Hagrid’s, smiling as Hagrid unlocked his own door to let Remus leave with a perfectly executed ‘alohomora’. He recognised their shared position, straddling two worlds that desperately fought to remain separate. Hagrid had no connections to other giants now, and that made Remus sad for him. It was a lonely life.
Back on his official syllabus, Remus had taken on more hours in the absence of Lockhart. It was giving him less time to think about Black’s escape, but more time to worry about Harry, who it seemed he’d pissed off somehow.
It had begun well. He’d located a Boggart for the third year students to practise on, and was having great fun at first making it transform into Snape wearing old lady clothes. He wished he’d had a camera on him, but he had no one to show it to anyway.
The problem was with Harry. When he stepped up to the Boggart, Remus suddenly realised what form it would be likely to take, and he stepped in front of him protectively. He had thought he’d passed it off relatively smoothly, handing it back to Neville before anyone had too good a look at the very obvious moon that was in front of them. But he sensed he’d done something wrong when Harry swept out the room without looking at him.
A couple of weeks later, he spotted Harry wandering the halls alone. He called him into his office and asked where Hermione and Ron were.
“Hogsmeade.”
He sounded so dejected, Remus felt his heart slip down a little inside. He wasn’t sure how familiar he should be with Harry at school; whether to be more teacher or more his… guardian? Christ, Remus didn’t know what he was doing at all. He knew he wanted to share in Harry’s struggles, to help him where he could. And he sensed it wasn’t only Hogsmeade that was troubling Harry. He started to try and tease it out of him, gently, over tea. He watched Harry shut him down, first, exactly like a younger Remus would have done to a teacher. And then he watched him choose a different path and open up.
“You know that day we fought the Boggart?”
“Yes” Remus replied.
“Why didn’t you let me fight it?”
“I would have thought that was obvious, Harry.” Was this why Harry had been cold with him before?
“Why?” Harry asked.
Remus tried to be as frank as possible.
“Well, I assumed that if the Boggart faced you, it would assume the shape of Lord Voldemort.”
Harry stared at him blankly. Apparently, Remus was wrong again.
“I did think of Voldemort first.” Harry said, thoughtfully. “But then I - I remembered those Dementors.”
Remus smiled at Harry, which seemed to catch him off guard. The boy was so self-aware for his age. “Well, well, I’m impressed. That suggests that what you fear most of all is fear itself. Very wise, Harry.”
Remus thought of the other children in the class with their everyday, tangible fears. He wished more than anything that his fears were like theirs. It was a luxury neither he nor Harry would ever know.