By the Time He Was Thirty-Eight
Remus Lupin - a drabble in six parts
I.
By the time he was eleven Remus Lupin was well-acquainted with loneliness. With a cynicism beyond his years he assumed without question that he would know that loneliness his entire life. His parents (graying before their time – tired faces, always tired) made no illusions for him. He was cursed.
Even at eleven, somewhere deep in the back of his mind Remus was already internalizing the mantra that he was a burden, an outcast, a thoroughly wearisome boy. He worried his parents, bothered his healers, and spent no time around children his own age. His mother’s smile and his father’s laughter couldn’t mask the muffled tears and arguments in the middle of the night when they thought he was sleeping. And so when a man with kind eyes and the longest beard Remus had ever seen showed up at the door and told him – him, Remus – that he had a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry it was the brightest moment of his young life.
His father was ecstatic, his mother concerned, and as the Hogwarts Express pulled out of King’s Cross Station Remus could feel only two things – his heart beating ferociously in his chest and a happiness unmatched by anything he had previously experienced.
that’s it, it’s split
it won’t recover
just frame the halves
and call them brothers
after the shrieking shack incident the rest of the marauders come around to forgiving sirius
