Is It Over Now?

Chapter Seven

"Okay, what's up with Lupin?" Barty asks, but his voice isn't judging, there was concern hidden neatly beneath the masks that everyone within the grove always donned with everyone outside of it.

Regulus glanced at the older boy, a look that told him that it was Remus's choice as to what he wasn't to say. That it always would be. The younger boy would never know just how much that meant to the Gryffindor, not when that choice had been stolen from him so many times before.

Remus opened his mouth, the words that he could hardly ever speak to himself - but had known how to spell since he was small before he knew how to read - but it felt as if his voice had been stolen like in an old fairy tale. Except this time there was no kiss that could bring it back.

"You're a werewolf."

The voice was soft and airy, delicate as the girl who spoke it, but nothing about it was a question and never would be again.

Remus doesn't deny it, but he doesn't confirm it either. He didn't need to. The eldest boy only bows his head and waits for the verdict of the others, the decision of those that had encouraged him to seep into this part of himself over the past few months without even knowing that it was there.

Pandora stepped through the forest floor as if she had been meant to live among the trees, her hand raising gently to the older boy's face as she looked at him with those blue eyes that were always impossible to read and excruciatingly open. Light touches brushed over the silver scars, brushing over them as if they were something to be delicate within and not a source of shame.

"You look the same to me," she whispered, yet the Ravenclaws's words carried in the quiet clearing.

A tear slipped down the boy's face, the first one in years. She brushed it away with the same loving care that a sister might hold for their brother.

Dora stepped up to Remus's left, Regulud still at the older boy's right as Barty and Evan glanced at one another, their sides pressed closely together in the same manner that the other snake and lion often were.

And Evan smiles.

"I've never liked pure silver much anyways," the boy says as the pair draw closer, a small circle forming as if they were performing a ritual that only those present knew. "Too posh, even for me."

And if the Gryffindor laughed weakly at that, then that was only the business of those gathered.

Barty spoke last, a playful smirk on his face that already had Remus rolling his eyes at whatever the younger boy was going to say. "I should have seen it coming, Mr. Werewolf McWerewolf," the snake says in a falsely disappointed tone, pointing out that the older boy was named after one of the sons of the she - wolf Lupa and the wolf constellation.

"I was born a few days before a total lunar eclipse," the lion admits with a smirk of his own.

" Merlin !" Barty laughed, and the sound runs through the clearing like a broken melody that they all soon sung, surprising the Gryffindor with just how easy this was. How little the fear gripped at him the way that it had in second year.

Remus looks at the last boy and sees that smile on Regulus's face, the secret one that so few ever got to know. The wolf smiles back, something just as small and fragile, but means everything as fingers lace together as if they didn't know what it meant to be apart.

Acceptance.

That was the only emotion that the others gave to the eldest boy. In the others' eyes, Remus found none of the hesitant fear that the other Gryffindors had held upon learning the truth, none of the disgust that so many adults that had figured it out on their own without even knowing him.