Slytherin Tower
Remus didn’t sleep well that night, either, although he managed to stay unconscious for ten minutes longer than he had the night before.
The morning had gone pretty identical to the one of the day before, too. He’d packed and left the dorm at an early hour, making it to the dining hall a minute or so past six. He’d eaten breakfast, gone to practice, and then lunch. The only part that differed was when he wrote a letter for Aaron whilst in the changing room before it had gotten too crowded.
Lunch is where he is, now, having located Mary, Marlene, and Lily quickly this time; just like he had done that morning.
He and Marlene hadn’t spoken too much at dinner, to his dismay, but they really did match each other, like Mary and Lily had said they would. Sometimes, they’d even comment something sarcastic in the same manner at the same time. Then there’s that whole understanding, too. About Marlene fancying Mary, and Remus never being able to do the same.
Marlene really is lovely, matching him perfectly, although he finds himself the most drawn to another.
Lily.
Sometimes, it feels as if she’s the only one who can keep up with him.
This had been apparent ever since that Sunday two days ago when he’d arrived; although in a bigger company, with Marlene and Mary also sitting at their table, he and Lily had been able to come to some sort of silent… understanding, he supposes. A Thing.
She sometimes makes literature references no one but he and Lily understands, and her eyes light up whenever he makes them too, and they can also sometimes start debating in a manner no one but them understand is joking. Lily knows precisely whenever Remus is feeling strange or down or tired, and Remus knows the same for her. He knows when the conversation gets uncomfortable for her, even if he doesn’t know why, and he understands when to stir the conversation away from said topic. She understands the same for him, too.
All of this is picked out by Remus just from that first lunch, as well as dinner and breakfast both the day before and today. He has never quite known someone like Lily Evans.
Remus wants to think that he and Lily really can become friends. Best friends.
He lets himself believe that Lily thinks the same about him, when she shoots him a playful glance that lunch.
“Remus, you should come with us into the city, today,” she smiles, nodding.
“Ah, Lils, let the poor boy go, will you?” Mary scolds immediately. “I mean, not that it wouldn’t be lovely to have you there hanging out with us, Remus. I just mean in case you have other plans,” Mary says, with a knowing glint in her eye, as if Remus knows anything about what she’s talking about.
She leans in then, over the table.
“Don’t think I didn’t see Emmeline making eyes at you yesterday at supper, I mean. If you want to shoot your shot…” Mary finishes the sentence off with a small shrug, leaning back conspiratorially.
He glances at Marlene. She looks to be poorly containing laughter; which then makes Remus feel like he wants to laugh, too.
He stifles an amused smile, a giggle, and instead tries for some sort of nonchalant small smirk as he shakes his head.
Remus must’ve made some sort of grimace, though, because Mary starts looking at him with questioning amusement, then.
“…not interested?” Lily grins with an equally amused look.
Remus shakes his head, glancing at Marlene again.
“Nah. Although I do want to post a letter, if you lot are alright if I come with you?” Remus says, suddenly remembering the small white letter tucked into his pocket.
“‘Course we are, Remus,” Marlene answers, but shoots a sort of worried look towards Mary. Remus frowns questioningly.
Mary picks both of their looks up quickly.
“It’s just that…” she quirks her head towards one of the more crowded tables, and as Remus looks over, he realises it’s the table of which his roommates are sitting.
His attention is first drawn by a certain black-haired boy with a matching last name. He immediately feels himself wanting to scowl and blush or something equally pathetic; an emotion Sirius often provokes with him. Well, with often he means the few times he’s seen Sirius through the past days of avoiding the trio.
Then, his eyes are drawn to the boy he’s sitting next to: James.
James is looking at him with an almost… heartbroken expression. Perhaps jealous is a better word.
Remus immediately averts his gaze and looks back at Mary.
“He’s looking at me,” he says dumbly, and he notes from the corner of his eye that Lily almost looks a bit nauseous.
“…yeah. Hey, if he says something, you have to—“ Marlene begins, with a worried expression on her face, matching the one Mary has.
Although her explanation is interrupted when someone else comes up to their table.
“Lily,” the voice says coldly, and Remus looks over at the person who’d spoken.
He recognises the boy immediately from his greasy black hair, his Slytherin-green tie, and his permanent scowl.
Snape, he believes he’s called. Severus Snape, to be exact. He remembers thinking about how stiff he looked whilst dancing, yesterday.
“Severus,” Lily replies, almost in an exhale. There’s something regretful in her tone. The mood is suddenly coming to be very tense; and both Marlene and Mary have quieted. To be slightly expected from Marlene in the tense situation, but not at all from Mary.
Snape has a longing, yearning look in his eyes as he looks at Lily. Or perhaps a disgusted, disappointed one. It depends on how you choose to look at his eyes. What you think matters the most.
“Lily, I’m sorry about-“ Snape begins, but Lily cuts him off.
“Look, Severus, it’s fine, it’s just— I don’t think I can do this anymore, alright? You should… go talk to someone else for awhile. Let’s just give each other a break,” she blurts out, not looking up from her plate.
Snape looks heartbroken again. He tightens his lips into two thin lines, before leaving with a small nod.
Remus looks questioningly at Lily, and he believes Mary is about to say something, before Lily looks up at him.
Not at Marlene nor Mary, but at him; because at this point Lily knows he can tell. By the way her eyes look, her brows pinched together.
“…I think it’s time to go back to the changing rooms. Our break is almost over. And, I think I saw Emmeline sitting down just a table or two away and I can’t contain the need to glare at her for much longer,” he says quickly, interrupting whatever question Mary had on the tip of her tongue.
Mary laughs, then, and Marlene smiles at him. The two start to talk about something, getting their trays to leave them before making their way to the dancing halls.
Lily smiles at him. It reaches her eyes and crinkles them nicely. It is a silent ‘thank you’, it is private and small but barely contained.
Remus smiles back at her. A silent ‘you’re welcome’, a silent promise that for a smile like that he’d advert any conversation at her mysterious request again, again, again.
————
The day goes quickly after that. He has no more strange encounters with his teacher, and they’re allowed to leave fairly early, just two hours after they’d began after lunch.
Remus showers and changes, and walks out of the blokes’ dressing room just in time to meet his three friends.
“Remus! Perfect timing,” Mary beams, and Marlene is beside her looking at her with those eyes again, not bothering to greet Remus, and Remus can’t help but smile.
“Hey, guys,” he replies.
“Sooo… anyone have anything to leave or get in the dorms, or can we go directly into town?” Lily asks, standing on the other side of Mary.
————
They end up going directly into town, carrying their bags with them. Remus didn’t want to go back to Gryffindor anyway, unsure of whether or not his three roommates would be there or not, and Lily might’ve sensed this, because she’d quickly agreed when he said he didn’t have anything to do in his dorm beforehand.
The four walk in duos, with Marlene and Mary giggling and talking just a step or so in front of Remus and Lily, who has their own quiet, but equally exciting to themselves, conversation.
Eventually, after browsing through a few stores on Mary’s demand, Remus remembers the letter that suddenly weighs down his pocket.
“Hey, I do really need to get to the post office before I forget,” he frowns very slightly. Maybe he kind of says that because he doesn’t really want to go to another Mary-chosen store without any of his sizes, but no one has to know that.
“I’ll come with,” Lily replies, and they bid their farewells to the other two, as they need to walk on the opposite direction of Mary and Marlene and their next stop to get to the post office.
Lily and Remus start to engage in another quiet conversation quickly after leaving, discussing anything and everything, and as they walk, Remus suddenly meets the gaze of someone.
The eyes of the boy genuinely look so animatedly heartbroken Remus recognises the emotion before he recognises the person.
A very jealous James Potter.
(And beside him is Sirius. Remus’s stomach flops strangely which is only out of discomfort at seeing the other boy’s discomforting face, thank you.)
At noticing he’s stopped speaking, Lily follows his gaze. He looks down at her and sees her wearing a tight expression, similar to the one she’d had in the dining hall a few hours prior.
“Hi Evans!” James shouts from the other side of the street.
Lily makes a ‘hmph’ noise, and Remus tries half-heartedly to wave at James before she drags him away, and Remus follows with a confused sound.
Once they’ve gotten around the block, Remus dares to ask her.
“Okay, what, exactly, was that?” he asks questioningly, surprised by the sudden difference from her usual politeness.
Lily sighs.
“It’s…” she swallows. “Okay. Let’s… let’s start off with Severus,” she nods to herself, and Remus doesn’t know what Severus has to do with it all, but he’s wondered about him and Lily too, so he supposes it will end up making sense if he lets her speak.
“Alright. Sev… isn’t that bad, really. He’s… he’s had it rough, alright? But he’s my childhood friend and I know him, and I know he could be better and kinder than he is if he tried,
“But. He’s… had it rough, like I said. Because when we were younger, the G204 boys, especially James,” she says his name with distaste, “would bully him. Which wasn’t alright. Now, he’s said some… some nasty things. He’s…” she worries her lip, “a bit of a classist. Okay, a bit a lot of a classist. And I don’t excuse that. I mean— I grew up poor, for fucks sake.
But we were childhood friends, and he never cared about any of that before, and it’s like… it’s like he was never allowed to be anything other than cruel, because…” Lily takes a breath, swallowing.
“…of them.” she says, looking up at Remus. Their eyes meet. It motivates her to continue. “They were so cruel, Remus. They’ve kind of… laid off, now, because we’ve gotten older and busier and stuff, but James… he’s popular, and quite obviously the objectively most handsome boy in school,” Remus distantly thinks that that’s Sirius, probably, actually, before cursing himself and continuing to listen to Lily. “And… and I fancied him. There. I said it. I haven’t told anyone else,” Lily sighs out.
“But you’ve met Mary, and Marlene. They figured it out, I reckon. Which… which was fine. It was a fleeting childhood crush. It was nothing. Until… until he asked me out,” she inhales sharply. “Because it was like— like I was hopeful about it, but I knew it was a joke, because I was really good friends with Sev, and I told him no, and then I stormed off, and now he just won’t stop, and I don’t know what to do, because it’s like both Severus and James are talking to me all the time, and then they’re glaring at each other, and I don’t know what any of it means, and it’s like I’m just waiting for one of them to grow up and leave me alone or— or stop making me a joke, at least, or just become my childhood best friend again, but how much I ever even wait none of them do, and Mary and Marlene talk about it all the time when they think I’m not listening, and I feel like I still fancy James a bit, because sometimes he’s so kind and he calls me lovely and clever but I don’t know if it’s a joke or not, because he’s… he’s James Potter, and I’m just—“ she cuts herself off when Remus stops her with a gentle hand to the middle of her chest. He wipes a tear from her cheek with his thumb, one she probably didn’t know fell.
“Oh sweetheart,” he mumbles, because that’s what Aaron would call him when he cried whilst drunk, and that just makes Lily cry harder. She starts sobbing.
Remus wraps his arms around her, and she presses her face against his chest, and Remus holds her tightly. And he presses broken pieces of her together, and it does not fix her but they do at least not need to lay broken alone anymore. She is a vase a child broke when playing, he is glue and a parent’s gentle hand, and she is a child crying in the corner over her mistake.
They do not move for minutes, or hours, or years.
————
They walk hand in hand to the post office awhile later. Lily’s eyes are still red and sad and there are tear and makeup stains on her cheeks.
“You don’t fancy me, do you?” Lily murmurs.
Remus shakes his head, huffing a small laugh. Lily smiles.
“Good. I don’t fancy you either,” she says.
And that’s that. The rest of the evening is spent under comfortable silence; and they leave possibly hours before Mary and Marlene does.
————
Once they get back, he and Lily eat a very early dinner, before Lily goes to her room to rest before Mary and Marlene comes back. Also to wash off her runny makeup, Remus reckons. She tells him thank you. Remus smiles and tells her ‘anytime’.
He sits in the common room for a bit, before finding himself awfully bored
He has a book to read, resting on his bed currently, which he had engaged in through his boredom the day before. He’d smoked and read until he was sure the other boys and gone to sleep, which had been fun.
Although he finds the idea boring today, and retorts to just staring at the wall of the common room. Which is also boring. He sighs, feeling very bad for himself.
When he remembers something.
A note.
‘leave open’, in all lowercase letters, next to the window of a dance hall.
Remus smiles to himself.
He doesn’t need a key to get in, like Lily and Regulus does.
Remus takes his bag from where he’d left it beside him on the couch, which he has been carrying around all day at this point, and decides he can just wear his old clothes from the earlier dance class and then shower in his dorm once he’s done.
He walks up to the big school building, and as it is at this point around dinner time meaning most students and staff are in the dining hall, in town, or in their dorms, he figures no one will be in the dance hall either way.
He’s right, and as he reaches the correct window and looks inside, he finds it to be very empty and dark.
He pulls open the window a bit more, and then climbs through without having to put in a lot of effort.
He turns on the light, and then puts on some music at random, and he thinks he’d like to depict happiness again; like mr. Wright had told them to do the day before.
He starts dancing, and he thinks about the dark orange shade of Lily’s hair, freckles that fit her better than they fit him, and the loudness and openness of Mary’s laughter and adoring blue eyes fixed on her in love, love, love.