He can feel it before it happens. In the way his legs feel weak when he’s not even using them and the transparency of his hands after he gets out of the shower. It’s the slight dizziness that comes whenever he shakes or nods his head, and the way his heart stops for a few moments before resuming its rhythm. It comes in waves, sometimes big leaving him bracing onto the wall or countertop for dear life. Other times they’re small making his handwriting messier than usual as his hands shake. Any sane person would take these as a warning sign. Remus takes them as a challenge.
He forces himself to walk and stand before the full paralysis of his legs kick in and puts on gloves so no one else notices the way his veins stand out despite his dark complexion. He smiles through the dizzy spells and nods again when someone asks him a question and keeps walking when his heart stops. He fights the waves, both big and small blaming his unusually messy handwriting on lack of time. And no one notices.
It’s a good thing. It means Remus is doing his job, but it leaves this feeling in his chest, one that he vaguely recognizes as pain. Is it supposed to hurt when no one notices even when you try to hide it? He doesn’t think so. It hurts anyway.
Right now he sits at his desk, head in his hands as he fights off yet another wave of dizziness. The door is locked, despite Effie’s well known rule but Remus doesn’t have it in him to care. Behind closed doors is the only time he allows himself to feel his symptoms, at least partially. Once the wave has passed Remus allows himself to breathe and lift his head.
The word document remains empty as it has for the past nine days. Not that it really matters, it was due three weeks ago. He slowly raises his hand from his lap to place it on the keyboard when it begins to shake. Remus groans and glares at it. He’s been at this for the past fifteen minutes. It’s the same thing really, a cycle if you will. Remus attempts to work and his hands shake. Remus wills them to stop shaking and they don’t. At some point Remus ethier gives up or grabs his hand and slams it downward. The action by itself should be harmless, but the increase in heart rate always makes his head spin. So he puts his head down and waits for it to pass, then the cycle starts anew. He’s getting tired of these damn cycles.
The door handle shakes, and Remus snaps up his head again, the action making him dizzy. Though he’s not sure if that's the word to describe it. Normal people are dizzy, healthy people get dizzy. What happens to Remus is worse. A pit grows in his stomach, one that nausea quickly fills and a headache quickly forms. The world blurs and tips and turns yet Remus stays completely still.
“Remus?”, someone calls from behind the door and he’s quickly reminded of what put him in this situation in the first place.
“Coming!” he calls back, in what he hopes is a semi-dignified manner.
He gets to his feet slowly and the world tilts, him going with it. He clunches to the frame of his bed which is thankfully right next to his desk, and uses it as support. The door handle jiggles again and the voice calls out filling Remus with annoyance. Can’t they see he’s busy trying not to fall and crack his head open? He opens his eyes and watches the world go from blurry to clear to some weird in between sort of thing and takes a step. His stomach lurches as he does so and he does his best not to gag.
“Remus, why is the door locked?” the voice calls again.
Remus sighs. He should be able to recognize them, there aren’t that many people in the house right now. But between his nausea, headache and rapid spinning of the world it’s nearly impossible. The door handle shakes again this time insistently before it comes to a sudden stop. He knows better than to think he’s safe. Whoever it is probably just went to go get Sirius so he could pick the lock. Either that or it is Sirius and he’s picking it right now, giving him less time than he’d originally thought.
Remus drops his head and groans, before pushing himself forward. His legs shake in the way they do before they are about to give out on him, and Remus tells them to shut the hell up. He stumbles into his dresser and then into the door before throwing it open. Sirius is of course on his knees, a knife between his lips and a look of concentration on his face, one that Remus shouldn’t find cute.
“Moony!” Sirius says and the knife falls from his lips. “Why was your door locked?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Remus throws out “I didn’t realize you were my mother.”
Sirius' face falls and Remus should feel guilty, but he doesn’t. Instead he’s filled with a slight satisfaction, knowing that for once he’s not the only one miserable.
“He may not be, but I am,” Effie interrupts “And you know my rule about locking doors, especially with you being sick.”
And there it is, the Elephant in every room Remus walks in. At school, at home, even in his own god damned bedroom. Remus thinks he ought to give this Elephant a name at this point, and maybe even its own personal design. Maybe if he decorates it the same way he did Romulus - his new cane, it’ll make him feel better.
“-so are you ready to go?”
Remus blinks and then internally curses. “What?”
“Lily’s party is today. She’s turning seventeen, remember?” Sirius asks gently.
Remus nods, despite the fact that he remembers nothing of this. There’s of course always the possibility that said conversation never happened and this is just Sirius’ way of getting him to go to another party. It wouldn’t be something he hasn’t done before, but it’s different now. Thanks to his chronic illness Remus has a tendency to forget things, he might repeat a question twice or he’ll get irritated no one’s answered a question he never asked. Which means when Sirius lies to him about the two having a conversation Remus can’t tell if they actually did talk and his brain fog is just acting up or if Sirius is just being a dick. Logically Remus knows he can just ask, but even just the thought of it is mortifying. He’s sixteen not sixty-one.
“So you’re ready to go then?” Sirius asks, and Remus nods.
___ Line break ___
The party is small, consisting of Lily and her friends whom Sirius and James had decided to call The Valkyries. Marlene’s girlfriend, Dorcas was invited who apparently invited Regulus (that was going to cause some problems later) Despite being invited by her, Regulus had placed himself into a corner next to his emotional support Pandora. Remus grimaced as he noticed her presence. It wasn’t that he had a problem with Pandora necessarily nor did he have one with her twin brother Evan. Who he did have a problem with was Barty, Evan’s situationship of the last three years. Those two couldn’t go anywhere without either breaking up or making up, the later being extremely gross.
“You’re late,” Lily declared, tapping her foot impatiently.
“What are you talking about Evans?” Sirius laughed “You know the party doesn’t start til the Marauders get there.”
Lily rolled her eyes and scoffed though the action was playful. She shifted her attention to Remus and looked him up and down as if sizing him up which she probably was.
“How are you?”
He shrugged “The usual,”
Lily raised a suspicious eyebrow at him and looked him up and down again.
“How are the girlfriends?” Remus asked, changing the subject.
Lily’s eyes brightened as she began to talk. Mary and Lily had only been dating for a few months despite knowing each other for forever and Pandora and Lily had just begun to date a couple weeks ago. Remus still wasn’t sure if Pandora and Mary had feelings for eachother but it was fairly obvious that Lily had a thing for those two. As if on cue Mary appeared from around the corner and slung her arm over Lily’s shoulder.
“I’ll leave you too be,” Remus said, before he could get roped even deeper into a conversation.
He found a comfortable place on a couch, and looked around. Apparently Lily had rented out a small bookstore or more accurately Sirius had. It was The Marauders’ birthday gift, one that Remus was eternally grateful for considering he’d forgotten about Lily’s party in the first place.
The place was rustic, and reminded him of a bit of a cabin or something else magical. It was the kind of place Remus would enjoy if it weren’t filled with a bunch of teenagers who were possibly about to get drunk and he couldn’t help but wonder if Sirius had thought about him at all when he picked it out.
“Nice pick right?” Peter asked, drink in hand.
“Getting drunk already?”
Peter looked down at his drink then back at Remus “Oh hell no, this is an energy drink. I was up all last night doing homework.”
“An energy drink that you poured into a red solo cup?”
Peter shrugged “I have to fit in somehow,”
The next thirty minutes went a bit like that. Certain people would pass by Remus’ spot on the couch and make quick conversation before quickly moving onto something more interesting. Not that he minded, still unable to fully shake the feeling from before. He felt fine physically, but his brain still felt fogged and his hands shook in his pockets.
Another teen walked by, one that he vaguely recognized as Evan, the blonde-white hair impossible to miss. He plopped down onto the couch Barty followed soon after and Remus quickly stood up. If there was one thing Remus wanted no part of it was Rosekiller drama.
Remus managed a few steps before it happened. His ears began to ring, giving the music an echoy effect and he froze in place. His vision blurred and the world tilted making him feel off kilter. If he were able to think clearly he would create a new word for dizzy. According to a dictionary (Remus has looked it up enough times to know it by heart) the word dizzy is defined as: having or involving a sensation of spinning around and losing one's balance. The word describes how he’s feeling in a way, but at the same time not at all. This is something different, more intense. A bit like getting off one of the amusement park rides. One that just spins you for three minutes straight, then puts you on a tightrope made of dental floss, where if you don’t put one foot exactly in front of the other you die.
Remus dies. It’s not his fault, at least not this time. He’s doing a good job of holding it together until Sirius and James arrive clearly having gotten themselves into some dispute that they needed him to resolve. Their mouths are moving and he can hear the words but they don’t process. In the back of his mind he knows he understands English and he knows what the words mean, but their definition is lost on him.
“Remus?”
He tries to understand what they’re saying and can distantly recognizes the sound of his own name, but there are so many people that he can’t decipher which is which. Since when did he know so many people? And why are they all looking at him? He’s fine, right?
Someone’s hands are on his face.
“Remus, can you hear me?”
He nods and then groans as the insistent dizziness grows exponentially worse.
“Remus? Remus!”
It’s the last thing he hears before he feels his body hit the floor. This time is different from the first, it’s not nothing his mind doesn’t go blank and he doesn’t totally lose consciousness. Instead he just can’t seem to open his eyes, they flutter lightly but when he tries to fully open them they feel like bricks. His body doesn’t move even when he asks it to, nor when others do apparently. He can still hear them, he can hear the screaming but it doesn’t fully register and it’s muffled. Not like he’s underwater but more like it’s far away or like he’s eavesdropping through a door.
“Remus, can you hear me?” someone asks, and he can feel their hands on his face, possibly the same ones from earlier.
He tries to groan, to let them know that he’s still alive but his face is numb along with his fingers which are currently intertwined with someone else’s. It goes on like this for a while. People talk and panic and scream, but throughout it all there’s a soft voice in his ear. He can’t understand what they’re saying, possibly because it's in a different language, possibly because he can’t even understand English at the moment.
He comes back in stages. His eyes feel less heavy and they flutter less. When he actually tries to open them it works but he doesn’t recognize anyone yet. The world is till blurred and so are faces. People start talking once his eyes are open asking him a plethora of questions that he doesn’t know the answers to.
“Are you okay?”
Maybe.
“What happened?”
I don’t know.
Eventually Lily takes the lead, she kneels down and takes both of his hands. The person below him tenses, but moves their hand into his hair and strokes it softly. It brings him comfort.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Remus,” he says and a look of worry passes over her face.
He doesn’t understand why, he did what he was told. But he’s too tired to think about that right now and melts into the mystery person’s arms.
“I asked him his name but he only gave me his first and his words were slurred.” she says
Another voice speaks through the phone but Remus can’t understand it. He’s still dizzy though less so and his eyes start feeling heavy again. Against his will he feels his head loll back to the side and his eyes roll into his head. It’s a strange feeling, one that he’s not completely sure how to describe. All he knows is that it's weird, though not as weird as the person who has for some reason started massaging his chest. He’s not in heart failure or anything. He’s just passed out, it’s no big deal.
When he comes to for the second time, the paramedics are there. Or technically they’ve just begun to walk into the door. They ask him some of the same questions Lily did and he answers them correctly this time. All of his friends and even the people at the party he doesn’t really know stare at him with worry and Remus gets a pit in his stomach. It’s not nausea this time, thank God. It’s fear. He fears his friends won’t view him the same anymore, that he’ll fall even further behind in school. He fears the helicopter parenting that will follow for the next few weeks and the inevitable bedrest he’s going to be put on. He fears he might be losing his life and along with it his mind.