Chapter 3
Remus was tired. So tired.
He always tried his best to make it seem as if nothing was out of the ordinary. He went to his classes normally, he was the first one out of his friends to finish any assigned homework and managed to keep a slight distance from everyone.
The people close to him were used to it. It was pretty obvious that he needed more time to himself than the average person.
James would sometimes joke that his instincts were what made him a 'lone wolf', but Remus never bothered to tell him that he was wrong. He was like that not because he was a werewolf, but because it was the only way he had learned to be. Alone.
No one ever understood him. Not his introversion, not his feelings, not how he thought or acted.
No one understood, so he slowly hid away more and more of himself. He didn't let others get too close to him. Not enough, anyway, to influence how happy, or angry, or sad he was. Not enough to let them control him.
Through the years he managed to build a wall around himself to feel safe. A glass wall, so he could still be with his friends but without ever giving them the chance to leave him. They were dear to him, important, and Remus knew it. He tried to remind himself each time to not get attached and however much fun he was having, to always remove himself mentally.
He knew it was irrational to think everybody he cared about would eventually leave him, but he was so caught up and tangled in his own self doubt and hatred it seemed as if it was only a matter of time before people realized he wasn't worth their time and effort.
He was thought to be the smart, quiet, occasionally mischievous marauder who preferred to be left alone. If only others knew though, that all this alone time was giving Remus the space to search for all the things he disliked about himself.
Sometimes, when he was younger he'd find himself talking more than was expected of him, often leading him to trouble, or people giving him disapproving looks. He slowly stopped the excessive talking and stuck only to the things others wanted to hear. Anything else but that made Remus feel like he was being an annoying little child. A child whose mother couldn't take care of him so she sent him to a children's home making his existence everybody else's problem.
It was the same with his temper, something he realised when he made his first friends at Hogwarts. Little things that annoyed Remus made him act out in a way that he could see was making his friends scared of him.
'He's just- so unpredictable.' he had heard Peter whisper to James during second year.
And so Remus tried hard to suppress his feelings, resulting in him searching for new mental and physical space.
Of course, it wasn't easy. He still had a hard time taming his negative emotions.
But whenever things got out of hand, he could always count on his friends to find an pitiful excuse for him, whether that was the full moon or the next examination coming up. It was exhausting.
As it was expected, all this anger he refused to let out slowly made its way inwards. He hated every inch of himself.
He hated his skin. Scars spreading all over him, a reminder of what he was and the destruction he was meant to cause. He hated his stupid hair and how it wasn't neat like Sirius' or James'. How the fat spread all over his body in places he didn't like. He hated his height. How huge and dysphoric it made him feel. How he was so different from everyone else and felt sick about how there was nothing he could do to control it.
This wasn't like the way he controlled his relationships. This wasn't like how he controlled his emotions. He felt powerless and he needed to feel in control.
Skipping meals and vomiting when he overate was his desperate way of trying to take matters into his own hands.
Remus was searching for something. Something that wasn't there. Something that didn't exist. Changing his body wasn't what he needed but he couldn't understand. All he saw was anger. Anger and guilt.
And he was tired. So tired.
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After purging breakfast he couldn't help but feel disgusted for the rest of the day.
His stomach rumbled and he felt dizzy, creating a familiar and beautifully torturous feeling that kept Remus high on his thoughts. It helped him find the motivation to stay away during lunch hours.
Peter had also excused himself and had gone to study in the library with a kid from Hufflepuff.
Remus noticed Marlene, Lily and Alice Fortescue go back to the tower after class and felt relieved.
Lunch was the most common meal to miss for Hogwarts students. A lot of people had work to do during the day, last minute assignments to finish, or were just still full from breakfast. The latter one was an extremely convenient excuse for Remus.
He said goodbye to his friends and followed some of the other gryffindors back to the dorm rooms.
Remus was a smart person. He could tell he was different and he could tell he was sick. And though it was usually hard for him to filter the reality out of situations, there where times when he could tell that even though it felt like his body image was only getting worse, the notably frequent purging of his meals had resulted in his body getting weaker and was causing his muscles to atrophy.
Yes, he sometimes thought, losing muscle was supposed to make him feel smaller, better, but that was the opposite of what happened.
He felt even more worthless than he did before. No matter how hard he tried he would not be at peace with himself.
During his break he decided to lay down and relax. There weren't many things you could do at this hour anyway. All his work was finished, his friends were at the Great Hall and he didn't have enough brain power to start Lilys book.
Music was all he had, really.
He put on the record player and just lay there. He let himself be and after a couple of songs, drifted off to sleep.
That was until approximately half an hour later, when he was woken up by Sirius, creepily standing over him, a biscuit in his hand.
"Why are you sleeping?" The boy asked, his mouth full.
Remus only groaned.
"No, why are you sleeping?" He asked again confused.
"Fuck off! I'm exhausted." Answered Remus.
Sirius pretended to gasp, clutching his pearls. "That is some unsuitable language for a distinguished young gentleman such as yourself." He said in an old woman's voice. "I am deeply offended by your behaviour."
Sirius' accentiated posh accent would most likely make Remus smile under different circumstances. But not today.
"Merlin padfoot! I'm being fucking serious. Let me sleep." Remus raised himself onto his elbows, grabbed his pillow and threw it at Sirius' face. "I'm not in the mood."
"No, moony." He said, a smirk making its way across his face. "I'm Sirius. You're Remus. And this behavior has declared a war." He threw the pillow back at Remus' bed, laughing.
"I am tired of you and your shity jokes. Not every situation is one you can ridicule. Just leave me alone!" He laid back down and turned his back to the other boy.
"Oh come on Moony, You know you love me." he reached down and softly touched his friend's cheek. "You pretend to hate me but deep inside you can't live without me or my shity jokes." he laughed.
He knew Sirius was just joking around, but this exceeded Remus' tolerance. Sirius' words had more truth to them than he could ever realize and it was hurting him, knowing that there was nothing he could do about it.
He hit Sirius's hand off of his face and with a cold voice repeated himself. "Leave."
He felt the shift in Sirius' aura as he realised he wasn't joking around and heard him back away from his bed. Remus grabbed his wand and with a swing of it closed his curtains.
Sirius was just too intense for him to handle. Not only because he made him feel things he had to keep to himself but because Sirius' ignorance made Remus feel like he would never be worthy enough.
For the rest of the day Remus avoided looking directly at Sirius. That itself was a pretty difficult thing to achieve since whenever they were in the same room he could feel Sirius' stare burning through his skin.
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Sometimes time passed way quicker than it should. Sometimes way too slow. Today, Remus felt like he was battling not to fall asleep every five seconds. He'd woken up from his nap more tired than he was before and in an even worse mood.
Time went by slowly.
It seemed as if nothing mattered anymore. Everything was meaningless, dull. He realized that all these people surrounding him spent their everyday lives doing things over and over again looking for meaning, for a reason, hoping that someday this repetitive cycle would lead them to an explanation of what they were meant to be.
But the most unfair thing of them all, wasn't that Remus would never be accepted as the werewolf that he was, but that he wouldn't be able to be accepted because of who he loved.
Class was dreadful. But so were the rest of his days anyway. He just had to sit through it.
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"You're all dismissed!" Remus heard the loud voice of the professor calling and zoned back into reality.
He looked at Peter collecting his things right beside him and then turned to look at James and Sirius sitting somewhere behind them. They both looked exhausted but extremely eager to get out of this class.
"I don't understand why almost all professors have been acting so generous this week. We've literally only been assigned the bare minimum for homework." Peter said in disbelief and grabbed his bag.
Remus only sighed
"We have an hour and a half break before dinner. I made Sirius promise that he'd help me with my potions essay today. I'm trying to get as much help as I can. Do you want to come along? We are going to the library."
"No, sorry Pete. I'm a bit too tired today." He said, and even though it was actually true, it wasn't the true reason he had denied. He just didn't want to be in the same room with Sirius at the moment.
"But how come you didn't ask for my help before? This essay has been assigned for weeks."
"Oh. Um. I did mate. Don't you remember? I asked you last week." He cleared his throat. " You got a bit frustrated and told me that you couldn't be bothered with things that didn't concern you."
Remus stared blankly at his friend.
"At the common room. You really don't remember?"
"I- I can't recall." Remus said anxiously.
"It's fine, really. I know you've been a bit weird the past couple of moons."
"What do you mean, weird?" His voice got a little firmer.
"Oh- you know, the usual. I mean, not really though. When I say the usual I don't mean- um, well not really, just uh.. Nevermind." Peter chuckled awkwardly and averted his eyes. "Only- you know.." he hesitated and finally repeated "..nevermind."
"Now what do you mean 'nevermind'? Stop tiptoeing around me Pete and just say what you want to say. You always do that. It's making me lose my patience with you." He glared at him.
"It's really nothing Moony" the boy took a step back. "I just promised James I wouldn't say anything."
"Well, I'm not giving you much of a choice here, am I?"
Wormtail exhaled sharply. "During these past um, transformations, you've been a bit angrier than usual." He paused. "It's like- you feel such rage that we're not even there anymore. Like we're not helping you at all. You just either go all wolf on us and attack us all night or run away into the forest to hunt."
Remus stayed still, looking at him.
"James said we shouldn't say anything to you if you didn't already know. He said it would only make you more upset." He looked at his feet and after a minute started pulling on a loose string on sweater. "Please don't tell James or Sirius I talked to you about this."
Peter gave his friend a last look of uncertainty and walked away.
Remus looked around. There was nobody else left in the classroom. He wanted to yell, he wanted to shout, he wanted to cry and punch something. But he couldn't.
Why had his friends kept this from him? And how had he not realized? He had always remembered bits and parts from when he was in wolf form, but lately he hadn't been fully sure that he did. Maybe it was because he couldn't even make sure he understood what was going on during the rest of the month.
They still should have told him. It was unfair not to. What was James even trying to achieve? Being the higher person? Nobody had asked him to.
'Fuck him!' Remus thought. 'Fuck everyone, actually!'
He hated this. Them.
His friends were all liars, hiding things from him. Pretending everything was fine.
If they lied about this, who knows what else they could be keeping from him.
"Such bullshit" he said, hitting the table in front of him with the side of his first. He grabbed his bag and stormed out of the empty classroom.