Stars in Her Eyes {Wolfstar's Daughter}

Chapter 60: Wonderland

Staring at the creamy white ceiling of her room, Nell found herself right back in the position she had worked so endlessly to leave. It took around an hour before Sirius was able to track her path all the way to the cemetery, an hour of being forced to kneel at the base of Cedric's grave, to face the destruction she had reaped.

It seemed that the moon set her right back to where she began, bloodied and bruised as if she had just returned from Voldemort's graveyard that night and emotionally exhausted as if the boy had just died only hours ago. It was as if all of the progress she had made melted before her eyes, for her to watch as it disappeared back into the mouth of her grief.

She heard the door creak open, expecting it to be Sirius as her other father would most likely still be in a similar position to her, recovering from the previous night. Only she was surprised to see that it was in fact Remus, gently placing a glass of water and a sizeable chunk of chocolate on her bedside table, making an effort to be quiet as he clearly thought her asleep.

The man himself just wanted to see his daughter, to check on her in the smallest action he could do to help, feeling that he was otherwise essentially useless on these types of days after the moon.

Part of Nell wanted to be alone, to feed into her pain and let her wallow in it as that same part of her believed she deserved. But another part of her, a smaller but in this moment far more strong part, just wanted her dad.

"Dad?" She called out softly, stopping him just as he reached the door to leave again.

"Hmm?" He hummed, turning back to face her.

"Read to me?" She asked.

"Of course" he smiled, making his back into the room.

He moved over to the bed, taking a yellowing book from where it always rested on her bookshelf as he went. She shuffled to the side so that he could sit down beside her, propping himself against the headboard as her head lay against the pillow beside him. Bringing his legs up onto the bed, he crossed his ankles over so that he was comfortably sat beside her.

"You know.... my mum, your grandmother, used to read this to me when I was a boy" he spoke softly, cracking open the copy of Alice in Wonderland as she looked up at him.

"When I was sick from the moon she would curl up on the bed with me for hours on end, getting through more chapters than either of us could count" he smiled at memory of his late mother holding him the way he was now holding his own daughter.

He began to slowly flicker through the pages in search of where they had last gotten up to in the story, him reading to her being a somewhat regular occurrence. Certainly a tradition that slowed slightly as she got older and went away to Hogwarts but maintained all the same.

"She would even read it out in welsh sometimes and by god I had no idea what she was saying but could listen to her all day just the same" he chuckled slightly, but his voice still remaining soft and gentle to match the glowing darkness of her room, the only light being the lamp in the corner, casting shadows and flickers of light across their matching scars.

"You miss her?" Nell asked in a quiet voice, encouraging the man to open up about his mum whilst simultaneously hoping to grasp an understanding of the long term affect grief held on a person. And how it would come to affect her.

Would she one day be speaking to her own child of the boy who laid down his life for her own? With little guilt or regret but only a sad smile grazing her lips as it did now to her father's?

"Oh all the time" he sighed gently, wrapping an arm around her.

"But I know that wherever she is, there is simply no way she isn't smiling right now, watching me live the life she always wanted for me"

"And how she would have adored you my darling" he looked down at her, beaming with pride and love.

When he was just her age, a boy struggling with the insecurities of being a werewolf fearing that no one would ever truly accept him, he could have never imagined that he would be where he was today.

"Now, let's see, where did we get to?" He hummed, turning back to the book in his hands and searching for the folded page, only to see that there were none, only the slightly creased marks of old foldings on almost every page.

"Hmm, looks like we've lost our place. From the beginning?" He asked, looking down to her as she nodded.

"From the beginning"

And so he flicked back to the very first page, where in the the top left corner, if one were to look close enough a small faded inscription could be seen.

Hope Lupin

Written in a delicate looping font, as old as the ageing paper.

Bringing his finger to the first line of words, he began, the words rolling off his tongue for the thousandth time.

"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do..."

Nell's eyes soon flickered closed at the familiarity of the words leaving his mouth and the way he read them as he always did. Memories began to dance behind her eyes of all the countless times he had read this very book to her before, and the countless times he would undoubtedly read it to her again. The way he spoke the words never faltering over all of those years as he had the story almost entirely memorised in his mind and she had his voice reciting it memorised in her own.

As the chapter went on, Nell felt herself slipping further and further away from his lulling voice until the arms of sleep welcomed her with open arms, greeting her in a way they hadn't done so in a while. And as Alice fell down the into hole in the ground, she fell into her own little Wonderland too, where death and Voldemort and war, none of it existed at all.

"For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible."

Noticing her gentle snores, his voice dropped down to a gentle whisper as he finished the last sentence of the page, folding the book closed and purposely not marking the page. So that when the next full moon arrived, they could start from the beginning once again, as if it was the very first time he was reading it to her and his mother's words were echoing through his own.

And creaking open the door, that was how Sirius found the pair hours later. Remus with his head drooped unconsciously back against the head board, the book resting in his lap with Nell sleeping soundly beside him.

The water and chocolate long forgotten on the bedside table.

A/N: Sorry for just a short and sweet chapter but it's mainly just a filler

Anyways, I go back to school on Tuesday and have an insane amount of exams so I'm really really sorry but updates will definitely be slowing from then on :(