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sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-08 03:22 pm
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-08 03:22 pm
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Three Galleons, Ch. 3
Summary: After the war, Hermione has settled into a quiet if unorthodox life with Severus -- until a small problem in the form of a refugee spy calls for an even more unorthodox solution.
Rating: R for sexual content.
Notes:arsenicjade challenged me the other day to write Snape/Hermione/Lupin in a hurt/comfort scenario, and VOILA. Blame her. :D
Originally Posted 12/16/2006
Chapter 3
Hermione had very little time to meet Minerva and Richard McGonagall when they emerged from her living-room floo; Remus was in the bedroom and Severus in the kitchen, both liable to appear at any time.
"Thanks for coming," she said, taking their coats and hanging them on a nearby hook. "I need a quick word..."
"I'll say hello to Snape," Richard said, striding into the kitchen. Minerva, not a whit changed since she'd been Professor McGonagall, looked at Hermione expectantly.
"Remus has important news for you and I think you'll appreciate the effort he made," Hermione said in an undertone, "But you should be prepared. Did Severus tell you anything about his appearance?"
"Just that he's not what he once was."
"He looks bad, but he's mentally pretty sound," Hermione said.
"Has he told you anything?"
"Only the barest basics, and I'd rather not garble them."
"Of course," said the Minister for Magic, walking calmly with her into the kitchen. "Good evening, Severus."
Snape looked up from laying out the silverware and nodded curtly. The little breakfast table, a cheap drop-leaf Hermione bought second-hand, was just wide enough when expanded to seat four comfortably, five at a squeeze. There were five places set there now.
Remus appeared in the doorway, looking shy and undersized in Severus' clothing. If the McGonagalls noticed his obvious ill health, they gave no sign -- Minerva took his hands and greeted him warmly, and Richard clapped him on the back and said what a pleasure it was to meet the man he'd heard so much about, just as if what he'd heard was not that Remus was dead and buried.
They didn't speak of business while they dined, either, and the topic of why Minerva was there didn't arise until dinner was finished, Remus eating with a heartier appetite than anyone despite knowing what was to come. With the dishes cleared away, Severus reached into a cupboard and brought forth a bottle of Muggle whiskey, carrying it to the table along with five glasses and offering the first pouring to Remus, who sipped it and flushed almost immediately. He poured for the others and took his seat again.
"None of it will be pleasant," he said, tipping his head at the bottle. "I suspect we will all need this before the night is over."
Hermione herself drank two glasses. The story needed it. Remus sketched out a conspiracy that Voldemort had tolerated or perhaps not even known about, a community in eastern Europe that was training soldiers instead of schoolchildren and making best use of the destructive powers of werewolf blood. His time in a cell, the full moons during which he was forced into infecting others (volunteers, the only small mercy), and his escape he glossed over in favour of more important things: numbers of soldiers, plans he had overheard, ways in which they were open to attack. McGonagall questioned him longer than Hermione thought he could stand, longer than she herself could have stood without the whiskey.
She questioned him too on the merry chase he'd led his captors across Europe, after his escape -- how he almost reached the French border before having to fall back to Italy, how he had been too afraid of spies to send a message even if he knew where to send it, how he'd bypassed two Death Eaters and stowed away on an imports vessel crossing the Channel to get to England. Even Severus could find little negative to say about his resourcefulness.
Finally McGonagall stood and offered Remus her hand again.
"We'll take care of it," she said firmly. Remus wrapped his hand around hers, improperly, palm at an angle and fingers curling over her thumb.
"If you need me -- "
"Your job is to rest now," she replied, with a glance at Hermione. "Any expenses can be billed to the Ministry incidentals fund; if he insists, keep the receipts."
Remus smiled a little at that. "Now I feel like I'm home," he replied.
When they were gone, Hermione sighed at the dishes in the sink and decided they could soak until morning. Remus was half-drunk on the single glass he'd had, and anyway the more sleep the better; she helped him down the hallway and left him to undress. Severus was in the living room, swirling the last of his whiskey in his glass.
"Bed for us soon too, I think," she said.
"The sofa again?" Severus asked. "Or the bed?"
She looked down the hallway, thinking.
"Is it so terrible to offer him a little comfort?" she asked. "You were a spy during the war, Severus. You know better than I do what he wants. What did you want?"
He considered the drink in his glass.
"Somewhere to be quiet and safe, and someone to tell me I could be," he admitted. It was the closest thing to actual vulnerability she'd ever seen in him. "And if you're fishing for compliments about whether or not you've provided me those things -- "
"Wouldn't dream of it," she grinned. "The bed, then? Just for one more night?"
"Fine, but this time he had better be wearing bedclothes. And tomorrow he must be dressed. He can't go running about in my clothing. I'll see to it before I open the shop. He will need wolfsbane, as well; the moon is ten days away, enough time to brew. I suppose the old Grimmauld Place basement will do for the rest."
Hermione solemnly reached into her pocket and presented him with the small sack of Galleon coins. He snorted, but he also smiled and pocketed them.
Remus was in bed when they came in, his eyes on the door; he closed them as they changed and she thought he was asleep until she lifted the covers and he flinched back, eyes at once wide and cautious. He turned when he felt Severus on his other side, still wary.
"We'll sleep here tonight," Hermione said. "You don't have to watch the door."
"You needn't -- "
"You have to sleep," she ordered, pulling the blanket up over their shoulders together. Severus was lying on top of it again with his own blanket, some kind of foolish masculine conceit, she supposed.
"We'll be here," she said. Remus watched her with those awful, frightened eyes for a minute, but his breathing slowed and eventually his eyelids drooped.
Hermione was almost asleep herself when she heard him draw breath. "Severus..."
"Do shut up, Lupin," Severus answered, from somewhere far away. "I feel quite sufficiently a fool as it is without your naptime confessions."
Hermione laughed a little but she was tired, too, and if Remus replied she was already fast asleep.
***
The Ukranian Business, as the newspapers had inaccurately taken to calling it, was a mess, but McGonagall had been given the time to prepare. When all was said and done it was minor compared to the war. Severus and Hermione and Remus read about it in the newspapers, but it was no part of their lives in their warm little flat. It was, finally, not their war anymore. Remus spent most of his time reading, when he wasn't eating, and slowly he grew into the clothing Severus provided, his face rounding out and his hair turning shaggy as it lost its strawlike roughness. He didn't speak about the prison again, but from some stray indiscretion she learned that they had kept his head shaved, probably for no other purpose than to remind him that nothing was his own. He was healing, though in the evenings there was a dullness to his eyes that Hermione didn't like.
And then there was Tonks.
He'd asked about her, a few days after his arrival, and Hermione sent Severus away because for once his acid insistence on facing reality would do no great service.
"I suppose she's dead," Remus said, looking at Hermione's face. Hermione shook her head, not meeting his eyes. "No?"
"She's in Paris," she said, and Remus laughed hollowly. He'd spent a week in Paris on his way home; Tonks, who could have saved him trouble and starvation, was never more than a few miles away. "She's studying art there."
"Art?" he asked. "What on earth...?"
"She couldn't stay an Auror, not after the war," Hermione murmured. "She lost her sense of proportion, she knew she wasn't holding together well. That wasn't just you -- it was everything."
"I see. But -- Paris isn't so far, why...?"
"She's married," Hermione blurted. "She thought you were dead and she couldn't mourn forever -- that's not in her, Remus, you must know that..."
He put one hand on hers, his fingers cold.
"I didn't expect a parade and my girl waiting for me when I came back," he said. "I didn't think I'd come back at all. It's all right, Hermione."
Hermione covered his hand with hers, trying to warm it. "It's a pretty welcome home for you."
"Nymphadora and I -- were always tempestuous at best," he said. "I haven't the energy for that anymore. I know what I am, Hermione. Severus says it when he thinks I can't hear. Broken. Coming home was my last fight. There isn't any left."
She looked at his face, seamed and drawn. He looked closer to sixty than forty-five.
***
Out in the world, Remus was an anonymous hero, but could not remain so forever. A tactless clerk in the Ministry told the story to a friend who talked about it over lunch with another friend and was overheard by a keen-eared young opportunist who went straight to the Prophet with the news. Remus Lupin was alive, the Prophet trumpeted without a shred of actual evidence, and was living in a flat off Charing Cross Road, and furthermore was the hero who had crossed Europe to bring the news of the Ukranian Business to Great Britain.
Owls poured in. Reporters set up camp and regularly had to be driven off by Severus, who was not averse to wielding a heavy stick in addition to his wand. Hermione had to take a leave from her job because they began turning up there, too. Severus obstinately kept his shop open, hurling jars of rat kidneys and sharp dissection tools at anyone who dared broach the subject.
Remus, bewildered as a child in the face of all the attention, seemed to think that they ought to be polite. As the weeks had turned into months he had gained enough strength to go out walking or dine quietly at a cafe in Diagon, provided he glamoured himself sufficiently to pass unnoticed. Now suddenly these curious people had pent him up in Hermione's flat again, and too many people wanted to see him. Harry, Neville, Kingsley, Alastor, half of the students he'd taught, most of the professors he'd taught with. Harry came often, because Harry understood; he had carried the burden of a war on his shoulders as well. He was respectful of Remus, treating him at once like a father and a child, bringing him treats from Diagon and asking for his advice on love affairs and matters of business. Some nights Hermione and Severus went to bed and left Harry and Remus sitting up in the kitchen, heads bent together, speaking quietly. Sometimes he didn't come to bed until two in the morning -- but he still came to bed, creeping in next to Hermione or curling up with his back to Severus.
Hermione hadn't believed that he really was broken in those first few days, but now she did. He never rose to baits that Severus carefully and deliberately laid, and he did all he was told to do with quiet efficiency, even when Severus tested him by asking the unreasonable. Hermione's flat, which had been almost exclusively the place she and Severus slept, had become a refuge; if they wanted to make love, they went to the cramped loft over the potions shop. Severus complained, but he sharply brushed off all alternative suggestions for where Remus could go so that they could have the place to themselves again. If nothing else, the wretch needed easy access to his potions, and someone to see to his physical needs after the moon, as they always did.
It was strange, not so much to have an interloper in their bed but that she didn't realise for two months that this was what he was. She hadn't seen him as an intruder on their domestic lives -- he was someone to be cared for and protected, and they were there whether he wanted them or not, to do the protecting. It only occurred to her later that he was an interruption, and might see himself as such. He accepted their charity in a way he would have been horrified to do five years ago, but there was still a spark of pride underneath.
And as time passed Hermione discovered him, the way she'd discovered men who looked at her on the street when she wore a short skirt in the summer. His eyes would drift over her body in the act of noticing that she was in the room, and he would turn back to his book with a slight flush on his cheeks; at dinner, if she reached across him for the salt, he watched the sway of her breasts under her shirt and then hurriedly flicked his eyes to Severus to be sure he hadn't seen.
One morning she woke to hear him whimpering, his face pressed against the pillow, and before she thought about it at all she brushed the hair from his forehead.
"Remus, wake up," she whispered. "It's only a dream."
Then he shifted and she let out a startled "Eep." What she'd taken for his knee or the edge of his hip in her half-awake state now proved to be most definitively something else. At the same moment as she felt his erection press against her thigh, his eyes opened wide in a panic. Somewhere on the other side, Severus snorted in his sleep.
Hermione gathered her wits about her.
"You were having a nightmare, I think," she said, ignoring her body's own reaction to the knowledge -- a sudden tightness in her belly and a sensitivity to the slide of her nightshirt across her breasts. He still stared at her, panicked, face pale. "It's all right. Do you want a glass of water?"
"Please," he said, thick-tongued, and she slid out of bed. She took her time finding a glass in the kitchen and filling it; by the time she returned, he had apparently got his body under control and looked -- well, not satisfied, but at least relieved. He sat up and took the water from her, while she sat herself on the edge of the bed.
"Perhaps I ought to start looking for somewhere of my own," he said, pressing the glass to his forehead. "I'm disturbing your sleep now."
"Not Severus'," she observed sardonically. Severus slept on.
"Yes, but you two have been good to me and I shouldn't like to overstay my welcome. McGonagall said she could offer me a small flat and a pension -- for my services to my country," Remus added with a quirk of a smile. "Harry's said I could stay with him, too."
"Don't go," Hermione insisted, tipping his face up so that he met her eyes. She took the glass out of his hand and set it on the desk. "It's no inconvenience, and we like having you here. I like having you here. You balance him, a little, you know," she said, indicating Severus with a tilt of her chin. "I love him and we get on well, because we understand each other, but -- since you've come, you've been...a buffer. Someone else to take some of the edge when he's being awful. And I like you. I always have. I want you to stay."
He nodded, not taking his eyes from her face.
"You can't fight, and Severus can't do anything else. So it's really like having two halves of one full man," she added, smiling, and he lifted his face the few inches it took to kiss her.
She opened her mouth to say something but his lips were already pressed against hers, and she felt his tongue trace the edge of her upper lip shyly. It sparked warmth down to her fingertips, the newness of another man kissing her, overriding the urge to stiffen and pull away. No matter; he jerked back in the middle of it, nearly falling onto the bed, staring wide-eyed at her.
"I'm so sorry," he gasped, fingers tightening in the blankets. "Merlin -- Hermione -- "
"It's okay," she said quickly. "It's not -- "
"It's just been so long," he interrupted, breath coming in short gasps. "Years, and I...when I left you were just a little girl and I came back and suddenly there was this woman who used to be Hermione."
She reached out to touch his face, but he flinched away.
"Severus is good to me, I can't possibly, not that you would want to, I just, I'm so sorry," he fumbled. Severus, still sleeping on the other half of the bed, snorted and shifted, pushing himself up on one elbow.
"Do you mind?" he asked. "One does like to get more than ten minutes of sleep around here."
"Remus and I were just going to get breakfast," Hermione said.
"Hrmf," he said, as he collapsed back into the blankets. Remus was pale and still.
"It's okay," she whispered, smiling at him. "I understand. Why don't you wash, and I'll make tea."
He gave her a grateful look and brushed past quickly; she heard the snick of the door locking behind him and then, shortly after, the sound of running water.
When Remus emerged there was toast in the rack and the tea was steeping; she poured a cup and put it in front of him when he sat down.
"Thank you," he said meekly, stirring some milk into it and sipping carefully. Hermione went to get the butter.
"You know," she said casually, having pondered the problem for several minutes, "Severus knows a few prostitutes."
Remus choked on his tea and coughed violently.
"It's true," she continued, as he sopped up the spillage. "They come in for contraceptive and aphrodisiac potions all the time. I'm sure we could find someone for you, if it is just -- needs. Women and men," she added.
"That's very generous," he managed, still coughing. He ate a few bites of dry toast and then set the slice down carefully. "I'm sorry, did you suggest male prostitutes to me?"
She shrugged.
"I suppose that means you know about Sirius and I?"
"Tonks knew. You were dead, she didn't think there was any harm in telling Harry, as if it would be a comfort that you and Sirius were together again. He told us -- Ron and me."
"Yes, well." Remus sipped his tea carefully. "It's a lovely offer, Hermione, but..."
"I find the idea a little distasteful, but I thought you ought to know it's an available resource," she said. "If it would make you feel better."
Remus gave her a sardonic look. "Well, you've succeeded in taking me out of myself, that's certain. I had thought breakfast might be rather awkward, but I should have known better."
Hermione carried her own teacup to the table along with the butter, sitting across from him.
"You wouldn't be very comfortable with a stranger?" she suggested.
"That would be...a good way of putting it, though that's not all of it," he replied. "I don't want some strange woman, or some strange man. There's an inequality there that I couldn't overcome. I'd rather be alone. Merlin, how old are you? I can't imagine why I'm discussing it with you."
"Severus is the same age as you are, and we talk about sex all the time. We have a great deal of it, if it comes to that," she said. "Remus, you know that I am nothing if not sensible."
"I suspect that was -- why I kissed you," he said. "Life is comfortable here. If there is inequality, it is on my side, not yours. I don't mind that, you wouldn't rub it in and it's the one thing Severus never touches on, though Merlin knows he's done plenty of that in the past. I think -- I wouldn't trust anyone but you. Both of you."
"How many lovers have you had?" she asked curiously. Remus frowned. "Sorry -- you needn't answer, I just wondered. It's only been Ron and Severus for me. Well, and I kissed Parvati once on a dare, but I don't think that counts."
He grinned a little. "No, I suppose you have a right to ask..." he cast his eyes up to the ceiling. "Alina Bones, fourth year, she was my first. I fancied Severus for a while, at school, but we never got on and besides, Sirius was like a force of nature once he'd made up his mind. It was Sirius up until a few weeks before James and Lily were killed. After that, there was a woman when I was about thirty, Rowan something. My mind is going, I fear. Oh, also a young man named Jack Gregorian. Then Sirius again, and Nymphadora."
"So there have been other men?"
"Oh yes. I never bothered much being ashamed of it; who notices or cares what a werewolf does?"
Hermione patted his arm. "Well, we care, now."
"That's a good deal of the problem, Hermione," he said. "I don't look at people on the street and think, if I don't have a shag soon I'm going to strangle myself. But I look at you and Severus and...I would never, never try to come between you. You do know that."
"It wouldn't be up to you. I doubt Severus would be susceptible to your charms, and I wouldn't break his heart."
"Good. I'm sure it'll go away, given time."
Hermione had her doubts, but at that point Severus skulked in and crankily poured himself some tea, effectively ending the conversation. He was surly and quiet, eating quickly and leaving for the shop without much fanfare; once he was gone, Hermione put on her coat and left Remus at the kitchen table.
"I'd better check in at the archives," she said. "I'll be home before five. You can come, if you like."
"I think I'll stay here. I could use the quiet."
She gave him a lewd look, at least as lewd as she knew how. "There's lotion in the bathroom."
"Hermione!"
"Just a suggestion. Carry on, soldier," she added, and kissed him on the forehead before she'd thought about what she was doing. He blushed to the tips of his ears and she stepped out into the crisp autumn air, rather hoping it would cool her own red face.
Continue to Chapter 4
Rating: R for sexual content.
Notes:
arsenicjade challenged me the other day to write Snape/Hermione/Lupin in a hurt/comfort scenario, and VOILA. Blame her. :DOriginally Posted 12/16/2006
Chapter 3
Hermione had very little time to meet Minerva and Richard McGonagall when they emerged from her living-room floo; Remus was in the bedroom and Severus in the kitchen, both liable to appear at any time.
"Thanks for coming," she said, taking their coats and hanging them on a nearby hook. "I need a quick word..."
"I'll say hello to Snape," Richard said, striding into the kitchen. Minerva, not a whit changed since she'd been Professor McGonagall, looked at Hermione expectantly.
"Remus has important news for you and I think you'll appreciate the effort he made," Hermione said in an undertone, "But you should be prepared. Did Severus tell you anything about his appearance?"
"Just that he's not what he once was."
"He looks bad, but he's mentally pretty sound," Hermione said.
"Has he told you anything?"
"Only the barest basics, and I'd rather not garble them."
"Of course," said the Minister for Magic, walking calmly with her into the kitchen. "Good evening, Severus."
Snape looked up from laying out the silverware and nodded curtly. The little breakfast table, a cheap drop-leaf Hermione bought second-hand, was just wide enough when expanded to seat four comfortably, five at a squeeze. There were five places set there now.
Remus appeared in the doorway, looking shy and undersized in Severus' clothing. If the McGonagalls noticed his obvious ill health, they gave no sign -- Minerva took his hands and greeted him warmly, and Richard clapped him on the back and said what a pleasure it was to meet the man he'd heard so much about, just as if what he'd heard was not that Remus was dead and buried.
They didn't speak of business while they dined, either, and the topic of why Minerva was there didn't arise until dinner was finished, Remus eating with a heartier appetite than anyone despite knowing what was to come. With the dishes cleared away, Severus reached into a cupboard and brought forth a bottle of Muggle whiskey, carrying it to the table along with five glasses and offering the first pouring to Remus, who sipped it and flushed almost immediately. He poured for the others and took his seat again.
"None of it will be pleasant," he said, tipping his head at the bottle. "I suspect we will all need this before the night is over."
Hermione herself drank two glasses. The story needed it. Remus sketched out a conspiracy that Voldemort had tolerated or perhaps not even known about, a community in eastern Europe that was training soldiers instead of schoolchildren and making best use of the destructive powers of werewolf blood. His time in a cell, the full moons during which he was forced into infecting others (volunteers, the only small mercy), and his escape he glossed over in favour of more important things: numbers of soldiers, plans he had overheard, ways in which they were open to attack. McGonagall questioned him longer than Hermione thought he could stand, longer than she herself could have stood without the whiskey.
She questioned him too on the merry chase he'd led his captors across Europe, after his escape -- how he almost reached the French border before having to fall back to Italy, how he had been too afraid of spies to send a message even if he knew where to send it, how he'd bypassed two Death Eaters and stowed away on an imports vessel crossing the Channel to get to England. Even Severus could find little negative to say about his resourcefulness.
Finally McGonagall stood and offered Remus her hand again.
"We'll take care of it," she said firmly. Remus wrapped his hand around hers, improperly, palm at an angle and fingers curling over her thumb.
"If you need me -- "
"Your job is to rest now," she replied, with a glance at Hermione. "Any expenses can be billed to the Ministry incidentals fund; if he insists, keep the receipts."
Remus smiled a little at that. "Now I feel like I'm home," he replied.
When they were gone, Hermione sighed at the dishes in the sink and decided they could soak until morning. Remus was half-drunk on the single glass he'd had, and anyway the more sleep the better; she helped him down the hallway and left him to undress. Severus was in the living room, swirling the last of his whiskey in his glass.
"Bed for us soon too, I think," she said.
"The sofa again?" Severus asked. "Or the bed?"
She looked down the hallway, thinking.
"Is it so terrible to offer him a little comfort?" she asked. "You were a spy during the war, Severus. You know better than I do what he wants. What did you want?"
He considered the drink in his glass.
"Somewhere to be quiet and safe, and someone to tell me I could be," he admitted. It was the closest thing to actual vulnerability she'd ever seen in him. "And if you're fishing for compliments about whether or not you've provided me those things -- "
"Wouldn't dream of it," she grinned. "The bed, then? Just for one more night?"
"Fine, but this time he had better be wearing bedclothes. And tomorrow he must be dressed. He can't go running about in my clothing. I'll see to it before I open the shop. He will need wolfsbane, as well; the moon is ten days away, enough time to brew. I suppose the old Grimmauld Place basement will do for the rest."
Hermione solemnly reached into her pocket and presented him with the small sack of Galleon coins. He snorted, but he also smiled and pocketed them.
Remus was in bed when they came in, his eyes on the door; he closed them as they changed and she thought he was asleep until she lifted the covers and he flinched back, eyes at once wide and cautious. He turned when he felt Severus on his other side, still wary.
"We'll sleep here tonight," Hermione said. "You don't have to watch the door."
"You needn't -- "
"You have to sleep," she ordered, pulling the blanket up over their shoulders together. Severus was lying on top of it again with his own blanket, some kind of foolish masculine conceit, she supposed.
"We'll be here," she said. Remus watched her with those awful, frightened eyes for a minute, but his breathing slowed and eventually his eyelids drooped.
Hermione was almost asleep herself when she heard him draw breath. "Severus..."
"Do shut up, Lupin," Severus answered, from somewhere far away. "I feel quite sufficiently a fool as it is without your naptime confessions."
Hermione laughed a little but she was tired, too, and if Remus replied she was already fast asleep.
***
The Ukranian Business, as the newspapers had inaccurately taken to calling it, was a mess, but McGonagall had been given the time to prepare. When all was said and done it was minor compared to the war. Severus and Hermione and Remus read about it in the newspapers, but it was no part of their lives in their warm little flat. It was, finally, not their war anymore. Remus spent most of his time reading, when he wasn't eating, and slowly he grew into the clothing Severus provided, his face rounding out and his hair turning shaggy as it lost its strawlike roughness. He didn't speak about the prison again, but from some stray indiscretion she learned that they had kept his head shaved, probably for no other purpose than to remind him that nothing was his own. He was healing, though in the evenings there was a dullness to his eyes that Hermione didn't like.
And then there was Tonks.
He'd asked about her, a few days after his arrival, and Hermione sent Severus away because for once his acid insistence on facing reality would do no great service.
"I suppose she's dead," Remus said, looking at Hermione's face. Hermione shook her head, not meeting his eyes. "No?"
"She's in Paris," she said, and Remus laughed hollowly. He'd spent a week in Paris on his way home; Tonks, who could have saved him trouble and starvation, was never more than a few miles away. "She's studying art there."
"Art?" he asked. "What on earth...?"
"She couldn't stay an Auror, not after the war," Hermione murmured. "She lost her sense of proportion, she knew she wasn't holding together well. That wasn't just you -- it was everything."
"I see. But -- Paris isn't so far, why...?"
"She's married," Hermione blurted. "She thought you were dead and she couldn't mourn forever -- that's not in her, Remus, you must know that..."
He put one hand on hers, his fingers cold.
"I didn't expect a parade and my girl waiting for me when I came back," he said. "I didn't think I'd come back at all. It's all right, Hermione."
Hermione covered his hand with hers, trying to warm it. "It's a pretty welcome home for you."
"Nymphadora and I -- were always tempestuous at best," he said. "I haven't the energy for that anymore. I know what I am, Hermione. Severus says it when he thinks I can't hear. Broken. Coming home was my last fight. There isn't any left."
She looked at his face, seamed and drawn. He looked closer to sixty than forty-five.
***
Out in the world, Remus was an anonymous hero, but could not remain so forever. A tactless clerk in the Ministry told the story to a friend who talked about it over lunch with another friend and was overheard by a keen-eared young opportunist who went straight to the Prophet with the news. Remus Lupin was alive, the Prophet trumpeted without a shred of actual evidence, and was living in a flat off Charing Cross Road, and furthermore was the hero who had crossed Europe to bring the news of the Ukranian Business to Great Britain.
Owls poured in. Reporters set up camp and regularly had to be driven off by Severus, who was not averse to wielding a heavy stick in addition to his wand. Hermione had to take a leave from her job because they began turning up there, too. Severus obstinately kept his shop open, hurling jars of rat kidneys and sharp dissection tools at anyone who dared broach the subject.
Remus, bewildered as a child in the face of all the attention, seemed to think that they ought to be polite. As the weeks had turned into months he had gained enough strength to go out walking or dine quietly at a cafe in Diagon, provided he glamoured himself sufficiently to pass unnoticed. Now suddenly these curious people had pent him up in Hermione's flat again, and too many people wanted to see him. Harry, Neville, Kingsley, Alastor, half of the students he'd taught, most of the professors he'd taught with. Harry came often, because Harry understood; he had carried the burden of a war on his shoulders as well. He was respectful of Remus, treating him at once like a father and a child, bringing him treats from Diagon and asking for his advice on love affairs and matters of business. Some nights Hermione and Severus went to bed and left Harry and Remus sitting up in the kitchen, heads bent together, speaking quietly. Sometimes he didn't come to bed until two in the morning -- but he still came to bed, creeping in next to Hermione or curling up with his back to Severus.
Hermione hadn't believed that he really was broken in those first few days, but now she did. He never rose to baits that Severus carefully and deliberately laid, and he did all he was told to do with quiet efficiency, even when Severus tested him by asking the unreasonable. Hermione's flat, which had been almost exclusively the place she and Severus slept, had become a refuge; if they wanted to make love, they went to the cramped loft over the potions shop. Severus complained, but he sharply brushed off all alternative suggestions for where Remus could go so that they could have the place to themselves again. If nothing else, the wretch needed easy access to his potions, and someone to see to his physical needs after the moon, as they always did.
It was strange, not so much to have an interloper in their bed but that she didn't realise for two months that this was what he was. She hadn't seen him as an intruder on their domestic lives -- he was someone to be cared for and protected, and they were there whether he wanted them or not, to do the protecting. It only occurred to her later that he was an interruption, and might see himself as such. He accepted their charity in a way he would have been horrified to do five years ago, but there was still a spark of pride underneath.
And as time passed Hermione discovered him, the way she'd discovered men who looked at her on the street when she wore a short skirt in the summer. His eyes would drift over her body in the act of noticing that she was in the room, and he would turn back to his book with a slight flush on his cheeks; at dinner, if she reached across him for the salt, he watched the sway of her breasts under her shirt and then hurriedly flicked his eyes to Severus to be sure he hadn't seen.
One morning she woke to hear him whimpering, his face pressed against the pillow, and before she thought about it at all she brushed the hair from his forehead.
"Remus, wake up," she whispered. "It's only a dream."
Then he shifted and she let out a startled "Eep." What she'd taken for his knee or the edge of his hip in her half-awake state now proved to be most definitively something else. At the same moment as she felt his erection press against her thigh, his eyes opened wide in a panic. Somewhere on the other side, Severus snorted in his sleep.
Hermione gathered her wits about her.
"You were having a nightmare, I think," she said, ignoring her body's own reaction to the knowledge -- a sudden tightness in her belly and a sensitivity to the slide of her nightshirt across her breasts. He still stared at her, panicked, face pale. "It's all right. Do you want a glass of water?"
"Please," he said, thick-tongued, and she slid out of bed. She took her time finding a glass in the kitchen and filling it; by the time she returned, he had apparently got his body under control and looked -- well, not satisfied, but at least relieved. He sat up and took the water from her, while she sat herself on the edge of the bed.
"Perhaps I ought to start looking for somewhere of my own," he said, pressing the glass to his forehead. "I'm disturbing your sleep now."
"Not Severus'," she observed sardonically. Severus slept on.
"Yes, but you two have been good to me and I shouldn't like to overstay my welcome. McGonagall said she could offer me a small flat and a pension -- for my services to my country," Remus added with a quirk of a smile. "Harry's said I could stay with him, too."
"Don't go," Hermione insisted, tipping his face up so that he met her eyes. She took the glass out of his hand and set it on the desk. "It's no inconvenience, and we like having you here. I like having you here. You balance him, a little, you know," she said, indicating Severus with a tilt of her chin. "I love him and we get on well, because we understand each other, but -- since you've come, you've been...a buffer. Someone else to take some of the edge when he's being awful. And I like you. I always have. I want you to stay."
He nodded, not taking his eyes from her face.
"You can't fight, and Severus can't do anything else. So it's really like having two halves of one full man," she added, smiling, and he lifted his face the few inches it took to kiss her.
She opened her mouth to say something but his lips were already pressed against hers, and she felt his tongue trace the edge of her upper lip shyly. It sparked warmth down to her fingertips, the newness of another man kissing her, overriding the urge to stiffen and pull away. No matter; he jerked back in the middle of it, nearly falling onto the bed, staring wide-eyed at her.
"I'm so sorry," he gasped, fingers tightening in the blankets. "Merlin -- Hermione -- "
"It's okay," she said quickly. "It's not -- "
"It's just been so long," he interrupted, breath coming in short gasps. "Years, and I...when I left you were just a little girl and I came back and suddenly there was this woman who used to be Hermione."
She reached out to touch his face, but he flinched away.
"Severus is good to me, I can't possibly, not that you would want to, I just, I'm so sorry," he fumbled. Severus, still sleeping on the other half of the bed, snorted and shifted, pushing himself up on one elbow.
"Do you mind?" he asked. "One does like to get more than ten minutes of sleep around here."
"Remus and I were just going to get breakfast," Hermione said.
"Hrmf," he said, as he collapsed back into the blankets. Remus was pale and still.
"It's okay," she whispered, smiling at him. "I understand. Why don't you wash, and I'll make tea."
He gave her a grateful look and brushed past quickly; she heard the snick of the door locking behind him and then, shortly after, the sound of running water.
When Remus emerged there was toast in the rack and the tea was steeping; she poured a cup and put it in front of him when he sat down.
"Thank you," he said meekly, stirring some milk into it and sipping carefully. Hermione went to get the butter.
"You know," she said casually, having pondered the problem for several minutes, "Severus knows a few prostitutes."
Remus choked on his tea and coughed violently.
"It's true," she continued, as he sopped up the spillage. "They come in for contraceptive and aphrodisiac potions all the time. I'm sure we could find someone for you, if it is just -- needs. Women and men," she added.
"That's very generous," he managed, still coughing. He ate a few bites of dry toast and then set the slice down carefully. "I'm sorry, did you suggest male prostitutes to me?"
She shrugged.
"I suppose that means you know about Sirius and I?"
"Tonks knew. You were dead, she didn't think there was any harm in telling Harry, as if it would be a comfort that you and Sirius were together again. He told us -- Ron and me."
"Yes, well." Remus sipped his tea carefully. "It's a lovely offer, Hermione, but..."
"I find the idea a little distasteful, but I thought you ought to know it's an available resource," she said. "If it would make you feel better."
Remus gave her a sardonic look. "Well, you've succeeded in taking me out of myself, that's certain. I had thought breakfast might be rather awkward, but I should have known better."
Hermione carried her own teacup to the table along with the butter, sitting across from him.
"You wouldn't be very comfortable with a stranger?" she suggested.
"That would be...a good way of putting it, though that's not all of it," he replied. "I don't want some strange woman, or some strange man. There's an inequality there that I couldn't overcome. I'd rather be alone. Merlin, how old are you? I can't imagine why I'm discussing it with you."
"Severus is the same age as you are, and we talk about sex all the time. We have a great deal of it, if it comes to that," she said. "Remus, you know that I am nothing if not sensible."
"I suspect that was -- why I kissed you," he said. "Life is comfortable here. If there is inequality, it is on my side, not yours. I don't mind that, you wouldn't rub it in and it's the one thing Severus never touches on, though Merlin knows he's done plenty of that in the past. I think -- I wouldn't trust anyone but you. Both of you."
"How many lovers have you had?" she asked curiously. Remus frowned. "Sorry -- you needn't answer, I just wondered. It's only been Ron and Severus for me. Well, and I kissed Parvati once on a dare, but I don't think that counts."
He grinned a little. "No, I suppose you have a right to ask..." he cast his eyes up to the ceiling. "Alina Bones, fourth year, she was my first. I fancied Severus for a while, at school, but we never got on and besides, Sirius was like a force of nature once he'd made up his mind. It was Sirius up until a few weeks before James and Lily were killed. After that, there was a woman when I was about thirty, Rowan something. My mind is going, I fear. Oh, also a young man named Jack Gregorian. Then Sirius again, and Nymphadora."
"So there have been other men?"
"Oh yes. I never bothered much being ashamed of it; who notices or cares what a werewolf does?"
Hermione patted his arm. "Well, we care, now."
"That's a good deal of the problem, Hermione," he said. "I don't look at people on the street and think, if I don't have a shag soon I'm going to strangle myself. But I look at you and Severus and...I would never, never try to come between you. You do know that."
"It wouldn't be up to you. I doubt Severus would be susceptible to your charms, and I wouldn't break his heart."
"Good. I'm sure it'll go away, given time."
Hermione had her doubts, but at that point Severus skulked in and crankily poured himself some tea, effectively ending the conversation. He was surly and quiet, eating quickly and leaving for the shop without much fanfare; once he was gone, Hermione put on her coat and left Remus at the kitchen table.
"I'd better check in at the archives," she said. "I'll be home before five. You can come, if you like."
"I think I'll stay here. I could use the quiet."
She gave him a lewd look, at least as lewd as she knew how. "There's lotion in the bathroom."
"Hermione!"
"Just a suggestion. Carry on, soldier," she added, and kissed him on the forehead before she'd thought about what she was doing. He blushed to the tips of his ears and she stepped out into the crisp autumn air, rather hoping it would cool her own red face.
Continue to Chapter 4
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The sense! How can you write such amazingly real people in such a bizarre situation?
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"Crankily", perhaps?
Your characterisations are, as always, true to canon without being boring, stodgy, or unrealistic.
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That name is familiar and I just can't place it. Loving this so far by the way.
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Bwahahaha!
And on an entirely different note, I love the conversation Remus and Hermione have. She is, indeed, nothing if not sensible. I love the way this is developing, especially the bit where he used to have a bit of a thing for Severus.
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