Boys Will Be Bugs

Chapter 3: Future

The following evening, Lyall came home from work to find Hope sitting at the dining room table trawling through books. Lyall picked one up. It was all cartoony, with numbers on the front.

"What's all this?" He asked.

"Muggle schoolbooks," Hope replied, not looking up from her reading. She didn't catch Lyall's look of confusion, but she sensed it, and continued to explain. "If he can't go to Hogwarts and he can't learn magic until he's seventeen, then I'm homeschooling him the muggle way."

"Really?"

"I've got it all planned out. Primary school to Secondary school."

"So he's not going to know anything about the wizarding world?"

"Of course he is. He'll have lessons on the wizarding world— you can teach him. But he has to focus on his muggle studies more." She finally looked up at her husband. "His only chance now of a good future is getting a job in the muggle world, and he can't do that without a muggle education."

"Does Dahlia know about this?"

"Remus is well aware of all of this. We've talked it through and he agrees. He wants to do this." Lyall sighed, placed his palms on the table and leant over.

"We never finished our conversation from yesterday." He kept his voice low and calm.

"There's nothing to finish-"

"For Merlin's sake, Hope, just stop being so bloody obtuse for one second and listen to me. This... Remus thing can't go on any longer. Do you think people like that are accepted? In the muggle world too. How's she supposed to get a job in your precious muggle world if no one accepts her, hm? You ever thought about that?"

"Have you ever thought about the fact that there's nothing we can do. Just like there's nothing we can do about his lycanthropy. Our only option is to accept this—"

"How can I accept this? Accept that we've lost our daughter?"

"We have to accept that we never had a daughter in the first place." Lyall simply sighed, exasperated. "I'm not letting him get hurt anymore, and you are hurting him." She looked at him, almost pleadingly. "Remember that night? The night he was attacked and we were sitting in the living room? You called him our son."

"I was stressed. I wasn't thinking straight."

"I think you were. I think you know deep down that he's your son, but your determination to deny it is affecting all of us. You're affecting Remus, and you're affecting our marriage." Hope gathered up the schoolbooks and stood up. "He's starting his studies tomorrow." Lyall said nothing, but when she was halfway up the stairs he added:

"He's only five. Not even six yet. What if this is just a phase?"

"Well... then we support him."

***

Life became routine for the Lupins. Lyall went to work everyday, still trying in vain to find a cure for Remus's lycanthropy. Hope took it upon herself to become Remus's teacher. She found schoolbooks for him to work through and sat with him at the dining table for a few hours each day. He learnt maths and English, and at his special request, history. He learnt both muggle and wizarding history. His mother started him off with some simple historical subjects. The erupting volcano of Pompeii, the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the Vikings and the Romans. She said they were the sort of things that she was taught during primary school. His father taught him wizarding history. The Statute of Secrecy, wizarding relations with muggles and the misconception that witches in Britain were burnt at the stake in the Middle Ages, when in reality they were hanged, or drowned.

"For God's sake, Lyall he's only six," reprimanded Hope.

"It doesn't happen anymore. And besides, real witches would have survived easily, as long as they had their wands of course." Lyall was a very smart man. He never dumbed down or censored his explanations, regardless of who he was talking to. Hope said it was too heavy for Remus, but Remus didn't mind. It was a little hard to follow at times, but Lyall was perfectly fine with Remus interrupting to ask for a simpler explanation.

His father was still holding on to some form of his denial over Remus being a boy, but he hardly protested anymore, and to his son's delight he'd finally started using the name Remus.

As for his monthly transformations, Remus had now grown used to them. He still hated them of course, and they were still a cause of great pain and anxiety to all three of them, but they were no longer his main focus, since there was nothing he could do about them. He could worry all he wanted, but at the end of the day there was no escape from the full moon. All he could do was treat them as just another inconvenient part of life, another thing he had to deal with. His mother gave him a four day break from doing schoolwork at the end of each month. Two days before he transformed and two days after, so he could rest. Things seemed to be going okay; Remus was less sad all the time, except when he thought about missing out on going to Hogwarts when he was older, so he tried not to think about it.

He wasn't allowed out of the house much. His parents were too worried for his safety, so they kept him inside. They didn't want the neighbours to notice his scars and start talking. Remus didn't mind too much. For starters, he hated people looking at his scars, which were still very visible. He'd once gone into a muggle town with his mother, and adults and children alike stared at him in slight shock. The adults would try and pretend they weren't looking, while children would stare right at him until they were nudged by a parent and given a stern warning about "rudeness". Remus always kept his head down as he walked.

Unfortunately, it was only a matter of time before Remus's reclusiveness and the family's strange behaviour sparked gossip amongst the neighbours. His father came home one day looking very tense. He explained to Hope that a neighbour had stopped him and asked if Dahlia was okay, feeling like they hadn't seen her in years. He replied back saying that Dahlia was fine and that her mother was homeschooling her, so she was inside most of the day. The neighbour didn't seem to accept the answer and warned Lyall that people were starting to talk.

"She said one neighbour was getting suspicious about Remus's scars," Lyall concluded.

"So what do we do?" asked Hope.

"Well, the longer we stay here, the more likely Remus will be found out. It's not safe anymore."

"You mean we have to move?"

"It was always inevitable, Hope. We need to go somewhere secluded," his face brightened ever so slightly. "Perhaps we could go up to Wales. You'd like to go back to Wales, wouldn't you? And there's certainly a lot of country up there. No neighbours for miles." Hope looked reluctant.

"I hate the idea of cutting us all off from the rest of the world. Besides, this is our home. Remus was born here."

"I know, but we don't have a choice, it's for his own safety." Hope, of course, couldn't argue with that, so reluctantly she agreed to think about moving.

***

Two months later, and the three of them were walking through the front door of their new house. It was an averaged-sized place, three bedrooms and a sizeable garden, but what attracted them to it was that it was located deep in the countryside. There was no one around as far as the eye could see and they had to drive just to get to the nearest town. Remus was safe at least, and that's what mattered.

He was nearly seven years old now.