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Remus used to wonder what it would be like to have a “home.”
He understood the concept, of course, and the fact that, most logically, Hogwarts, with its polished hardwood and engraved stonework, was the obvious selection. He'd counter, however, that it was the people in attendance who made Hogwarts draw closer to a supposed home .
So, yes then, Hogwarts was his home. Lovely.
Except, sometimes when his classmates whispered notions of “home,” crowded into dimly lit corners of the library, sharing cushioned chairs by the common room fire, the whole area smelling of herb and smoke and something else, something tangible that snaked up through his lungs and clouded his vision, blocked his senses and set his vision into a haze of cinnamon and bergamot– sometimes, Remus felt as though he really didn’t understand the concept of home at all.
Booksmart as he was, a conclusion was reached rather quickly: people associated home with. . .people. . ? How did that work?
It was only one evening, on the cusp of First Year’s summer holidays, the upcoming sun and train ride and freedom from essays and star charts so close he could taste it, feel it searing into his tongue in a flash of lemon and pine, that he began to truly understand this inconceivable concept for the first time.
Piled onto Sirius’ four-poster, four scraggly boys settled unceremoniously on top of each other in a heap of eleven and twelve, wandwork fresh and smiles fueled by Great Hall feasts and successful pranks, Remus tugged on his jumper sleeve and pondered.
Logically it was much too warm to be wearing jumpers any longer, midway through June as it was, but his scars didn’t exactly fade for the weather and, well, he could bear it by now. Perhaps more logically it was much too late and much too close to the end of the school year to be doing any pondering , yet there he was, Remus Lupin, complete enigma.
He wondered briefly if it would be considered strange to think of the three boys around him as home , when most instances of the term he’d encountered, be them in ink-blotted literature or candlelit whispers, tended to be reserved for significant others. He shrugged the thought away to look back at his friends, his home .
Later he thought that maybe he considered them his home so easily because they called him Remus and he and him easily, with no questions asked; did not blink when a handful of professors spoke a different, venomous name into the tense air of a First Year classroom before hastily scribbling it out on their parchment at his hasty correction; remained unfazed when he pulled skirts from his trunk and shoved them ungracefully to the bottom of a drawer, before they were indiscreetly “borrowed” by Sirius mere days later.
It was a form of simple, thoughtless acceptance he’d never experienced before, so he figured it was only appropriate to think of them as his home .
Fifth Year, every moment leading up to it and every one following, solidified Lily as a part of his intangible, immeasurable, incredible home .
She was constant in an unmatched, incomparable way – always present to listen to him and hold him and whisper the sweetest, most intoxicatingly placid half-truths promising an okay future for him.
Remus found it hard to describe how much Lily meant to him. “Friends” was laughable for how infinitesimal it was as compared to the magnitude of his thoughts, mixed up and interwoven with emotion as they were, yet there was nothing remotely romantic about their dynamic, either. They were, in the simplest of terms, just Remus and Lily, just them .
They were Remus and Lily and sometimes he’d run up to her, in the rare but ever-sparkling excited Remus fashion he adopted occasionally, a flurry of flapping hands and gleaming eyes, words spilling from his lips faster than his mind could fully process them. And she’d smile, laugh, grip his hands between hers not to stifle him but to join him, share his glee, fill the space and moment in time with Remus and Lily and them.
Occasionally, of course, they’d split and slip apart, bare their cracks and teeth at each other with a flare and bite even Sirius would envy. Words would puncture air, trail poison with them, strike deep, hidden places within each other. Each time, though, they would drift, slowly, progressively, back to each other to fit their jagged edges against each other, sand them down with words and apologies, conversations and hugs on dorm floors, until they could fit and work together again. Because, well, they were Remus and Lily. She was his home .
It was only in Sixth Year, coupled with far too much fumbling and idiocy, enough stumbling and screaming to last ages, that Sirius stepped apart from the other Marauders and nestled himself unobtrusively further into Remus’ messy, scrapbooked “home” dynamic.
Past the initial shock and startle and chaos of it all, Remus and Sirius became Remus and Sirius rather easily. Holding hands under potions benches, sneaking kisses behind four-poster curtains, ignoring cheeky snickers from the friends who had been waiting for such occurrences for likely years – it all came as second nature.
It wasn’t that Sirius’ increased presence undermined Remus and Lily’s relationship at all, though, it simply meant that, on quiet dorm evenings when Remus’ couldn’t manage to walk past a mirror without flinching at his reflection, or mealtimes in the Great Hall when Sirius would silently and knowingly build a careful plate for him as his own hands quivered and his throat dried and sealed itself shut, or even dawn-broken, dewy mornings when classes felt like certain death after particularly bad moons, Sirius had the luxury of being omnipresent, with Lily waiting, a crease between her brows, to smile at them both as they stumbled into the common room come class time.
With the same earnest determination that Lily called him “Remus,” spoke his chosen name so loud it could drown out any stray whispers of anything else, Sirius whispered and shouted, screamed and breathed “Moony” with a softness to his vowels and a fondness to his tone that made him bury his flushed face in the neck of his jumper.
This – this , with a burning smile and creasing eyes, with halfway-to-reckless teenage youth clutched fleetingly in a slipping grip, this was love, it was family, it was forever.
It was, for Remus, home . It was rather unconventional, perhaps, and pockmarked with a few too many metaphors for some tastes, but it made Remus feel safe, feel whole in an unparalleled, ruffled-hair-and-toothy-smiles type of way, and wasn’t that exactly what a home was meant to do?