A/N- My first time writing R/Hr (: I really love this pairing, but they're so hard to capture! I hope I did it well enough in this little drabble thing-y-ma-bob.
Disclaimer- Yeah... no.
Moony, they called him. Appropriate, you mused after you heard, considering his... furry little problem, as he said James liked to call it. But you didn't think of it as a problem. You thought of it as something that made him beautiful.
And you laughed at the irony of that. A werewolf, beautiful—ha! And you called yourself smart. But even so, in that outlawed woodland back in time, laced with terrors and horrors of the night, you couldn't bring yourself to not include him in that category even if he was, at the present moment (and completely not in his right mind, as he hadn't taken the potion), trying to kill you.
So Harry held you then. He was protecting you from the monster in front of the man, and you oh-so wished that you didn't need that protection right then. God, why couldn't Remus have just taken his Wolfsbane? Because he was defending you, you told yourself, even if it was a lie.
When he barged into the Shrieking Shack, when he expelliarmus-ed Harry's wand, when he made you think he was helping a murderer, he wasn't doing that for you, he was doing it for Harry. For Sirius. For the memory of James and Lily. He looked at Sirius like he was his long lost brother (which, you mused, to him he was) and always looked at Harry like he was the most precious thing alive (which, you mused, to him he was).
You've never really been jealous of Harry before, but something about being the son of one of Remus' best friends makes your blood pop and your heart ache. You want to be that close to him. You want him to see you as more than a child; more than Harry Potter's best friend.
And then you remember that he called you the "cleverest witch of your age". He also said "that he'd ever met". This meant you were cleverer than Lily. And you remembered him talking about how smart Lily was. Granted, you were hopping mad at him then, and he was pretty much sassing you, you still like to think he meant every word he said. That he'd always meant every word he said.
Something about this made you fill up inside, and you were pretty sure had a dementor come up right then and there you'd be able to conjure up one heck of a Patronus.
Silently, you wondered what form yours would take, considering you've never actually preformed the charm. You hoped it would be a wolf, and then blushed at the cliché. Of course it wouldn't be a wolf. Patronuses take the form of something sentimental to the person conjuring it (and as appropriate as that would be, you have a feeling Remus and the rest of the Hogwarts faculty would find it very, very inappropriate), and to you, Remus Lupin was nothing more than a Defense professor and schoolgirl crush. At least, you hoped it was just a schoolgirl crush. You didn't think you'd be able to live with it being more, especially considering you might never have seen him again.
Your heart hurt.
You knew he was leaving before you even saw his bags. Before Harry even got back from his office; before you returned to Hogwarts in year four and saw Umbridge teaching Defense. You never did see him, that year. And when you finally did see him things were already too late.
He had moved on, if there was ever anything to move on from. You were thirteen and he was thirty-three, and it just wasn't right, and you knew it. Not with the twenty year age difference. It will never be right. But you can't force yourself to get on with life and move on.
So it wasn't just a schoolgirl crush. It wasn't something that would go away with a week of not seeing him, or a month, or even a year. Silently, you wondered if it ever really did go away.
Remus, they called him. Remus Lupin. Appropriate, you mused. Very appropriate.