Disclaimer: Not mine.
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Remus Lupin is glowing golden eyes, charged with emotion and intelligence and something like the kind of wisdom that is gained by too much pain. The look is wrong in a boy of ten, but Sirius feels himself drawn to it, somehow. They all do, and he thinks that Remus is the glue that holds them all together.
Remus Lupin is softly graying hair, twined with light brown. His mother cards her fingers through it, cleaning up the blood from his transformation with one hand, sadness in her eyes.
"You'll go gray early, darling. Your father did, and all this…stress won't help much…" She trails off, hand heavy on his head, bones in her leg digging into his cheek. "Your hair won't ever be white. Just a dignified gray. A handsome gray." She traces his features with a finger. "You'll always be handsome, sweetheart."
Remus Lupin is the smiles he gives. The shy curl of the lips he shows that day on the train, eyes peering up through long lashes; the polite model-student smile he puts on for the professors, and even McGonagall goes soft talking about Remus; the involuntary, almost unconscious one he gets when he wakes up, full moon after full moon, and finds the three of them curled in slumber on the floor next to him; the exhilarated beam on his face as he touches down on the ground, cheeks whipped red from the wind; the lazy grin tugging at his lips as he falls bonelessly next to Sirius, arms thrown out onto the other boy's chest as they fall asleep comfortably.
Remus Lupin is not his scars, as Sirius will tell him time after time after time. He tugs at Remus' hands as the other boy tries to cover the deep marks marring his pale skin.
"They're a part of you, Remus," Sirius says quietly. "But they're not all that you are." And then Sirius is tracing the scars with his fingers, and following his fingers with his lips, and Remus lets his head fall back on his pillow, and for the first time in his life, he lets himself believe that it's true.
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