How We Remember

Remus Lupin frowned as he looked at the latest stack of third-year exams. He'd come to the one name that seemed to be troubling him more and more: Luna Lovegood.

Her essays were always well-written, if a little...well, creative was the term he liked to use. Naturally, on seeing the discrepancy between her essays and her exams, his first inclination had been to think that she was cheating. But every line of those essays shone with her personality and voice.

She wasn't incapable of logic; he'd finally made her give up believing in the Potteleopardus, a being she claimed could move at light speed, after he made her work out the energy required to propel an animal of the size she argued for it at light speed, and the amount it would have to eat in order to produce that kind of energy. He saw it as a small victory.

But when it came to exams, she seemed to freeze up and lose every ounce of capability that she possessed, writing down heart-breakingly wrong answer after wrong answer. When he'd talked to the staff about her, the assessments had ranged from just a bit lost in her own world (Flitwick) to undisciplined (McGonagall) to barking mad (Hagrid, surprisingly enough) or lazy (Snape, of course). Yet none of these seemed quite right.

A knock on his door disturbed his reverie, and Remus called out, "Come in."

Luna stepped through the door, her fair, lank hair all tied up in riotously-colored ribbons. "You wanted to see me, Professor?"

"Take a seat," he said, kindly. He leaned forward, resting his hands on his desk. "I wanted to talk to you about this last exam."

Her face shuttered for just a moment, and then she recovered. "Oh, yes?"

"It's another fail." His voice was quiet and gentle.

Her hands, twisting together, were the only sign of her anxiety. "I see." She looked at him blandly, as though inquiring what he was going to do about it.

"You're not stupid, Luna, I know you aren't. Is the problem that you're not studying?" He was anxious to help her. "Maybe you should start coming to study in here for a few nights before the exams."

"I study for four hours a day," Luna said flatly. "In the library. You can ask Madam Pince."

He didn't doubt her truthfulness, but he was frustrated. "What is it then? There must be something I can do to help you."

"I just don't do so well on exams, I'm afraid," she said, looking out the window.

"Luna, that's not good enough. As you get older, exams will determine your future. Is it that you're nervous?"

She sighed and said, finally, in the softest of voices, "There was a memory charm when my mother died."

Remus sucked in his breath sharply. There had been a fashion for memory charms on children, of course, just after the last war, but he'd have thought Luna would have escaped any such thing. "And now you have trouble remembering things."

"Some things," she said, sounding more cheerful. "I remember what day it is and to change my socks and things." But the way she said it made it rather clear that even that was rather an uphill battle.

He thought for a while. "Luna, how do you remember the names of all the creatures that are mentioned in the Quibbler?"

She pondered this. "Well, Daddy tells me stories about them. And I could hardly forget, could I, a story about a heliopath?"

"No, I don't suppose you could," he said, smiling a bit. He leaned forward. "Listen, let me tell you about zombies..."

Six months later, Remus Lupin tripped over a huddled figure sitting on the broad steps as he was leaving the castle. It was a testament to his distress and distraction that he did so, as he was usually a good deal more careful about such things. "Luna," he said, laying a hand on the small shoulder. "Are you all right?"

"Oh, yes." She stood up and shook herself off, making her necklace of cowbells chime. "I just wanted to be sure and say goodbye to you. And thank you. Daddy's ever so happy about my grades getting better," she added, remembering her manners.

Remus felt a slight pang; he'd been worried about leaving Harry and hadn't even remembered that he was abandoning Luna to her dreary academic fate. But inspiration kindly struck him. Reaching into his carryall, he drew forth a bound, blank journal--people always gave them to him since it was presumed that anyone who was bookish liked just about anything in book form--and handed it to her. "This is for you. I want you to tell yourself stories and write them down. Stories about the potions you have to brew, stories about transfigurations, stories about everything that you want to remember. Make them real, and then you'll remember them."

She bit her lip dubiously. "It'll be difficult."

"I know." He smiled down at her. "But someday, I'd like to read them."

Her face brightened, and she wrapped her arms around his waist, giving him a fierce, brief embrace, then stepped back, smoothing her skirt down demurely. "Thank you, Professor Lupin."

"You're welcome." Her brave smile hurt him almost as much as Harry's anger. "Goodbye now."

"Goodbye," Luna said, then perched on the heavy balustrade that faced the steps, watching as he left.

Five years later, when the war had ended and Remus returned to Hogwarts once more as a teacher, he found his office empty save for one thing. It was a little journal, crammed and cross-written. A note was tucked inside it. You did say you'd like to read them. It turned out I wanted to remember rather a lot of things. L.L.

As he flipped through the pages, he saw titles like "Severus Snape and the Awfully Bad Draught of Peace," "Hermione Had a Little Patronus," but also titles like "The Last Battle" and "His Dying Breath," scribbled on pages blotted with tears.

Fortifying himself to relive some of the most painful years of his life, torn between pleasure and sorrow, Remus sat down to read.