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Remus woke sluggishly, his muddled senses pulling his brain laboriously – traitorously – out of a surprisingly restful sleep.
It was late morning, judging by the bright sunlight that was warming his face and turning the inside of his closed eyelids a dull orange. He noticed a hum of indistinct voices nearby, mostly children, but occasionally interrupted by the sensibly strict voice he’d come to associate with Madam Pomfrey’s care.
Hospital wing then.
Of course.
Full moon.
The mere thought of it sent his senses into a nosedive and he groaned as flashes of memory passed through his mind. Early morning, a cold dawn creeping in through shuttered windows; a hard floor with a threadbare rug; the taste of iron in his mouth.
The crisp white curtains surrounding his hospital bed swam into view as his eyes stuttered open, trying to latch onto anything in sight, anything to vanish the image of the dark pool of blood below the severed tendons of his left wrist. He wiggled the fingers of his hand minutely, feeling for a bandage, then winced and bit back a hiss of pain. At least he was patched up well, though he wasn’t sure the lingering ache was worth the reassurance.
He tried to remain as still as possible, after, to prolong the inevitable moment when he would move a limb and begin the cascade of pain. Grinding joints, splintered bones, stinging, carved up flesh. He breathed shallowly and shut his eyes again. It was only on the rarest of occasions that he could will his body back to sleep, but it never stopped him from trying.
~
Some indiscriminate time must have passed, because the next thing he knew he was being awoken again from a delicious state of semi-consciousness by familiar voices.
“‒be okay, won’t he?”
It took a few seconds for the words to catch up to his foggy brain, but when they did Remus started, eyes flying open.
Had someone seen him…? But no, the curtains were still shut. He took a deep breath and tried to bury his mingled sense of relief and jealousy, knowing it must be some other soul that had stirred up a sympathetic crowd.
“Of course he’ll be fine,” a bracing voice said. Sirius.
And of course it would have been Peter, worried.
“But gosh, that was a long fall,” a higher pitched voice whispered.
“Serves him right,” someone sniffed. Lily Evans.
Meaning something had, evidently, happened to James.
“Every year, the same,” Madam Pomfrey tsked, her voice carrying from the far side of the hall, echoing as it grew louder, “I don’t know what Madam Hooch is doing during those try-outs… out of my way, out of my way.”
Quidditch. Of course. Remus’s stomach sank.
Promise me you’ll be there, Remus, eh? You’ve got to come support me. And anyway, you don’t want to miss them choosing me as the newest Gryffindor chaser, do you? It’ll be like a legend in the making!
Remus, knowing the date, knowing the moon, had lied: I don’t care much for Quidditch, James .
Other boys could care about Quidditch, but not him. Other boys, healthy boys, whose only fear of broken bones came from flying too high.
Just come to support me, then James had said matter of factly. That’s what friends do.
Other boys could have friends, his father had said. Other boys, whole boys. His job wasn’t to make friends, it was to keep his head down and try to get through school without being found out and expelled. Or worse.
But somehow, against his better judgement ‒ and without quite understanding how it had happened ‒ James had become his friend. They all had. Peter first, who had looked somehow even more lost than Remus on that first train ride to Hogwarts. Then James, who plopped himself down next to the pair at the Gryffindor table and took them in like a pair of loveable strays, slinging an arm around another boy, who had been his own compartment-mate on the train, dragging him bodily into a conversation and declaring the four of them lifelong companions right then and there over pudding.
And despite the scar along his cheekbone and his rather shabby robes, the other children followed James and Sirius’s lead and were kind to Remus. At the beginning of their first year it was just a handful of other students who looked to the pair for direction, but by the end of their first year and now into their second, Remus could already see what they were becoming: golden gods who ruled the school. All the younger classmen now rolled their sleeves up like James and loosened their half-windsor knots like Sirius. They play-acted their coolness, their rebelliousness, their unfettered happiness, chasing after them in the hopes that some effortless radiance might rub off on them. And there Remus was, along for the ride, basking in their light, wrenched heartily and unwillingly into the brilliance of their friendship.
He loved it and hated himself in equal measure.
He pressed his head back into the pillow and listened to James's voice now, the sound of it muffled, no doubt, by his own bed curtains. He was arguing happily with Madam Pomfrey about his injury, and Remus could practically see him alight with energy and pushing the matron away. No time to lay in bed when there were quidditch moves to practice.
Remus sighed and ignored another wave of sadness.
That friendship would be over now. One way or another. Sooner or later.
Maybe it would fade slowly, diminishing into nothingness as he failed to explain again and again why he could never match James and Sirius’s level of loyalty. The feeble lies would stop holding water and they would begin to wonder why he was really absent for a tryout or a missed birthday. He would be perceived as unfeeling, uncaring, cold. He’d drift out of their lives with nothing more than a few questioning looks and muttered dismissals.
If he was lucky.
If he wasn’t, the friendship would explode spectacularly, like a dying sun, shattered by the very explanation they craved.
He had deluded himself, he knew, during that first year at Hogwarts. He could he have expected to hide in the shadows with friends who burned so brightly?
Madam Pomfrey interrupted his self-loathing with a delivery of pain potion and dreamless sleep.
“Oh good, you’re up,” she said, rather more kindly than she had spoken to James.
She pushed her way through the curtains, “Let’s see the hand.”
He lifted his bandaged wrist dutifully, sparing only the smallest of panicked glances towards the curtains as they shut behind her. He saw dust motes dancing in the light, starched white curtains of the bed next to his, a pair of bright silver eyes.
He wrenched his hand back in surprise.
“More pain potion then?” Madam Pomfrey asked, misinterpreting his sharp inhale of surprise as one of pain.
He choked the pain potion down, his mind reeling, and fell asleep dreaming of easily-avoided consequences and stern words from his father, Icarus and melting wings.
~
“Remus?”
“Remus?”
“Remus, are you awake?”
Remus shot up, heart pounding, hand shooting automatically to the curtains surrounding his bed. He clutched the hangings between his fingers, willing his visitor not to open them.
“Remus? It’s us,” James called, his voice a hoarse whisper.
Slender fingers were snaking their way through the curtains, feeling blindly for the edge of the fabric to part them. A forefinger trailed against the overheated skin of Remus’s uninjured wrist and stilled.
“Oh. You are awake,” Sirius murmured.
Remus covered himself and parted the curtains tenuously, eyes blinking against three pinpricks of wandlight. His heart stuttered, rabbit fast. He should have expected it really, as Sirius was never one to let things lie. Remus had spent a few fretful hours that afternoon trying to come up with a plausible cover story for why he would be in the hospital when he was allegedly visiting his mother, but nothing seemed convincing. He fell asleep with difficulty earlier that evening, hoping even then for more time to fabricate his lie.
“Yes,” he said finally.
Sirius, who was closest, lowered his wand first and perched on the edge of Remus’s bed, his utter lack of boundaries pressing the softness of his nightshirt into Remus’s right shoulder, which was bloody and bandaged. Remus held back a wince and shuffled further back on the bed.
“The party was winding down and… well, I thought I saw you in here earlier. We wanted to check on you. And bring you… er, Peter?”
They all turned to look at Peter, who fumbled in his robes for a moment, then pulled out a little chocolate cake.
“Bring you this!” Sirius whispered happily, snatching the sweet from Peter and holding it out to Remus with a small smile.
“Oh. Er. Thanks… could you maybe…” he nodded at the bedside table.
Sirius obliged, placing the cake down carefully before turning back to Remus with an expectant look.
“So…”
“What party was going on?” Remus asked suddenly, eager to turn the conversation away from his poor health.
“Gryffindor always hosts one after the quidditch tryouts, didn’t you know?” James asked, face transformed with delight, “a tradition, I guess. Davey Gudgeon reckons the Prewett brothers started it, but my dad said it’s always been a thing so… anyways don’t you remember it from last year with the Filibusters? I thought everyone had been woken up by that racket.”
“He wasn’t here last year, either.”
Their voices were no louder than whispers, but Sirius’s voice cut through the room like a shout. James deflated somewhat, throwing the long-haired boy an uneasy look. Peter fidgeted. Sirius just fixed Remus with a calculating gaze. Remus just looked past him, to the little cake on the table.
“Are you okay, Remus?” James finally ventured.
“I’m just a bit sick. A flu, Madam Pomfrey thinks.”
“Ah.”
Remus could feel the weight of Sirius’s eyes still on him, growing heavier each passing second. Remus flicked his eyes up quickly, in time to see Sirius’s own slide down to Remus’s shoulder before flickering back up quickly, guiltily. Remus glanced down in a panic, but to his relief the blankets were covering him. Perhaps there was the faintest outline of a bandage? Or perhaps Sirius had felt something through their layers of clothes and bedsheets?
“Yes, just a flu,” Remus said again, more firmly this time.
“We just thought maybe… I just thought,” he amended after a cautionary look from James, “Well, weren’t you visiting your mother?”
“I caught it while I was away,” he said defensively.
“Oh, okay. It’s only… we’d noticed that…”
Sirius trailed off, voice almost at a whisper.
Remus stayed statue-still, save for a hand convulsively clenching his blankets into a fist. There was a pregnant pause.
“Noticed…?” Remus asked, proud of how steady his voice sounded. He was fighting the urge to run towards Madam Pomfrey’s office, to hide from the group of boys who would ‒ more likely than not ‒ turn on him if he were to confirm their biggest fear.
“Well it’s… yesterday was…”
Sirius looked around at James and Peter. Peter looked cowed, but James took a steady breath and a step forward.
“It was the full moon,” he said quietly, his characteristic, beaming smile replaced with some sort of twisted expression. Fear perhaps. Maybe pity. Remus couldn’t tell the difference.
Bile was rising in his throat, blood turning to ice.
It was amazing, really, how he could have known this was coming for nearly twelve hours and still found himself caught off-guard.
“It’s… That’s… I’m…”
“Hey, it’s okay,” Sirius said, stretching out a hand.
Remus ripped himself away, nearly falling off the bed in the process. Sirius stood up hastily. He, and James, and even Peter seemed to be talking but Remus couldn’t hear them past the sound of blood rushing in his ears. His vision wavered for a moment, the room darkening and blurring around him.
“Here, just… drink.”
A glass of water was pressed into his hand. He took a sip, his brain belatedly warning him that accepting food or drink from individuals who just accused him of being a category five beast. He shuddered to think of what his father would say if he knew.
“I’m,” he was breathing heavily, sharp and painful, “I’m… I’m not .”
“Okay,” someone said quickly, reassuringly. Remus wasn’t sure who it was.
Silence fell. Remus didn’t want to look up at them, just wanted to stare at the glass of water that may or may not be poisoned and hope to disappear into the blankets. He should be thinking about his next move, should be going to Madam Pomfrey, then Dumbledore, should ask for a flu back home. But his mind wouldn’t settle enough for him to
The glass of water was lifted from his hands and when he finally looked up, Sirius and James were both perched on the end of his bed with Peter hovering uncertainty behind them.
“It would be okay,” Sirius said tentatively, running a finger in the condensation around the rim of the cup.
Remus didn’t speak.
“It would be okay if you… er, got the flu… every month at the full moon. We wouldn’t mind. We wouldn’t tell anyone.”
The other boys made noises of assent, both nodding fervently. Remus simply stared at them, not daring to believe it.
“Here,” Sirius said, clearing his throat after a few tense seconds, “try this. It’s really good.”
Remus shifted, the blanket sliding off of his right shoulder. A bit of bandage was visible underneath his collar. He winced involuntarily, breath held in anticipation.
“Go on,” Sirius said with a smile, moving a bit closer to him on the bed, “it’s good. It’s all good. We promise.”