A Lost Cause

I always thought I was a lost cause.

Even when the large painful bite mark on my left hip had finally healed, I was a lost cause.

Even when I saw his laughing face staring back at me from behind bars I was a lost cause.

For my parents, there was nothing to be done. What had happened had ruined any chance of me having a normal life. Period. I was a lost cause.

Of course, they still loved me; maybe even more because of what had happened. It made sense, I guess. When something like this happens, your parents will either love you more, or desert you, and luckily, my parents chose the former. Their love might have made up for some of the fact that I was a lost cause.

On the outside, Dumbledore may have had some faith in me having a cause.

He did not hesitate to accept me into Hogwarts, my dream, and made every necessary accommodation.

On the inside however, even Dumbledore thought I was a lost cause.

When I first met him, he was missing the twinkle in his eyes that my mum had assured me was his signature. He may have desired to think of me as not a lost cause, but it usually proves near impossible. Even to the man who believed in everyone who was usually not believed in, I was a lost cause.

The sorting hat as well, believed me to be a lost cause.

I took the longest time out of all the students to be sorted into my correct house.

The hat insisted that I belonged in Slytherin with the rest of the people like me and only relented when I begged continuously to be put into Gryffindor. I'm not sure why I pushed the hat so hard to put me into that house because even I thought I was a lost cause.

Even as I stepped off of the stool and took off the hat and made my way to the cheering Gryffindor table, I thought I was a lost cause

I thought I was a lost cause.

Everyone thought I was a lost cause.

Everyone except them.

As I sat down at the Gryffindor table, a rather good-looking boy in my year with black hair and grey eyes was next to me and introduced himself. Introduced himself, like he was talking to any other normal boy who had just been sorted into Gryffindor, and not a lost cause.

Then, as the sorting progressed, two boys, sorted right after the other, one with messy black hair and one with blonde hair and watery eyes made their way to the Gryffindor table and sat down on either side of me and the boy who was recently introduced to me a Sirius Black. They told me they were James Potter and Peter Pettigrew and asked me who I was like I was most definitely not a lost cause.

And it stayed that way. Not for one year, or two, or until they found out why most people thought of me as a lost cause.

In fact, I was never a lost cause for Sirius, James and Peter.

I was even less of a lost cause when they became Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs.

In fact, at the moment when they lead me into the outskirts of the Forbidden Forest and transformed into my new animal companions for the first time, I felt like anything but a lost cause.

If only it had lasted.

Ten years, ten glorious years of being someone with a cause. Being someone who is a cause.

But all good things have to come to an end, and with the end of James's life, and in too short a time, Sirius's life, I became a lost cause again.

And it's selfish to say, but that may be the thing that I miss the most about my best friends.

I miss the fun we had.

I miss their careless laughter.

I miss their mischief, and jokes, and just sitting under the beach tree near the Lake trying-but-not-really to keep them in check, laughing the whole way.

But mostly I miss that with the Marauders, I, Remus Lupin, was never a lost cause.