Life After Death Part I: Waiting

There were three words that could sum up Remus Lupin’s life: waiting, worry and self-control. In their own way they defined him. When he thought about it, which was rarely, he would admit the waiting was the hardest. He had begun waiting the day when at six years old he had been bitten. He had waited for his parents to stop loving him because he was now a werewolf, waited for the other children to find out he was a monster and abandon him. He had waited for Hogwarts to decide they’d made a horrible mistake and expel him. Most of all he had waited for the day when he would loose control, loose his hold on the wolf. Remus Lupin was not a terribly optimistic person, but life hadn’t really given him a lot of incentive to be.
When Sirius had come into his life Remus had spent most of his time waiting for the day that Sirius would find someone else, or get sick of him, or simply come to his senses and realize Remus wasn’t worth it. After James and Lily’s death and Sirius’ imprisonment Remus spent his time waiting to forget, waiting to move on. When Sirius had come back Remus had started waiting for him to be taken away again. In that case at least he hadn’t needed to wait long. After that Remus simply started waiting to die, even that though turned out not to be the end of it.
Remus had died. Struck down in the heat of battle, everything proper, everything that was expected of him. As the spell was cast and he felt himself falling, he was seized be a great sense of satisfaction. It was over, ended, he could stop waiting. As darkness took him he knew he had won. He came back to consciousness, in a great deal of pain, lying among the rubble and the bodies of the fallen, and had to suppress hysterical laughter.
They found him hours later. After the final battle, after everything was over. At first there was a great deal of concern and then confusion, because Harry swore Remus had been numbered among the dead when Voldemort had finally been defeated. A great deal of interests circulated. Had he not been hit fully by the curse? Had he really died? Was this some kind of divine sign from the Powers that Be? Personally Remus had the horrible feeling someone some on a higher plain was playing a terrible joke on him.
He was the subject of much debate and interested for about a week. Then the wizarding world in general forgot about him and moved on rebuilding their lives. Remus moved back to the apartment he had lived in before the war. In time they offered him a job; it was after all the least they could do, him being a hero of the war and all. But he found the last thing he wanted to do was be an Aurora for the new ministry and spend his days sentencing dark wizards to Azkaban. He had already done that once, the last time around, and felt he had paid his due. He attended all the funerals he was supposed to. He even cried at Tonks’, feeling cold and numb inside, but mostly just guilty, because he hadn’t loved her, because he had been the one to survive. They had offered him back Teddy, but Remus had said his life was nothing a small child disserved, and left him with Tonks’ mother, who was more then happy to take the baby. They had offered him a job at Hogwarts, but he passed that up too. Finally however after a long and exhausting argument with McGonagall he had agreed to take on the job of librarian for Hogwarts. He kept his apartment though. Choosing not to move back to school, needing his privacy. Everything in his life now seemed strange, yet so familiar. Sometime he wondered if anything had happened at all, if Harry and the war and Sirius coming back, than dying had all been a dream. He started waiting again, but this time he was no longer sure what he was waiting for.
He kept on living. If he had been Sirius he knew he probably would have ended it; a silver bullet to the head, or burning the house down while he slept, poison maybe. Actually knowing Sirius the way Remus had, he would probably have gone overboard and tried all of the available methods at once, going out in a messy, brilliant, blaze of glory.
Remus is not Sirius however, and he goes on living now because that’s what he does. Even in his darkest moments he has always known that he’s too stubborn, too bound to his own tightly held self-control to be the one that does it. That ends it all. Besides he’s already tried dying. Instead he takes what remains of his life and pulls it around himself. He slides back into his routines, his small rituals. He waits for the full moon, using his potions to mute the wolf, if not tame him. He goes and sees Teddy every weekend, and owls Harry from time to time. Maybe he drinks a little too much and doesn’t sleep quite enough, but he survived. Of course he waits. After all waiting is one of the things he does best, one of the things that defines him. He waits for it to make sense. For him to understand why, he was spared, why he survived. Mostly he waits for his life to start again.