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Remus knew he should be beaming with happiness, and not curled up against the window forcing a smile at his parents, who continued to wave and smile proudly at him from the platform.
It was just hard to believe that this would work. Clearly the old headmaster, Dumbledore, had good intentions; he had assured Remus and his parents -in that comforting voice of his- that everything was arranged, that he and the rest of the students would be totally safe.
“With all respect, sir” Remus had said, shily. “I’m not worth it. I could hurt someone, and I wouldn’t forgive myself for that”
The old man had looked at him from behind his half-moon glasses, with the kindest smile Remus had ever seen in his short life.
“Just for saying that, Remus, you are worth it”
Remembering the conversation now made Remus feel guilty. He was thankful, incredibly so, but he was scared as well. Terrified that he would hurt someone who was not himself. Terrified of looking at the headmaster’s eyes if that ever occurred and finding disappointment in them. Scared of proving Dumbledore, his parents and himself that he was in fact not worthy.
“Here” a voice said from the hallway. The door to the compartment opened and two boys entered. They sat in front of Remus, and the taller of the two smiled at him. “Hey, I’m James Potter”
He had a nice smile, Remus decided. Honest and inviting. “I’m Remus,” he replied in a soft voice.
“Pe-Peter” stammered the second boy. He kept throwing glances at James as if he was looking for his approval. “Pettigrew”
“Nice to meet you” he said, and then proceeded to look out the window, hoping that would be enough to stop the boys from trying to keep a conversation with him. It’s not that he didn’t want to make friends; he shouldn’t make friends. He was convinced that his time in Hogwarts would be short, so why bother? Besides, he couldn’t let anyone get close enough in case they suspected his condition.
The door to the compartment opened again, and he couldn’t keep himself from turning around.
“Hello” said a dark-haired boy, looking attentively at each of the other students. “Do any of you have any desire or hope to be placed in Slytherin?”
They stared confusedly at him for a moment.
“Merlin, no. I’ll fly into a wall if that happens” blurted out James.
Peter glanced at him and quickly announced: “Me too”
The boy’s eyes now focused on Remus.
“I… I really don’t care?” he mumbled.
The boy nodded. “That’ll work.” Then he entered the compartment, closing the door behind him and sitting next to Remus. “I’m Sirius.” He swallowed, suddenly looking uncomfortable. “Black.”
A moment of silence followed Sirius’ words, until James cleared his throat and spoke. “I’m James, this is Peter, and he’s… Remus, right?”
Remus gave Sirius a half-hearted smile and promptly turned around to look out the window.
“So you mentioned flying,” said Sirius, focusing his attention on James. “Do you play Quidditch?”
“Of course,” replied the boy, pushing his big squared glasses up his nose. “Do you?”
They were soon engaged in a thorough discussion of the sport, nodding and laughing and repeatedly interrupting each other. Remus silently envied their capacity to socialize. They had only met half an hour ago, but they already looked and talked as if they had known each other all their lives. The smaller boy, Peter, contributed to the conversation by nodding vigorously at everything James said and jumping in his seat whenever Sirius looked his way.
“What do you think, Rems?” asked Sirius suddenly, setting his eyes on the brown-haired boy. “The Chudley Cannons or the Appleby Arrows?”
Remus squirmed under Sirius’ gaze. “I-I don’t know anything about Quidditch,” he murmured.
“Oh, that’s alright. What do you like then?”
The brown-haired boy gaped at him, not knowing how to stop the conversation without seeming rude. “Books,” he said.
“Nice,” replied Sirius, but it worked: he appeared to have lost interest in Remus. He turned to James again and Remus sighed in relief.
Hours passed and the glass against Remus’ forehead started getting colder. He guessed they were close to Hogsmeade already. He’d put on his school robes before getting on the train so that he wouldn’t have to change in front of other students. Sirius, James and Peter all changed into their robes and continued chatting, sharing and eating the sweets Sirius had bought from the Trolley witch; Remus himself had been unable to refuse a piece of chocolate.
Even though there couldn’t be more than an hour left until their arrival, Remus felt his eyes start to close. He was about to fall asleep when he felt a tickling in his throat, and he covered his mouth and nose with his inner shoulder as he sneezed. When he lowered his arm, he saw out of the corner of his eye that Sirius was looking fixedly at his wrist.
Shit , thought Remus, and quickly pulled down the sleeve of his robes to cover the scars. He raised his eyes and found himself looking directly into Sirius’s. What he discovered there made a shiver run down his spine. It was not disgust like he had expected, but understanding.
Sirius didn’t address Remus all that much after the incident in the train, except when he muttered a soft “Congratulations, mate” as Remus sat down in the Gryffindor table.
The four of them were sorted into Gryffindor, and Remus found himself feeling happy by this fact, even though he was determined not to keep bonding with the three boys. He forced himself to focus on the food before him, which had appeared out of thin air once the last first-year was sorted.
“Hi,” said a female voice at his side. Remus turned his head and encountered two big green eyes and hair the colour of fire. The girl's eyes were really pretty, though he couldn’t help thinking that Sirius’ grey ones were even prettier. “I’m Lily,” she announced.
“Remus” he replied. She had freckles, noticed Remus. They spread all over her face like stars in a pale sky.
“Would you like to be my friend?” she asked. Remus gaped at her, again wondering how to find a way out of the conversation without appearing rude. In the end, he gave up, and gave her a small smile.
“Sure, I’d love to be your friend”
The girl’s face lit up and Remus couldn’t bring himself to regret his decision.
He felt a tug at his sleeve and turned around.
“Oh my Merlin, did she tell you her name?” whispered James excitedly. “She’s so pretty!”
Remus rolled his eyes. “Lily. She’s very nice”
James sighed, leaning to keep staring at the girl. Lily caught him looking and frowned, moving closer to the girl beside her and further from Remus and James.
“Great, you’ve creeped her out” said Remus. The boy didn’t even heard him, though, too focused on staring at Lily and looking like a right creep.
As the days passed, Remus began to discover how hard it was not to talk to people when people were nice and interested in getting to know you. He was used to being alone in his house, with the quiet company of his parents and his books. Now he was forced to address teachers, respond to questions, and say “no, thank you” to everyone who invited him to play Exploding Snap in the Gryffindor common room.
For some reason, the pretty red-haired girl, Lily, seemed eager to become close friends with him. She sat next to him in every subject and during meals, and talked non-stop about how wonderful magic was and how unbelievably ignorant wizards were to some muggle technology. Remus, against his better judgement, found himself talking just as much, providing his point of view as a half-blood and beaming with happiness when Lily listed Pride and Prejudice as one of her favourite books of all time.
At the same time, because Lily followed Remus around, James followed Remus. His attempts at engaging with the girl were unsuccessful to say the least, and the way he kept drooling whenever Lily talked passionately about something was so embarrassing and awkward that Remus couldn’t blame the redhead when two weeks into the school year she cursed James’ glasses so that he started seeing everything blurry every time he stared at her for more than two minutes. This, of course, only caused James to launch into lengthy rants about Lily’s intelligence and perfection, which Remus had to suffer through. By the time the brown-haired boy realised what was happening, it was already too late: he now had two friends.
Well, three, really. Peter followed James around like a toddler who wraps himself around his mother’s leg. He was extremely quiet and had a constant frightened look on his face, but once in a while he blurted out an opinion that was slightly different to James’, and he could be quite funny in his own way.
Still, the fourth member of the group that had formed that first day in the train compartment remained distant, at least from Remus. Sirius sat next to James in classes and talked to him in whispers, both of them laughing their asses off at Merlin knows what until the teacher silenced them. But during meals he sat a bit further away, keeping his eyes on his plate. Remus thought he had caught him looking his way a few times. Even though he had promised himself he wouldn’t be making friends, he felt oddly disappointed by Sirius’ unwillingness to engage with him. He reckoned that if he couldn’t keep Lily, James and Peter from being his friends, he wanted Sirius to be part of the group as well. Yet he didn’t find the courage in him to be as direct with Sirius as Lily had been with him, and so he waited for the other boy to approach him instead.
Maybe he knows what you are , thought Remus. He saw your scars, he figured it out and he’s scared of you.
However, Sirius did approach. It happened when Remus least expected it to, more than three weeks into the academic year and less than a week away from his first full-moon in Hogwarts. He was turning around in his bed late at night, anxious and scared, thinking about all the ways in which the transformation could go wrong, when the bed curtains opened slightly to reveal a dark-haired head and a pair of shining grey eyes.
“You’re okay?” asked Sirius in a whisper.
“Yeah” replied Remus, also in a soft voice. “Sorry if I woke you”
To his astonishment, Sirius stepped closer and sat down on Remus’ bed. He’d cast a Lumos charm, and the end of his wand bathed Remus’ bed and the boys’ faces with a soft white light.
“Are you sure you’re alright?” insisted Sirius.
“I am, just…” Remus struggled to find an excuse, and failed. He was usually good at lying, but there was something about the way Sirius was looking at him that made him feel guilty for even considering lying. “I just couldn’t sleep”
They remained in silence for a moment, and Remus saw Sirius’ eyes quickly travel down his body. He tugged at the covers with the intention of bringing them up to his nose, but it was already too late. Sirius extended his hand, and careful fingers grazed the scars in his right wrist. Sirius then focused on Remus’ chest, a small portion of skin left visible, and Remus knew the boy was observing the long scar that reached all the way up the side of his neck.
Sirius' eyes finally left his skin and set on Remus’ own. Again, everything Rems could recognise in the boy's look was complete understanding. Pain, too, and sympathy. But not disgust or fear, and that gave him a bit of hope that even if Sirius had found out his secret he did not plan on running away screaming for the time being.
Suddenly, Sirius did something unexpected. He grabbed the end of the white t-shirt he slept in and took it off.
At first it was the unforeseen act that left Remus in shock.
Then it was Sirius’ bruises.
Remus cursed under his breath.
“Don’t worry they… they don’t hurt much now” murmured Sirius. “I have some scars, too. Here.” He grabbed Remus’ hand and guided it towards his right side. Remus’ fingers felt little circles on the dark skin; they were the size of cigarettes, like the ones Remus’ father smoked when he was sad and quiet. He felt tears form in his eyes and he looked at the boy in front of him, who looked back at him with a fierce expression.
Sirius put on his shirt again. “I just wanted you to know that…” He twisted his hands in his lap, but didn’t move his eyes from Remus’. There was not a single tear in sight, Remus noticed, but the sadness was still evident. A sadness that was so much bigger than the small body of the eleven-year-old that carried it. “I get it. I know what it feels like, and-and you don’t have to hide them from me. You’re… we’re safe here. They can’t hurt us while we’re here. We’ll get through it”
Remus didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t explain to Sirius that he was mistaken, that the scars in Remus’ skin had a completely different cause, that no one had ever hurt him besides himself (except for the creature whose teeth had marked Remus’ leg for eternity when he was too young to do anything but scream). In that moment, he wanted to, though. He wanted to tell Sirius everything, but he could hear his mother’s voice in his head, warning him over and over that people were quick to judge, quick to betray, quick to run away. Sirius understood pain, but he came from a family known by their prejudice and their narrow-mindedness. And Remus knew how hard it was sometimes to ignore the voices in your head, no matter how much you wanted to.
He leaned forwards and hugged Sirius, careful of not doing it too strongly in case it hurt him.
“Thank you, Sirius” he said at last, in a whisper, feeling tears stream down his face. “Thank you”
A few seconds later they separated, and with one last sad smile, Sirius left.
They didn’t talk about it again for a long time, until the year when Sirius would discover the real reason for the other boy’s pain, and the words “You’re safe here” would acquire a whole different sense when he whispered them in Remus’ neck, embracing him as if he wanted some of Remus’ pain to stick to his own skin.
But until that moment, whenever a specially nasty letter fell in Sirius’ lap during lunch or every time they came home from the endless summer holidays, Remus would sense a warm body sliding next to him in the bed late at night. No words were uttered and no tears were shed, but as the years passed the space between the two bodies became narrower, and hands and feet wandered more freely. By their last year, they had cured each scar and each bruise with their lips, and they repeated in each other’s ears, over and over again, that they were safe. Even if they were soon leaving the school that had been their safe place for so long, they were safe, as long as they were together.