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The first person Remus held hands with was his mother. She had always been territorial, sometimes perhaps overly so, and he took their linked hands as a sign of protection, of love, of ownership. He had, and has, a complicated relationship with his mother, but he remembers those few and far between moments of physical intimacy, clinging to them as tightly as one would hold onto a cliff edge, desperately, and as if one were very close to death. In a way, when he finally allowed himself to be estranged from her, it was a death. Not a physical one, but the termination of something that held tremendous weight to him. The memories of the feel of her hand in his caused pangs of happiness, and simultaneously twinges of pain and remorse.
Against most societal norms, Remus had no recollection of his father. According to Hope, he had abandoned them when he was 5. Remus privately thought he had good reason to, considering his less-than excellent health condition, and the fact that he turned into a vicious carnivorous monster once a month. It was hard to feel deserving of love when he himself didn’t think he was worthy. Sometimes he studied his relationship with his mother and resented his father for leaving, but then evaluated the circumstances, and decided that his life was a pile of shit, and resentment wouldn’t make it any better.
When he was 11, he made the acquaintance of a boy called James Potter. From the start he seemed lively, trustworthy and friendly, if a bit egotistical. Though Remus self-identified as a lone wolf, with James he felt like he could open up, be caring and vulnerable, something that he had never felt with anyone else in his life. In many ways, James was his first. His first best friend, his first confidant, and to even his own surprise, his first kiss. It happened when they were in fourth year, at the point in Remus’ life where he had started to build frustration against his friends for their obsession with the opposite sex. At this point, James had been pining over Lily Evans for almost two years, and he came to Remus devastated by yet another rebuttal. Remus had remarked in himself a distinct lack of interest in females, though had previously chalked this up to his unusual maturity level, though when in a turn events that culminated in him snogging his best friend, he supposed he must be a queer of some kind. Up until that point, he had thought the only intimacy was that of skin-on-skin, but he supposed he could see the appeal of more intimate modes.
In contrast to his immediate bond with James, Sirius Black he felt an intense hatred for. He was well-bred and privileged, and the opposite of Remus in almost every discernable way. At their first meeting, the first words that were exchanged concerned his blood status. After Sirius met James, however, his prejudices became crystal clear, as he perceived and treated James with much more admiration and respect, based only on his status as pure-blood. Over the next few years, Remus would learn why he behaved like this, and witness his change in views and, subsequently, personality. In the following three years, he would grow to like, and even love this arrogant, cocksure boy. They do say that the feelings of love and hate are extremely close in nature, after all.
In the summer of fourth year, not long after ‘the incident’ as he and James called it, Remus met a boy called Will, who lived in the same northern Welsh town as him. They spent hours together, and Remus confided in him secrets he had not even told James. Wonderful, lustful, shameful things. One day in mid-July, they were sitting on the village green, reading, and Will leant over and kissed Remus. Later, when Remus asked him why he had done it, he had just shrugged and said ‘’fuck it’’. Will was the first time he had been able to be so casually open with someone. Touching him, kissing him, meant everything and nothing all at once. The night before he left his home for fifth year, he spent the night at Will’s, and in the wee hours of the morning confessed to the fact that he was gay. It was the first time he had ever said it out loud to anyone but himself, and it felt justified, and right. In typical Will fashion, he did not respond in any vocally meaningful way, just guided Remus’ head onto his own shoulder and kissed it comfortingly.