Chapter 1
August, 1993.
Sunlight beams through the checkered window, painting the pale wall a shade of golden warmth. It’s a hot summer afternoon, and even in gloomy London the sun doesn’t rest. Sweat soaks the bedsheets. Drew’s place is a small flat located not too far from Soho, one bedroom, a kitchen and a bath. A little old, but not quite enough to be called shabby.
Remus watches Drew as he switches the record over, his pale cheeks still damp and glistening from earlier.
“What’s this band called again?”
“Suede.”
He makes his way back onto the bed, tossing a pack of cigarettes into Remus’ chest. It’s become a routine, and the wrong familiarity brings an uncomfortable clench in Remus’ stomach. Drew goes on and tells him about how he’d thought of Remus when he’d first heard the band, thought he would like it. He does.
He never meant to talk about music with him. Music brought memories and memories to him, good or bad, were never particularly a delightful guest. But he did, inevitably, at one point over the past couple years he’d known Drew, and since then he never let Remus stop. People who love music never really shut up about it once they find someone with the same taste. Remus of all people should know.
The thing is, he was very fond of Drew. It wasn’t like the earlier days anymore, when he’d look at him and immediately think of everything that was wrong. The shade of brown, wrong. Freckles, wrong. The lack of tattoos, the blunt wrists, all wrong. But now those were what he grew to recognise as Drew, what made him feel at ease. Those were what made it easier to ignore the perfect length of his hair, and the perfect height, the perfect dimples on his back.
He feels nauseous again.
He inhales from his cigarette, wrapping his arm around Drew, who has now started to read yesterday’s papers, leaning against his arm.
Back where the dogs bark
Where still life bleeds the concrete white
Try not to go too far inside your mind
Remus glances at his papers. If only he weren’t a muggle, he thinks, that he’d be reading completely different news right now. One where pictures would move. One where pictures, would capture the movements of a certain scream, sharp cheekbones jutting out as his mouth forms the two-syllables of a version of his name that he now hasn’t heard in twelve years.
He escaped last night.
Oh, if you were the one, would I even notice now my mind has gone?
Maybe it was stupid for him to think, but he’d half-expected him to show up at his doorstep. To beg forgiveness, though that felt unlikely. To explain himself, if there even is anything to be explained. Or to finally kill him, finish what he’d started. Why, why didn’t he kill him?
“Remus?” Drew speaks, his eyes still fixed on the sports section of the newspaper. “It’s him, isn’t it?”
It catches him off guard, but Remus immediately knows what Drew means. He knows him, and he knows that he knows. He hates feeling transparent, but it’s different when it’s Drew.
He smiles bitterly.
September, 1993.
He had slipped a note underneath Drew’s door before he left to catch the train. He wasn’t sure what he could possibly say to him to explain that his working class, part time janitor part time barista fuck-buddy had suddenly gained the title of a professor to teach in a posh private boarding school in Scotland. Even without the magic part, it still sounded like bullshit. So instead he wrote to him saying that his mother was sick, and that he had to visit home in Wales. He knew he wasn’t exactly a gentleman, leaving a three year long not-quite-a-relationship via letter, but Drew had made it perfectly clear from the beginning that he had no intention of becoming an obligation, so he reckoned that he’d understand.
Inside the train he pulls his coat higher above his face, shifting onto his side. King's Cross was already too much for him to handle. He isn’t sure how he’d handle being back in Hogwarts. Maybe he was being way too self-conscious back there, but he could swear that everyone in the station was looking at him. Every adult, at least.
Is that Lupin? You mean…? I thought he’d… but after what happened over the summer? Do you think he’d have… Merlin’s beard, leave the poor man alone… You know, he and Black used to… well, that was only back in their Hogwarts days, of course, but…
He isn’t sure if those whispers are real or if they’re just sounds of his own hysteria, but there’s one thing that he’s certain of and it’s that he should have never have agreed to Dumbledore’s request. Both now and twelve years ago.
This was exactly why he had no other choice but to live in Muggle London for the past decade. This, and the fact that sustaining a job would be close to impossible without someone eventually suspecting his lycanthropy. But this, this was the main reason.
Every memory is fresh and unwelcome the same.
He isn’t asleep when Harry walks into the compartment. He doesn’t have to look up to realise that it’s him. The name Harry is a common, but his laugh isn’t. Remus tries to breathe as he consciously erases the memory of his younger self sat in a similar corner of a similar train, hearing the very, very similar laughter ring through his ears.
He flinches when Sirius’ name slips out from Harry’s mouth.
I don’t go looking for trouble, trouble usually finds me.
As Remus tries his very best to fall asleep, he slowly realises that memories are relatively easier to erase than visions of things that he never actually got to see. For example, at the moment, he can’t seem to get over the fact that for the past three years, Harry Potter has been living in his dormitory room. In the Gryffindor tower.
To think that Harry sleeps in the very room he once shared with his father— to think that it’s the very room he once laid next to his father’s killer—
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
It’s a strange thought, but he misses Drew. He would know what to do, even if he never even knew completely what Remus had been through. He didn’t have to know to understand. Drew would put on a good tune, put way too much sugar in his tea, make him hard, help him forget his mind, then let him shake in his arms like a child.
October, 1993.
Remus invites Harry into his office. He’s not sure if he knows what the day is, but it doesn’t really matter to him either way because selfishly, he doesn’t want to be alone.
“Your mum loved Halloween,” He tells Harry. “I used to hate it when I was little, you know.” He hated seeing the other kids dressing up as werewolves for fun, wishing that he too could just play dress up once in a while instead, but he doesn’t tell him that part. “She made me love it again.”
He also doesn't tell him the part where his mum had also been the one to make him hate the day again.
Harry is quiet for a while. Professor Lupin, he calls after a while. In another life it would have been just Remus, he thinks. Uncle Remus. Uncle Moony.
“What was she like?”
“Beautiful. Intelligent. Sometimes your friend Granger reminds me of her. Only in certain aspects, of course, but… she was always observant, brilliant.”
It was Lily who’d known first, even before Remus knew himself. It was early in their fifth year, when he’d cried in Lily’s arms, rambling on incoherently about how perfect he thought he was, and how angry that made him, how beautiful and nonchalant he would look when he’d snog Emmeline Vance, how he wanted to punch him the face or to, or to— Remus, darling… I think you might be in love with him. He’d looked up at her with a trembling jaw. Oh, fuck.
That fucker. He wonders where Sirius is now. He’s never had to wonder before. On Halloween he was always by his side at a party or their shared bed, and then one night he was at the Potters’, then Azkaban. But he wonders now.
He wonders if he’s feeling guilty and torn like Remus is now, but it wouldn’t make any sense if he did, because that would mean he has a heart. Maybe Remus had never really known him at all.
And in that moment, Snape walks in to hand him his potion. He looks like he hasn’t slept, even more so than usual. Through his greasy hair, his dreadfully sunken eyes are bloodshot red. Remus recognises the grief in his eyes, and he’s almost certain that Snape sees the same look in his own. Lily, he realises. It’s something miserably ironic, and probably something James and Sirius would have either laughed their asses off to or eagerly refuted against, but he comes to accept that he and Snape are extremely alike.
Gloomy, out of place, avoided, abandoned, leftovers.
It’s the exact same thought that goes through his head when Snape steps into his office once again, later that night. After the feast, after the search.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” He barks as he barges in through the door. He has his wand outstretched. "Whatever you’ve told Dumbledore to gain his trust won’t work on me. I know you and your—“
“He hasn’t come to me,” he whispers, hating how broken he sounds. “I don’t know why either.”
Sirius Black was in the same grounds as him, but he didn’t come to him. Why didn’t he come to him? Because you’re not important, his brain supplies. A disgusting part of him wishes that Snape’s accusations were true. That he really was the one to let him in the castle. That Sirius had come to him before he’d went anywhere else, and begged him. Because he would have forgiven him. He would have let him in. He would have let him anywhere. This thought is what tortures him the most. It makes him so gutted, so painfully guilty in the thought of James and Lily, in the thought of young Harry.
Snape flinches, slowly scanning the dimly lit room. Remus knows that he’s noticing the bottles. The cigarette stench so strong that it’s faintly detectable even through the odor eliminating spell. His bloodshot eyes slowly rises away from the desk to meet his. He stares.
Gloomy, out of place, avoided, abandoned, leftovers.
“Severus?” Remus calls, instantly regretting his choice but speaking on anyway, “Stay for a drink with me, will you?”
He looks hesitant, but he doesn’t leave.
“You of all people understand what today is like.”