She loved tulips. She loved daisies. She loved forget-me-nots, and gerberas and roses and daffodils - she loved every flower he brought her. He always tried to bring something. Flowers were free, as long as he kept Madam Sprout on side, and Hope hadn’t much appetite, so chocolate was no good.
They had five more meetings over the spring of 1978, and Remus would forever mark each of them by the flowers he’d brought to her. The conversations they had too, of course - but the flowers seemed to bookend everything; colouring each session with its own personality.
Tulips had presided over their second meeting. They were orange, pink and yellow, with sturdy dusky green stems and sumptuous velvet petals. A very generous flower, Remus thought.
She was ready for him, this time; she’d had her hair washed and combed, and it gleamed sunny platinum blonde against the pink hospital blankets. She’d put a spot of makeup on, too, though Remus felt bad for noticing that, because he felt he ought not to care how she looked.
“I got my sister to dig out some pictures,” Hope said eagerly, tapping a brown paper envelope on her bedside, as Remus set down the weird vase he’d drunkenly transfigured.
“What are they pictures of?” He asked, cautiously, pulling up a seat beside her. He didn’t want to be caught unawares by anything too painful.
“Some of you, as a baby,” she smiled with shiny coral lips, “Some of me and your father.”
“Lyall.” Remus said, quickly.
“Me and Lyall,” she corrected herself, out of politeness.
Hope would bend over backwards to save Remus even the smallest upset; that much was clear from the beginning. He found it unsettling; very few people had ever cared about his feelings so intensely before.
He picked up the envelope, and held it for a moment.
“You don’t have to look. We can do it another time.” Hope said, a tremor of fear in her voice. He didn’t want to frighten her. He wanted to tell her not to worry; that he wasn’t going to run away, or disappear forever; that he wanted to be there, and get to know her. But that was all too much, so he just opened the package and smiled,
“No, I want to see.”
Fortunately there weren’t very many - but he was surprised to find that more than half of the photographs were magical, and the images moved in his hands like film reels.
“I’ve had to keep them hidden,” Hope confided, “Lyall never liked the usual sort of photography; he said they were too flat.”
“How old is he, in this one?” Remus held up a photograph of both of his parents, standing in someone’s back garden. Lyall was wearing a muggle suit, and they were both squinting against the sunshine, but smiling. He had his arm around Hope’s waist.
“Oh, I think we’d only met a few weeks before that was taken,” Hope said, taking it from him to look closer, “He’d have been… thirty, I think?”
Remus looked at it again. He knew he looked like Lyall, he’d been told so a few times, and to some extent he agreed. They were both gangly; tall and skinny with bad posture. But Lyall looked more at ease than Remus had ever felt in his over-long body; his movements in the photograph were confident and self-assured.
She let him take the pictures back to school, and he tentatively showed his friends. Over his seven years at Hogwarts, he had been shown a lot of family photos. Peter and James kept pictures in frames on their bedside, or else tacked up on the walls over their dressers. Lily had an album that she flipped through when she was homesick, and Mary had a shoebox full of holiday snaps, Christmases, postcards and pictures of her cousins in Jamaica. So it was a surprisingly nice experience, Remus thought, being able to share his own modest collection.
