Turquoise Teddy

Sixteen Years Later

Today is the sixteenth anniversary of the Battle Of Hogwarts. Granted, my birthday was a little under a month ago, but I still link my birth and the death of my parents together as though they were on the same day. I wasn't even a month old when my mum, Nymphadora Tonks, and my dad, Remus Lupin, were killed in their fight against Voldemort and his supporters. I didn't know them, but I still have one memory - their beaming faces when I first turned my hair turquoise at nineteen days old (or that's when Nan says it was). That's why I keep it that way. And yes, if you're wondering, I am a metamorphagus.

We're going to the memorial service later, to commemorate the lives of all those who died in their efforts to make the wizarding world safer. My parents, of course, being among them. But I don't want to go. I don't want to hear the list of lost names again, read that sombre poem. It's like I have a gaping hole in my heart and despite it seeming to shrink as time goes on, it's always ripped open again at the very first of those crushing words on the second of May. I can't do it this year. I've been every year as long as I can remember, surely that is enough respect to suffice? It's not as though I'm choosing not to go out of selfishness, but I cannot actually bring myself to go through the emotional trauma for the sixteenth time. I'll have to run. Not away, but to the place where they died. It's a little corridor hidden deep in Hogwarts, and even though they were both murdered separately, coincidentally the two tragedies occurred on the same corridor. Sometimes I think I see my mum's violet hair flash around the corner, or my dad's battered suitcase waiting at the end. Obviously this isn't real, because I know exactly what ghosts look like and what I see of my parents is different. But it's a comfort. I miss them.

So that's how I find myself, curled up on the windowsill, crying in the empty skeleton of Hogwarts while everyone else attends the service on the anniversary of my parents' death. Nan might kill me for hiding, but I'll find a way to get around her. I always do, being the poor little orphan who's ever so slightly deranged, obsessively mourning the parents he never knew.