Unspoken

Finding Remus

Summary: Hermione invites Lupin to a magical convention, but the moment the two enter the underground venue, things take a turn for the strange. Even Severus is acting a bit peculiar...and who's that with him? Eventual HG/SS pairing.

Finding Remus

He was not on the corner, where they'd agreed to meet.

Angling her umbrella, Hermione scanned the street, but saw only other umbrella-carrying commuters and a couple of diehard runners sloshing their way through the morning rain—a rain that turned to mist the moment it hit the street. In the foggy odd-light, everything about her seemed imbued with a trancelike quality, one that slowed even time's forward crush to a surreal crawl.

She glanced at her watch. Bugger that! Time was not crawling, but ever steadily still tick-tick-ticking away; to make matters worse, he was late! Which also meant that now, she, who prided herself on punctuality, would also be late. Harry'd said this might happen, but why today—today of all days? She shook her coat sleeve over the offending time piece, hoping out of sight could influence out of mind. I should have met him at Grimmauld Place, sighing, she stepped into the street.

A horn blared. Out of nowhere a double-decker bus burst through the rainy haze. Narrowly missing her, the bus drenched her with a spray of dirty puddle water. Then, belching a cloud of noxious blue exhaust in her face, it sped away, leaving her splay-legged on the curb.

Muttering a few favorite expletives in its wake, Hermione tried to brush off her coat. To her chagrin, her brand new, never-before-worn, green military jacket with brass buttons, a birthday gift from her mother, was soaked through. After shielding herself behind the Burberry's capacious ribs and whispering a furtive Scourgify, Hermione shouldered her umbrella and trudged grimly up the street.

Fifteen minutes later, she found him huddled under a tree on the outskirts of Kensington Gardens. She'd been silently rehearsing a pithy speech about the merits of timeliness but after seeing him in such a disheveled state--because truly, Remus Lupin had to be the sorriest looking man ever to sit on a park bench alone without a hat in the rain--all she could muster was an exasperated, "Honestly!" 

"Hermione, please accept this as a peace offering." Grinning sheepishly, he proffered a cup of tea.

She took the cup, but couldn't help noticing how badly his hand was trembling. "I was beginning to think I'd lost you," she said. Taking a sip for politeness' sake, she immediately had to conceal a wince. The tea was ice cold.

"I think I got turned about a bit somewhere..." Remus gestured toward the park. "I'm just not myself today. It's those blasted treatments. I'm sure Harry told you about them?" Nodding, Hermione started to answer, but he cut her off before she could say a single word. "After yesterday's, I went to the gate in Diagon Alley, but when I wasn't able to open it, well, I—I guess I just... Damn!" He dashed his cup of tea against a nearby trash bin.

A pair of elderly passersby glanced at them nervously.

"Remus, it's..." Fine. She wanted to reassure him, tell him that everything was just fine, but it wasn't. He wasn't. Harry had told her as much in his letters, but she hadn't wanted to believe it. In the months following his near-fatal injury at the Battle of Hogwarts, the were-virus responsible for saving his life had been wreaking steady havoc with him and the monthly treatments he received at St. Mungo's seemed to be doing more harm than good. Pale, thin, and stoop-shouldered: the man who stood before her now was a shadow of the friend she once knew, a scarecrow cloaked in frayed brown tweed. Glancing at his graying temples and gaunt cheeks, Hermione wondered, how much longer he could live like this?