When Remus Lupin was two years old, he’d already had quite enough of cribs and having to do things on other people’s schedules. He was tolerant of it, but distinctively more pleased when allowed to toddle about the house on his own.

When Remus Lupin was three years old, he decided he wanted to be a dinosaur when he grew up.

When Remus Lupin was four years old, he changed his mind to zookeeper.

When Remus Lupin was five years old, lots of things changed, including him. Several times.

When Remus Lupin was six years old, he was generally on the edgy side and tended to speak less often than he had done before. The neighbour commented on how well-behaved he always was when his mother started working more often and Mrs. Lowell took care of him on occasion. Whichever parent was picking him up always gave a little smile and nodded and said thank you and then they and Remus would have a quiet walk home.

When Remus Lupin was seven years old, he got really tired of drinking potions, but kept doing it anyway because his parents seemed to get quite sad after he’d said he didn’t want to anymore.

When Remus Lupin was eight years old, he broke his arm trying to ride his dad’s old Comet 240. When they arrive, the front desk informs them they must go to the magical creatures division in order to receive treatment. His mother is angry, his father puts both hands on his son’s shoulders and walks on down with him. A couple of days later, his arm is just fine, and they all go back home. When he was eight, he learned that not everyone was the same.

When Remus Lupin was nine, he decided being a zookeeper or a dinosaur or whatever else he’d thought he wanted to be was stupid – particularly the dinosaur idea – and quietly decided that he didn’t really care what he wound up doing anyway, even though he knew he really did.

When Remus Lupin was ten, he met Albus Dumbledore and the entire world turned around for a second time.

When Remus Lupin was eleven, he was surprised to find himself in a house for brave people, and much more surprised to discover that he was apparently going to have friends ‘whether he liked it or not’, as both of them so gracefully put it. He even got another one a few months further on.

When Remus Lupin was twelve, he was horrified to learn what a terrible liar he was, frightened of his friends after they began showing signs of knowing, and then absolved of both and pushed into a state of happiness he hadn’t thought possible when they told him they didn’t think it mattered.

When Remus Lupin was thirteen, he burned his hand on the ladder to the divination classroom and decided to take arithmancy instead, even if it was all maths and somewhat less interesting to him.

When Remus Lupin was fourteen, not a whole lot happened.

When Remus Lupin was fifteen, far too many things did. He took his OWLS and did better than he had expected, not that he was convinced it would result in anything in the end. By this point he had decided that even if the education would mean nothing, he would fully make the use of it for the sheer point of all the work done by other people solely so that he could have it in the first place. He also nearly killed someone else, which weighed quite heavily on him for a while even if it wasn’t his fault.

When Remus Lupin was sixteen, there were suddenly stories about scary people running about in masks. There were also meetings about what to take at NEWT level, and an interesting and confusing relationship with a girl.

When Remus Lupin was seventeen, graduation felt as though it was probably quite a bit more bittersweet to him than it was to most of his classmates. It wasn’t something he minded, and outwardly he looked just as pleased as he ever managed to do, but at the same time he couldn’t help but feel as though it were quite possible that the happiest part of his life had just come to an end. Of course, just after this thought, he told himself he was being over-dramatic, and let Sirius smash a piece of pie on his face with glee, even though he’d seen it coming.

When Remus Lupin was eighteen, he looked up from what he was doing every now and then and took a moment to register how surprised he was that he seemed to be fighting in a war.

When Remus Lupin was nineteen, he didn’t realise how close he was to dying several times throughout the year, and the older adults he was working with made sure this particular realisation never dawned.

When Remus Lupin was twenty, the war ended very abruptly, but at a cost that he thought – somewhat selfishly in his own opinion – was probably too high.

When Remus Lupin was twenty-one, he felt extraordinarily aimless.

When Remus Lupin was twenty-two, not a whole lot happened again. This time he was really quite pleased about it.

When Remus Lupin was twenty-three, he had three jobs at once, then one, then four for a very brief period of time, and then none. Having the four was, he conceded, a little too much even for him, but having none at all was just as exhausting for entirely different reasons altogether.

When Remus Lupin was twenty-four, the muggle world seemed to not be able to decide whether it wanted to make good films, or really really terrible ones, and either way you went with it, he decided that A Nightmare on Elm Street was cheesy and scary both for oddly similar reasons.

When Remus Lupin was twenty-five, he ran into Emmeline Vance purely by chance and spent the afternoon having a light lunch and reminiscing about people and times gone by, and things seemed to perk up a little in general.

When Remus Lupin was twenty-six, he got clipped by a bus in muggle London simply because he was uncharacteristically unobservant that afternoon. It wasn’t much of a serious injury, much to the amazement of the bystanders, and healed relatively quickly, but made him a bit paranoid about walking around for a few months.

When Remus Lupin was twenty-seven, the Wolfsbane potion was still in fledgling research stages, but he managed to write and converse with one of the scientists working on its creation for a few weeks. It wouldn’t be effective to any helpful degree until he was about thirty-one, and he wouldn’t be able to afford it at any point, but that didn’t stop him being very cautiously excited at the time regardless.

When Remus Lupin was twenty-eight, he tried to help do some editing for a book called ‘The Invisible Book of Invisibility’, but after ostensibly receiving several copies and never managing to locate any of them, politely wrote back to the lady and explained that this was a particular job he was not likely to be able to complete. She seemed quite understanding, having been having a difficult time attempting to ship ‘empty crates’ anyway.

When Remus Lupin was twenty-nine, jobs became nearly impossible to get at all, thanks to new legislation passed by the Ministry of Magic. One of his friends ruefully noticed that finding a job at all was now more of an occupation than actually having one. He politely remarked that would mean that not much would change.

When Remus Lupin was thirty, he discovered he was really not a big fan of gazpacho.

When Remus Lupin was thirty-one, he learned that his best friend’s son started his own time at Hogwarts and was sorted into the same house his father had been, and quietly hoped to himself that the boy would find as much of a home in the castle as he himself had done.

When Remus Lupin was thirty-two, Albus Dumbledore started sending him letters asking him to accept a teaching position at Hogwarts. He, in his own stubbornness, politely refused for several reasons he was then obliged to delineate specifically across a series of letters then exchanged at a rate that might have bordered on the harassing had they not come from that specific individual.

When Remus Lupin was thirty-three, he found himself quite startled by the sudden appearance of Minerva McGonagall at his kitchen window during the few minutes he was spending washing his dishes. It was only quick reflexes that saved the third of what had once been a six plate set from shattering on the floor. A few months later, he found himself walking into his very old, new, professorial office.

Technically, it was when Remus Lupin was thirty-four that he ran into a friend he hadn’t set eyes on in over a decade, and amusingly, things felt a little brighter with Black around.

When Remus Lupin was thirty-five, he felt like he was fifteen again fairly often.

When Remus Lupin was thirty-six, he lost a friend for the second time, and then agreed to go undercover to try and convince people ‘like him’ that they should fight for a group of people who had never given them anything. Unsurprisingly, he returned as empty-handed as he’d been when he left.

When Remus Lupin was thirty-seven, he realised he was going to be in a relationship with a very silly girl with very silly hair who had very silly ideas about what sort of men were suitable for her, and shortly afterwards realised he was very, very much in love with her regardless of how very, very silly the idea was.

When Remus Lupin was thirty-eight, he locked eyes with his wife from across the room in the instant before Dolohov’s curse had him fall to the ground, having known precisely where she’d been at the time and looking to her almost as an apology for failing to protect himself adequately. Upon finding himself nearly instantly a kilometre away in the forest and twenty years younger, he decided that the afterlife really wasn’t any less strange than the life had been.

When Remus Lupin died, there was similarly little commotion to things.