Remus wants to see the lunar eclipse.
Hope tries her best đ
3126 words, G, No warnings
"Mami?"
Hope glanced down from pegging the washing to the line to see Remus standing next to her, barefoot in the grass.
"Can I help you?"
He glanced up and the pale, Spring sky and she followed his gaze. There, up in the crisp blue was the half moon - looking fragile as tissue paper in the bright daylight.
"On the radio-" he gestured vaguely to the open backdoor "it said about a blood moon. What's that one?"
If she were honest, she was not entirely sure.
"Ah⊠I think it's just when something to do with the position of the planet makes the moon look red, but I'm not certain."
Remus blinked up at her, looking distinctly unimpressed at the lack of knowledge.
"Maybe it's like a blue moon?" he suggested, casting another nervous glance at the sky.
"I don't think so. There's no other 'extra' moons, Mouse."
"Maybe it's one less?"
Hope gathered up the basket of pegs and an armful of underwear that she hadn't been willing to hang on the line of the garden they shared with downstairs.
"Look, let's ask Dadi when he's back from Nain and Taid's, alright?"
Lyall was, of course, hesitantly delighted at the opportunity to explain astronomy in great detail. It was a touchy subject, because it was sometimes difficult to tell genuine curiosity from intellectualisation as a veil for panic, but this one seemed genuine.
When accosted at the front door with the question, he'd huffed in mild annoyance.
"If you'd asked me before I'd left, I could have picked up my old astronomy textbook from the attic at my parents. It's got all the moons-"
"I know all the moons," said Remus, impatiently. It was true - he knew all of the names for each month's moon and had taken recently to correcting them on it, as though offended on behalf of the solar system that his parents weren't using that month's given name.
"Let me in, please," Lyall picked Remus up so he was no longer blocking the doorway and kicked off his shoes before closing the door. "It's just about the colour, anyway. It's an eclipse, so it will look red."
"An eclipse?"
"Yeah." He dropped Remus on the sofa and raised his eyebrows in amusement at Hope on seeing her. "How'd you find out about this, anyway, Mouse?"
"Radio," Hope answered for him, accepting a kiss. "I didn't know there was going to be an eclipse. Will it er⊠do anything?"
Lyall understood what she meant even in euphemism.
Will it be worse?
"No, that's just superstition. It's still just a full moon. If anything, it's the perigee that might affect-"
"Dadi! What is an eclipse?" Remus tugged impatiently on Lyall's robes, not pleased with being ignored.
"It's rude to interrupt people," Lyall said, mildly, but answered the question anyway, despite Hope's eye roll. "A lunar eclipse is when the moon is in the earth's shadow."
Remus was quiet for a few seconds, obviously trying to make meaning out of the explanation and struggling the come up with anything useful.
"Look, I'll draw it for you."
He pulled their address book from the side table drawer and flicked to the back, taking an offered biro from Hope. He drew three circles; large, medium and small, all in a row.
"Okay, look- the moon doesn't have it's own light. It is lit by the sun-"
"Yeah, I know. So when moon moves, we see different amounts lit up by the sun." He pointed to Lyall's diagram. "But this is just the full moon. Because all the sun's light is on one side of the moon and we can see it."
Lyall's lips quirked at Remus' smug lecture.
"Yes, okay, well eclipse means to completely cover something. So during a lunar eclipse-" he drew an arrow from the sun to the earth, then a shadow from the earth, eclipsing the moon "the moon is exactly in the earth's shadow, so it doesn't get the sun's light properly."
Remus looked at the drawing very carefully.
"That's like a new moon, but on the wrong side?"
"Mm, I suppose you could describe it like that. It's different, though. We are in the right place to see the lit half, but it is being obscured by our shadow."
"So I won't change?"
Ah.
"Sorry, Mouse," he said, offering him a one-armed squeeze. "It's still a full moon."
"But-" and there was a definite note of defiant whinge in his voice "it's not lit up, so the wolf can't see-"
"It's not about whether you can see it." Remus knew this, of course, but it would be unkind to do anything other than explain it again. "It's about the position. It's in the position of the full moon."
And then, because he was unable to correct a misunderstanding when he saw one; "You can still see an eclipsed moon, by the way. That's why they called it a blood moon on the radio. It's usually red."
The combination of the let-down about still having to go through his monthly ritualistic nightmare and the interesting snippet that the moon would be red were warring in him and it was plain across his face, oscillating from tear-prickling frustration and wonder.
Lyall tried to prod at the wonder, in an attempt to save the atmosphere of their evening.
"Sometimes it looks like it's on fire."
"Wow!"
Job well done.
And then;
"I want to see!"
He shared a miserable grimace with Hope, who had been watching from the safety of the arm of the sofa. She jumped in to his rescue.
"We can probably get a book with pictures at the library."
Remus oriented towards her, his disappointment at his continued reality already fading. He climbed over Lyall - digging his his sharp knee right into his thigh when doing so - and approached Hope gleefully.
"Today?"
She glanced at the clock. It was only half one.
"Yeah, alright then. Go and get your shoes."
Remus and Hope returned a couple of hours later with a small stack of books under Hope's arm and an ice-cream melting down Remus' hand.
"I see no one asked me if I had a mouth," Lyall commented, watching Remus lick ice-cream rivulets from down his wrist.
Hope ignored the complaint and presented her findings. "How do these hold up? Some of us didn't study astronomy in school, after all."
Lyall flipped through the top book. It was for children probably a bit older than Remus, but had nice muggle photographs of the moon, and some diagrams in the back half showing the positions of the moon during the lunar cycle.
"You're the primary teacher," he quipped, taking the second and scanning through the photographs of various solar eclipse. "Surely this is your domain?"
Remus had bitten off the bottom of his ice-cream cone and was sucking remnants out the bottom. Lyall eyed his sticky hands warily and, as soon as the ice-cream was eaten, flicked his wand at Remus and tidied him up before he touched the books (or him).
"I think this falls under 'magical nonsense', what do you think, Mouse?"
"Mam says there's lots of lunar eclipses," he told Lyall, uninterested in the marital bickering. "But I've never seen one."
"You have. And you've seen a solar eclipse, too. But you were barely one for that - you won't remember. And I'm sure there was a blood moon at the beach that one time we went to Harlech - you were, what? Three? It was sitting on the end of the road- well, not really." Remus had looked about to object about the impossibility of this claim. "It just looked like it, because it was low in the sky. And it wasn't really red - more like orange. Remember, Hope? We could see it at the bottom of the street?"
"Yeah. It was massive. But you were asleep, Remus. I think I was carrying you back to the car."
Remus looked distinctly put-out in finding out he'd slept through this experience.
"I'm never going to see it!" he bemoaned, pushing the book Lyall was holding back down to the table so he could see the pictures of the moon. "I didn't look, then, and now I'm never going to see!" He turned to Hope with an unfairly accusatory expression. "You should have woken me up!"
She did not object to the ridiculous accusation that she had been somehow neglectful in not waking up her sleeping toddler to look at a particularly beautiful moon three years ago, in case he would later be bitten by a werewolf and never witness a full moon ever again. Instead, she just offered him a sad, sympathetic smile.
"Sorry, cyw."
Even armed with a now encyclopedic knowledge of the moon, tide, perigee and apogee, the various celestial phenomena that make up a solar and lunar eclipse, and the names of most of the moon's craters, Remus was still led, as usual, to confinement when the full moon came around.
In their old house, the upstairs bathroom had been the best option, but given that the flimsy window was accessible if one stood on the sink, they had decided not to risk it and had opted instead for the kitchen. Lyall had shrunk the table and chairs, locked every cupboard door, and had sealed with both key and magic, the much studier kitchen door. Remus sat on the tile looking bedraggled wrapped in an un-loved camping quilt and sweaty-haired. His eyes were locked on the lavender sunset distorted by the thick crown glass set in the window of the backdoor.
"Will it be big, like the one in Harlech?"
"What?"
Lyall glanced up, befuddled, from where he'd been testing his charms' resilience by bouncing his shoulder off the kitchen door from the inside.
"The moon. Will it be a big one?"
"Oh. I don't think for us, Llygoden. We don't have a good line of sight, here."
Remus flopped over to lie on the floor, tucking the quilt around himself and resting his cheek on the cool tile.
"You'll be just outside?"
Hope crouched by his head and stroked his hair, miserably.
"Always, hun. Just in the hall."
"You won't see it, either."
A soft laugh escaped her.
"I could look out the window."
"Will you tell me what it looks like?"
Lyall sat himself on the floor next to them and gathered Remus up for one last hug.
"Yes, we'll tell you what it looks like, you strange boy."
They sealed the kitchen with five minutes to spare and sat vigil in the hallway as usual Remus pressed himself to the floor near the door and asked pointlessly for them again and again until words failed him and it was just them, the door, and the unrecognisable creature, snapping and scrabbling on the other side.
As always, the wolf temporarily lost interest in trying to dig through the wood of the kitchen door and retreated briefly to inspect the rest of his container. It was in this brief reprieve that Hope stretched her legs from her anxious crouch in the hall and peeked through to the front room.
"What's the matter?"
Lyall was sat, as usual, with his elbows on his knees, wand in hand, eyes on the door.
"Just trying to get a look."
"At the moon?"
She glanced down at him, a feeling oddly silly.
"Well⊠yeah."
He peered up at her from under his fringe, in disarray from his worried hands, and had an unexpectedly soft look on his face.
"Go on, then. Get a proper look. You have to report back, don't you?" He nodded towards the front door. "I'll wait here."
With one guilty glance to the kitchen door, she hurried out onto the front steps and scanned the still-sunset-pale sky for the moon.
It's very top was just visible over the roofs of the surrounding streets. It looked as though the horizon was on fire. She trailed down the road a bit, eyes locked on the point of bright, orange light, trying to get a better view of it from between the buildings, but it was impossible to get a good look.
It might appear clearer, once it was higher in the sky, but she remembered with a clarity that was almost painful, now that Remus had expressed his sorrow at having missed it, the way it had seemed to sit at the end of that rain-glittered road, bloated and burning.
The desire to capture it in all it's rising glory propelled her with a sudden urgency.
She wrenched her eyes away from the scant sight of the moon and hurried back into the house, going immediately to the wicker box at the bottom of the bookcase and yanking it out.
"You alright?" Lyall called softly from the hall.
"Yeah." She pushed aside a couple of photo albums and a rattling box full of allen keys. "Just- where's the camera?"
There was a distant clatter and she presumed he'd summoned it. He appeared in the doorway, holding it out to her.
It was in it's original box still - habitually replaced back into the fluffy-edged cardboard after each use, given it's expense.
"I won't be long," she promised, fishing in the side-table drawer for her car key. "It's just- well⊠He asked, didn't he?"
Lyall raised a hand in farewell and she hurried out of the front door, camera in hand, and unlocked the car, hurrying inside as though it was any warmer than the brisk Spring night.
She drove without any real plan as to where to go, following the road and glancing out the window every now and again, trying to decide - based on how the red semi-circle of rising moon appeared in the gaps between buildings - where to go for the best view.
It struck her as soon as she was out of their estate and the fire-light glittered, reflected on the distant water, that she down by the sea wall might be the best option.
The night was quiet. Just the glowing light of sitting room windows and the smoke heavy front doors of pubs as their patrons rotated in and out to catch a glimpse of the red moon, cigarettes in hand. Closer to the shore, the streets turned from outer-city road to quaint cobble and the car grumbled across the stones, their damp surface glittering with the scattered reflection of her headlights.
Once past the small chippy on the corner and free from the confines of buildings, the night stretched out, empty and dark. A low, dry stone wall that separated higher from lower ground. Small houses down by the sea were recognisable only in their silhouette, pressed dark against the navy sky, separated by the glittering sea.
The red moon rose from behind the last jut of land, off to the left and, standing by the coast, she finally had a clear view.
It was big. Not as absurdly huge as that one night in Harlech, but big enough. It had nearly broken free of the horizon, and Hope thought, briefly, of Remus, trapped in the locked kitchen, snapping and snarling at the door, driven mad by the presence of someone warm-blooded and docile, sitting just out of sight.
Even so, she could still see him - the image clear in her imagination from over a year of similar mornings - sitting waiting for them to open the door and have him back between them.
God, this picture had better come out good.
She opened the car door and immediately reached into the glove box for something to tie her hair back with when the sea wind whipped it across her eyes. At first, she tried leaning against the bonnet as she unfolded the camera awkwardly, desperately trying not to drop it as she faffed with the latches in the dim light. Having set it up, she had a brief panic that there might not be any film left in it from when it was last used at Christmas, but she was in luck.
She held it up, squinting at the horizon through the viewfinder, and knew, as she played with the focus, that there was no chance she was going to be able to capture the sheer beauty of it to bring back. Even in the little window, the moon looked diminished and blurred at the edges, no matter how precise she tried to be with the dial. A quaint, rusty smudge in the dark night. Holding it steady was a mission - elbows tucked in as tight as they'd go to her sides, she could still see the moon wobbling in the viewfinder.
She clicked the shutter anyway and pulled the film through with her bottom lip between her teeth. The shiny little strip clamped between her cold-dry, crossed fingers as she waited for it to develop.
Placing the camera back on the driver's seat of the open car for safekeeping, she peeled apart the print.
A dark square, marred with a red streak.
She huffed and shoved the failed photograph in the glove box, looking around for a solution to the problem.
She tried leaning awkwardly against the stone wall, and crouching, with her elbows on her knees, growing a touch frantic at the amount of time she was spending away from Lyall, before she ended up resting the camera on the bonnet of the car and kneeling on the wet cobble behind it, cheek to the cold metal so she could squint through the little window and line it up.
It was incredible, how looming it appeared to her own eye, and how underwhelming it appeared in the viewfinder.
Still, she took the time to get it into the sharpest focus she could manage and held her breath as she captured it this time, as though even exhaling might blur the image. Again, she pulled the tab and held it tight, lest the sea wind whip it from her, and sat back in the driver's side - slouched with her knees against the wheel - waiting for it to develop. From the passenger window, the red moon watched.
It was better, she thought. Pretty in its own way. Still too-small and still a little fuzzy around the edge, but unmistakably the moon, and unmistakably rusty red - its light glittering on the inky water as though witnessing an oil fire. The image did not capture the surrounding stars, or the lighter streaks in the sky where thin clouds drifted across them. Didn't capture the absoluteness of its presence, and the way it drew the working men from the smoky pubs in admiration.
Still, she thought, placing the camera and the photograph on the passenger seat and starting the car, I can just tell him that.
Let's go on a Marital Breakdown Road-trip with Mama!
A derpy little sketch for this scene in Inevitable - 1969. Don't look too hard at the car, I am neither good at, nor interested, in drawing them lol
He didn't cry, this time, as she drove through Pontypridd, down the familiar main road that branched off towards the school she used to work in and that Remus had briefly attended. He just squinted out of the window and said nothing.
Bethan Howell lived in a semi-detached, pebble-dash '30s build that had been painted a pale green since Hope had been old enough to remember. They had never moved. Her car was in the driveway when they arrived, and Hope pulled her own up the the curb and cut the engine, waiting in silence for a moment, not knowing what to do.
She had no real plan. Had given the matter very little thought. She hadn't even known she would end up in Tonteg when she'd bundled Remus into the car. That was what Lyall was for - thinking too much about the consequences down the line. Remus lifted his head from where it had been resting against the window for the last few hours and turned to her. The sunglasses were wonky, his hair was sweaty and sticking to his head on the left side, and the shirt she'd picked up for him was a little too small.
She reached out and straightened them. When his bloodied eye was hidden from view, she could enjoy the goofy, slightly over-grown look that had come upon him in the last few months without feeling sick.
"You alright, fi cyw i?"
He nodded, vaguely.
"How's your head?"
Not that she had any idea what to do with him, if he did anything other than shrug. It wasn't as though she had magic concussion solving powers.
Predictably, he did shrug.
"Where's Dad?"
Her stomach twisted and she forced herself to smile reassuringly at him, despite the anxiety that the repeated questioning provoked.
"At home, Mouse. Remember?"
"Yeah."
She looked past him, out the car window, and studied the front of the house. There was a shadow at the kitchen window and someone peered out.
Well, there was no turning away now.
Her mother was out the front door by the time Hope had unlocked the car and gone around to Remus' side to help him out. Remus sat with his legs dangling out the open car door, watching them as Bethan clucked in both annoyance and surprise, pulling her into her open arms.
"Bloody hell, Hope, what's going on?"
Her mam still smelled like cigarettes and too-much-fabric-softner and she tried not to cry when the familiarity overwhelmed her.
"Why does something have to be going on?" She tried to sound cheeky, but her voice came out flat. "Maybe we just wanted to see you."
Professor Sprout is a real one and accidentally does autism accommodations in the 60s to stop her wayward hufflepuff from skipping lessons and biting people. Queen
"I wonder, Newton⊠Now, this would require you to be sensible - to not 'take the mick' if you know what I mean?"
He shrugged.
"I wonder if we can try, for the rest of this school term, to be more strategic about this. I considered giving you detention, but I have a suspicion punishment will not stop you. That, and every other detention you've had, I fear you've quite enjoyed⊠You have attended two History of Magic classes this year. You are, realistically, going to fail the end of year exam. You have not done any homework, and I think I am correct in assuming that you have not done any reading in your own time on the subject."
Newt nodded, feeling his face grow hot.
"How do you feel about writing the grade off now? I will present your situation to the headmaster, you will not sit the end-of-year exam, and will automatically fail. You will not have to attend any more History of Magic classes this academic year. You'll have a free period."
Newt stared hard at his knees.
The word fail had twisted his guts, but at the same time, the promise of certainty was tempting. One subject where he knew the outcome. And really, Sprout was right. He hadn't the foggiest what was going on in History of Magic. He would fail the exam. And worry about it for nothing, and likely, despite his worry, do nothing to rectify the gaps in his knowledge.
Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because theyâre used to writing essays rather than prose. I donât wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesnât offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (âdialogue tagâ just refers to phrases like âhe said,â âshe whispered,â âthey askedâ):
âFor most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and donât capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,â she said.
âBut what if youâre using a question mark rather than a period?â they asked.
âWhen using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless itâs a proper noun!â she snapped.
âWhen breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,â she said, âuse commas.â
âThis is a single sentence,â she said. âNow, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so thereâs no comma after âshe said.ââ
âThereâs no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.â She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.
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