Disclaimer: Am I the only one that would be flattered if JKR sued them?
(A/N) And because you all love my metaphors so much: This is a building block of which I am constructing a wall that will shield any sane or coherent thoughts from entering my mind. Written to Come Clean by Eisley, more for incorporated feel than lyrical meaning. For Kibler, to whom I hope this won't be utterly superfluous.
He could try to avert her gaze.
Because it's hard to look at her these days, so he doesn't. He knows what is waiting for him inside those eyes. He knows they'll be cold and unforgiving and longing. He knows that when he goes back, he won't be able to think of anything else but that gaze. It will haunt him, whenever his mind strays to her.
Because it does so regularly. And it hurts and his heart gives painful pangs of regret and yearning when he wakes to find that he's not in her flat, she's not in his embrace.
So he stares at his plate, eagerly cleared of the feast Molly had ardently supplied. He can still feel her gaze fixed on him, like a transparent spotlight. Her Auror qualifications becoming blatant as her eyes dexterously penetrate him, trying to get him to lower his noble resolve. He makes silent plies that someone will try to make conversation with him, make conversation with her.
Unfortunately, Fleur is making sure that everyone in the Grimmauld kitchen is concentrating on her, as she tries to explain the overly complicated seating chart for her fast-approaching wedding. And she is capturing everyone's attention, except for the one he desperately wishes would lift from him.
And part of him knows he's cruel, because she is longing for him to look up at her, a desire she has most-likely shared with a not-so-sneaky arbitrator Molly, who had coaxed him into visits for these dinners, luring him with offers of home-cooked food and the advantage of not being on her infamous bad side (Why do you think Mundungus is so skinny?).
He knows that if his determination fails, she'll try: Try to force whatever she is feeling to her eyes, trying to compensate for all the verbal conversation he has not bothered to listen to, to look into it on the profound depths he knows she speaks from.
She needs it, and he wishes that she didn't. She doesn't deserve to be with him, she deserves better. And somewhere in his rants on his insufficiency he had somehow made her feel inadequate.
Her hair, bland and mousy. Her eyes, no, not her eyes; the lustrous Black black that he remembers from Sirius. Sirius would flaunt them. She could as well, if they weren't shadowed underneath, from lack of sleep, worry, and from the rigorous, work she had been putting herself through.
So that she doesn't have to go back home to her empty flat. So she doesn't have to confirm he's not there. She'd eat out most days, because she could never cook for herself, and sitting alone at the table was painstaking, especially when she would turn in her seat to say something and find the chair next to hers vacant.
And he knows more than anything what is waiting for him back with the other lycanthropes. Savaging, cold, killing. He is one of them; they have accepted him, albeit apprehensively. He knows Fenrir Greyback is already suspicious about his motives, as he should be. Remus is the last victim he would suspect to give into the feral ways of his equals.
The more he thinks about the wilderness he accustoms, the weaknesses he doesn't have the strength to surmount, and the treachery that his kind has committed, the more he is convinced that he is doing the right thing. Even if it will take time for her, he is doing the right thing.
Silent readers will forever be on Molly's infamous bad side.
