Hello! This is just a little ficlet about Remus that I wrote while feeling blue. Hope you like it (=
-Sachita
Chocolate
***
It's funny how a plain, black bar of chocolate can solve problems much bigger and much bitterer than it. When he was young, chocolate dispelled the taste of blood on his tongue (a particular hard full moon), made the neighbour girl's tears go away (it's because of phenethylamine, a hormone, they say, but for him it was just chocolate) and restores life to meaning. It even makes him smile at times and that is hard to achieve.
But chocolate is not there to help as he cries over James' and Lily's bodies. Chocolate does not hold him as he weeps on the streets of London the nights afterwards, alone, friendless, abandoned. Chocolate does not comfort him while he bemoans Sirius's betrayal, Peter's murder and little Harry's plight, growing up without parents.
But in the end, chocolate is the only thing that is left for him and in spite of its infidelity, he finds himself walking into a Muggle shop mere weeks after that fateful Halloween 1981, buying a whole carton full of chocolate bars. After just one bite he notices that his moth is full, swallowing is painful and that the chocolate tastes of tears and resentment, but he keeps eating mechanically, because that is the only thing he can do now.
Year later, when he meets James's son on the train, his first words to him are: "Eat it. It'll help," but his aim is a far more complicated one than just making the boy feel better; he's counting on chocolate to establish a tenuous bridge between Harry and him. The boy is the only thing that is left from James, but his cowardice prevents him from introducing himself and the connection he had to his parents at first. Instead he relies on chocolate to convey the words unsaid.
That bar of chocolate on the train does a lot for him that year, though. He finds out that an old friend thought dead was really no friend at all, and he regains a lost friend on the way. But still, all is taken from him a second time and, piteous creature that he feels he is, he turns back to large quantities of chocolate to make it all okay.
He offers chocolate to everyone else after the battle in the Department of Mysteries, that cost him his best friend, but they all regard him with looks varying between pity, and in Harry's case faint disgust thrown in the jumbled mix of grief and sadness he emanates ( "How can he even think of chocolate now?" is clearly written in his young face). The others even seem to be glad when he turns to chocolate. They clearly think that it's his way of coping and they don't need to comfort him as it would only mean mutual awkwardness, but because he is afraid of destroying their illusions- the only thing they got left- he never tells them how much he loathes chocolate.
That night Molly finds him in the kitchen, a bar of chocolate in his hand and tears streaming down his face. She, the epitome of a mother, takes a worried look at him and embraces him, telling him, that it will all be okay. But when Remus opens his fist and sees the melted black mass caught up in the crumpled silver wrapping, all useless and inedible, the tears start all over again.