Friends
When Remus wakes up again at five thirty AM, he finds that he won’t be able to sleep anymore.
He sits up in the bed, one that is briefly too small for him and his long limbs, and he rubs his eyes.
He can’t help but feel a bit grateful, though, at being up the earliest. It lets him pick his brown bag up again, and take a pill without anyone looking or asking. It is exactly what he does.
He gets dressed quickly and quietly then, trying not to disturb the rest of the boys in the room.
He isn’t… dreading being roommates with them, per se, it’s just…
They have this sort of essence to them, all three. That sort of confidence that shines through even if they’re trying to hide it, even if they’ have a shy or introverted personality, the kind that just screams of popularity.
Now, Remus isn’t to judge, it’s just that…
Well, it’s the type of people that would follow him and Aaron, call them names. It’s the type of people that would comment on his scars, giggle in groups when he shook his head to not answer. That kind of group.
He supposes, though, that the three boys wouldn’t do anything like that to him. They seemed nice enough the night before. He isn’t… scared, it’s just that he also isn’t sure what, exactly, Lily meant by saying that they are “troublesome”. He can’t help but think that, maybe, he is their next target, and that James’s initial kindness really only means to set him up for whatever they’re planning.
Which, really doesn’t matter, he reasons. Remus is no new subject to mean names nor pesky comments. He is also no new subject to hanging around the groups that called those mean names or those pesky comments. He’s sure he’ll make it through.
It would just not quite be ideal to share a room with that sort of people, is all, since he is also known for being violent; at least by mean boys around London and schools of which he’s been kicked out from.
And, to say the least, he really does not want to fuck this up.
But Remus has also always been known to overthink; mind getting too loud too quickly whenever he finds himself alone.
Once more he misses his music. And then Aaron; being able to speak more than enough for the both of them, often.
Remus sighs, starting to tie his tie.
It hits him that he will be the only one with a red one, today.
The Academy has an unusual system, for a school.
For example; they begin a week before other, typical, schools to give the students a head start in their courses. It is pretty intense the first week, them being expected to dance or play or whatever the fuck for pretty much a whole typical school day.
When the classes start they will not be spending as much time on their courses, although they will still be spending time. Remus isn’t sure exactly how many hours per day, though he knows it varies from one hour to two hours a day.
So, the first week will, in Remus’s case, be spent dancing.
Alone. With Slytherin and Hufflepuff boys and no Lily since she’s a girl and a tie that sticks out.
What a first impression.
Though, Remus has never been very shy.
He makes his bed once he’s dressed, before picking up his schedule that he had left on the table beside his bed the night before.
He has two schedules; one telling him his classes on a typical school week, and one for the first week. He takes the latter; and checks the small square of information at the bottom.
Breakfast is served at six to seven forty on weekdays. It is served at seven to nine thirty on weekends.
Remus spares a quick glance at the clock on the wall. Five fifty AM.
He hears someone stir, and decides to pack his school bag as quickly as possible.
He looks at his schedule again; seeing his first dance class begins at eight AM.
Well, he thought. It’s not like he has anything better to do.
He pulls out a brown messenger bag and packs everything he can muster up he’d need throughout the day. He doesn’t want to have to go back to the dorm until tonight, anyway.
He throws in a change of clothes for the dance classes, his schedule, shoes, a water bottle to fill up, and a bottle of his pills. Just in case.
Then he leaves the dormitory, starting to make his way over to the castle-like school building.
He walks in through the main entrance, walking through the halls Lily had shown him just the day before. He locates the door Lily had introduced as the ‘signature dining hall door’ yesterday, and reluctantly pushes it open.
There’s a handful of people eating already, surprisingly to Remus. He looks up at the clock and finds it reads ten past six at this point.
McGonagall had mentioned something about different houses having different tables, although Remus didn’t need to search; for he quickly notices Lily, waving him over, from a table with decorations in the same red and gold as his tie.
He starts walking over with a small smile, noting she’s sitting with someone.
She has a red tie and an identical outfit to Lily’s, too, but she carries herself in a completely different way.
She screams of confidence; but, to be fair, Remus would probably be quite confident if he looked like that, too.
She has hair coiled into tight curls, that she’s separated into two low pigtails, and gorgeous features. Her skin is a dark brown, practically glowing, her face slightly covered with makeup.
She doesn’t even look tired, despite the early hour.
Remus sits down beside Lily.
“Morning, Remus,” Lily smiles. “this is my friend, Mary. She does dancing, too.”
“Morning,” he smiles back, before turning to the pretty girl, Mary. “nice to meet you, Mary. I’m Remus,”
“I know,” the girl giggles. “nice to meet you, Remus. Truly, Lily has been rambling about ‘the only non-asshole in room G204’ since last night,” she says.
Remus frowns, not loosing the smile.
“You too? I’m getting nervous, are they really that bad?” he asks, looking over at Lily.
“Nah…” Mary begins. “not too bad, I mean. Probably won’t be to you anyway. They’re just…” she makes a vague gesture with her hand.
“…troublesome,” she eventually lands on, looking at Lily quickly.
Lily has a somewhat sour expression on her face.
“So I’ve heard,” Remus murmurs, glancing over at Lily before meeting Mary’s gaze with a silent question of; that’s not the whole reason she dislikes them so much, is it?
Mary shakes her head very subtly.
“Anyway!” she switches the topic before the conversation gets too tense. “my appetite is back, and I’m starving. Let’s go and get some food?”
————
The conversation rolled on smoothly after that, and Remus found himself getting along well with Mary.
“You’d really get along with Marlene,” Lily shakes her head after a particular comment Remus had thrown out.
“Ohmegosh yes!” Mary laughs. “bloody Hufflepuff, though. Music students don’t start until nine,” she huffs out.
“Ah. That’s why you two are up so early?” Remus asks.
“Oh, Lily, yes. She likes to warm up ages before we begin. I’m just up because she forces me to keep her company. I’d be sleeping until ten to eight if I could; forget breakfast. Still have a terrible hangover from Saturday,” Mary explains.
Remus smiles.
“Why are you here so early, though? I can’t imagine you got in bed until late, judging by the fact that you arrived at, like, nine PM,” Lily asks.
“Uh… don’t sleep well first nights at a new place, ‘s all,” Remus shrugs, willing himself to sound casual. “Anyway… what do ya mean ‘warm up’? I mean, professor McGonagall said the dance halls don’t open until class starts? Do you… dance in the changing room?” he asks.
“Oh! No, they let me have a key. It’s ‘cause I’m a prefect, they say, but honestly? Just get on your teacher’s good side and he’ll let you come and go as you want. We’ll have different teachers, though I imagine yours is even less strict than ours,” Lily vaguely gestures to her and Mary.
“Yeah… I mean, Regulus has a key to the blokes’ dance hall and he’s not even a prefect, so he doesn’t even have an excuse for it. But, that’s kind of only a matter of time, I suppose. It’s just ‘cause he’s not old enough he isn’t one yet, I reckon,” Mary fills in.
“…huh,” Remus raises his eyebrows slightly. The thought of having a whole dance hall to himself, no teachers or anything, doesn’t seem so bad. Somewhere to spend his time other than the dorm, he supposes.
“Speaking of warming up before class, we sorta need to go. The blokes’ dance hall is right across from ours, if you wanna come with?” Lily says, glancing at the clock.
“Uh, yeah, sure thing,” Remus says, realising he doesn’t actually know where, exactly, the dance hall is.
The three leave the dining hall, that is significantly more full by now, walking through corridors Remus tries to map out in his head, to little to no avail.
Eventually, the three stop in front of two big doors, right across from each other, with yellow and green as the colours for one of them, and red and blue as the colour for the other. Remus assumes that the one with yellow and green is the one leading to the boys’ dressing room, and the opposite for the girls’ dressing room.
“Well. Here we are,” Lily says. “suppose you can guess which is which, with all the gender stuff.”
“Yeah. Well, thanks for showing the way,” Remus says, suddenly nervous.
“Our pleasure!” Mary smiles. “good luck now, Remus! Don’t let the Slytherins bite!” she cheerily says, before leaving with Lily, not leaving Remus any room to ask what, exactly, the fuck she meant by that.
He looks over at the door he’s supposed to go through, before swallowing tensely. He stares at it for a moment before finally getting himself together, going up to push the door open.
He finds himself surprised to see someone there, putting on their pointe shoes, although he probably shouldn’t, judging by what the girls had said about ‘Regulus’ and how he, just like Lily, also gets there early to practice.
What he didn’t expect is that ‘Regulus’ is the rude guy from the train.
The black haired boy looks up upon Remus’s arrival, and Remus narrows his eyes.
“Believe me now?” he can’t help but ask, raising his eyebrows.
The boy— Regulus— eyes him up and down.
“Gryffindor,” he huffs.
“Yeah? Have a problem? They didn’t have place elsewhere,” Remus replies.
“…Nah,” Regulus replies after a moment of silence. “my brother’s in Gryffindor,” he blurts out, before looking almost surprised with himself for mentioning it.
“Sirius?” Remus asks, walking over to sit down on the bench opposite of Regulus, taking off his bag and setting it beside him.
Regulus’s lips part slightly, and he raises his eyebrows in a sort of subtle surprise. He ceases to tie his shoes for a moment.
Remus smiles at him, glad to have provoked the reaction.
“You’re identical, if you were to pay attention. And, c’mon, Sirius and Regulus? Not exactly common names,” he says.
Regulus shakes his head, huffing.
“…whatever,” he grumbles, going back to tying his pointe shoes.
Remus lets himself glance at the clock in the room, then, which he finds unnecessarily grand for being in the mens’ dressing room, and notes the clock being pretty precisely ten to seven.
He sighs. Still awhile to go, then.
Regulus seems finished with his shoes at that point, and walks up to a door on the opposite end of the room from the one Remus entered through, to unlock it with a key before disappearing into what Remus assumes to be the dance hall.
Remus himself decide internally to get ready, too, and he starts digging for his water bottle to fill up with a water fountain he spots in the corner of the room.
He lets his mind wander, then.
He’s sure the other G204 boys have to be awake, at this point. Or maybe they aren’t. Troublesome, and all, maybe they get up first ten minutes before their classes start, like Mary had mentioned wanting to, or something.
Troublesome.
Remus has heard that one before, really.
He didn’t like it at all; never did with those kinds of words. Words that teachers and principals and peers had used, speaking of him, leading to him getting kicked from school after school.
They never really were speaking of him, though, but of the company he kept.
He really did use hang around the nastiest people. He didn’t agree with them, though, nor what they did. He only did it for that word. To be called troublesome, be sent away from the school, get a scolding from his dad, have more time for parties, or sneaking around, or Aaron, until his father found another school he could go to. Then, repeat.
But, this one time, it is different. He does not want to be sent away, this one time.
He will not associate with them, this once, and he finds himself afraid.
Afraid that, for once, karma has found him. For once, he will pay for all the things he’s done to others.
Or, rather, all the things he hasn’t done. All the things he’s let slide.
All the times it should’ve been him, instead of someone else. Someone much more deserving of life, of fortune, than him.
(A car. Screams; the faint scent of alcohol Remus knows like the back of his hand. Always will. Always, always, always.)
Remus sighs, shaking his head, and closing his water bottle, deciding not to dwell on it too much. He’s sure he’ll be fine.
What isn’t fine is that he really doesn’t know what to think of the group, if he sees past all the rumours.
James had been nice. Peter had looked at him with big and curious eyes, but not with the slightest bit judgement.
And Sirius…
Well.
He hadn’t done anything, really.
Remus is still unsure of the feeling he got when he first saw him.
Sirius is, as Remus could quickly tell, a classic high school heartthrob.
There’s something about him that screams fiction, something about him that makes Remus wonder how on earth someone looking like that could end up somewhere like here. Because this is Remus’s life, and this is not fiction, even though Sirius in a way is fiction. Something Remus made up, a shadow of… something.
A shadow of something, someone, he’s known. Perhaps, someone from another lifetime; a past or alternative version of Remus that knows exactly why and how he feels the way he does around Sirius.
What a terrible thought to have.
Remus is snapped out of his trance when the door opens again, and someone else walks inside. It’s two Hufflepuff, he supposes at least, judging by their yellow ties, boys Remus doesn’t recognise. They sit down a bit away from him and start getting ready in a slow tempo, engulfed in a conversation Remus can’t hear.
He takes this as his own sign to get changed before the room gets too crowded and he has too much of an audience, and walks over to his bag again, starting to change and get ready too.
————
Remus is nervous when it’s finally time to begin the class.
The dance hall is big and slightly rectangular, leaving a lot of space for all the students to take up. There are windows on the walls where there isn’t mirrors, and on a small note Remus reads ‘leave open’.
Their teacher is a mean and old looking man, with lean and muscular arms and legs as well as a tall frame.
He stares at them all intensely as he starts speaking, with a tone that is scolding and almost judging, despite the fact that none of them has done anything yet. He has a slight British accent.
“Hello. My name is mr. Wright, and I will be your teacher for the rest of the semester. Although I do expect the majority of you know this already,” he says.
He pauses, for some sort of dramatic effect. It works; for Remus feels his body tense slightly.
“I will be showing and telling you how and what to dance, and then judge you accordingly after how much precision and elegance you preform these moves. I will also be looking at each and every one of you individually to my best capacity. If you are good enough, you get a chance for a leading role in the play, although if you are not, you do not get the chance to audition. I will pick out a handful of you I find most fitting for the play we will be preforming in spring, and those selected few will be the only ones, and I mean the only ones, who are allowed— and expected— to audition for the lead roles,” the man says, sternly and bluntly, making Remus feel nervous all over again.
And excited.
Because, wouldn’t that be something?
Now, Remus knows he’s good at dancing. He also knows the other students at the school are, too.
He’s not cut out to be the lead for any play, sure, because that’s not his role. His part is to set a mood and make the scene more emotional from a distance, and he’s good at that.
But to get the chance? To be expected to audition for a leading role? That, Remus can get behind. It certainly won’t do any harm to his low self esteem, anyway. He won’t get the part either way.
So, he straightens his back a bit more, continuing to listen to what mr. Wright tells them, feeling the room getting more tense with every word; and feeling himself grow more and more determined to get an audition with every moment.
————
Despite the very strict instructions, and the very nerve-wracking attention Remus gets from mr. Wright, he quickly finds himself having fun, to no one’s surprise.
During the consistent breaks some boys start crying, talking about how their parents will kill them if they don’t get a chance to audition this year either, and others talking about what to eat for lunch, and what time it is, and how nervous they are, and how tense the room feels.
Remus himself lets himself watch. Listen. It is what he does best; what he likes the best, really. Before Aaron and the parties it was all he did.
He notes who is related to who, a boy complaining about his brother and a boy talking about his last name and do you not know who my father is? He notes which few of them got into the school on a scholarship, judging by their avoidance to speak about family or similar, and which people who are convinced they could do anything with the right amounts of money.
There is classical music playing on low volume all the time, and mr. Wright picks the boys one by one during their short breaks to corners of the room, for a scolding or an “improvement talk” which always leave them looking heartbroken and convinced their whole career will fail.
With about an hour ‘til lunch, and the other boys walking to fill their water bottles or eat something in the changing room, mr. Wright walks up to Remus.
The room is almost empty, and Remus already sits in a corner, so he does not lead him anywhere.
Remus finds himself standing up, nervous.
Mr. Wright looks at him with a calculating expression that Remus can’t quite make out, before giving a smile.
It’s small and private and Remus finds himself relived.
“You are outstanding, mr. Lupin. You dance with, not only precision and grace, but with emotion. You are well above your peers,” the man nods at him approvingly, with something akin to respect in his gaze.
Remus feels his face heat up at the praise.
“Thank you, mr. Wright,” he says with a small smile back.
The man just nods again, before turning back around, starting to instruct the growing amount of people in the dance hall again.
Remus finds the interaction strange yet rewarding, and he doesn’t forget about it until many, many, years later.
The teacher instruct them to improvise and show different emotions, now, leaving the class to their own imagination. Some of Remus’s classmates go pale at such an instruction. Remus feels himself smile.
Mr. Wright tells them to dance like they want to show happiness. Remus thinks of Aaron and the countryside and dancing by himself back at home. The world goes quiet, quiet, quiet.
————
But they cannot, after all, dance forever; and sooner than Remus would have liked the boys are being hurried to eat.
They do not shower nor change yet, except for a few very posh boys, since they will be continuing to dance after the meal and somewhat late into the afternoon.
Remus changes his shoes and throws on some looser trousers over his clothes, before starting to make his way out of the changing room.
Because, despite his reluctance to stop dancing now that they were getting to the fun and individual part, he is really freaking hungry.
He only walks a few steps before he is stopped, though.
“Wait,” a voice says, and Remus turns around, despite already having a guess at who it is.
Regulus.
“I saw you dance,” the shorter boy says, or rather blurts out.
Remus raises his eyebrows pointedly.
“You— you’re good,” Regulus nods. “really good. I wanted to say sorry for doubting that, I suppose,” the boy shrugs, blushing a bit at his own apology.
Remus can’t help the smile that tugs at his lips.
“Thanks,” he says, briefly recalling seeing Regulus dance from the corner of his eye, too. “you’re good too.”
Regulus nods again, before looking over Remus’s shoulder quickly. He does a double take at whatever or whoever he spotted, before he bids a quick farewell and leaves with fast steps. It all goes so quick Remus barely has the time to react before someone taps him on the shoulder.
He turns around, gaze meeting Lily’s.
“What’d he want?” Lily asks.
Remus shrugs, opting to not talk about it yet.
“Nothing. Let’s go to lunch?” he says instead, and Lily smiles, leading him along before starting to ramble about her own lesson.
————
“Mary and Marlene should already be here, somewhere,” she says with a slight frown, scanning the hall for the two.
Remus looks around too, although he doesn’t know what Marlene looks like.
He doesn’t find them, unsurprisingly, although he does spot his roommates.
The three sit at a table that is very full, and Sirius is talking animatedly to James who seems to be indulging in him wholeheartedly. Peter is sitting beside James with a girl at his side, talking to her with a lovestruck expression. There are girls whispering about the three, or rather James and Sirius Remus would guess, with giddy expressions all over. Since there aren’t assigned tables for lunch, Remus finds his gaze swimming in irregular patterns of red, green, yellow, and blue.
“…there,” Lily mumbles, before she drags Remus along to a table on the very other side of the dining hall.
Remus spots Mary quickly. She’s talking to someone with a yellow tie, a boy Remus recognises from the dancing class just a moment earlier, and with her body language and high giggles Remus can hear even as he’s still a bit away from the table he quickly realises she’s flirting.
Beside her sits a girl with messily layered, platinum blonde hair and bright blue- although not in an annoying way- eyes. She also has a yellow tie, and Remus immediately recognises her as Marlene; the Hufflepuff in the music course Mary and Lily had been talking about that morning.
She looks at Mary longingly, with impossibly more interest than the Hufflepuff boy’s own eyes holds as he looks at the same girl.
Remus catches her gaze as he sits down, neither of them hearing the conversation Lily and Mary starts as the boy leaves reluctantly.
Remus tilts his head, a silent question in his eyes.
Marlene looses eye contact, starting to engage in Lily’s and Mary’s conversation instead.
It is answer enough for Remus. He starts talking to them, too.
They talk about boys, later on, and Marlene says she hasn’t got an eye on anyone.
She glances over at Remus when she says that; timidly, like she doesn’t know whether or not to trust him with such a gaze. And because Remus knows loving, all he does is agree when Mary says she’ll find someone soon, but not without a knowing look; a glint in his eye, one that Mary does not have.
When they ask him about girls later, he looks at Marlene when he answers he does not have an eye on anyone.
She smiles at him when no one is looking.
Remus smiles back, and he thinks he’s made yet another friend, despite not having exchanged a single word with her individually yet.