Remorse

Chapter Seven: Christmas

Remus looked doubtfully at the jumper he had just unwrapped. In the first place, a gift of clothing looked suspiciously like charity, and he never accepted charity – but, on the other hand, he was sure Molly would be hurt if he told her he couldn’t accept it, and he wouldn’t have hurt Molly for the world. In the second place, it had rainbow stripes.

There was a sharp knock at the door of Bill’s bedroom, and he realized, with a startled glance at the clock, that it was past nine. “Come in,” he said.

The twins burst into the room. George had a gift-wrapped box under his arm, and Fred was carrying a tea tray. “Mum’s asked us to bring you some tea, and she said to tell you she’ll send up breakfast if you’re not feeling well.”

“Oh.” Had he been looking as poorly as that? “No, that’s kind of her, but it’s not necessary. Tell her I’ll be down in a few minutes.” He accepted the tea with a word of thanks, but set it down untouched on the bedside table, having had too much experience with the twins to consider eating or drinking anything that had passed through their hands.

Fred was eyeing the jumper. “Congratulations, Professor. I see you’re a Weasley now.”

“Are you sure your mother meant it for me?”

“No, she meant it for You-Know-Who. I’ve heard her telling Dad a thousand times, ‘You know, I’m worried about the Dark Lord – the nights can’t be too warm wherever he keeps his headquarters, and I doubt if any of the Death Eaters know how to knit.’”

“I was just wondering. I mean, I don’t like to think that I’ve done Fleur out of a jumper.”

“Nah,” said Fred. “Mum doesn’t believe in wasting good yarn on Phlegm.”

“I don’t think that’s what he’s asking,” said George sagely. “I think he’s wondering if that color scheme is completely ... masculine. Aren’t you, Professor?”

“Count yourself lucky,” said Fred. “Just be glad you’re not Ron. He always gets purple.”

“Maroon,” said Remus.

“Purple,” Fred insisted.

“But anyway, that one’s definitely yours,” said George. “If she did knit a jumper for Phlegm, she’d probably choose puke green.”

Remus sighed. “As long as we’re on the subject of Fleur – do try to be decent to the girl, won’t you? She’s very young, and it can’t be easy for her, living in a foreign country and being so far from her family...” He refrained from saying anything about the open waves of hostility that radiated from Molly and Ginny; it wasn’t his place to criticize the internal dynamics of the Weasley family.

Fred peered into his eyes. “I think the professor’s had a good dose of the old veela charm, wouldn’t you say, George?”

“It’s nothing to do with veela charm!” Remus protested. “I just feel sorry for her, that’s all. And you needn’t call me ‘professor’; I haven’t been one for years.”

The twins, still at that awkward stage between adolescence and adulthood, looked at each other uneasily. Since leaving school, they had seemed uncertain where they stood with him or what to call him. They had experimented with “Moony” once or twice last year, but backed off after Sirius’ death, and finally settled on “Professor,” delivered with a certain air of sly irreverence.

“‘Remus’ will do fine,” he added.

“All right, Remus, now that you’re one of the family,” said George, throwing himself down on the bed, “it’s time you learned about the Deep Cultural Significance of the Molly Weasley jumper. The Unspeakables have been studying our family’s Christmas rites for years, but we’re here to give you the real story. You see, these jumpers – dropped stitches, lumps and all – represent in its purest form a powerful force that the Ministry thinks it can confine behind a certain door in the Department of Mysteries, a door that is always kept locked.”

“And,” Fred added, “if you ever refuse or return a Molly Weasley jumper, like a certain idiot brother of ours who shall remain nameless – not that we think you have anything in common with him whatsoever – then woe betide you, for the full wrath of that force shall be unleashed upon you. And if you don’t think that sounds scary, imagine Mum on one of her rampages, and magnify it by ten billion.”

“Right. I’ll keep that in mind.” Remus blushed, remembering how recently he had been thinking of the jumper as charity. Well, if the boys were right, it was, but only in the oldest, truest, and most generous sense of the word.

“Anyway, welcome to the family,” added George.

“Thank you.” Remus absent-mindedly took a gulp of the cooling tea, and startled himself by turning into a toucan.

He’d been on the verge of saying something else, but the best he could manage was a sort of croak. “RRRK! RRRK!”

“Oh yeah,” said Fred, “and now that you’re one of us, we reserve the right to use you as a test subject. Just so you know.”

“RRRK!” Remus tried out his wings and found that they were not at all effective, or at any rate he didn’t know how to use them. He half-flapped, half-hopped across the room.

Pop! He molted in a puff of black feathers, and found himself sitting on the floor in his tatty pajamas and dressing gown once again.

“Well, George, it looks like the ‘Tea for Toucan’ is a success.” Fred grinned broadly and scribbled something in a pocket notebook. “And his bill matches the new jumper nicely, wouldn’t you say?”

“That it does,” said Remus, laughing in spite of himself. “Nice one.”

“And because you were such a good sport about it, we got you a Christmas present,” said George, holding out the gift box.

“Thank you,” said Remus again. He opened the box with great care, gripping his wand and concentrating on a few wordless counter-jinxes. “My own Deluxe Skiving Snackbox. Just what I’ve always wanted.”

Fred and George filled him in on the finer points of Nosebleed Nougats, Fainting Fancies, and Puking Pastilles, until Remus remembered that he was expected downstairs for breakfast. “Er, would you mind leaving me for a few minutes so I can get dressed? You can tell me about the rest of it later.”

He pulled the jumper on slowly. It hung rather baggily on him and made him uncomfortably aware that he had somehow contrived to lose weight, even though he hadn’t had much to start with.

It was made from lamb’s wool, as soft as a kitten and so warm that he wondered if Molly had put a Heating Charm on the yarn. She must spend a fair bit of money every year on yarn, and he supposed he ought to feel guilty about it, but he didn’t. Not this morning.

And, he decided, there was nothing wrong with a little extra color in one’s life. Or a lot of extra color, as the case might be.

He was smiling broadly by the time he went down the stairs. “Merry Christmas, Molly. And thank you.”

 

                                                            *          *          *

“Parsnips, Remus?” George offered. Remus looked slightly askance at him, but George’s expression was innocent, and he supposed the twins were unlikely to use him as a guinea pig twice in one day. He helped himself to parsnips.

“Harry, you’ve got a maggot in your hair,” said Ginny, reaching across the table.

Fred and George peered at Harry with interest. Remus addressed himself to his turkey with great concentration and politely refused the bowl of rice that was going around the table.

There was a crash at the other end of the table as Ron, who seemed to be very susceptible to veela charm indeed, knocked over the gravy boat into Fleur’s lap. “You are as bad as zat Tonks,” Fleur commented. “She is always knocking –”

“I invited dear Tonks to come along today.” Molly set down the dish of carrots with a bang, and Remus felt his stomach tighten. “But she wouldn’t come. Have you spoken to her lately, Remus?”

“No.” He tried to play it cool. “I haven’t been in contact with anybody very much. But Tonks has got her own family to go to, hasn’t she?” He looked around the table: Arthur was watching him closely, but nobody else seemed to have noticed anything amiss.

Molly made a harrumphing sound. “Maybe. I got the impression that she was planning to spend Christmas alone, actually.” To Remus’ relief, she didn’t press the issue. Perhaps as an apology for bringing it up, she refilled his wine glass generously.

“Tonks’ Patronus has changed its form,” Harry said unexpectedly. “Snape said so, anyway. I didn’t know that could happen. Why would your Patronus change?”

Oh dear Merlin. He’d been telling himself that she was young, she couldn’t possibly be as much in love as she thought she was; she’d find a nice boy her own age and forget all about him in a year or two. Evidently he’d been lying to himself. A change in Patronus meant that you were changed heart and soul, that somebody had touched you in ways that would last a lifetime.

He waited until he was sure he could swallow his turkey without choking. “Sometimes,” he said vaguely, “a great shock ... an emotional upheaval...”

“It looked big, and it had four legs,” said Harry, in a voice that seemed guaranteed to carry halfway across the village. Fortunately, the others seemed to be absorbed in their food, except for Bill and Fleur, who were absorbed in each other, and Molly, who was staring out of the kitchen window. Abruptly, Harry lowered his voice. “Hey – it couldn’t be –”

“Arthur!” Molly interrupted. “Arthur – it’s Percy!”

“What?” said Arthur. Everybody turned around.

“Arthur, he’s – he’s with the Minister!”

While Percy favored his mother with some rather rehearsed-sounding Christmas greetings and she threw herself into his arms, Remus kept his eyes on the Minister. He had never seen Rufus Scrimgeour in the flesh, but he had heard enough from Tonks and Kingsley to know that when the Minister was smiling affably and a little fatuously, as he was now, he was at his most calculating.

“You must forgive this intrusion,” Scrimgeour announced. “Percy and I were in the vicinity – working, you know – and he couldn’t resist dropping in and seeing you all.”

This was patently a lie, as Percy did not look as if he particularly wanted to see anybody in the room. Molly, oblivious to the stiffness of his manner – or perhaps deliberately ignoring it – straightened her hat and urged the Minister to stay for a bite of dinner.

“No, no, my dear Molly, I don’t want to intrude,” Scrimgeour repeated unctuously. “Wouldn’t be here at all if Percy hadn’t wanted to see you all so badly...”

With the air of a martyr going to the stake for a noble cause, Percy submitted to being kissed by his mother.

“We’ve only looked in for five minutes, so I’ll have a stroll around the yard while you catch up with Percy. No, no, I assure you I don’t want to butt in! Well, if anybody cared to show me your charming garden ... Ah, that young man’s finished, why doesn’t he take a stroll with me?”

Scrimgeour nodded at Harry, whose name he seemed to be pretending not to know, despite the fact that the boy was at least as famous as the Minister.

“Yeah, all right,” said Harry.

Remus got to his feet; he wasn’t sure how much Harry understood of the Minister’s motives, but he thought that his young friend could at least use someone to back him up and run damage control.

“It’s fine,” Harry insisted, and Remus reminded himself that Harry was sixteen, almost a man.

“Wonderful!” Scrimgeour said in an artificially hearty voice. “We’ll just take a turn around the garden, and Percy and I’ll be off. Carry on, everyone!”

Everybody stared at each other, and then at Percy, who did not sit down in the chair Harry had vacated.

“Well,” he said, shrugging off the hand his mother had laid on his back, “I think I’ll go outside and wait for the Minister. It was nice to see you.”

“So is that the only reason you came?” said an icy voice from the other end of the table. Remus was surprised that it was not one of the twins, nor Arthur, but mild-mannered Bill. “Tell me, do you think being a Rufus Scrimgeour delivery mechanism is all you’re worth? Are you expecting him to promote you to human being after you’ve been at it for a few years?”

“Percy!” said Molly in a distressed voice, shooting a sideways glare at Bill. “Aren’t you going to stay?”

“It looks like you have more interesting company than mine.” Percy looked straight at Remus. “As I’m sure you are aware, Father, Ministry employees with my security clearance are barred from fraternizing with Dark creatures.”

Arthur stood up abruptly, knocking his chair backward onto the floor. “APOLOGIZE TO OUR GUEST!”

“It’s all right, Arthur –” Remus tried to say, although it wasn’t. Encountering prejudice from one of his former students was particularly awful because apart from a handful of the Slytherins, they had given every impression of liking him. If he were to be perfectly honest with himself, he had resigned in part because he couldn’t bear the prospect of facing fear and hostility from the children who had shared the best year of his life.

“IT IS NOT ALL RIGHT!” Ginny was on her feet, her face mottled with red blotches. She had been allowed wine with dinner for the first time, and Remus thought it might be going to her head. “You walked out on us for more than a year, and you never even went to see Dad when he was in hospital, and now you have the nerve to w-walk back in here and act like you have the right to in-insult our friend...” She was overcome by a severe case of the hiccups, which rather spoiled the effect of her tirade, and had to sit down.

Remus poured her a glass of water and handed her a fresh napkin.

“Thanks,” she whispered as the shouting match continued all around them. “It isn’t fair – I wanted to forgive him – he was so kind to me after – after first year... and now he’s gone and – hic! – ruined it again...”

“I know, Ginny. He’s put your whole family in an awful spot. But sometimes you don’t have to forgive everybody to be a good person. It’s all right.”

She reminded him forcibly of Tonks for some reason, and he wondered if Tonks had had anybody to tell her these things after Sirius was arrested.

“I do not consider you an enemy. I consider you sadly misguided.” Percy was saying to Arthur in an appallingly patronizing voice. “You may have thought you had good reasons at the time to side with a radical group of law-breakers against the Ministry – I daresay you still think you have good reasons – but I shall be more than happy to accept you as my father if you repudiate them.”

“He IS our father whether you bloody well accept it or not, you pompous prat!” shouted Ron from the other end of the table. “And you DON’T have the right to order him around.”

“Ron, Ron.” Percy shook his head slowly. “I do not blame you; you have had little exposure to anything other than our parents’ beliefs and associates. But when you’re older, you will come to see –”

“You don’t have the right to treat me like a kid either! Ginny and I were fighting against Death Eaters while you were standing there with your head in the sand, and we nearly DIED! What have you done for the last year? Were you measuring cauldron bottoms when You-Know-Who broke into the Ministry?”

“I have been doing my duty,” said Percy, “which includes, among other things, shoring up public confidence in our government. The loss of that confidence undermines the very fabric of wizarding society. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that those who try to work outside the approved channels, as pure as they may believe their motives to be, are in fact lending unwitting aid to the Death Eaters –”

He was drowned out by a babble of angry voices: Arthur and Bill argued, Ron swore, and the twins hissed at him.

Remus felt heartily sick of it all; any sympathy he had felt for Percy had long since passed. His eyes fell on the bowl of mashed parsnips that George had passed him a few minutes before Percy’s arrival, and almost before he knew what he was doing, his hand had closed around his wand under the table. “Waddiwasi,” he muttered under his breath.

His aim wasn’t quite as good as it had been in his school days – most of the parsnips hit Percy’s glasses instead of flying up his nose – but it was quite sufficient for the purpose. Percy stood there gaping like a fish, parsnip dripping onto the front of his new robes, all dignity forgotten. His younger siblings fell about the table laughing.

“I don’t know why I bothered to talk to you,” Percy announced after a moment. “You’re nothing but a bunch of animals! Animals!” He stormed out of the room and went outside to wait for the Minister.

“Who did that?” Molly demanded after a moment.

“Me,” said Fred proudly.

“I cannot tell a lie, Mother. I did,” said George.

“You wish! It was me!” Ginny piped up.

Remus, who had been wondering how he was going to explain his decision to shoot parsnips at his hosts’ son, stretched out in front of the fire and smiled to himself as the three teenagers argued over who was going to take credit. But he began to feel contrite when Molly burst into tears.

 

                                                            *          *          *

Twilight on Christmas Day found Arthur at the edge of the wood at the back of The Burrow, chopping firewood with a level of energy that suggested barely suppressed violence.

Remus approached cautiously, and made sure the older man had seen him before he spoke. “Would you like a hand, Arthur?”

Arthur eyed him rather dubiously. “You can stack,” he said at last.

“I’m stronger than I look,” said Remus in some embarrassment.

“It isn’t that. We’ve only got the one axe.”

Remus began to stack the wood behind the broom shed. The first stars were out, and the breath of the men hung like clouds in the frosty air. He waited.

“Percy always seemed like such a good child,” said Arthur at last. “Never gave us a moment’s trouble, not even when he was a baby... Molly and I never could give the children much, but we tried to teach them the difference between what was right and what was easy. It’s hard to think that one of ours could go so far wrong.”

“He’s very young, Arthur. Give him a few more years to sort things out.”

“You were his teacher. What did you think of him?”

“The same as you. He was a very good student.” But it had been a negative sort of goodness, Remus thought, as blank as the snowy fields that stretched out on either side of the village. The kind of goodness that kept its hands clean and its nose in its schoolbooks, and didn’t lift a finger to protest the censorship of the Prophet or the imprisonment of Stan Shunpike.

“Was he a good Defense student?”

“In some ways,” said Remus noncommittally. He saw where the question was tending. Defense Against the Dark Arts was one of those subjects that showed the true character of the student; one needed a good heart and spirit as well as a good mind. “He was very hard-working, and his results on the written portion of his N.E.W.T.s were some of the best I’ve seen.”

“But...?”

“But he had trouble dealing with the unpredictable. Boggarts, for example.”

“But that’s a third-year subject.”

“Yes. And he’d never asked for help with it, so nobody knew.”

“He’s got too much pride.” Arthur gave the axe a final swing and sat down on a stump. “He gets it from me, I reckon. I wonder if...”

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s only – if I had taken another job when he was young, I wonder if things might have been different ... Because they all felt the sting of being poor, I think. Well, not Charlie so much – he always followed his heart, could’ve played professional Quidditch if he’d wanted to, but he loved dragons too much. And maybe not Ginny either, but the others did. It’s made them hungry for the things we couldn’t give them.”

“And if you had chosen to go chasing after the money – rather than staying where you could do the most good – what sort of example would that have set them?”

“You’re right, of course. But then again, I wonder if I wasn’t fooling myself about trying to do good within the Ministry. If I had walked away from it all, like ... Listen.”

A girl’s voice, high and clear, echoed across the frozen fields. In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan. Earth as hard as iron, water like a stone...

“That’ll be the Lovegood girl. Trust her to go caroling when everyone else in the village is settled in by the fire.”

Luna caught sight of the two men and waved a magenta-mittened hand in their direction before she strolled into the wood, still singing.

Remus thrust his hands into his pockets to warm them. “It’s getting colder. Should we ask her in for some eggnog?”

“I’ve tried it before. She won’t come,” said Arthur. “She goes her own way. Probably got it into her head that somebody needs to sing Christmas carols to the squirrels.”

Judging by his memories of Luna as a student, Remus found this easy to believe.

“Anyway, going back to what I was saying, Martin Lovegood’s a case in point. He’s always gone his own way too. He used to work for the Prophet, but he walked out the first time the Ministry tried to lean on them. That would’ve been – oh, ‘72, ‘73. You wouldn’t have been more than a child. And I’ve been thinking, perhaps it would have been better if I’d resigned over – over some of the things that have gone on.”

“Umbridge?”

“If not much earlier. I sometimes think that if I had half Martin’s integrity, I’d have left the day old Crouch started throwing people in prison without a trial. Let’s walk, it’s warmer.”

Remus was inclined to think that going back inside the house would be warmer; but as Arthur seemed to be in a confidential mood, he followed his host into the wood. “But you couldn’t very well have resigned, could you? Not with all those children to support.”

“Well, that’s exactly it, isn’t it? I keep feeling like Molly and I have been selfish.”

“Arthur, two more unselfish people than you and Molly never lived!”

“When I look at you – and at Tonks and Moody and Dumbledore – knowing that you’re risking your lives every day, and knowing you’ve paid too much of a price already –”

“It isn’t too much.”

“It is. Do you think I haven’t got eyes? Do you think I can’t see that you’re all but killing yourself out there? And meanwhile we’re snug at home – comfortable, and about as safe as anybody can be in these times, and Dumbledore insists on giving us the softest mission in the Order ... ‘Just look after Harry and be a family to him,’ he said. That isn’t work. We would have done that anyway.”

Remus pictured a certain clock with nine hands pointing to “Mortal Peril,” and thought that not many people would.

“You’ve been a family to all of us,” he said slowly, “and it makes more of a difference than you know. I shouldn’t have had the courage to face Greyback without knowing that it would keep homes like yours safe, and I don’t believe I could have gone on these last few weeks if I hadn’t had the promise of being able to visit at Christmas.”

It was the closest he had come to voicing a complaint since the beginning of his mission. Arthur did not respond immediately, and when at last he said “Thank you,” his voice was thick. They stood in the middle of the wood feeling rather awkward, as the night wind died down and the creaking of frozen branches and clatter of icicles subsided. Now they could hear a clear voice that wound its way through the trees.

The ivy bears a leaf

As green as any shoot,

Because the chill of wintertime

Pierces not the root.

“I’ve never heard that verse before,” said Arthur. “Have you?”

Remus smiled. “I expect she thought the holly got more than its fair share of the verses, and decided to even things out.”

The rising of the sun

And the running of the deer,

The playing of the merry organ,

Sweet singing in the choir.

They listened, hands in pockets, until Luna finished her song and got the bright idea of acting out “Good King Wenceslas,” following her own footsteps back to the village with a load of firewood tucked under her arm. Remus realized belatedly that they had been walking in circles, and it was in fact the Weasleys’ firewood. Arthur didn’t seem to mind. “We’ve plenty of it, and I don’t think Martin is much of a hand at chopping his own. Too busy chasing Snorkacks. Shall we go in?”

“Yes.” Remus looked up at the darkened sky with its icy pinpricks of stars. “It’s getting late. And,” he added in the hushed voice that people used to report the latest rumors of Death Eater activities, “you shouldn’t stay out in the woods too late at night. Not these days.”

Arthur tensed. “Why not?”

“Well, perhaps there’s nothing in it – but I’ve heard there are werewolves around here.”

Remus ducked and ran toward the bright lights of The Burrow as Arthur took aim with a handful of snow.