Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The first thing Remus notices when he stands in the bedroom of his shithole flat in a shithole neighbourhood with shithole prospects is that he’s far too tall for his bed. When you spend just about your whole life seeing above everyone around you, you start being able to gauge things quickly. He doesn’t need to lay down to know his feet most certainly will hang off the end, and he doesn’t need to lay down to know being curled up every nigh to mitigate that is most certainly not going to help his knee problems.

It should have been more than enough reason to turn around, say sorry to Marlene, tell her to find some other craigslist bloke and move on, but he’s desperate enough and broke enough that he turns back around and thanks her for letting him rent it out. She shrugs and heads off down the hallway, and Remus is left in his too-small room to dwell over whether or not he has time to catch the Greyhound back to Toronto, and then take the first flight back to London.

He shouldn’t be there. Not really. He knows that, knew it the moment he bought his plane ticket. London’s more than enough for music, all the greats are British, anyway. But he’s already there so he unzips his suitcase and starts unfolding his life into the closet and onto the shelves, begins creating a corner of himself in a city so large it’s honestly hard to believe he came from somewhere bigger at all.

The first night just about goes as well as Remus expects it to. The buildings creaky, the stairs outside the plex clang with every footstep that goes up them, and there seems to be an endless line of cars begging to drive down Urban no matter the time. He sleeps, anyway, and doesn’t even wake up to the racket Marlene makes at six in the morning. He’d say it was the fact he lived in downtown London, but it might have more to do with the fact that he slept that first night with his pillow clamped over his ears and a fan cranked so loud it might as well have been on a loudspeaker.

So while Remus sleeps through Marlene leaving at six, when she comes back in at nine, he’s at least conscious, and sitting curled up at the shabby breakfast table with his feet on his chair and a wad of paper in front of him, his pen hardly making a dent.

“First night?” Marlene asks, and her voice has the twinge of a French accent Remus can place if he’s listening to it. He assumes she’s asking how his first night was, takes a breath, and hopes for the best.

“It was good,” Remus nods, then looks back down at his paper while she stands, leaning against the doorway between the kitchen and the small section of the living room she’s deemed as the dining area.

Marlene stares him down for a moment, her arms crossed, before she pushes off of the doorframe and opens the fridge, pulling out a container of blueberries.

“I buy groceries every Sunday,” she says, and sets the container down on the table. “If you want something, just ask,” she pops a blueberry in her mouth and motions for Remus to take one. He does.

“Oh, and sometimes the oven loses power on its own. You have to pull it out and wiggle the cord, there’s a broom I use to reach it with.” Marlene sets his spare key down on the table. She pops a few more blueberries in her mouth and goes to leave, but as she crosses the threshold towards the entrance hall she stops and turns around.

“Is your name actually Remus Lupin?”

Remus huffs a laugh at this. It’s got to be about the hundredth time he’s been asked it.

“Sure is.”

“It’s just wolf wolf,” Marlene says, then, and Remus feels like he’s lived through this exact conversations about a hundred times before with a hundred different people.

“Funny how that works,” he says, and before he can dwell on it being too unkind to the person who’s renting out a room to him, he turns back to his empty pad of paper and taps his pen against it. He vaguely hears Marlene leave, the screen door closing shut behind her.

“Hey, where’s your accent from, again?” Marlene’s hanging out the balcony door, tapping her chin. She’s got a girl hanging off her arm who’s looking at Remus like he’s got three heads.

“Wales,” he says, and clicks his pen once, twice, then again.

“Wales,” Marlene repeats, like she’s feeling it out on her tongue, and the girl on her arm flicks her.

“I dated a guy from Wales, once, maybe you know him,” the girl says, grinning, and both Remus and Marlene look at each other for a moment. Marlene shrugs, and Remus mirrors it, and they both smile.

Remus’s first two weeks in the plex— he’s learned to call it a plex instead of a flat— have been nothing short of equal parts charming and equal parts overwhelming. The apartment is tiny, much too tiny for someone Remus’s height, and he often feels like he has a third roommate with how often Mary McDonald is hanging around. He supposes he can’t complain too much, it’s cheap and he’s lucky to have gotten it at all, but all the same he’s growing tired of Mary eating all of his blackberries thinking they’re Marlene’s and he’s had just about enough of trying to hang up his laundry on the clothesline and having to wait because Marlene and Mary are smoking a cigarette and blasting the radio at the table set.

He tells himself he’s being ungrateful as he’s squished between the two girls in a cramped bagel shop at the corner of Fairmount. He’s got about £500 to his name and he’s spending three of them on a corner shop bagel when he’d much rather be back in the plex working on anything he could pitch so he doesn’t run out of money. But he’s here, listening to Mary go on about how she knows she should get salmon because it’s healthier but she really wants double cream cheese. He scans the menu and makes his own choice and by the time they’ve made it to the counter, he’s getting a plain bagel toasted with butter and an americano.

Montreal’s quite beautiful in the summer. It’s bright, for one. It feels like the sun itself is making effort to shine just on this city, and it feels so different from how grey London had started to feel. It’s lively, too, Remus notices. The city doesn’t even have half of the population that London does, but as he stands on the corner of Fairmount and Urban, eating his overpriced Bagel while Marlene and Mary debate whether Blondie’s new album will top or if Floyd will continue to dominate, he thinks he’s seen just about as many people in Mile End who catch his eye than he has in his entire adulthood in London. He doesn’t dare compare it to Cardiff because his chest can’t handle that just yet, but he already knows he’s being wooed.

“Mm, they’re clearing. Sit?” Marlene asks, and then they’re following her to a small black table outside of the shop. Remus pulls up a chair from a nearby table where only one person is sitting. Marlene has one leg pulled up onto her chair despite the fact she’s wearing a skirt and Remus can’t help but think she really is the coolest.

“Are you liking it?” Mary asks, and gestures to the road. A car blows by. “Montreal.”

“It’s decent,” Remus nods, smiles, and stuffs his mouth full with bagel so they won’t ask him anything else. He much prefers to listen to them fight about charting songs.

“And what is it you do again?” Mary asks. Marlene beats him to it and says he’s a writer. Mary seems genuinely awed by this, and Remus feels strangely pitied. He’s seen this reaction before. Saying he’s a writer, and getting that look, like they’re itching to say aww or ask him if he thinks he’s the next Stephen King. Remus has always wished he was more like Nick Kent, instead, he’s never cared much for fiction.

Mary rubs the charm of her necklace between her fingers. “Who do you write for? Is it someone famous? Atwood?”

“Oh, no, I’m not, like, a writer,” Remus says, after scarfing down his mouthful of bagel when he realizes Marlene can’t answer everything for him. What she has answered, anyway, is hardly true. “I’m more like… a wri…ter…” He says, like the awkward pause in the middle makes any sense to anyone but himself. It doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t.

“Right…” Mary says, and laughs, and its short and awkward and her hearts obviously not in it and she’s looking at Marlene and Remus suddenly feels like he owes them some kind of real explanation, prove he has a real job and a real goal and a real history—

“I wrote for Record Mirror. In London. It’s an English music paper. I wrote, like, reviews, and stuff. Critiques on rock music. You know, like The Police.” Remus runs a hand through his hair.

“The Police?” Mary asks, and blinks, and Remus thinks her slight accent sounds funny when she says it. She hasn’t a clue, he realizes, and just shakes his head. “Yeah.”

“You write here, too?” She asks, then, and Remus feels that familiar spark of shame. He could shut this down now, pretend he has to go somewhere, hurry off and down Urban until he’s past the plex and far away. He could pretend to choke on his bagel, or maybe really choke on it. But running from it gets you nowhere, he knows, so he takes a deep breath and nods.

“Something like that,” he says, dismissively, and smiles. Marlene smiles back at him. Mary seems satisfied with his answer so she goes back into a debate about the hockey scene becoming suffocating in city third spaces, and Remus can finally breathe.

By the time Remus has finished his americano and Mary’s coffee has gone cold after neglecting it to talk, the three of them walk back down Urban towards the plex. Mary’s hands are moving as she talks, and Marlene is nodding along, her arm hanging over Mary’s shoulders. Remus follows behind like much more of a shadow, a ghost living in someone else’s place.

Montreal is great, he tells himself over and over, because it is. It is great. It’s bright, and it’s lively, and his first two weeks have been nothing short of fantastic, and he’s so busy keeping up with Marlene MacKinnon and Mary McDonald that he can’t even find time in it to wait for the other shoe to drop. But all at the same time, he’s two weeks in and he hardly has anything to pitch and he’s three months away from broking himself on rent and groceries alone, no matter how good the British pound is in Canada.

He needs a job, he knows, and he needs one soon. Not even just to have money, which he’s steadily draining already without having even been there for a month, but to have something to do. Something more than get shitty bagels with the only two people he knows and stare at a notepad he can’t even manage to fill.

He’s out of inspiration. That’s it. He needs a job to get inspiration, something shitty that’ll motivate him, like all of the greats. A baggage handler, a filing clerk— something that’ll really kickstart that mind of his, remind him where he came from, or whatever. That’ll get the creative juices flowing.

Instead, Remus trips on the first step going up the stairs to the plex, bangs his face on the step ahead, and yells as he hits the cement.

“Fuck!” He says it so loud he’s sure he’s imagined it entirely. He’s sitting up, hands pressed to his face because fuck is right. Marlene has her hand over her mouth, staring down at him, and Mary is already trying to get a look at his face.

“Remus! Jeez!” Marlene says, behind her hand, and when he finally pulls his own away from his face he glares up at her. Not because she did anything wrong, no, but because she’s grinning behind her palm.