#*flashforward

Remus’ parents’ house hasn’t felt like home in a long time and he knows he would struggle more to lie about the Order if he was living with them, especially in light of his father making a statement against him in January 1978. He moves into Godric’s Hollow with James and Lily for some time while he figures out how to afford a place of his own to give the couple their own space.

True to his predictions, he struggles to get and hold down any jobs and after a couple of attempts at mundane muggle jobs which fired him soon after him taking sick leave while still in his probationary period he resigns himself to working full-time for the Order and living off the charity of his friends.

Almost immediately after leaving Hogwarts, Remus starts his work with the werewolves. Having spent the summer before seventh year searching for packs, he is now being thrown into the middle by Dumbledore’s orders and by the knowledge that Greyback is looking for him now that he has finished school.

Dumbledore tells him not to tell anybody else which Remus is mostly happy to do, as he has still not told anybody else in the Order that he is a werewolf but he makes it very easily guessable for the Marauders.

To begin with, it’s only occasionally and in between he is doing other work for the Order, particularly using his skills as a fighter, but as the months go on it becomes more vital that he spend Full Moons with the packs he is trying to talk to. The occasional month turns into extended periods. Having to transform with the packs, watch and even partake in the violence of wolf packs left to follow instinct, and being away from his friends for such a long time all take a massive toll on him, both emotionally and in terms of his self-esteem.

Whenever one of the other Marauders brings up the fact that spending time with the packs is affecting him so negatively, he argues that he is the only person who can do this.

Remus is one of the first, besides Dumbledore, to find out that Snape has changed sides and he keeps such a fact a secret from everybody, knowing the importance of Snape staying under the radar. His experience with the werewolves has made him aware of where he might have been if it weren’t for Dumbledore, his sorting into Gryffindor and his friendship with the Marauders so he feels sympathetic towards Snape, especially once they have got some stilted apologies about their teenage years out of the way.

Harry being born is, to Remus, the light in all the dark. He doesn’t believe the prophecy is reason to be hasty, because all of them have been in danger and he knows his classical literature well enough to know the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It upsets him a lot to think of the Potters going into hiding, but he supports them in doing whatever they feel they have to to keep Harry safe.

In 1981, he spends more time with werewolf packs than he does away from them. It feels like he is only grabbing the odd day around the New Moon to escape and give or get updates from the Order and each time he does things feel more awkward, more stilted, more like he has missed too much. Even when he is back, he finds himself on other secret missions for Dumbledore or having clandestine meetings with Snape, to compare notes spy to spy, and he gets very frustrated, just wanting to go and see his friends.

The combination of Dumbledore enforcing his secrecy surrounding what he is doing, the prolonged absences, and the occasional time he is spotted by an Order member talking to Snape combine to make the rest of the Order suspicious of him. They know there is a traitor. Remus, rarely at meetings these days, has only heard whispers of it and doesn’t believe it. He thinks the war is simply making everybody paranoid and he doesn’t hesitate to express such an opinion, unaware that he is only reinforcing the belief that it is him selling them out.

Hope dies of emphysema 18th April 1981. It was the night of a Full Moon and Remus was with a pack in the Peak district so doesn’t find out until three days later when he gets home. He isn’t sure if his father is really blaming him for her death or if his own guilt is making him feel that way, but the funeral is the last time he sees Lyall before the end of the war all the same.

He ends up joining Greyback’s pack for the August, September and October Full Moons of 1981, as well as all the time in between, when he is kept captive & tortured by the werewolf who bit him, too suspicious of him for all the time he had grown around wizards, despite the months with other packs.

Despite being in with Greyback’s pack, Remus doesn’t mind that his position is compromised by the patronus message that the Potters need help. He’s felt more and more distant from his friends over the past few months, after tensions within the Order and Dumbledore’s insistence on his wolfpack missions but he would always put his friends first so he apparates before the wolves have a chance to react to the message.

Realising that the war is over, that Voldemort is gone and it doesn’t matter that the wolves now viewed him as a traitor because he never has to go back to them is like the first breath of freedom in years.

It’s slow work, but his friends all still being there and the war fresh in all their minds helps Remus to start to talk about his trauma sustained over the course of his months with the werewolves. 

Rebuilding of the trust that was damaged in those last few months of distance from his friends && learning to love himself -- all of this is so much easier now that there is no war and he’s able to spend as much time as he wants with his friends, which he needs because his struggles to find work haven’t improved.

James buys him a flat in London and loads of food which Remus is getting better at accepting.

Full moons are spent at McKinnon manor with James and Sirius. Mornings after, he lets Lily heal and fuss over him.

Encouragement from his friends means he does try some freelance work, dealing with, writing about and studying various magical creatures (particularly dark creatures). He also offers up his services babysitting and tutoring the children of his friends.

He eventually opens himself up to love and finds a man who cares for him and with whom there’s mutual trust. They marry and Remus takes his husband’s last name, happy to be done with the Lupin name which he has never liked. As Lyall has, by this point, passed away, this means the end of the surname.

When they hear of a 3 year old girl who has been bitten by a werewolf and abandoned by her family, Remus and hubby want to do everything they can for her. She’s in St Mungo’s as a Jane Doe and doesn’t remember anything before her attack. They adopt her and give her the new name of Carys Hope. While they don’t have her christened, James and Lily are all but named as godparents and Remus rewrites his will to ensure they are named as Carys’ guardians if anything were to happen.

About a year later, the Wolfsbane potion is invented. Remus is reluctant to use it, arguing the costs and difficulty of getting many of the ingredients. If it were just him, he wouldn’t care about the risks of taking a potion containing aconite but with Carys to consider as well, he expresses concerns about how it is poisonous though he does eventually give in, as it has passed the testing stages, and lets Lily brew a batch just for him. He’s reluctant to accept charity but can’t deny that the transformation is so much better with the potion and so both of them start taking it on a monthly basis.

When Carys is five, Remus wants her to go to primary school, both to honour his muggle upbringing and because he doesn’t want her to be as lonely and friendless as he had been by the time she starts Hogwarts. Though she has friends in the form of ‘cousins’ and family friends, he knows befriending people while keeping the secret of her lycanthropy from them will be more difficult but he wants her to get used to the idea before she develops the same fears and anxieties Remus did. She starts school, considering her being a werewolf as much a thing to not talk to her muggle companions about as magic. They tell the school she has a chronic illness that will cause her to miss some schooling.

Remus starts a BEd course with a view to get into teaching. He completes it the summer before Harry starts school and spends two years teaching at Carys’ school. Having been on Wolfsbane for so long now, Remus has got very good at not having to miss a day of school after a Full Moon, though he’ll happily use Carys as an excuse to miss on the worse months.

Since being on Wolfsbane and having his teaching qualification, the main reason Remus hadn’t gone to Dumbledore for a job was because he didn’t want to get himself wrapped up in the curse of the DADA post. (that and he quite enjoyed working with little ones). When Kettleburn retires, however, he applies for the job. Dumbledore offers him the DADA position instead and Remus decides to take it, knowing that Harry’s first two teachers were crap and he might be able to do some good.

He is still forced to resign at the end of the year when news spreads that he is a werewolf and Umbridge writes her anti-werewolf legislation which makes it impossible for him to work in the wizarding world so he goes back to primary school teaching, just as Carys starts Hogwarts, this time under an alias and with forged papers to keep the Ministry off his back.

If the war were to rekindle again, Remus would play a much smaller part in it this second time around. He would still want to be there for his friends and fight to keep them alive and to keep the life he has, but he doesn’t have the same self-destructive tendencies that he does in the other verse, or that he did during the first war. He’s come too far to not want to live. He doesn’t go back to the werewolf packs, under any circumstances, and he is open and honest with his best friends, his husband and his daughter through every mission he does go on.

First War

(( Wartime headcanons here ))

He isn’t around in 1981 enough to worry about who might be a traitor.

It goes without saying that Sirius will be the Potters’ Secret Keeper, so Remus isn’t surprised when he hears of the plan. He knows it will make Sirius an obvious target which he hates, but he can’t offer himself up for the job when he is away so much and at such a high risk of dying every Full Moon.

He doesn’t ask to be given the secret. It’s better if less people know, even if he wouldn’t be able to tell anybody else and he doesn’t want to risk Voldemort using a wolf pack to kill the family if Remus were able to find them.

End of the War

Remus starts to make headway with Greyback’s pack a few weeks after the October Full Moon, to the point where he is finally trusted enough to be allowed to come and go as he pleases. As soon as he is left alone, Remus sneaks off, with the intention to send an update to Dumbledore.

However, something within him is telling him to go to Godric’s Hollow and as soon as he remembers what is in Godric’s Hollow, he feels his heart drop to his stomach. He apparates to the village to find a house in such ruins that the Fidelius has broken and hoards of mourners filling the streets. He finds a copy of the Daily Prophet and discovers that it is 7th November and that his life had ended a week before without his knowing.

He goes immediately to Hogwarts where Dumbledore confirms everything the paper had said. Remus struggles to process the information. None of it makes sense to him -- that James and Lily could be dead. That Peter could be dead. That Sirius could be the one who betrayed them. He doesn’t believe it, but Dumbledore speaks much too reasonably to see how it could be false. The evidence only points in that direction. That Sirius was Secret Keeper (and Remus doesn’t believe his friends would ever lie to him, so when they told him Sirius would be Secret Keeper it must have been true). That dozens of witnesses had watched Sirius kill Peter (Remus throws up right there in Dumbledore’s office and tries to convince himself that it’s because the next Full Moon is now only a few days away). That there was no other explanation.

He assumes he has simply missed Sirius’s trial when he hears he is already in Azkaban and only finds out years later that there never was one. By then, his urges to reopen the case are dismissed by anybody he tries to talk to.

He asks where Harry is, only to be fobbed off with platitudes about how the boy is safe, excuses that his location cannot be compromised, and reminders that Remus would never be suitable to take custody of the child.

Though Dumbledore tried to talk to Remus about the Order continuing their work, and especially about keeping up the work with the werewolves to promote peace but Remus was in too much shock to listen. Desperate to get away from everything, he flees to Belgium where he stays for the Full Moon on November 11th.

He missed the funerals.

“The Lost Years”

Remus settles into a routine of a couple of weeks of menial work, followed by a Full Moon usually abroad, apparating back to Mary’s house where he collapses on her doorstep, lets her heal his wounds and grieves with her before he goes back to looking for a new job now that he has lost the last one.

He spends a lot of time without a fixed address, slowly chips away at money left to him by his mother and by James and spends most of his earnings on fuelling his old cigarette addiction and his newfound alcohol addiction.

He keeps trying to look for Harry but Dumbledore has put too many security charms over Privet Drive for him to be successful and everybody in the know has been told not to tell him anything. By Halloween 1982, he has given up, too depressed to try any longer.

Honestly it’s depressing af and I don’t want to talk about it, if you feel like crying there’s a whole Pinterest board of pain here.

He visits Lyall a couple of times but their relationship hadn’t been the same since Remus first found out the truth about his bite and it has been even more stilted since Hope’s death. The end of the war has been good to Lyall, who finally seems happy, and Remus felt too much like he was the reason Lyall had been unhappy before, so he stops going back.

Lyall dies about two years after the end of the war and leaves Remus with everything he had at the end. Remus sells most of it, including the house, keeping only Hope’s record player and records. Eventually, he runs out of money and has to sell those, too.

He never manages to find it in him to hate Sirius, and he hates himself for that.

Professor RJ Lupin

He’s squatting in a tumble-down cottage in Yorkshire when Sirius escapes Azkaban, and hears the news from Dumbledore himself who comes to ‘his house’ to a. Deliver the news and b. Ask him to be the new Defence teacher at Hogwarts.

Remus agrees despite the dumbassery that is Dumbledore refusing him access to Harry’s life until now because Remus is a pushover who still thinks the sun shines out Dumbledore’s arse.

Wow don’t think about what went through his mind when he realises Harry is in his compartment.

Remus is ashamed to reveal who he is to Harry so when Dumbledore tells him not to say anything, he doesn’t question it, only goes along with it.

The fact that he still cares for Sirius plays a large part in his not telling anybody about the different passageways into the school he knows the faculty do not know about, as well as Sirius’ animagus abilities.

When he gets to the new home McGonagall has insisted on finding for him (and paid his first six months worth of rent for) after he resigns, he has a breakdown over everything that went wrong.

1994-1997

Remus does start up a letter correspondence with Harry after his teaching career is over, though it is a little erratic thanks to full moons and Remus’ general disorganisation whenever he doesn’t have a routine. He writes to Sirius, too.

Snape keeps making wolfsbane for him, which he takes every month from his resignation from Hogwarts until he goes back to the wolf packs in September 1996.

It is a little too easy to fall back into depression when all his attempts to find a job are met with hostility. Umbridge’s new laws make it almost impossible, as they even make it so the Ministry could arrest him for seeking employment in the Muggle world. His year at Hogwarts has, at least, been enough for him to stop drinking and he doesn’t smoke as much these days either, so he lives on the money he had earned and the ridiculously high severance pay Dumbledore had given him for that year, but he rarely leaves the house and he loses track of the days to the point where the Full Moon sometimes creeps up on him.

(At some point he probably asked Snape what the fuck he was doing at his house because he thought the Full Moon was still two weeks away)

Sirius showing up on his doorstep with the news that Voldemort is back and Harry saw it happen is like a punch to the stomach. Remus almost wants to say he can’t do this again but then— well he hasn’t been doing anything else productive, has he? He needs to be needed and that’s how he finds himself handing in his notice on his flat and joining Sirius at Grimmauld Place.

After Sirius’s death, nobody is there to stop Remus going back to the werewolves even though it destroyed him the first time (:

1997-1998

It’s easier to say no to Tonks when he was literally in the same school year as her parents and she’s more than twenty years younger than him and he’s become closer to Mary over the years who would definitely not want him to enter a relationship with her goddaughter just because none of James, Sirius and Lily are there to tell him that’s a dumb idea and that neither of them deserve that.

He doesn’t have a reason to go into hiding without having a family because he’s only trying to stay alive at this point for Harry so helping with the war is the only option in his mind. It’s honestly very hard to see him not still going to Harry and asking to join the golden trio and as he’s not running from his unborn child and Harry wouldn’t want to see him go back to werewolf packs there’s a chance it actually ends up happening but I might as well rewrite the entire last book if I say that happened so instead let’s say the Order is still active enough and he has enough to do away from the wolves to keep him busy.

By the time he gets to the Battle of Hogwarts, he’s so tired of living, he’s just trying to do anything he can to make sure Harry gets through it but he’s firing offensive spell after offensive spell at two Death Eaters at once and doesn’t even attempt to defend himself.