The Stranger
Remus focused intently on chopping the tomatoes that he had just picked from his garden, washing them and thinly slicing them on his battered wooden chopping board. He was doing this not because he particularly liked salad, in fact he couldn’t think of anything he wanted less right now, but because he was very stressed and he didn’t know what to do with his hands when he was stressed. So he kept chopping the tomatoes and tried to shut his brain up.
Predictably, however, the tomatoes did nothing to soothe Remus’ overactive mind. He cast a wary glance at the pile of blankets on his sofa. All he could see was a mop of curly black hair splayed out on the cushions, and the blankets were rising and falling slightly in time with the breathing of the stranger buried somewhere underneath. Remus wondered whether the stranger liked tomatoes.
He hoped so.
He had inherited the cottage from his mother when she died. He had only been 17, and it hit him hard. The cottage lay empty for a year afterwards, with Remus finishing his final year at school and not being able to bring himself to even take a step inside the gate.
By the time he was 18, Remus and his best friend, Lily, had finally come to see the cottage. She had been trying to gently coax him into going to see it for at least 6 months before she finally gave up asking and just bundled him into her red VW beetle and drove him up there herself.
The cottage felt like Hope. From the moment Remus stepped inside the front door, he could tell it was hers, there was no question. There were dusty pictures of him as a baby, and even a lingering trace of her vanilla perfume hanging around the house, like a small reminder of herself she’d left just for Remus.
He remembered Lily squeezing his arm encouragingly and whispering,
“We can leave whenever you want if it gets too much, love.”
For the next year, Remus and Lily spent their weekends slowly making the cottage liveable again. Remus mostly dealt with the garden- he had tried clearing out the interior of the cottage first, but the smell of mothballs and his mother’s old perfume was stifling and so he resigned himself to planting vegetables and herbs, and attempting to tackle the large bed of nettles at the bottom of the garden.
Lily dealt with the inside of the cottage, clearing out the rooms one by one and consulting Remus before throwing away anything sentimental. And before he knew it, by the time Remus was 19, they had made the cottage his own.
It was small, barely even big enough for him to live in, but he was comfortable. He filled it with books, his extensive record collection, plants, art, and as much clutter as he could fit into the small space. Whilst it was technically a bungalow, he converted the attic into his bedroom, so that what was the bedroom could be an office of sorts.
Remus filled his office with as many books as possible, as well as his guitar, and any of Hope’s things that he didn’t want to throw away were stuffed into tatty boxes in the corner. He had large windows in the living room, and the last thing he and Lily did before declaring the house ‘officially complete’ was hang up a stained glass suncatcher, which threw beautiful multicoloured glimmers across the whole of the ground floor. Hope would’ve loved that, Remus thought, as he hung it up.
The stranger on the sofa shifted slightly, jolting Remus out of his thoughts. He didn’t wake however, and Remus let out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding.
The kitchen was Remus' favourite room in the whole cottage. It had original flagstones from when the cottage was first built hundreds of years ago, which made the floor feel cool in the summer, though icy cold in the winter. There was a small wooden door with a lace curtain covering its window that led onto Remus' vegetable patch, and some long-forgotten brown wellie-boots lay on the stone step leading up to it. The counters and cupboards were Remus' favourite though- they were a lovely sage green, and Lily had added small flowering vines in acrylic paint across the bottom of the cabinets and shelves. There was a large, 16 paned window, the windowsill of which was piled high with recipe books, old mugs and hastily scribbled post-its that Remus had quickly forgotten the meaning of.
He filled the kettle and left it to boil whilst he searched for a book. On his 23rd birthday last March, Lily had gifted him a book on herbs and their healing properties. Whilst not usually being a fan of nonfiction, Remus had read it, knowing that Lily probably bought it for him out of worry for him living so far away from any of the local hospitals. He attempted to quietly root through the stacks of recipe and plant books on his kitchen windowsill, not wanting to wake the sleeping stranger. When he eventually found it (propping up a long forgotten stand mixer) he flicked through the pages, occasionally making notes on different herbs that sounded useful.
The kettle on the stove whistled, and Remus poured the boiling water into a large, pale blue china teapot.
He then searched through many dusty jars of dried herbs for valerian root and peppermint. The book said they would help with shock and calm the nerves. Remus thought that was probably what the man on the sofa needed.
He opened a large mason jar filled with dried blue flower buds, and emptied a handful into the teapot. He added pinches of the herbs, and a copious amount of honey, and left the tea to steep whilst he cleaned up the mess he’d made of his kitchen counter.
He poured the dark blue liquid into a large mug, stirring it slightly. It had a grassy scent, mixed with the slightly bitter smell of the herbs. Butterfly pea tea had become something of Remus’ “signature blend” since he’d accidentally stumbled upon some at a village market. There was something about it that looked magical, like it was some kind of potion. It was exactly the kind of thing he would’ve wanted, had he woken up in a strangers house with mysterious injuries.
With a deep sigh, Remus picked up the plate of chopped tomatoes and the mug of blue tea and made his way out into the living room.
He set the cup and plate down, and then nearly jumped out of his skin as he looked up, and saw a pair of steely grey eyes staring intently back at him.