J. Rowling - Short Stories From Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies

By the time the four friends left school, Lord Voldemort’s ascendancy was almost complete. True resistance to him was concentrated in the underground organisation called the Order of the Phoenix, which all four young men joined.

The death of James Potter, along with his wife Lily, at the hands of Lord Voldemort, was one of the most traumatic events of Remus’s already troubled life. His friends meant even more to him than to other people, because he had long since accepted the fact that most people would treat him as untouchable, and that there could be no possibility of marrying and having children. Even worse, within twenty-four hours he had also lost his two other best friends. Remus was in the north of the country on Order of the Phoenix business when he heard the horrible news that one of them had murdered the other, and was now in Azkaban, a traitor to the Order and to Lily and James themselves.

The downfall of Voldemort, such a source of jubilation to the rest of the wizarding community, marked the beginning of a long stretch of loneliness and unhappiness for Remus. He had lost his three close friends and, with the Order disbanded, his previous comrades returned to busy lives with families. His mother was now dead, and while Lyall, his father, was always delighted to see his son, Remus refused to endanger his father’s peaceful existence by returning to live with him.

Remus now lived a hand-to-mouth existence, taking jobs that were far below his level of ability, always knowing that he would have to leave them before his pattern of growing sick once a month at the full moon was noticed by his workmates.

One development in the wizarding community gave Remus hope: the discovery of the Wolfsbane Potion. While this did not prevent a werewolf losing his human form once a month, it restricted his transformation to that of an ordinary and sleepy wolf. It had always been Remus’s worst fear that he would kill while out of his right mind. However, the Wolfsbane Potion was complex and the ingredients very expensive. Remus had no chance to sample it without admitting what he was and so he continued his lonely, itinerant existence.

Once again, Albus Dumbledore changed the course of Remus Lupin’s life when he tracked him down to a tumbledown, semi-derelict cottage in Yorkshire. Delighted to see the Headmaster, Remus was amazed when Dumbledore offered him the post of Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. He was only persuaded to accept when Dumbledore explained that there would be a limitless supply of Wolfsbane Potion, courtesy of the Potions master, Severus Snape.

At Hogwarts, Remus revealed himself to be a gifted teacher, with a rare flair for his own subject and a profound understanding of his pupils. He was, as ever, particularly drawn to the underdog, and both Neville Longbottom and Harry Potter benefited from his wisdom and kindness.

However, Remus’s old flaw was at work. He had grave suspicions about one of his old friends, a known fugitive, but did not share them with anyone at Hogwarts. His desperate desire to belong and to be liked meant that he was neither as brave nor as honest as he ought to have been.

An unfortunate combination of circumstances arose that resulted in Remus undergoing a true werewolf’s transformation on the grounds of the school. Severus Snape’s resentment, never abated by Remus’s subsequent respectful politeness, made sure that it was widely known what the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher was. Remus felt obliged to resign and departed Hogwarts once more.

As Lord Voldemort once again gained ascendancy, the old resistance regrouped and Remus found himself once more part of the Order of the Phoenix.

This time, the group included an Auror who had been too young to belong to the Order during its first incarnation. Clever, brave and funny, pink-haired Nymphadora Tonks was a protégée of Alastor ‘Mad-Eye’ Moody, the toughest and most grizzled Auror of them all.

Remus, so often melancholy and lonely, was first amused, then impressed, then seriously smitten by the young witch. He had never fallen in love before. If it had happened in peacetime, Remus would have simply taken himself off to a new place and a new job, so that he did not have to endure the pain of watching Tonks fall in love with a handsome, young wizard in the Auror office, which was what he expected to happen. However, this was war; they were both needed in the Order of the Phoenix, and nobody knew what the next day would bring. Remus felt justified in remaining exactly where he was, keeping his feelings to himself but secretly rejoicing every time somebody paired him with Tonks on some overnight mission.

It had never occurred to Remus that Tonks could return his feelings because he had become so used to considering himself unclean and unworthy. One night when they lay in hiding outside a known Death Eater’s house, after a year of increasingly warm friendship, Tonks made an idle remark about one of their fellow Order members (‘He’s still handsome, isn’t he, even after Azkaban?’). Before he could stop himself, Remus had replied bitterly that he supposed she had fallen for his old friend (‘He always got the women.’). At this, Tonks became suddenly angry. ‘You’d know perfectly well who I’ve fallen for, if you weren’t too busy feeling sorry for yourself to notice.’

Remus’s immediate response was a happiness he had never experienced in his life, but this was extinguished almost at once by a sense of crushing duty. He had always known that he could not marry and run the risk of passing on his painful, shameful condition. He therefore pretended not to understand Tonks, which did not fool her at all. Wiser than Remus, she was sure that he loved her, but that he was refusing to admit it out of mistaken nobility. However, he avoided any further excursions with her, barely talked to her, and started volunteering for the most dangerous missions. Tonks became desperately unhappy, convinced not only that the man she loved would never willingly spend time with her again, but also that he might walk to his death rather than admit his feelings.

Remus and Tonks both fought Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries, a battle that resulted in the public exposure of Voldemort’s return. The loss of the last of his school friends during this battle did nothing to soften Remus’s increasingly self-destructive attitude. Tonks could only watch in despair as he volunteered to spy for the Order, leaving to live among fellow werewolves to try to persuade them to Dumbledore’s side. In doing this, he was exposing himself to the possible reprisals of the werewolf who had changed his life forever, Fenrir Greyback.

Remus came face-to-face with both Greyback and Tonks at Hogwarts barely a year later, when the Order clashed with Death Eaters within the castle. During this battle, Remus lost yet another person he had loved: Albus Dumbledore. Dumbledore had been adored by every member of the Order of the Phoenix, but to Remus, he had represented the sort of kindness, tolerance and understanding that he had received from nobody in the world outside his parents and his three best friends, and had been the only man ever to offer him a position within normal wizarding society.

In the aftermath of the bloody fight, inspired by Fleur Delacour’s protestation of enduring love for Bill Weasley, who had been savaged by Greyback, Tonks made a brave, public declaration of her feelings for Remus, who was forced to admit the strength of his love for her. In spite of continuing misgivings that he was acting selfishly, Remus married Tonks quietly in the north of Scotland, with witnesses taken from the local wizarding tavern. He continued to fear that the stigma attached to him would infect his wife and wished for no fanfare around their union; he swung constantly between elation that he was married to the woman of his dreams and terror of what he might have brought upon them both.