Chapter Text
So much younger than today
(I never need) I never needed anybody's help in any way
(Now) but now these days are gone (these days are gone)
I'm not so self assured
(And now I find) now I find I've changed my mind
And opened up the doors
Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being 'round
Help me get my feet back on the ground
Won't you please, please help me
In oh so many ways
(My independ-) my independence seems to vanish in the haze
(But) but every now and then (now and then)
I feel so insecure
(I know that I) I know that I just need you like
I've never done before
Remus had been a nervous driver.
Not the sort who stalled at every traffic light or forgot which pedal was which, but the sort who checked his mirrors three times before changing lanes and approached roundabouts as though they were particularly difficult exam questions.
He had passed his driving test only a few weeks earlier and still felt vaguely convinced that somebody would ring him one day to explain there had been a mistake.
His father insisted the feeling would fade.
Remus wasn't entirely convinced.
It had been only the fourth time he had driven the car by himself. His dad's silver Ford felt too large, too important somehow, even though it was only cheap.
Every driver behind him seemed impatient. He remembered sitting a little too upright in the driver's seat, both hands fixed carefully on the steering wheel, determined to do everything exactly as he'd been taught. If he concentrated hard enough, nothing could go wrong.
The silence inside the car had lasted less than two minutes before he had reached for the CD player.
Peter had laughed when Remus mentioned he still used CDs. Apparently it was ancient behaviour. Especially after Peter's older brother, Luke, had spent an entire afternoon fitting a Bluetooth adapter into the car. Remus had thanked him politely. Then continued using CDs anyway. There was something reassuring about them. Something predictable.
His mum had bought him several Beatles albums for his seventeenth birthday. She'd found them second-hand somewhere and presented them with the same excitement most parents reserved for much more impressive gifts. Remus had loved them immediately. That morning he had picked Help! almost at random, sliding the disc into the player before pulling away from home. The familiar crackle had filled the car a second before the music started.
By the time the first song was playing, some of the tension in his shoulders had eased. Not completely. He was still seventeen. Still driving alone. Still hyper-aware of every other car on the road. But the music helped. Trees blurred past outside the windows. Grey clouds hung low overhead. The road stretched ahead of him, quiet and ordinary. He remembered tapping his fingers lightly against the steering wheel and singing along under his breath.
It had happened too quickly.
One moment he had been driving. The next, the world had ceased to make sense.
For years afterwards, he could never remember the impact itself properly. Not the exact sound. Not the exact movement. Only fragments. A pair of headlights where they shouldn't have been. A flash of something moving far too fast. The sudden certainty that something was terribly wrong.
Then everything had become noise.
When Remus became aware of himself again, he couldn't tell how much time had passed.
Seconds. Minutes. An hour.
His body felt strangely distant, as though it belonged to somebody else. He tried opening his eyes and wasn't entirely sure if he succeeded. There was darkness either way. Not frightening darkness. Just nothing. His thoughts felt slow and heavy, floating through his head without much urgency.
Something hurt.
His hip.
The pain arrived gradually, sharpening as awareness returned. It felt wrong. Not the sort of ache that followed exercise or sitting awkwardly for too long. Something deeper. Something sharp. Every tiny movement seemed to make it worse. Instinctively, he tried not to move at all.
The music was still playing.
For some reason, that became the most important thing in the world.
The Beatles.
The opening chords were unmistakable.
Help!
At first he couldn't understand why the song was playing again. Then he realised the CD had restarted. It had reached the end and looped back to the beginning. The thought drifted through his mind slowly. Absurdly. If the CD player was still working, then surely the car couldn't be completely destroyed. That felt logical. Or at least logical enough for a seventeen-year-old whose head wasn't working properly.
He focused on the music because it was easier than focusing on anything else. Easier than the pain in his hip. Easier than the strange metallic smell hanging in the air. Easier than trying to understand why he couldn't see properly. John Lennon's voice filled the car again, sounding impossibly normal. As though this were an ordinary drive. As though nothing had happened.
For a moment, a terrible thought crossed his mind.
What if this was the last song he ever heard?
The idea arrived quietly.
Without panic.
Without drama.
Just a simple observation.
If he was dying, then the final thing he would hear would be Help! by The Beatles. Somehow that felt both deeply unfair and vaguely funny. He would have preferred something more modern. Something more profound. Instead, the same track his mum had bought him for his birthday played softly through damaged speakers while he sat trapped in the wreckage of his father's car, trying very hard not to think about what had happened.
But that had been five years ago.
"Earth to Remus? Remusssss? Are you with me? You've blanked out again."
Lily's voice cut cleanly through the memory. Suddenly the twisted metal and Beatles music disappeared, replaced by the familiar sight of Lily Evans waving a hand dramatically in front of his face. Remus blinked once. Then twice. Right. He wasn't seventeen anymore. He wasn't trapped in a car. He was twenty-three years old, sitting cross-legged on the floor of Lily's bedroom while attempting to work on an English assignment that neither of them particularly wanted to write.
Lily's room looked much the same as it always had. It was comfortably cluttered in a way that somehow never felt messy. Bookshelves lined one wall, overflowing with novels and textbooks. Photographs were tucked into the edges of mirrors and pinned to corkboards above her desk. Fairy lights wound lazily around the bedframe despite Lily insisting they were only there because she hadn't gotten around to taking them down after Christmas three years ago. The room smelled faintly of vanilla candles and highlighter pens, the latter because Lily had an alarming habit of colour-coding absolutely everything she owned.
Remus glanced down at the essay spread across his lap and realised he'd been staring at the same sentence for several minutes. He could hear Mrs Evans talking on the phone. Reality. Present day. University deadlines. Significantly less dramatic than where his mind had wandered.
"You were doing the thing again," Lily informed him, pointing her pen in his direction. "The staring into the middle distance thing."
"I was thinking."
"You looked dead."
"I wasn't dead."
Lily narrowed her eyes.
"You sure?"
Remus rolled his eyes and threw a balled-up piece of paper at her.
"What were you even talking about before I apparently died?" he asked. "You were saying something about your parents."
Lily groaned instantly, dropping backwards onto her bed with all the theatrical misery of somebody discussing a genuine crisis.
"Ugh. James." She said his name as though it personally offended her. "Mum and Dad hired him as a lifeguard at the leisure centre and he's impossible."
Remus snorted.
"Impossible how?"
"He's such a flirt." Lily threw her arms dramatically into the air. "Like, genuinely incapable of speaking to another human being without flirting. Receptionists? Flirts. Swimming instructors? Flirts. Old ladies doing aqua aerobics? Flirts."
Lily hesitated. "He's cute." There was a brief pause. "But he's so full of himself."
The words were delivered with such force that Remus nearly laughed again.
"Tragic."
"I know."
"How ever will you survive?"
Lily threw a cushion at his head. "You're supposed to be on my side."
"I am on your side."
"No you're not."
Remus grinned.
Unfortunately for him, Lily immediately threw another cushion.
Remus caught the second cushion before it hit him and raised an eyebrow.
"You're jealous."
"I'm not."
"You are."
Lily looked genuinely offended. "Remus Lupin, I am not jealous of James Potter."
"I didn't say you're jealous of him. Im saying youre jealous hes flirting with people arent you"
"You are so annoying."
"You're jealous."
"I'm not jealous."
Remus grinned. "Then why are you blushing?"
"I'm not blushing."
"You are."
The conversation somehow continued for another twenty minutes. Remus learnt far more about James Potter than he had ever intended to know.
Apparently his hair was permanently messy no matter what he did with it. Apparently he wore ridiculous round glasses that constantly slid down his nose. Apparently he had a chipped bottom tooth from falling out of a tree when he was seven years old. According to Lily, he'd been attempting to rescue a football he'd kicked into the branches. The dentist had repaired the tooth three separate times, but the filling kept falling out, and eventually James had apparently decided that having a chipped tooth gave him "character."
Lily had rolled her eyes when telling that story.
By the end of it, Remus was struggling not to laugh.
"You know," he said eventually, setting his notes aside completely, "for someone you hate so much, you sure talk about him a lot."
Lily froze.
"Oh no."
"And know a lot about him."
"Oh no."
"The tree story was particularly concerning."
"You know about his childhood dental history, Lily."
"Remus."
"You know the state of his teeth."
"Remus."
"You know his haircut."
"Remus."
"You know what age he fell out of a tree."
Remus shifted against the floor and immediately regretted it. A familiar ache sparked through his hip, not enough to stop him moving, but enough to make him wince. Lily caught it instantly. She always did. Her expression softened slightly as she lowered the cushion she'd been threatening him with.
"Is that what you were thinking about?" she asked. "The crash? Your hip?" She tilted her head. "When you zoned out, I mean."
Remus looked down at the essay in his lap for a moment before shrugging one shoulder. There wasn't much point lying to Lily. She'd known him too long for that.
The question pulled him back to a hospital room painted in aggressively cheerful colours.
Back to seventeen-year-old Remus with a broken hip and enough pain medication in his system to tranquilise a horse. Lily had appeared three days after the crash carrying a gigantic bouquet of lilies that nearly obscured her entire face.
"Lily's?" Remus had asked from his hospital bed. "Bit full of yourself, aren't you?"
She'd threatened to hit him with them before wheeling him down to the hospital café anyway. Lily had bought a Bounty. Remus had gone looking for banana bread, only to discover they'd sold out. It remained one of the great tragedies of his recovery. Forced to compromise, he'd settled for carrot cake instead. His second favourite.
Lily had declared that carrot cake was superior anyway, and they'd spent twenty minutes arguing about it while she pushed his wheelchair far too fast down hospital corridors.
Remus sighed and rubbed absent-mindedly at his hip.
"I know I should be grateful," he said quietly. "Physio helped. The surgeries helped. I can walk. My legs work. I know that." He stared down at the notes in his lap. "But I'm just... annoyed sometimes."
The admission felt ugly the second it left his mouth. "I'm twenty-three and I walk with a limp. Some days I feel like one of those dogs with three legs that everyone's really proud of for managing to get around."
Lily didn't interrupt, so the words kept coming.
"And I can't exercise properly because my hip starts complaining if I do too much. So now I've got this stupid little pouch on my stomach that won't go away." He patted his stomach for emphasis. "Well, maybe it would if I actually worked out harder, but then my stupid hip starts hurting and we're back to square one." He swallowed. "I haven't been on a date in five years, Lils. Five years. I look different. I feel different. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I just..." He stopped.
The silence that followed felt enormous. Almost immediately, regret settled heavily in his chest. He looked away.
"Sorry." The word came out automatically. "Sorry. Ignore me." He forced a laugh that sounded entirely unconvincing.
Lily stared at him for a moment as though he had personally offended her. Then she sat upright so quickly that several pens rolled off the bed.
"Oh, for God's sake, Remus."
Remus immediately looked guilty. "What?"
"Firstly," Lily said, holding up a finger, "you're very handsome."
Remus snorted. "I am not."
"You are."
"Lily."
"You are."
Remus rolled his eyes.
Lily ignored him.
"I'm serious. Mary wanted to ask you out."
That caught his attention. "What?"
"Mary Macdonald."
"Mary?"
"Yes, Mary."
"Mary from our seminar?"
"How many Marys do you know?"
Remus stared at her.
Lily looked smug.
"She wanted to ask you out last year."
"What?"
"So I told her you don't swing that way."
The fact that Mary Macdonald had apparently considered him attractive was information he genuinely did not know what to do with.
Lily softened slightly.
"I'm serious though." Her voice became gentler. "You're handsome, Remus. You always have been. So stop acting like nobody's ever going to fancy you."
Remus looked away.
The compliment settled awkwardly in his chest.
Because he believed Lily loved him.
He just wasn't entirely convinced she was objective.
"As for your hip," she continued, "and the exercise thing..."
Remus sighed.
"Please don't suggest yoga."
"I'm not suggesting yoga."
"Good."
"Remember when we went to Norfolk last summer?"
Remus frowned.
"What about it?"
"You swam loads."
"So?"
"You swam really well."
Remus blinked.
Lily waited.
Remus frowned.
Lily waited some more.
Eventually she dropped her head into her hands.
"Oh my God."
"What?"
"Remus."
"What?"
"Remus, you daft cow."
Remus looked offended.
Lily pointed dramatically towards the floor.
"My parents own a leisure centre."
"...Yes."
"A leisure centre."
"Yes."
"With a swimming pool."
"Yes."
Lily made a strangled noise. "Swimming pool. You. Exercise that won't hurt your hip. Swimming"
Then, finally, understanding dawned.
"Oh."