Chapter Text
Lyall doffed his Winter cloak and unlaced his shoes to the sound of Remus' feet thundering down the stairs. He sat himself at on the bench by the front door and removed his glasses so he could dry off the raindrops, replacing them to see his eight year old standing in front of him. He was still wearing the smart jumper and trousers Hope had dressed him in to take him with her to work that morning. No doubt bursting with unspent energy from a day of sitting obediently at the back of her classroom, he was caught somewhere between bouncing happily in the entryway at the return of a parent, and embarrassment at his own childish urge.
"Evening," he said, raising an arm for a side-hug. Mad that, when he was sitting, Remus was near a head taller than him now. "I've got a surprise for you."
He felt the iron clamp of Remus' hand at the back of his robes, activated in thoughtless excitement and was filled with fond amusement at Remus' wide eyes when he stepped back.
"What? Tell me, then?"
"Where's your manners?"
Remus tipped his head back dramatically at his teasing. "Dad," he whinged, and looked imploringly down the hallway. Lyall followed his gaze to see Hope watching them from the kitchen doorway.
"What's the big surprise?"
"Big surprise is, no more pestering from you, Mouse, for a field trip - got one coming up that Smith backed out of, so it's just me and Rodger on it. You can come along, if you want?"
He'd barely gotten the question out before Remus cut across with an emphatic yes, fizzing with anticipatory excitement.
"Dragons?"
Lyall laughed.
"No, sorry, not dragons."
Despite the lack of dragons, he was alight at the promise, sporting a face-splitting grin and wriggling with uncorked anticipation.
"Not tomorrow, but the day after-" Remus was not listening.
"What is it, then?"
Lyall grunted as he stood and stretched, fingertips brushing the low ceiling as he tried to hold back a yawn.
"Boggarts. Some muggle department store is full of them, apparently. Builders were seeing all sorts of nonsense." He turned to Hope, raising his eyebrows playfully. "Your mother's favourite monster."
Hope snorted. "Hmm, second favourite."
"I'm not a monster," Remus called back to her, indignant.
"I was talking about your father."
Remus did not let the topic drop for the rest of the evening and Lyall was close to regretting even offering for him to come in the first place by the time the bedroom door was finally shut on him after another half-hour round of post-bath questioning. Hope was waiting for him on the sofa and dog-eared the book she'd been reading against her bent knees when he entered, tossing it gently to the coffee table.
"He's excited," Lyall noticed the careful impartiality in her voice and knew he was in for a conversation.
"Yeah, he's been asking for nearly a year. And you know Rodger doesn't mind him tagging along." He joined her, entrenching himself in the opposite corner, well aware that once he was sat, he would be staying until bed. If he didn't fall asleep there.
He flicked his wand over his shoulder and a record slid itself out of the bottom shelf and presented it's cover to Hope for her approval. At her nod, he sent it to settle itself on the turntable and play. Ticklish piano jazz filled the room, just loud enough to drown out the rain.
"Boggarts, though, Lyall?" The gentlest grimace flicked across her mouth and he considered her, trying not to appear condescending.
"It won't be like- like when we met. They won't chase him down. And, well, like I said then - boggarts are simple enough, once you know what you're dealing with. There's no real danger."
"I know there's no real danger," she had an air of patience about her, and an almost apologetic look in her soft, brown eyes. "But don't you think that it's a bit… oh I don't know… misguided, I suppose? He's only eight. You can tell him it's not real as much as you want but… if it's frightening enough…"
He let Vince Guaraldi fill the silence for a while as he thought properly about how their little trip was likely to play out for the first time. Initially, his response had been simply one of convenient satisfaction at the opportunity for wish fulfilment. Remus wanted to go on a work field trip and see some creatures, and finally one had popped up without senior supervision what was sufficiently safe and routine.
On the second consideration, prompted by his wife's careful words, he did see the glaring issue.
Lyall had been working with boggarts since before Remus was born. Since before he'd met Hope, even. Apparitions were his early speciality and they were, at this point, nothing more than a mere nuisance. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that the trip in two days' time meant getting to avoid whatever other nonsense appeared in the DDC for three or so hours and the opportunity to chat to Rodger without Smith hovering around, he would have passed it on to their apprentice. Boggarts were boring routine, now.
He hadn't been caught off guard by one since he was still a teenager. The Ministry protocol of holding a tame, but believable fear in the forefront of his mind was so ingrained that he sometimes found himself thinking about scorpions when opening the cupboard under their sink from sheer force of habit.
But Remus wouldn't see a crawling bug that illicited nothing more than a shudder and a grimace, would he?
He hummed thoughtfully, chancing a glance at Hope, who, to her credit, was approaching his short-sightedness with a soft, motherly - or maybe teacherly - affect.
"I'll, ah… I'll talk to him about it in the morning. Make sure he knows."
Hope reached out one foot and nudged him with it, playfully.
"Eager to play the hero to a naive little Howell for the second time?"
"Oh hush. He's hardly naive."
He'd meant it jovially - Remus had spent many a night listening to whatever horror-come-exaggerated-adventure story Lyall was willing to tell him about magical creatures - but Hope's face fell and Lyall felt his mouth grow sour.
"Sorry, I didn't mean-"
"No, it's alright."
She sighed and repositioned herself, turning so she could flop down on her back on top of him.
"It might well do him some good - you never know. Exposure therapy is a thing."
"I won't expose him to- to Greyback," Lyall argued, shifting to try and allow her to lie down without her shoulder digging uncomfortably into his stomach.
"You don't get to decide what he sees."
"I'll talk to him."
The next morning saw the uncharacteristic dynamic of Lyall, awake at half six before wife or son, splitting his attention between making sausage and egg sandwiches and reading the Morning Prophet. He held the paper up as a shield as he shuffled the pan, trying to block the fatty spit from hitting the back of his hands.
Hope was taking full advantage of being part time and was enjoying her Thursday lie-in. He'd left her in the bed, a little jealous of her reclaim of his half of the quilt that she'd then gleefully buried herself in. Remus was undoubtedly awake, likely reading in bed by the light of the weak morning sunshine, soon to be summoned by the smell of breakfast. The radio tittered away on the kitchen windowsill, tuned into a wizarding station this morning - some news channel bordering on gossip that was discussing the changes to the Hogwarts' Board of Governors.
The kitchen door inched open and Remus appeared, barefoot in white and red striped pyjamas and a jumper pulled on top. His head looked like he'd slept in a tumble dryer.
"Alright, Mouse?"
"Morning," he mumbled, still half asleep. He'd brought his book with him and, having sat down, let William the Detective flop open in front of him. He rested his folded arms upon the kitchen table and set his cheek atop them.
"Your mam still asleep?"
"Think so," he flicked the page over and glanced up at Lyall. "Can I have just sausages?"
"Yeah…" Lyall flicked the burner off and summoned the bread over from where it sat atop the fridge. "Hey, Remus?"
He felt his throat go tight as soon as he broached the conversation and resigned himself that it had to be done. If anything, the physical discomfort that it elicited was enough to prove that it was worth having.
"Remus, about the trip tomorrow-"
"I can still come?" His bird's nest head popped up, successfully roused by the threat of missing out.
"Maybe. Look, about the trip - I should have given it a bit more…" Lyall sighed and combed his hair away from his face with his fingers, searching for the right words. It wouldn't do to accidentally imply that it was Hope's fault that he was even considering not taking him. That was hardly fair.
Remus was watching him with (very effective) puppy-dog eyes, his bottom lip anxiously between his teeth.
"I… You can still come, we just have to talk about it first. I didn't really consider, when I said you could come… it might be a bit scary."
Remus licked his lips and pulled one foot up to the chair so he could hug his knee. The pages of his book, released from the pressure of his arms, rose slowly, a few pages flicking backwards.
"I'm quite brave," he offered, lamely. Lyall laughed.
"Yeah, I'd say that's fair."
Are you brave? Or have you just seen too many terribly frightening things?
He sent their two plates to the table, and the bread packed itself away while he busied himself with pouring a tea.
"Can you just… describe a boggart for me? Please?"
He kept his eyes on the task in front of him, watching the rusty bloom of the tea in the water with more interest than it deserved.
"Er… yeah. They're a… an apparition. They're not alive, or dead, so they can't be killed. They're shape-shifters, and turn into something scary when they're seen, right?"
"Right."
Lyall took the chair opposite, his tea between his elbows on the table.
"You're right, thanks. Okay…"
Oh how do I even go about this?
"It probably won't be enjoyable for you to go somewhere where you're confronted with things that frighten you at random for hours."
Apparently, with no tact.
"No, I still want to."
He'd thought he'd say that. Time to try a different angle.
"What are you most frightened of?"
Remus cocked his head, resting his cheek on his raised knee. His eyes drifted off to the open kitchen window, thinking.
"Erklings," he said, eventually, gaze settling back on Lyall. "Sometimes I have nightmares about them."
Lyall privately was thankful that Hope wasn't with them to hear that confession, or she'd never let it go.
"Okay, what would you do if you opened the kitchen cupboard and a little erkling was sitting in there?"
Remus glanced at one of the cupboards as if imagining it might make it true. That is how boggarts work, I suppose.
"Probably scream."
Remus closed his book properly and looked as serious as his wide-eyed face would allow. Lyall tried not to smile.
"I'd be okay, though. I'll know they're not real erklings."
"When we do apparition training, at the DDC, they teach you to know all the things you're frightened of," he explained, much more comfortable approaching the topic from a lecturing standpoint. If Hope were there, she might've rolled her eyes.
"How could you not know what you're frightened of?"
"Well," Lyall leaned closer, wanting to take Remus' hands, but he was getting a bit old for that now. He settled on wrapping his hands around his mug of tea instead. "You'd be surprised. Sometimes, when you're so frightened of something, you can't bear to think about it."
Remus held his gaze, listening with the intensity of a man waiting for bomb diffusal instructions.
"So, it's one thing to be frightened by a boggart shifting into something you know you're scared of - that you're expecting. But it's another when it's something else that you're not… prepared to see."
"Is that why Mam was so scared, that time when you met?"
Lyall huffed a fond laugh and shook his head. "No. Mam didn't know it was a boggart, remember? She thought it was for real."
"Yeah."
There was a soft silence and Lyall burned his mouth on his still-too-hot tea in the lull. Remus extracted a sausage from between the two slices of bread and picked at it idly.
"How do you know if it's for real?"
Lyall drummed his fingers thoughtfully. "Well, it depends on what your fear is - what the boggart turns into. Sometimes, it's something frightening, but it doesn't make sense. Then it's easy to know it's a boggart. For example, I don't like scorpions. I usually think of scorpions when I'm dealing with boggarts. I know it's going to turn into something I'm frightened of, so it might as well be something that's not… horrifying. And also, we don't get scorpions in this country, so I know for sure it's a shape-shifter."
Remus seemed to be occupied with mulling over the admittance that his dad was frightened of scorpions. Lyall caught a little twitch of a smile at the corner of his lips, giving him away.
"You can't tease me, you know," he said, smirking. Remus grinned wickedly at him. Lyall suspected he'd be finding rubber scorpions in his shoes at some point in the coming months.
"Well, if I see an erkling, it must be a boggart - because they live in the woods."
"Good lad. You're right about that."
"Okay, so I can come, then?"
Lyall laughed.
"Well, I suspect there might be things other than erklings that you're frightened of."
Remus' attention went back to his sausage sandwich and he busied himself with peeling the blistered, split skin off them.
"Yeah. I don't like lethifolds, either."
"Yes, I'm not keen on those."
"And I don't like the Cybermen, even though I know that's not real."
"Remus, you know I'm not talking about those things."
The other knee came up, and Remus tucked his chin against his chest, hiding his face.
"Yes, but we don't talk about that," he whispered into the dark space between his thighs and his chest where Lyall couldn't see him. His fingers were tight on the legs of his pyjamas - they were grease-marked on the right side from his fingers.
"I think we should talk about it, if you're going to come along. I don't want you to see something from that night unexpectedly. That would be… unfair to you."
Remus mumbled something that was too low for Lyall to hear. He could imagine it was some vague, half-formed argument to the contrary.
"Remus."
He peeked up, eyebrows knotted together.
"Obviously I'm scared of that-" he bit out, then baulked, surprised at his own acidity. "Sorry."
"It's alright. I just- you might see… something like that, if you come. I don't know if it's a good idea for you to see something like that."
"Tell me how to- how to only see scorpions, or whatever. Then I won't."
He remembered, quite abruptly, being taught boggarts in school. He could hardly remember if it had been defence against the dark arts, or care of magical creatures. Surely defence? He regarded Remus again, frizzy fair hair sticking up at the back of his head, in his stripey pyjamas.
Among the classmates who faced clowns, spiders, snakes, banshees and fwoopers, would Fenrir Greyback make an appearance? Not a human thought left in his mind, salivating at the promise of doing far more damage to Lyall than he'd even imagined possible? Or perhaps something worse still? Perhaps the animal itself - the creature Remus was "locked away with" once per month. Or even he and Hope, who had damned him to that existence, hauling him bodily up the stairs while he screamed and kicked and scratched, back in those first months?
Well, it hardly matters, does it? He won't be going to Hogwarts, anyway.
"Okay. We'll practise, tonight, ey? When I get back from work - I'll see if I can get off early, since I'll be staying late tomorrow anyway."
Remus dropped one leg, revealing half of his face - still serious but no longer sulky.
"You'll bring a boggart?"
"No," he downed the rest of his tea that had somehow slipped from scalding to lukewarm - he hadn't enjoyed a single mouthful at the appropriate temperature. "I'll use something called legilimency. I'm not amazing at it, but I reckon I'm good enough to read my own kid."