The Past
Where he stands is simultaneously too big and too small. His isolation is tangible; and he stands in a room full of memories that will not cease to scar.
It is a flat, and it is warm and it is shabby and it is Remus' past.
In his past there were lazy Sundays, and boozy Fridays. There was shagging on the sofa before Prongs would come visit, just so they could tell him later and make him squeal.
But the past tense cuts like glass. There was. Not there is; not there will be: there was.
His past. Not his present, never again his future. He was given a life he never expected; given friends who cared too much and a man whom he loved with all his heart. But it was ripped away from him by the darkness that lurked within someone he thought he knew so well; too well.
Remus wonders at what point it was that he began to understand that he needed these things in his life. He wonders because he knows that this was the moment fate would have decided to take it all away from him.
Remnants surround him. The unmade bed reminds him of the angry fuck of only yesterday. The shattered glass on the kitchen floor reveals to him where it all went afterwards. The missing photographs confirm to him that Sirius left, and that now there is no chance of ever getting him back.
He doesn't want him back. He does want him back. Remus had never been too good at handling his emotions; he hid it all away until it was forcibly procured from him by someone. Someone like James. Someone like Peter. Someone that he will never get to see again.
Because of that boy; because of Sirius. Sirius: the boy who chewed his lips to shreds after their first kiss in anxiety; the boy who told him that he loved him convincingly enough that he actually believed it. Was it all a lie?
He has lost everything. Even himself; even his identity. He doesn't know who he is without his friends, doesn't know who he is without Prongs and Padfoot coercing, without Wormtail sighing conspiringly with him. Before them he was reticence personified; the boy no one noticed, a boy who wasn't special. With them he became someone else; someone he didn't completely hate.
But now it is gone; they are gone. And so he prepares for a life where he'll always be Remus Lupin; because there's no one left to call him Moony.
