Disclaimer- I don't own it. :)
Written for the Fanfiction Quidditch League Competition. My prompts were sadness, black, weekday, and stupid. Not an especially cheerful combination. It's a tiny bit under a thousand words, but I remember there beign a give-or-take-fifty rule, and as it's 987 words, it should be okay. :)
Remus Lupin attended the Potters' funeral alone.
He wore what had been Caradoc Dearborn's suit, which tugged at his neck and sagged around his shoulders and weren't quite the shade of black he wanted. They were normal-sorrow black, the sadness over losing an aunt or a cousin or a grandparent. There were not Remus Lupin black, not nearly black enough to convey the pain someone felt when their world had crashed around him, when three best friends were dead and one was imprisoned for it, when everything became hazy with betrayal. That was the kind of black he wanted his suit.
As he sidled into the funeral parlor's halls, he was hit with a sense that he didn't belong. It was ridiculous, of course. He knew he had as much right to be there as anyone else. It was stupid of him to think otherwise. And yet...a part of him screamed at him that he was too unclean to be here with Lily's Muggle relatives and James's many friends, that if the people around him knew what he was, it wouldn't matter that Lily and James would want him here, that they'd kick him out...
No. Remus was being foolish. Lily and James would want him here. That was what mattered.
There was no one left but him, after all.
He walked down the hallway into the main room feeling as though a cloud of dementors were swarming over him. He nearly bumped into several people, including a couple of blue-haired old ladies that could have been aunts of either Lily or James.
"Oh my, that young man," said one old lady when Remus mumbled an apology for nearly bumping into them. "You'd think he'd have better manners."
"Yes, almost as bad as having the funeral on a weekday," tittered the other in reply. Remus felt as though someone had dropped a stone into his stomach. "You'd think someone would have more taste."
Was that it? Was that what they were there for? Gossiping about the day of the week the funeral took place on? Remus wanted to vomit. Remus wanted to throw a temper tantrum in the middle of the funeral hall. He wanted to punch both of those old ladies in the face.
Remus, being better (or calmer or more of a coward, because he knew James or Sirius would have punched them, except he couldn't think about Sirius, he could never think about Sirius again) than that, followed the trickle of people into the viewing room. The room where he would be expected to look at the dead bodies of one of his best friends, one of the only friends he would ever have, and his wife, a woman who had been kind and smart and a wonderful mother, if she had ever been given a real shot at it. A woman who hadn't expected to die at twenty-one.
Most people only took a minute or two to examine the bodies before moving on, but Remus froze when he saw James's face as he lay in that casket. His breath caught in his throat when he saw that James's hair, so messy and unruly in life, had finally been tamed in death. Someone had taken off his glasses. Remus thought James looked smaller without them.
Remus tore his gaze away and kept walking. He didn't look at Lily. He would rather remember her the way he'd last seen her (narrowing her eyes in poorly-concealed distrust, trying to smile at a man she believed to have betrayed her). Maybe, he thought, he would rather not remember her at all.
He took his seat and waited for the service to begin, even thought it wasn't due to start for some time. He didn't want to talk to these people. He didn't want to see their grief, not when he was so deeply entrenched in his own.
A thin, long-necked woman with eyes that were too large seated herself next to Remus. He wished she hadn't. A minute passed in silence.
"Did you know her?" she asked Remus quietly, her voice trembling. "Or were you here for...him?"
"I knew both of them," answered Remus. He wished she would stop talking to him. Why him?
"Did you know them well?"
"Yes."
The woman sighed. "I wasn't on very good terms with her...with Lily. But I didn't...I didn't want her dead."
He looked at her closely and realized who she was. "You're Petunia."
"W-what? How did you know?"
"I was very close with both of them," he said lamely. He didn't want to elaborate, especially not to the woman who made Lily come back to school in tears for seven years in a row.
"So then...you're a..."
"A wizard."
"But you look so...normal."
Remus didn't dignify that with a response. Silence lapsed.
"I...I have Harry," Petunia whispered suddenly. Remus stared at her.
"Dumbledore...he told me not to tell anyone, but if you were close with them, then I don't think it's bad that you know. I have Harry."
"Of course you do," said Remus.
Petunia seemed highly disappointed that his reaction hadn't been grander.
"Why aren't you surprised?"
Remus shrugged.
A middle-aged couple seated themselves behind Remus. He heard one whisper, "Did you hear? Sirius Black requested permission to come to the funeral. Isn't that sick?"
Remus stood up.
"I have to go to the bathroom," he lied.
He left Petunia Dursley sitting all by herself and retreated to the hallways, where he crumpled against the wall and hid his face in his hand as he cried.
He watched the service from the entrance, not sure what he was hiding from.
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