Black Hole

"There's Got to be a Morning After, If We Can Hold On Through the Night"

Hope Lupin was an eccentric yet simple woman. She knew how to be passionately loud and she knew how to be appeasingly quiet. She wore long skirts and no bra and long leather necklaces with colorful beads and was often called a 'dirty hippie' who had no business being with someone as put together and plain as Lyall Lupin (little did the people of their small Welsh town know that he was a bloody wizard). What example was she setting for her son, they would whisper when she walked away with her trademark smile on her young, pretty face after pouring them some coffee, dirt under her finger nails and a skunky, herbal smell protruding from her clothes. What with being a thirty-five-year-old 'dirty hippie' waitress who took off work to take her son to equality marches and who worshipped Stevie Nicks.

And, God, did the woman love flowers. There was always a daisy behind her ear or a bluebell pinned to her uniform.

Ever since she was a girl, growing up in the same house in which she raised her son, in which she intended to live out the rest of her days (however short or long that time period may be), she had gardens and painted terra cotta pots and window boxes. Her mother was the one who started it all, being a florist, of course bringing home bright yellow forsythias and dark purple bellflowers and tulips of ever color. The sweet scents filled her cottage since the day she was born.

She loved her flowers, yes, but she loved nothing more than her little boy. She was young when she had him, only eighteen, but she was prepared to be a mother for as long as she could remember. And so, so many bloody people had told her that she married and got pregnant much too young, that she had thrown her life away. But, no, she would tell them. Her life started, truly, when that little baby boy's cry broke out in the hospital room.

Remus, she named him. After a boy raised by wolves. She thought it complimented his surname, her new one. Years later, she would feel as though she doomed him from birth.

On that night, like horrible, agonizing night, as they, her and Lyall, both covered in blood, their five year old boy's blood, sat in the strange hospital waiting room with objects flying around and people walking by with comically enlarged body parts or legs where arms should be and arms where legs should be, she thought that she would simply die if her son didn't make it. How could she live on this earth without being his mother?

But he survived, they told them (well, the doctor was just looking at Lyall as he spoke), but the man who did this did it with a certain intent. He had succeeded.

In that moment, Hope wanted nothing more than to hurt her husband. She had never wanted to hurt anyone, ever. But in that moment, when there were wizard doctors and wizard police around them, talking about a man named Greyback and a registry and chains and locked doors, in that moment, she blamed him. She blamed him for dragging her and her boy into his strange world. And it took everything in her to not scream and hit and take her boy and leave.

And, of course, she never said those thoughts out loud, because Lyall thought the same, and said it enough for the both of them. And soon, she realized, that man was to blame, only him, for hurting her boy. Her most precious flower.

She stared down at her boy, who was seventeen now, but looked so, so young when he was asleep. He slept a lot on days like this, days when the moon would be full and bright and he would tear apart his beautiful face and his soft skin. He was stretched on on their aging green, leather couch, his log legs partially over its side, with his head on her lap. A show was on, one of those old-timey black and white westerns Remus liked. She moved a curl from his sweaty forehead as he shuddered, a small whimper coming from lips.

"Mam?" He murmured, hazel eyes that matched her own flickering open.

"Yes, carriad?" She soothed, running her hands though his soft brown hair which he inherited from his father.