Am I dead?
Slam!
His hair was untidy as it would always be, I would later know. The blood in it had long since crusted and dried, flakes of rusty red sprinkled into the greasy black glinting mop that somehow managed to defy gravity in spite of the fact that it should have been matted to his forehead. Dirt was sprinkled in, too, a healthy amount of brown adding to the general feeling of rusted obsidian, if volcanic glass could rust. The hair was so black it glinted purple in the hall, and it reminded me of an odd combination between the greasiness of Severus Snape’s hairdo and the untame-ability of James’s.
The shirt that hung off his frame was so tattered that I could tell, even at this distance, that he was wearing two of them and not one, the remaining untarnished patches of one covering the rips and tears of the other. But, despite that, whenever the wind caught the clothing wrong in the drafty great hall you caught glimpses of skin and scars just beneath the blood stained cotton. Or maybe polyester - I was never exactly a fashion guru.
The hall was silent, everyone staring at the boy who had just slammed into the great hall with bloodstained hair and darting eyes.
His pants were in better shape than his shirt, only a few rips here and there marking the obvious lack of recent replacement. They, too, were unwashed, stains of what could be dirt or blood covering it in thick patches and chlorophyll seeped into the knees. Every tear in those cargo pants revealed a scar; some thick and grisly, some thin and crusted with dried blood, one even the shiny mark of what looked to be a burn from dragon’s breath.
Scents from the boy filled my nostrils, and nobody looked away from the boy as my nose twitched. Emotion was harder to distinguish, especially in a hall full of overly-emotional teens, but I could smell the waves of despair seeping out of the boy as clearly as I could smell the scent of blood.
And loss. That empty, dark, pungent smell. Ask me not how a smell can be empty, but that is the only word I had ever been able to fit to it.
But most remarkable about him was his eyes.
I had thought, once, that I would never see eyes more vivid than those of Lily Evans. Those eyes of jade pierced him with endless fields of shining gems, and the rolls of his nails had stopped as he had felt their cold gaze fill him, when he had laughed with his friends and been treated to glares from her for his trouble.
But no; the most vivid gaze I know, even to this day, belongs to the eyes of the man staring into the hall right this moment.
Where Lily’s eyes were emerald, shining caves and stone caverns, his eyes were lighter, brighter, though much less innocent. The eyes of Lily shined with white light, like the harsh light of fluorescent lamps, and her gaze was so… innocent. Like the eyes of a child.
But his eyes shined with a light that was golden. The melted amber of honey, not glittering like those emerald eyes, but shining and pulsing with some unknown goal, some unknown ambition. And the colour of them…
Killing curse green.
That was the only colour which fit that shade; killing curse green. That harsh, swooping light; lighter than grass, brighter than jade and darker than lime. Killing curse green.
But most outsetting about those eyes were the pupils.
In Lily’s eyes, the pupil was something you could skip over. It was all the same plane; the iris, the pupil and the cochlea. The only difference was, the iris shined with emerald, while the pupils were dull. Flat. Skippable.
Like I had always thought my eyes looked.
But his pupils… they were like pits. Empty ebony that seemed hollowed out with despair, with that empty scent of loss that I knew so well and yet so rarely smelled. The walls of the pit were cold, stiff, and stretching forever into the inky black void.
When you stare into the void, it stares back.
Those eyes darted around the hall, seeming to drink in every little detail. For the smallest moment, I could have sworn his eyes locked onto me before continuing their darting glances at silent, shocked faces.
I could never quite capture what I felt in that moment, later; and sometimes, I wasn’t even convinced I actually felt it. It was too… ethereal. Too untouchable, too happy and dream-like to be real. Like that crush you had on the girl which never showed you more than common courtesy; something private, hopeful, and yet doomed to failure. Something you knew would never come true, no matter how much you dwelled on it.
Some thoughts, I always knew, were private. Were for you and you alone. I had always known that you should tell your loved ones everything, but some things were just for you. Some thoughts nobody else should, or would, know.
I had one of those thoughts, then. That, at that moment, I could have fallen into that gaze and never came back.
And then, the moment was gone. The beautiful, untouched feeling swelling inside me was snuffed out as that gaze darted one last time; to the golden headmaster’s chair, where he was met with a pair of blue eyes twinkling with concern.
“Am I dead?”
The whisper would have never been heard in a great hall with nearly half its noise capacity. The voice was too quiet, too broken. But in the complete, deafening silence, the broken whisper nearly echoed off the walls in its volume, so complete was the shock of the student body.
The boy had only spoken three words, and yet I was already curious.
Then, the silent moment was broken by the loud scraping of the headmaster’s chair. I glanced up only long enough to see the concerned gaze of Dumbledore before looking again at the fascinating mystery in front of us.
Though the silence was broken, nobody spoke as Dumbledore walked forward and escorted the boy out with kind eyes and soothing words which seemed to roll off the boy like water. When the door closed, though, the hall was filled with loud chattering as everyone instantly got to talking about the unprecedented surprise.
That was the first time I, Remus Lupin, ever saw Horatio Maeyres in person. And I must say, the dramatic entrance certainly fit his dramatic appearance at hogwarts; fast, shocking, unplanned, uncontrolled and forceful. That was Harry in a nutshell, alright.
Sometimes I wasn’t sure whether to slap him or laugh when he was over-dramatic.
Which wasn’t exactly rare.
And that was pretty much when my life started getting better.