Chapter Text
Lily woke with a start, her hand instinctively grasping the edge of the cushion to keep herself from tumbling to the floor.
She had dozed off in her favourite spot in the common room, a floral settee tucked comfortably into a nook near the girl’s staircase. She liked the way its back faced away from the centre of the room, where the cluster of squashy armchairs surrounding the fireplace may as well have belonged to James Potter, his friends, and their admirers.
The Marauders had a way of becoming the gravitational centre of whatever room they occupied, but the Gryffindor common room was their Mount Olympus. Even if she might have been tempted to join in on their fun from time to time, Lily stuck to her habit of avoiding their domain on principle.
She had been enjoying a rare quiet afternoon in the common room while the rest of the school took advantage of the sunny spring weather outside. It had been blissfully empty when she’d drifted off halfway through her Potions reading, though she couldn’t have been out for long. The sky was bright blue through the windows and the large, airy room was still quiet—apart from the two new voices disrupting her nap.
“Re—”
“You idiot. What are you playing at?”
“Playing? I’m not playing with you.”
“Of all the reckless—If you ever do that again—”
The owners of the voices didn’t seem to realise they weren’t entirely alone, and it took Lily longer than it should have to recognize them as belonging to two of the Marauders. Sirius Black didn’t sound like his usual cocksure self, an uncharacteristic waver undermining his low tones. Remus Lupin sounded different as well, his words harder and sharper than those of the mild-mannered boy Lily sat across from in Charms.
It hadn’t been their voices that had startled her awake, though. First, there had been a clattering crash followed by the sound of stumbling footsteps righting themselves.
Lily rubbed at her eyes and was halfway through sitting up when she stilled, realising belatedly that she was overhearing the beginnings of a fight. And not just any fight between rowdy boys (a common enough occurrence in Gryffindor House), but an unprecedented clash between two highly unlikely characters: the cool and contemptuous king of chaos and his calm, quiet compatriot.
“It’s not brave, or funny, or whatever the hell you were thinking,” Lupin was saying in an angry, cutting tone. “It’s just stupid. What was the plan? What did you want to happen here? Well?”
“I wanted you to kiss me back. Which I should have thought was obvious, but apparently I’m an idiot, so…”
Lily’s eyes widened to the size of galleons. She definitely couldn’t make herself known now. She sank deeper into the settee, straining her ears to hear Lupin’s broken response.
“You—this isn’t some kind of joke? A dare? Something James put you up to?”
“No.”
“But I can’t; you know I can’t, and it’s cruel to—”
“What do you mean, ‘you can’t?’ Listen—if you don’t like me that way, I can understand that. But these past few months I really thought… well. I didn’t think you’d yell at me.”
“No, it’s not that I… but you know why. Come on.”
“What, because we’re both blokes? I didn’t think you—”
“No. Of course not. You really—you’re really going to make me say it out loud?”
“I think you’re going to have to, because I’m completely lost here.”
“Because—never mind. Just… don’t do that again.”
Deliberate footsteps headed toward the portrait hole. Lupin’s profile came into Lily’s narrow line of sight behind the settee, his face twisted into a resigned grimace.
“Because you don’t want to ruin our friendship?” Black called after him. “Because you think you’re supposed to be some kind of tragic fucking lone wolf your whole life?”
“Because my mouth is infected!” Lupin’s raised voice cracked as he turned back to face Black, his long fingers disappearing into his hair. “I carry a curse in my teeth. I—you don’t—” his hands fisted in his hair and he started to pace like a caged animal, drifting in and out of Lily’s eyeline.
“Moony… you’re not a disease. You’re a boy. And I’m not asking you to bite me. Just to kiss, if you feel the same way I do.”
Given a hundred years, Lily never would have imagined hearing anything so vulnerable coming out of Sirius Black’s mouth. She blushed at the soft words not even directed at her.
“That’s like playing with the barrel of a loaded gun.”
“Well, I’m a wizard and don’t know what that is. And you didn’t answer my question.”
“You didn’t ask one.”
“Do you feel the same way I do?”
“That doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. It never will.”
“It matters a lot to me, Moony.”
“That only makes it worse!”
“Why?”
“Because if I say yes, you’re going to try that again. It’s not fair. And it won’t work.”
“Do you want to say yes, then?”
“I want you to leave me alone now.”
Silence hung heavily for several drawn out seconds. Of the three of them, Lupin seemed to be the only one in the room breathing.
“Okay, Moony. Okay.”
Lily caught the briefest glimpse of Black, his eyes cast low and long hair brushing the angles of his clenched jaw as he crossed over to the portrait hole. She heard it open and close quietly, and after a moment’s pause another set of footsteps slowly made their way up the stairs to the boy’s dormitory. As soon as she heard the click of a door near the top of the boy’s staircase, she gathered her scattered belongings and flitted silently up to her own room.
Lily sat on top of her bed covers, worrying her lower lip and clutching her Potions textbook to her chest.
‘I carry a curse in my teeth,’ Lupin had said, his face pained and voice wretched.
Lily hated herself for shuddering as she considered the gory horrors those words revealed. Because, unless Remus Lupin was some new kind of sun-resistant vampire, there was only one thing they could mean.
Severus’s whispers echoed in her head.
She pictured the light brown hair that curled at the tips thickening to the coarseness of fur; the gentle hands that had helped her repot her mallowsweet plant sprouting long, cruel claws.
She imagined a howl tearing through Lupin’s long throat, leaving it raspy in that nice way she’d noticed it sometimes was at the breakfast table.
She remembered seeing Lupin in the Hospital Wing the morning she’d woken up with terrible cramps, and how he had offered her his own dose of pain potion before Madam Pomfrey had drawn the curtains closed around his white-sheeted bed.
Damn him, Severus had been right all along.
But no—that wasn’t true. Sev’s theory about Lupin’s condition might have been correct, but he was still wrong, so wrong, about what that made him.
Surely, by any definition of humanity, Remus Lupin was more human than the cold-hearted snakes Severus called friends. Lycanthrope or not, Lily was certain that Remus’s inner darkness extended no further than the dark looks he cast at the Daily Prophet when news of Voldemort’s supporters marred the headlines.
The papers had been reporting a rise in werewolf attacks over the past few months, and the village of Hogsmeade was plastered with posters of missing children. Around the same time, Lupin had begun spending his free evenings teaching defensive spellwork to any first and second year kids that were interested.
The rest of the Marauders quickly piled in on his lessons, attracting bigger and rowdier groups of young students. Potter made the whole endeavour look like a game, of course, and the lot of them made an obnoxious mess every time they practiced, adding in unnecessary explosions and charmed confetti. But behind his friends’ noise and showmanship, Lily had noticed Lupin looking on proudly as an eleven-year-old boy deflected one of the sparkly purple tickling charms Black was casting as protego practice from the sidelines.
Looking back with what she knew now, she thought the smile Lupin had worn then might have been more wistful than anything. Lily wondered just how long he had been living with his secret, and how much it had shaped him into the person he was today.
She recalled his expression when he’d tried to escape Black’s questioning in the common room, his lips twisted and brow set low in resignation. She tried to imagine what he must have looked like when he’d shoved Black away from the kiss he’d never outright denied wanting—because however much he’d stubbornly talked around it, Lupin had seemed unable to bring himself to say he didn’t feel the same way.
What was it Black had said? ‘You think you’re supposed to be some kind of tragic fucking lone wolf your whole life.’
Lily couldn’t claim to know Lupin very well, but it seemed like Black had him pretty thoroughly figured out. Her kindest, most unassuming classmate was determined to walk a lonely path, whatever sacrifices that meant for his own happiness and well-being.
Lily decided then and there that she would do her utmost to make sure that wasn’t the case. Even if that meant spending more time in the company of Sirius Black and James Potter.
Black had proved most of her assumptions wrong today. Maybe Potter would, too.