To celebrate the love for Jewish Sirius and/or Remus we are hosting a Wolfstar mini-fest for the week of Hanukkah ✨
Prompts and posting will run from December 18th - 26th
Super super simple to participate. Each of the eight days will have a Hanukkah-themed prompt. You can submit fic or art each day for the prompt, for as many or few days as you want. We’ll have an AO3 collection for you to post to, and we’ll reblog everything here too!
You can find our FAQ/Rules here
EVERYONE is welcome to participate, Jewish or non-Jewish
We highly encourage sensitivity readers for anyone not familiar with Judaism or Jewishness. Slide into our DMs or message @soloorganaas or @narcissa-black-supermacy and we can help you find someone
Tag your work @hanukkahwolfstarweek or #hanukkahwolfstarweek and we’ll reblog it here
If you post to AO3, you can add your work to our collection
Hi!!! I finished my Chanukah fic for the @hanukkahwolfstarweek fest!!! This is the link to the entire work, but I’ve added chapters seven and eight since I’ve last posted on here. I hope you like it!!! And thank you for letting me be a part of this super fun fest!!!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
for @hanukkahwolfstarweek, inspired by @green-lights-33 and likeafunerall's incredible artwork
Here’s the thing about growing up in Wales — and then going to school in the Scottish highlands, and then getting your first adult flat in London just after that. Christmas is everywhere. It’s unavoidable.
And Remus doesn’t want to avoid it, particularly, it’s just that he ends up feeling like a right Scrooge every time someone asks after his Christmas plans and he’s forced to say something along the lines of, “Not my holiday, actually.” Because then comes the inevitable confusion, and then the flustered apologies, and none of that’s necessary, really. He likes the festive cheer. Bright lights and enchanted baubles, carolers and hot cocoa with whipped cream, the parties and excitement and general good cheer of Oxford Circus and Diagon Alley and Seven Dials as shoppers go about their day. Even the solemn bells on Christmas Eve have a beauty to them that Remus can more than appreciate.
Only the thing about having Sirius Black for a boyfriend is that Sirius Black is very, very enthusiastic about Christmas.
(The last Hanukkah chapter…thank you to the mods of @hanukkahwolfstarweek for putting this together. I’ve really enjoyed writing this, and exploring the characters in this context. Happy holidays, everyone)
That night was the eighth night of Hanukkah and the candles lit up the kitchen with a soft glow. After they said the blessings, Remus turned off the lights and they stood admiring the candles before they went into the living room to exchange gifts one last time. Harry opened his gift, a small, leather bound album filled with photos. There was one from James and Lily’s wedding, where they stood with Remus and Sirius waving. Harry bit his lip as it appeared they were waving to him.
“You’re old enough for these,” Sirius said, sitting down next to Harry. “Keep them safe, ok?”
“Yeah…of course,” Harry said, “Thank you.”
After the boys were in bed, Sirius and Remus curled up on the sofa, under a quilt. “Should we have gotten a tree?” Sirius wondered.
“No,” Remus said. “He understands a little better now.”
“I don’t want him to resent us. I always wonder if it’s…we’re…enough,” Sirius said softly, laying his head on Remus’s shoulder.
“He was really afraid he’d upset you,” Remus said, running his hand through Sirius’s hair. Sirius closed his eyes at the sensation.
“I’m not upset with him.”
“That’s what I told him,” Remus said.
“Ok,” Sirius said, turning his head and capturing Remus in a slow kiss. “Happy Hanukkah.”
We’ve finally reached eighth night and the end of Hanukkah 😥 This week has been so incredible - seeing the quantity and quality of work contributed so far and the amazing support from readers is genuinely so moving 💜
✡️ Dec 25: Open Prompt ✡️
For our last night we’re leaving things up to the writers for whatever stories they’ve been wanting to tell 💖
Please tag us @hanukkahwolfstarweek or #hanukkahwolfstarweek so we can share your work here! You can also upload your fic to our AO3 collection
Feel free to keep writing and submitting fics in the coming days. It has been an intense week of writing during a very busy holiday period, so if you haven’t had time to submit or finish a story yet, please do so whenever you’re ready. The collection will remain open and I’m going to publish the masterlist of fics in another week or so ✨
Thank you to everyone who’s participated and engaged in this fest!! It was such a spur of the moment thing and it’s ended up so successful and meaningful because of you all 💙
The kids sat in a group on the mat, facing their families and the first teacher started reading the story of Hanukkah. The kid who played King Antiochus was wearing a paper crown. He stood up and glared menacingly at the others waving his finger as his teacher narrated the story. Teddy was one of the Maccabees and when it was his turn, he and some others stood up and waved their daggers.
Sirius leaned against Remus, who slid his arm around Sirius’s waist. He thought about his own journey as he watched his son. There was a time when he didn’t think he could have any of this - the loving partner next to him, his uncle on his other side, any children. His parents would have had him believe that if he didn’t do things their way, he didn’t deserve to have these things. But he found that wasn’t true at all.
Remus squeezed his hand, drawing him back to the present. The kids were now all wearing bands on their heads with paper candles and singing a song. Sirius joined in, as did the other parents. Then Teddy came scrambling toward them and they scooped him up.
A boy is born in Swansea on a cold spring day in March, 1960. He’s named John for his father’s father, Rémus for his mother’s — hold the accent aigu. After all, the Jews of Morocco name their children for the living, not the dead.
Remus John Lupin grows up speaking Welsh at home and English at school and Haketia with his ma whenever they damn well please. He has his father’s tawny hair and his mother’s thick curls and olive-gold skin, and by the time he’s done growing he’ll be taller than either grandfather ever was. His mother teaches maths at the local uni and his father works on assignment for the Ministry of Magic, capturing boggarts and banishing lethifolds and dueling against spirits of all kinds. Ma still thinks she’s got the more exciting job.
When he’s four, he survives an attack.
He survives.
He survives.
There’s a part of the boy that no one can know about, not even his new school friends. If they find out, he’ll have to leave. He’ll be driven away, out of fear and ignorance and an unwillingness to learn that there’s a breadth of experience outside of one’s own sphere. Little boys, after all, don’t grow up on stories about monsters by accident. Their parents want them to know that in the darkness, there be dragons, so they'd do best to stay close to the light.
No one can know. Dad reminds him of that all the time, in the summer before he goes to school. He needn’t bother. Remus was raised on stories of refugee ancestors fleeing Valencia massacres for Moroccan shores, grew tall on days celebrating Esther and Yehudit’s necessary deceptions. He knows how to hide what others fear without making a single part of himself small.
Seventh night means we’re almost over which I’m so sad about. The stories this week have been amazing and I’m so proud of the collection we’re putting together 💙
✡️ Dec 24: Hanukkah story and message ✡️
Additional optional word prompts: Story, struggle, history
This prompt is a broad one and covers both the actual story of Hanukkah and the themes it conveys: resistance and persistence, light in the darkness, and pride in your history and people. Interpret that however you wish!
Please tag us @hanukkahwolfstarweek or #hanukkahwolfstarweek so we can share your work here! You can also upload your fic to our AO3 collection
Three knocks, over the Hanuká of 1975, and the first comes as the biggest surprise. Lyall Lupin opens the front door of the small Mayhill flat he shares with his wife and daughter to find Sirius Black, cold and dripping in the rainy Swansea night, shivering violently in nothing but a set of outrageously expensive silk dress robes.
His first instinct is to slam the door in the girl’s face.
His second — that of a father, who’s seen his child in pain too many times — wins out. Sirius is bleeding from somewhere just above her hairline and looks as though she’s been on the receiving end of a Confundus Charm. He lets her inside.
Rimona is fifteen, and normally Lyall’s heart sings when she gets the chance to act her age. Not this time. She slams the door in his face when he tells her who’s here, screams from inside her bedroom to make her ex-best friend leave. It’s bad enough they still have to share a dorm at school, Sirius isn’t wanted here. Rimona hasn’t seen the extent of the damage those people did to her. She’s still in pain from what Sirius herself did.
He is, too. So is Hope, although she doesn’t have the context Lyall does. The Blacks are dark magic. The Blacks are bad news. He went to school with Orion, after all. Lyall feared for Rim the moment she wrote home first year, talking about her new mates James Potter and Sirius Black, and the urgent missive he received in the middle of the night two months past only served to confirm his worst fears.
There’s been an incident at the school, Dumbledore’s neat, looping handwriting had read, the full moon hanging like a taunt in the sky. I urge you to come at your earliest convenience.
Three hours he’d spent, convincing the Snape boy not to talk.
London was somehow more freezing than his Shropshire cottage, the biting wind whipping up along the Thames nipping punishingly at his skin. He’d apparated over as early as possible in a bid to avoid the crowds, which left him in streets void of both people and any buffer against the cold. Remus moved between muggle and wizarding shops a quickly as possible, picking up gifts for the Tonkses, Mary, and the smattering of friends he’d been lucky enough to share the last couple of years of his life with. He tried not to think about what he’d have got David; he tried not to think about the dark shadow looming over the holidays. He tried not to think about anything.
Until he turned a corner and saw a small, golden menorah resting in the windowsill of a small terrace house, and the wind was knocked out of him.
“We thought it would be something for your new home together,” Lily said slightly shyly, as Sirius carefully unwrapped the box to reveal a glistening gold menorah, just the right side of elegant to match Sirius’s taste without reminding him of his family. Sirius looked up at her, and then immediately over to Remus with wide, overwhelmed eyes. He glanced back down at the menorah, biting his lip, then handed it tenderly over to him.
“What do you think?” Lily asked anxiously.
“It’s beautiful, Lily,” Remus assured her.
Sirius gave a silent nod of agreement with slightly watery eyes. But later, alone in the quiet, Sirius wrapped his arms around Remus as they watched the last flickers of the candles burn out, and whispered, “It’s ours, Moony.”
Remus felt the grief clawing at his chest like a monster waking from slumber. Sirius’s phantom was suddenly there looming before him, the magnitude of love and loss clearer than it had been in years. He refused to be silent, to be laid to rest, to ever stop being the gravitational force Remus’s life orbited around.
“Yeah,” Sirius said. Harry came over and looked up at Sirius and grinned. “And where have you been, mister?” he asked, picking Harry up. Harry was getting too big to do so, but he delighted in it anyway.
“We were playing Uno in the game room.” Harry said, holding onto Sirius’s neck. Regulus was hanging back, but Sirius drew him into the group. “This is your Uncle Regulus. I don’t know if you remember him.”
Harry regarded him thoughtfully. “I think so.”
Regulus gave him a small but genuine smile. “I remember you, Harry. But you were much smaller last time I saw you.”
“Alright!” Alphard boomed. He was wearing an apron that said, ‘The Hostess with the Mostess.’ “Thank you all for coming tonight. It is always a blessing to have the family gather for Hanukkah. Sometimes, we have to make our own family and Levi and I are happy to welcome you into ours,” he said with a glance at Regulus. “Now…Andromeda, will you do the honors?”
“Of course,” she said, taking the matches from Alphard and lighting one. A hush fell over the party as everyone started singing the blessings together. Once the candles were lit, Alpahrd gestured the assembled group into the dining room where a buffet of brisket, latkes and toppings were laid out.
Sirius helped Harry make a plate and found a spot for the four of them to sit on the floor. Andromeda and Ted joined them and Andromeda coaxed Regulus into the group. Regulus’s eyes were wide as he took in the party.
“It’s different isn’t it?” Andromeda asked him softly.
“Yes…it is different. But it’s not scary in the way that our parents say it is,” Regulus said, cutting into a latke and nibbling it.
“You know…people fear what they don’t know,” Andromeda said, carefully, with a glance at Sirius. “Once you see more things, you realize…they’re not as scary as you might think.”
Alphard sat down on the floor with them and Harry immediately moved closer to him. Alphard ruffled the boy’s hair affectionately. “Glad to have you among us, Regulus.”
Regulus was quiet for a beat. “Thank you, uncle. I suppose I was being dramatic.”
“Nonsense,” Alphard laughed. “You’re looking at the two biggest drama queens in the Black family,” he said, elbowing Sirius. Sirius scowled. “You’re allowed space to think about what you want..”
“My parents don’t agree.”
Sirius could feel rage boiling in his stomach at the mention of his parents and Remus squeezed his arm. Sirius gratefully threaded his fingers through Remus’s.
“Your parents don’t have to live your life, Regulus. You do,” Alphard said.
Regulus sighed. “I suppose I know that.”
“Take all the time you need…you always have a place in the Home for Wayward Blacks,” Alphard said with a wink.
“Tell me about this one,” Sirius says, running a thumbpad lightly over Remus’ left eyelid, the faint scar there so old it barely registers anymore when he looks at himself in the mirror.
He leans back into the faded green cotton pillowcase, eyes closed, and breathes in the delicate flutter of Sirius’ fingertips brushed against the soft, tissue-thin lid.
“I was nine,” he murmurs, and doesn’t open his eyes.
The scent of oil and paprika wafts from his mother’s kitchen down the hall, along with the chatter and laughter of her final, straggling guests. Hope Sarfati Lupin knows every Jew in the greater Swansea area, it seems sometimes. Maybe all of Wales. She doesn’t bother with the only synagogue in town — Ashkenazi Orthodox as it is — but they’re her friends all the same. Hope collects people like she collects stories, a walk in Parc Singleton or a cup of hot tea at the ready for a friend of a friend or one of her students from the university who's missing home. They swarm like bees before their queen’s table, Jew and gentile, magic and muggle alike, all eager for the blessing of her warmth. All are welcome at Hope’s famous Hanuká parties. She would never think to turn someone away.
In the small guest bedroom right next door, Harry was put to bed several hours ago. A year past, maybe, either James or Lily or even both might have snuck out with them to set off fireworks in the street below. Now, they're curled up tight around their sleeping son. They won’t leave him by himself, not for anything.
Sirius kisses the scar that slashes down his brow and lid, a gentle reminder to keep talking.
This is what they do now, in the days since the end of October. Since the end of the war.
Part 5 out of 8 for @hanukkahwolfstarweek (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)
Fifth night: Parties
Prompt words: fireworks, warmth, memories
Also on: AO3
They are all seated around the table at James and Lily’s place, laughing loudly about something Sirius can not recall clearly any longer. But the feeling is there, a sensation of pure euphoria and happiness, surrounded just by the right people on one of the most precious periods of the year for him, all of them so happy, wrapped in warmth and brightness on the holiday of light.
James is yelling, as he always is, telling something excitedly, his speech barely coherent after two glasses of wine and through his snorts of laughter as he struggles to finish his own joke without bursting into tears.
Lily is laughing too, hand covering her mouth to unsuccessfully stifle her own snorts. Sirius doesn’t think she actually understands a word of what James is saying - if he can’t then she definitely doesn’t stand a chance - but James’ laughter is loud and infectious, causing them all to double over with it even before he reaches the middle of the joke, cheeks hurting and eyes watering.
Sirius’ gaze crosses with Remus’ across the table. His hazel eyes shine with a bright, golden hue, the light of the five candles of the Hannukiah on the table reflected in them, making them even wider and brighter than they normally are. Sirius thinks he could drown in them.
“I think this calls for a toast,” Peter says abruptly, getting up to his feet at the head of the table. He reaches his hand out for his glass, but instead he picks up the Hannukiah at the centre of the table, raising it high up in the air.
Everyone around them keeps laughing, but Sirius finds the sound getting stuck in the middle of his throat, his mouth going dry and bitter. A strange feeling of dread settles in his stomach. He can not explain it, but he can sense that something is wrong. He can tell that there’s something off just from the dark glint in Peter’s blue eyes when their gazes cross from opposite ends of the table.
Peter loosens his grip on the handle and the candle holder falls, six lit candles scattering across the table. In a matter of seconds, the tablecloth is burning, sparks flying off in all directions like fireworks, spreading onto the carpet, the curtains, the clothes, anything within its reach around them.
“What are you doing?” Lily screams, darting to Harry’s seat to pick him up, eyes scared and lost as she searches the room around her.
Peter’s lips spread in a smug smirk.
“It was Sirius Black,” he speaks, the words echoing around the room with a deafening loudness. He lifts his arm slowly, finger pointed forward at him. “Sirius Black did it.”
Everyone’s eyes are on him then.
James. Remus. Lily. Harry.
They are all on fire, burning, flames climbing up their bodies, but nobody tries to run. They all turn to look at him accusingly, dark glares and hateful whispers spreading through the room.
“I knew it,”
“Once a Black - always a Black.”
“I told you, James,”
“It was only a matter of time.”
“No.” Sirius stumbles backwards until his back hits the wall behind him. “I didn’t do it,” he speaks frantically, eyes darting between the four of them, seeking out someone who would be willing to listen, just for one second. “I didn’t-- It wasn’t me!” he cries out, desperately trying to shake off the burning hands reaching out to him. “You all saw it! Come on, you were all in here with me! You saw him do it! It wasn’t me! It was--”
He spins around to look in the direction where Peter had been standing moments ago, but there’s nothing there but a puddle of blood.
“You killed him.”
“You did it.”
“You killed all of us.”
“You ruined everything, Sirius. I trusted you. You always ruin everything.”
“No,” Sirius shakes his head violently, trying to yell, to make them listen, but his voice is nothing but a whisper in the darkness engulfing him. “No, no, no--”
He slides down the wall, hugging his knees to his chest as he buries his face into them, trying to drown out the voices around him. They keep getting louder and louder until a deafening snap slices through the air, and then complete silence and darkness around him. He blinks himself awake, peeking up from his arms to look around him, and that’s when it dawns on him.
Azkaban.
Peter.
James and Lily.
Fuck--
James and Lily.
The real memories are mixing with the nightmares in his head. He can feel the presence of the Dementors all around him, sucking out every remaining bit of light out of them, turning even the most precious of the images into bloody lakes of gloom, the biggest core memories all his hope and resilience is built on shattering into dust under his fingers.
The whole point of the holiday is to battle darkness through the light - but how can you do that in a place that has no light, no hope, that physically sucks every string of joy and faith out of you, leaving only misery and doom?
Sirius runs a shaky finger over the cold stone pavement underneath him, tracing the shape of the Menorah with six candles on it. He isn’t actually sure it’s the right day, he had lost track of time a long while ago, but his limited knowledge of astrology and the lunar calendar allows him to at least relatively estimate some of it in a pathetic attempt at keeping his sanity.
“Happy Hannukah,” he whispers, but there is no one to say it back this time.
