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Tuesday is library day but it's really no different than any other day of the week for Remus. He has tea and maybe a little toast at the window sill (only if his stomach is feeling up to it). He takes the train to Oxford and then the bus from the station where he walks to the special wizarding section of the Bodleian. More often than not he manages to set off the dark creatures detection barrier around the Maleficarium & Dark Arts section prompting two aged ghosts in Victorian dress to check his clearance again. They smell faintly of loose leaf tea and coal dust, and the one not wearing a wig tries to make conversation. He can't see how they died but he expects it must being something like Professor Binns. When they check his charmed id card their fingers pass through it again and again before he remembers to hold it up for them. Yes, he was here on research. Yes, the Defensive Arts Research Kouncil Kingston-upon-Thames (DARKK for short), and yes, old master Quedgeley sends his regards. Their hands are the ancient blue-grey of a coastal storm, their touch very light and curiously textured. It reminds him of something but he can't put his finger on it. A wedding veil maybe, he muses later on the train home.
He likes Oxford, the Thomas Cranmer plaque, Blackwells, the Camera. He likes looking upwards to the surprise of gothic vaulted ceilings how his shoes, old and pinched in the toes, clack on the cobbles. He dreamed of going here when he was young, Magdalen, Christ Church or maybe Brasnose. The host of other research institutes hidden from the muggle eye. His father bringing him up here on day trips during summer hols, buying him books from the crammed back alley shops, pointed out the confetti in the gutters, "From the end of term, see" his father said. Cut from mylar in shiny pinks, greens, and yellows they waited to be washed from the street by the light summer showers. As a child Remus's mind completed the rest of that carnival fantasy: Champagne corks, stumbling through dark streets moist with day's rain shoulder to shoulder after exams, the warm arm around his waist and a high familiar war whoop.
It was only during his second year at Hogwarts he realizes that having impeccable grades and a good demeanor might not be enough. There's an intense interview process for Dark Arts Studies and while it's illegal to discriminate "How could you ever remain impartial?" they ask him before sitting back, lighting a cigarette with their shaking arthritic hands and looking him over with new curiosity. So now he cultivates small pleasures. Sometimes when he finishes early Remus stops at the special Wizarding section of the Pitt-Rivers museum crammed with its macabre cabinets and displays: vampire fangs (2) source: Transylvania courtesy of B. Stoker, Celtic bronze mirror #6 thought to cracked by Basilisk, a set of werewolf pelts with very peculiar burns. Authenticated, he reads below them on the little yellowed tag, by silver reduction.
Tuesday is library day but it's really no different than any other day of the week for Remus. He has tea, maybe a little toast at the window sill (although his stomach is never up for it, really). He takes the train to Oxford and then the bus from the station and walks the last mile to the Bodleian. He spends the day a kilometre underground among the screamy books, and the books spelled shut and chained to the shelves, with grimmories full of diagrams of vivisection and men with the heads of dogs; the whole testament of their bloody, awful history under preservation charms, kept by rote and ink. Sometimes he thinks he will go mad with it, the great cochlea of it all spiraling, crushing him under the weight of printing presses, painstakingly inked illuminated manuscripts, and slabs of bluestone carved thousands of years before with hammer and chisel by the light of a torch. Of so many things he will never know, and so many things he used to (Sirius laughing at the kitchen window on a Sunday afternoon, sheets of sunlight on his body). How he had once been young and was now only poor, buried alive among ghosts.