Hollow by thirty2flavors

Hollow

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It is four years before Remus returns to Godric's Hollow.

He attends the Potters' funeral, of course, but does not linger when it ends. In the months that follow, the Prophet runs a segment describing the town's newest monument and a letter from Dumbledore asks for an epitaph, but Remus skips that article and tells Dumbledore he can think of no phrase sufficient.

After four years - four long, nearly unendurable years - Remus feels he's run out of legitimate excuses. Thinking of them no longer causes an ache so deep he fears he might collapse into himself, and he finds himself worrying that the admirers that cropped up after the fall of Voldemort have faded into obscurity, leaving the Potters' grave forgotten and ignored. Guilt begins to tug at the corners of his heart and he finally returns on March 27th, 1985.

(He leaves that day, like so many others, unmarked on his calendar and tries not to remember that it should be James' twenty-fifth birthday. The effort, like so many others, is in vain.)

The core of the village is the same as he remembers it and his feet carry him automatically in the direction of what was once the Potter cottage. It feels, for a moment, as though everything is back to the way it used to be - the way it ought to be - and he half-expects that when he reaches their house Lily will stand in the doorway with Harry and James will be wearing a ludicrous birthday hat.

Remus allows himself, perhaps foolishly, to indulge in the mental image for a second too long - then he passes the large obelisk in the town's centre and it shifts into a stony approximation of the picture in his mind's eye. It shocks him like electricity and as his throat begins to ache he wonders if perhaps four years is not long enough; he wonders if perhaps forty years would not be long enough.

From the obelisk he veers almost erratically to the cemetery and stays only long enough to Conjure a bouquet to leave behind. It's the cottage that he finally stops at, and it's as he reads the plaque that his vision begins to blur.

He wants to burst into Azkaban and kill Sirius, the way Peter couldn't. He worries for Harry, growing up in a world without his mother and father. He resents the Wizarding community for thinking that this - a statue and a headstone and a sign in front of a dilapidated house - is sufficient means of bandaging the gaping wound inflicted on the world by the loss of Lily and James Potter. Mostly, he misses them.

He brushes the tears aside and uses his wand to write all the best of luck to you, Harry on the plaque.