Transatlanticism
Despite all appearances to the contrary, Remus has always been slightly uneasy around magic. He prefers Muggle things, familiar things from the first eleven years of his life, and no matter how much Sirius smirked at him, or James smiled indulgently, he never quite lost his affinity for the creations of his roots.
He misses Lily, because she understood, being Muggle-born herself.
So that's why, in the corner of his room in the mausoleum that he must now call a home, is a desk overflowing with quills and inkpots and scraps of parchment. Some are new, untouched by Remus' script; others are covered in messy handwriting and jotted notes. He knows that it would be easier to capture his memories with a Pensieve, that words scribbled on parchment are only pale imitations to the vivid Technicolor memories that the magic device could provide.
But Remus still feels more at home with his Muggle habit of writing.
Molly looks askance at his ink-stained fingers when he comes down for breakfast, and only his ever more weary face, legacy of yet another sleepless night, stays her ire. He knows that she would understand, remembers her grief over the loss of Gideon and Fabian, her brothers, in the First War. But Remus has kept so many secrets over the years that it has become second nature now to hold his tongue, to never offer an explanation.
He only clears his throat and asks if Fred could pass the toast.
Nights are the hardest, he knows. Days can be wiled away, attending to meaningless chores around the house, or Order business, but nights…at night there is nothing to do but lie awake, staring at the ceiling and thinking, and remembering.
The memories are coming less frequently now, Remus notices, or perhaps it's just that he's exhausted all the good ones. He suspects it's more likely that the memories are fading back into time, becoming ghosts of their former selves.
He lifts his wand, mutters a spell and the candles on the desk flicker into light. He sits down, rifles through the stacks of used parchment, pulling one out at random. He reads slowly, savoring each word, and when he is finished he closes his eyes, watching the memory play out across his eyelids as if it were only yesterday. He watches Sirius, alive and strong and as wicked as ever, and James, tall and confident and ever-laughing, and Lily, sweet and kind and with eyes that soothed wounds in the soul.
He knows that he omits Peter from these memories, and his only thought in the direction of the rat he once called a friend is a wish that someone could be erased from life as easily as they could be erased from memories.
Opening his eyes, Remus takes up his quill, hastily scratching down a snippet from a long-forgotten day sitting beside the lake with his best friend. He stops suddenly, wincing as the memory fades away, lost in the ever-increasing void in his heart. There are days when he looks down at the half-finished pages, wondering if they were real memories or if he had only dreamed them. The longer he looks at them, the more is convinced that they are just shadows and wisps of dreams that he had once, when he was happy.
He sets down his quill, gathers the pieces of parchment close to his chest as tears begin the slow slide down his cheeks. Remus holds the pages, holds the remnants of happier times, and weeps for all he's lost – both the people and the feelings, the memories.
Because he is coming to understand that, no matter how many pages he writes in his frantic search to keep the people he loves alive, no matter how many memories he could put into the Pensieve to preserve them, eventually Time touches everything. Eventually, everything becomes shadows of what it had been.
He is coming to realize that he is a shadow of who he had been. The boy who ran and joked at Hogwarts, the man who bravely fought a war with his lover at his side, are no more. They too have become shadows, remnants of dreams from a better time. All he has left of that boy, than man, are smudges of ink on parchment, memories so leeched of color and feeling that they are hardly real.
All Remus has left is half-forgotten shadows, and a void in his heart that gets larger every day.
He wonders, just before he sleeps, how long it will take the man he is now to become a shadow too.