nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
She's always thought him loveliest in Muggle clothes, although it's getting rarer and rarer for wizards to forego their robes in this day and age for fear of slurs, of doubts, of whispers that reach the wrong purebloods and end in hexes and trips to St. Mungo's. Still, Mary would walk up to the boys' dormitory and there he'd be, sprawled across his bed and telling Sirius jokes with his head hanging upside-down off the edge of the mattress, sides of his plaid button-up pooling loose onto the sheets around a cotton tee and she'd melt a little to see him, even now she's always finding puddles of herself splattering onto her ankles every time he steps in the room. She's always kept close the roughness of his jeans on weekends and his crinkled smile when he'd wake to greet her with nighttime eyes in the mornings, hair tousled and spiked with grease, spikier once she'd tangle herself in it, but she's not supposed to see Remus through those eyes anymore.
It's ruining the entire castle—she took a walk the other day and where there were corridors and closets and stairwells she saw entangled fingers, flowers slipped into one another's hair, chaste kisses, not so chaste kisses. It made her head pound, makes her head pound, clutching her temples and her deepening lines as if to pull out the days but a dozen cuts later, they are still swirling there, festering in her past where there he stood and there he stands and there he'll always stand. Long after he's run away, in her cluster-mind Remus is still meeting her eyes with the intensity of a dandelion tipping its yellow fragility up to meet the wind, his jaw relaxing into open-mouthed marvel, unable to dam all the futures they didn't know how to hold. His hands were gentler than summer rain and his body was softer and hotter and stickier than sweet hell from all the sweat she cried for him and when Mary touched him, she would open her eyes wide and rock him hard and soft and breathless into the ground and pray he could hear her I love yous over his screams, see them in her eyelashes so brightly that he can still see them now, even with the corners of their mouths turned down and her head bowed with avoidance and anger and shame and all the gifts that she broke herself to give him but couldn't.
His eyes are big and stretched apart and his nose is weaker than he wants it and he's got Hepburn lips and calluses and folds over his belly that he's losing, little by little, with every full moon, and to Mary he is flawless in every way she has ever seen him, fat and malnourished and grey and grinning and sad. He would weep between moons sometimes and she would hold him and count weeks for a cure, love him as he was (is), love the tears because they were his, hate the tears because they always came and they'd always come back after she'd scrape them away. Mary was forever scraping him when she didn't want to be, trying to sandpaper away his softest edges as if a person could be enough to heal them. From what she can tell, he's happier now without her, glows more when she glimpses him across classrooms, and it makes her sob and punch things and hope it's real and hope it isn't.
There are so many things she has left to say—confessions and proclamations and adorations and proposals and she'd have fucking married that boy if he'd asked her after graduation, she probably still would, sense be damned—but if they didn't sink in the thousands of times she's already said them, they couldn't possibly now that he's feigning stranger and she's breaking down in every corner of the castle that reeks everywhere of wolf. There are so many things to say and no time or chance or matter, and he is gone and she is with him still and it is only when she struggles to sleep alone that she can convince herself that she's only holding the echoes of his hands.
A/N: Title quoted from ee cummings's beautiful "somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond."