I like to watch Remus when he reads.
I can sit there for hours staring at him with an intensity only rivaled by the devotion that he shows towards the words on his lap. And it will be for hours. Remus would spend the entire day reading if left to his own devices and I admire him for that. I'm lucky if I last five minutes.
When he reads, his eyes zoom across the page and shine with such a passion, such an immense concentration that I find myself jealous of paper. I watch his brows furrow in darkness, raise in surprise. His lips move through all of the emotions; sometimes they'll appear in a line thin enough to rival McGonagall's, other times the ends will raise in that smirk that makes my heart expand.
Sometimes I'll sit close enough to him so that I can see the words that he is reading. It makes me feel closer to him than sitting near him could ever achieve. At that moment we are connected in more than just proximity, we are connected in thought; our inner voices exclaim the same phrases, they perform in the same tone. But these instances are short lived. I always feel as if I am intruding on something private. The characters' names mean nothing to me; the situations stem from no where. I feel a slight and guilty pang of jealousy again. These characters get Remus' focus and they share their story with only him. I want to share my story with Remus. I want the names and places of my life to be relevant to him.
I could tell that the book that Remus was reading last week was particularly moving to him. He would hardly move from that chair near the fire, and as I watched him, his eyes simply bored into the typeface with a new kind of reverie that I had never seen before. God, how I wished that same look could be sent in my direction, meant for me. The longer I watched Remus, the more enthralled he became by what he read and I became all the more engrossed by what I read on his features.
Finally, as the final pages drew to a close, I noticed that Remus had tears in his eyes, tears that reflected the firelight and made his amber eyes shine with such feeling that I feared my heart may burst from the strong love and emotion that I felt for him at that very moment. My breath caught in my throat. As Remus closed the book in his hands, his gaze shifted from the dirtied back cover up to me, sitting directly in front of him.
It was almost more than I could handle. That striking, moving, stare that was normally only reserved for the written word was focused on mejust me. Those eyes, those eyes that were full of depth, and knowledge, and feeling; the beauty of it all was directed at me. Those few seconds that Remus and I shared by the fire that night felt like an eternity of bliss. I felt as though an immense understanding passed between us, almost as if a special relationship was created right then and there.
And then it was gone with the literal blink of an eye. Remus looked down at the carpet and then back up at me, the sorrow replaced with the usual kindness that his eyes wore. He offered me a small smile that I returned.
"Sorry about that," he said, slight embarrassment evident in his tone. "I don't normally get that worked up over a book, but, you know…"
"Oh, Moony," I sighed, quickly falling back into my usual role, "No need to apologize. We all now you love your little stories more than life itself."
That earned me a "Shut it, Padfoot!" and a swift blow to the head by the very book that Remus had just finished. As it fell to the floor I made a mental note to return to it later.
"C'mon, let's go find Prongs 'n Wormtail. You need to do something reckless after all of that reading."
As I grabbed Remus' arm and pulled him to the portrait hole, I thought that maybe one day those looks would be all mine. Maybe one day Remus would read me.
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