Chapter 1
Remus Lupin became a writer because he was told it would make him happy to follow his dreams.
These people didn’t lie, exactly. Remus knows that they were trying to be helpful, trying to encourage him to not end up in an office cubicle with no window like everyone else. What they didn’t mention, though, was the fact that his life would be incredibly monotonous.
See, the thing is, if you turn your passion into your profession, you’ll never get a break again. Remus envies the office cubicle men because they get to read and enjoy books. They get to go to the beach and ignore work for a little while.
But not Remus. He thinks about his work all the time, because it’s his passion. At his job? Of course. Walking home from work? Yep. Grocery shopping? Mhm. In the shower? You betcha. Remus even thinks about his writing when he sleeps (he keeps a little notepad on his nightstand just in case a dream is particularly thought-provoking).
Is he happy? Sure. But he’s not living. And he’s thinking this desperation for interest and excitement in his life will go away as he gets older, past the ripe age of nineteen, but now he just wants to rip out his hair all the time out of boredom. Well – not boredom, exactly. It’s more of an ache from lack of variety.
Remus feels neutral toward this job, as he does toward many things. He got it because he needed a source of income while he wrote his novel, and made the brilliant choice to work somewhere that would definitely not take his mind off that wretched thing– a bookstore.
Every day, excluding Sunday, Remus wakes up, eats toast and drinks tea because coffee makes him jittery, and walks to the little bookstore on the corner where he works. It’s slow, stocking shelves, cashiering, and sweeping, and his boss rather hates him for writing his novel on the job (a bit ironic, that. Remus is convinced the man has never read a thing in his life, with how grumpy and unimaginative he is. It’s bewildering that he somehow landed a manager position at a bookstore). Still, Remus retains his job, and his boss remains grouchy.
After his shift, he walks back home, occasionally picking up food if he forgets he’s supposed to be saving his money. He eats alone at his flat and reads, which often make him think more about his own book. And then he goes to sleep, wakes up, and does it over again.
It’s a dull existence.
That is, until a strange boy walks into the store one lifeless Thursday.
His boss took off work today, and Remus is the only one at the bookstore. He hasn’t had a customer in thirty minutes. They’re going to close in twenty, and then in wanders the boy. He’s got long black hair and a leather jacket that clashes horribly with the entire store. He walks lazily, nonchalant, and gives the sense that he’s trying to look cool. Remus thinks, oddly, that he pulls it off quite well.
The boy spots Remus, at that point, who realizes he’s staring. Remus coughs. “Anything I can help you with?”
“I’m looking for the cookbooks,” the boy says, and he sounds so posh. Remus almost laughs at the oddness of this situation. A posh boy in a leather jacket in a bookstore.
He doesn’t laugh, though, he instead points to the corner that houses the cookbooks. “Right over there.”
“Thanks,” the boy says.
He stays over at the cookbooks for a few minutes, seeming to be trying to decide between two, from where Remus can see behind the counter. Eventually he comes back to the register with both.
“Which one of these do you think would be best?” The boy asks, holding the two cookbooks up. “‘Easy Weeknight Dinners’ or ‘One Pan Wonders?’”
“Well, that depends,” Remus says. “If you only have one pan, go with One Pan Wonders.”
The boy laughs at that, startling Remus. It’s sudden and loud, like a bark, like a sunny afternoon. “I have more than one pan,” he says, smiling. It would seem like his smile shouldn’t go well with the jacket and the hair, but it works, strangely enough.
“Ah, I see the issue,” Remus says.
“Exactly.”
Remus nods, thinking. “Do you despise dishwashing?”
“I wouldn’t say I despise it, but I do ignore my dishes until they pile up,” the boy says thoughtfully, and then trails off. “Maybe I do despise dishwashing.” He looks a bit concerned now.
“That’s okay,” Remus says reassuringly, because the boy looks like he just learned a new, distressing fact about himself, which he did. “I think you should get One Pan Wonders. If there’s only one pan, that’s less dishes,” Remus reasons.
The boy nods. “I’ll take it,” he says.
While Remus is ringing him up, the boy inspects his name tag. Remus feels a bit like he’s been suddenly shoved into a spotlight and expected to sing an opera. It’s uncomfortable, but Remus is so fascinated by this boy that he doesn’t mind all that much.
“Remus,” the boy says. “Reeeemus. That’s an odd name.”
Remus hands him the cookbook and the receipt. “Yeah, I know.” They make eye contact for a brief moment.
The boy turns a bit pink as he takes his items. He thanks Remus, walks out the door with the cookbook, and then he’s gone, and Remus is alone.
He blinks a few times, trying to orient his thoughts, which are a little scrambled up. It’s not like anything was incredibly significant about their interaction; the dark-haired boy was only in the store for ten minutes, but he somehow managed to make a huge dent in its atmosphere. Remus feels like the air is still settling after he stalked in and whooshed it all around. The end of a tornado, but it isn’t sunny yet.
That night, back in his flat at his desk, Remus writes more in one sitting than he has all week. It’s like his brain has been wrung out and then doused in a mixture filled with new stuff that bounces around the walls of his skull. Something about that boy in the store stirred things up; there’s movement now.
It’s not organized, but he manages to get some abstract ideas down on paper. It’s written down (though not much of it makes sense).
Remus, for the first time in awhile, sleeps without worry about his book.
—
Friday
The next time Remus sees the dark-haired boy is actually the very next day. This time, it’s almost noon, and he’s about to take his lunch break. Funny that he always seems to show up right before something. About to close the shop. About to eat lunch. Always teetering on the edge of something.
Remus is helping a customer find the sci-fi section, and when he turns around to head back to the register, there he is. He’s by the entrance, still sporting the leather jacket, which still does not match his backdrop whatsoever. Remus figures something went either terribly wrong or incredibly right with ‘One Pan Wonders.’
“Did the cookbook work out?” Remus asks once he’s made his way over.
The boy nods, flicking his hair back. “It was fantastic. All I used was a bowl for ingredients, the one pan, and a fork. I ate it straight out of the pan,” he says.
“I’m so glad.”
“I looked up your name, by the way.”
“Oh?” Remus is a little intrigued as to why this odd boy would be researching his name.
“It means ‘wolf,’” he states matter-of-factly. “Did you know that?”
“Well, it’s my name, isn’t it? I’m bound to know what my name means,” Remus says.
The boy wiggles his eyebrows. “I knew you would,” he says with a wink. “Wanna take a guess at mine? I’ll give you a hint: it’s a star.”
Remus does not know astronomy, at all. He is perfectly happy with his two feet planted firmly on the ground and often doesn’t bother to look too far into the sky. It makes his brain feel funny. However, he is not at all surprised that this whimsical boy in front of him might be interested in that sort of thing (or be named after it).
“I dunno, what is it?” Remus asks, not even trying to think about what the name might be.
As if he was waiting for this moment, the boy makes a dramatic sweeping gesture with his arms, a bit hindered by the grin on his face, but dramatic, nonetheless. He says, “Sirius Black.”
Sirius Black. The name is fitting to the leather jacket and vibe of coolness that the boy sends off on his outermost layer. It’s like a lightning strike. But also, Remus is finding that the Sirius’ cool exterior easily gives way to show someone different. Not not cool. Just… different. He’s fiery, and real, exciting. Remus is fascinated. He wants to somehow reach out and touch it, that excitement. He thinks it would be a stronger feeling than whatever he’s had lately.
“Well, Sirius Black,” Remus says, “is there anything I can do for you today?”
Sirius flips his hair back again. “No.”
“Okay,” Remus says, but he’s intrigued. Why would Sirius go out of his way just to tell Remus about how he didn’t use many dishes to eat dinner? He suspects there’s something else to it, but he’s not sure what it is yet.
Just then, they’re interrupted by a very elderly man, who says he’s looking for the encyclopedias (?). Remus goes to show him, very pointedly not looking back at Sirius, however much he wants to. When he returns, Sirius has left.
Remus tries to squash his disappointment. But it’s hard, especially because Sirius is so… compelling. Remus thinks he’s so intrigued by the boy because his own life is horribly uninteresting, and Sirius seems like he’d have an interesting life: things like smoking and eye makeup and driving off into the sunset on a motorbike. All that. Remus feels incredibly bland in comparison.
After his lunch break outside, which consisted of a very boring peanut butter sandwich and a slightly more interesting book he picked up at random from the ‘popular’ shelf by the door, Remus braces himself and goes back inside. He’s having an especially hard time bearing the tediousness of it all, today. Every customer seems irritated, and the clock is almost moving backwards, at this rate.
Nevertheless, he pushes through the rest of the workday.
—
Saturday
The majority of Remus’ Saturday is spent watching the door. He tells himself he isn’t looking for Sirius, if only to stay focused on work. Sirius doesn’t show up, and Remus begins to convince himself he’s just too boring for Sirius.
It’s an especially slow day for the weekend. Remus spends more time writing (well, mostly just thinking about) his novel than he does helping customers, and even decides to tackle that scene in his novel that he’s been avoiding for months. The whole issue is that it’s a part where two characters realize they are in love, and Remus has never been in love. But he’s heard what it’s like, and he’s had crushes on people, so it can’t be that hard to write about. Right?
Remus sits there on his stool at the counter for the entire day and scrapes up a whole two sentences by the time four-thirty rolls around.
All the new, interesting stuff that fell out of his brain Thursday night sits unmoving on the paper, and he can’t seem to wring out any more. Remus can practically feel the flies buzzing around in his head, searching for something in the desolate wasteland of his brain to feed on.
It’s like that first interaction with Sirius was a drug, one that filled his mind with new, inspiring ideas, and now that it’s worn off, he needs more of it, a bigger dose, to get the high again.
Remus drops his head against the counter with a sigh. Why did he choose this profession? And why must Sirius not show up?
As if on cue, the door opens with a little jingle of the bell attached to it. And there is Sirius Black, in all his glory.
Sirius walks in the way that he does over to Remus at the counter (Remus is oddly disappointed that he’s chosen not to wear the leather jacket today, but the energy surrounding him is similar, nonetheless).
Sirius hops up onto the counter so that he’s sitting on it, right next to Remus. He shuffles a bit to get situated cross-legged. “What are you writing?” Sirius asks, peering over at his pile of papers.
“Words,” Remus replies vaguely.
Sirius snorts. “Gathered that, yeah. What are the words about?”
Remus runs a hand through his hair, because he’s slightly frustrated from accomplishing nothing on the novel all day, and because Sirius is sitting right there. “It’s book, sort of. And I’m trying to write the scene where these characters fall in love, but I can’t do it, for some reason.”
Sirius simply looks at him.
“Don’t you have places to be?” Remus sighs, because Sirius seems like he would absolutely have places to be. “Why the bookstore?”
“Have you ever been in love?” Sirius asks abruptly, completely ignoring his question.
Remus briefly gawks at him, because what kind of question is that? But he quickly composes himself and shrugs, but his heart has secretly decided to perform an Olympic floor routine. “Nah. Seems great and all, but no.”
Sirius smiles, a little twitch of the lips that contrasts his loud, bark-like laugh that Remus heard on Thursday. “So, how are you going to write about it, then?”
“Well, that’s the problem, Sirius. I have no clue.”
Sirius hums. He’s fiddling with a piece of hair. Remus watches, and wonders if his hair has always looked like that, shiny and flowy, or if he does something to it.
“Love is like… it’s all-consuming,” Sirius says. “It makes your heart feel so full that you think it might burst. But then, it’s somehow comforting at the same time.” Sirius looks at Remus; his eyes are clear like a blue sky.
“And when you feel like this for someone,” Sirius continues, “you think everything about them is perfect. Physical features like eyes, mouth, body…” Sirius trails off, seemingly lost in thought. He’s still concentrated on Remus’ face, eyebrows very slightly furrowed. Remus thinks his heart just completed a double backflip. It’s going a million miles a minute. Why does this feel so intimate?
Sirius keeps going. “And everything inside, too. You think they’re charming, and funny, and when they laugh it’s like the whole room lights up.” At that, Sirius smiles a little. He’s beautiful, Remus thinks. And then, What?
“It’s all emotion. Sometimes you don’t even think,” Sirius murmurs. There’s a moment of silence where they both stay very still. Then Sirius seems to snap back into himself and says, “I mean, I’m no writer, but you need to make sure this part has lots of emotion, right? To keep it interesting and accurate?”
“Yeah,” Remus says. His brain reconnects and he remembers he’s supposed to be writing, and it whirs to life as it processes new information.
“And you’re stuck? Nothing coming to mind?”
Remus nods, because that’s exactly what’s happening. For too long, he’s been unable to procure anything of interest. Stuck.
“So, what if you wrote down what you felt during some emotional experiences you’ve had, to get a sense of that part?” Sirius suggests, still watching Remus. “I know it’s not the same, but…”
Remus starts furiously scribbling words down on a piece of paper. “No, you’re right, because then it will be more authentic.”
“Exactly.”
“Sometimes I think too much about what the words will be and not enough about what the feelings are,” Remus says, still scribbling. It’s an epiphany. Of course. You can’t write by thinking about the words, you have to write from the heart.
—
Two hours later, Sirius is still on the counter, now laying on his back in a jumble of papers scattered about, Remus has written thousands of words, the store has long since closed, and they’re both absolutely exhausted.
But Remus finally feels like he’s moving again, like a stick flowing down a river, unstuck from behind a rock. Like he can properly breathe for the first time. He’s made it past the mental blockade, and he can actually see where the novel is taking him.
“So, did we do it?” Sirius asks. He’s spinning a pen between his fingers, and Remus refuses to be distracted by this, however pretty and mesmerizing his fingers are.
Remus gives a short, dry laugh. “Of course not,” he says. “You never just do writing. It’s a long process. This is just a first draft. Some raw ideas, if you will.”
Sirius flips around on the counter so that he’s no longer on his back, but on his stomach and propped up by his elbows. He looks at Remus, chin resting in his hands. “But we did do something, yeah?”
Remus knows the novel is going to take a lot longer, and it’s going to involve a lot more mental blocks that he has to get through. It won’t be easy. But he’s gotten through one block, with the help of Sirius, and that is something.
“Yeah. We did.”