Chapter 13: Who Loves The Sun?
Upon returning to the Common Room, Remus went straight up to the dormitory, intent on taking the backlog of work that he'd put off to the weekend down to the fireplace and working there. Peter had left him to go to the library, saying he'd meet Remus for lunch later.
Sirius was lying on his unmade bed, coffin-like; arms and legs straightened and tucked in, symmetrical among the folds and furrows of linen. Anger was manifest in his hands. They gripped bunches of white by his trouser pockets. He stared at the bulge of his fabric ceiling, ignoring Remus.
Lunch was subdued. The Marauders were at half strength, and Remus and Peter made a brooding pair, planted in the middle of a sea of chattering Gryffindors. Mr and Mrs Potter's expressions had taken on the permanence of memory. They lurked in the corners of Remus' vision, in the shadows of his brain, wearied and damning, external conveyors of all the self-loathing he felt.
The afternoon dragged on, as time often does when one has nothing to measure it against. Sunset in February came just before six. Remus paused, halfway through an Arithmancy exercise, to watch it. The only windows in the Common Room faced west. The Fat Lady, the fireplace and the two staircases leading up to the dormitories held their places on the other three walls in the room.
There were five windows in total. The central window caught the eye first, for both the space it occupied in the centre of the wall, and its design, an elongated diamond of stained glass. It showed a large rose propped up by a thin green stalk. The petals were rendered in two colours, shards of pink and red glass, to give the impression of shadow. As with any other stylised piece in Hogwarts – oil and canvas, stone or steel – it had been charmed into animation. The petals would dance, glass fragments magically shrinking and expanding to slide by each other if there was a wind blowing outside. Every October, the rose wilted, turning gold and then brown. A green bud, no more than an extension of the stalk, would appear overnight, swelling for a week then giving way to new petals which unfurled and reddened, so that by Christmas the rose had blossomed again, a bowl of trembling pink.
The other four windows, set in pairs either side of the decorative centrepiece, were the height of a man, and the width of his palm. One could only approximate the weather by looking out of them: catch a snatch of sky, a hint of white that would suggest a cloud, the lower part brushed green and occasionally white in the winter. Sunlight lanced in horizontally, filling the plain windows with dipping orange, parallel ribbons of light. Four beams were strung across the room, between the windows and the wall above the fireplace. They gave strips of illumination to the wood, which glowed like plates of heated metal.
The rose looked like a grapefruit.
Peter wandered over to the table, using both arms to carry a black tome decorated with the constellations of the Northern Hemisphere. He sat next to Remus and pored over the book, growing frustrated. After twenty minutes, he'd written nothing but his name on the parchment beside him. He leant back in his chair with an exaggerated huff.
"I thought this was meant to be a doss subject", he moaned.
"It's divination, how bad can it get?" Remus asked.
Peter paled. "Next term", he whispered, "we're doing entrails".
"Entrails?"
"Professor Mistovich says, 'Vi are lucky to learn such noble Slavic art'" Peter said in a terrible attempt at a Russian accent.
This was lost on Remus. He'd just noticed Lily, sat beside Alice at the table on the far side of the Common Room, frowning at her homework, a familiar crease between her eyebrows. She glanced up and spotted Remus so quickly he wondered if she knew he'd been sitting there all along. They watched each other for several seconds until Lily returned to her work, smiling to herself. Marlene McKinnon and Julia Pepperwood – the two other sixth year witches in Gryffindor – turned around from the girls' table to see what Lily was smiling about. Remus quickly looked anywhere but Lily, settling on a chess match on the table next to his. Once he felt the girls were no longer eyeing him suspiciously, he returned to his work. Peter gave him a curious look. Remus cursed inwardly, berating himself for being so obvious. Staring at Lily Evans across a crowded Common Room would only lead to questions he couldn't answer.
"Sorry, Pete. James told me about your heroics", he said, figuring flattery would divert Peter from his own distractions. "Sounds like you did pretty well."
Peter grinned. "Thanks. Wasn't going to be much help as a rat, was I? Wish I'd acted sooner though", he mused.
"I'd have bitten you as well then".
"Nah, I reckon I could take a skinny wolf like you".
Remus tossed a ball of scrunched parchment at Peter. He swatted it away with the back of his hand. The parchment projectile sailed across the room and struck a small girl in the back of the head, causing her to start and turn around nervously.
Remus sniggered as Peter held up a hand in apology.
Half an hour after sunset, James returned to the Common Room. His unexplained absence brought with it a few stares. A couple of paces into the room he was met with a worried Marlene, demanding to know if he was alright and clucking in consternation when he showed his bandaged forearm off under the vague pretence of a 'Quidditch accident'. Managing to shrug her off, James headed straight up to the dormitory, reappearing a quarter of an hour later with Sirius.
Supper was marginally better than lunch. Sirius and Remus weren't on speaking terms and neither felt compelled to offer much in the way of conversation, leaving James and Peter to do most of the talking. Their group of four would lapse into uneasy silence from time to time.
James was in no hurry to fall asleep that night.
"Oi, Moony!"
Remus rolled over from the wall, tugging himself out of the first stages of slumber to look at James – neither had closed their hangings yet.
"Did you see Lily in the Hospital Wing today? She was all over me!" James said in a carrying whisper, rushing the words in his excitement.
A prickle of annoyance woke Remus further.
"Yeah. Nice one, man."
James continued, failing to notice his roommate's curtness.
"Does she ever talk about me on patrol?"
Quite often, Remus thought. 'Why does Potter pull those stupid pranks?' or something along those lines.
"Er, sometimes".
"What does she say?" James asked, wide-eyed, leaning towards Remus on his elbows. Remus looked back listlessly.
"She was impressed that time in Transfiguration when we'd just started human to animal transfigurations and you turned your hand into a claw before anyone else", Remus muttered, managing to dredge a lone positive comment Lily had made about James from his tired mind.
"Oh", James said, his grin slackening at the mention of schoolwork. "Anything else?"
"Asking her out in public", Remus said, causing James to nod repeatedly, with enough vigour to make himself dizzy, "isn't warmly received".
This was almost as large an understatement as Sirius describing Abbie Fletchley, a pretty Gryffindor witch in the year below, as 'slightly upset', when he'd broken up with her. The poor girl hadn't been dry-eyed for weeks afterwards, remonstrating with Sirius on several occasions in the Common Room.
"I'm gonna give it a week or two before asking her out again, so she's more likely to say yes", James said, boyish insolence softening his features.
Remus could only offer a rictus grin in return. James paid no attention to his fellow werewolf, flipping himself over to see if Sirius and Peter had anything to say on the subject of Lily Evans. He was met with settled snoring from both of them, and fell asleep in short order.
Sleep eluded Remus for some time; he lay awake, digesting what James had told him. He knew he should be happy for James for finally getting on with Lily. But if he was honest with himself, he wanted nothing of the sort. He couldn't deny that he'd grown far too close to Lily these last two days.
Once at Hogwarts, Remus had realised pretty quickly that he could never become romantically involved with a girl; there was every chance she'd discover he was a werewolf, and when she did, she wouldn't want anything to do with him. Not that there were scores of witches queuing up to date a skinny, bookish prefect. Granted, his head had been turned by a pretty girl more than once, but he'd never felt compelled to act on it. And as a result, he'd never really wanted to go out with a girl, or even have what Sirius referred to as a 'conquest'.
But he wanted Lily.
He wanted her green eyes, her red hair, and her tremulous laughs. He wanted every part of her slim ivory body. She'd found him out and she hadn't been repelled. She said she liked him. Remus repeated this fact to himself. He murmured it into his pillow; for a velvet second he held it like gospel to his chest. There was a novel lightness between his ribs. He supposed it must be hope.
Hope was dangerous. It was insistent. It was a type of arrogance, he supposed, that did not listen to circumstance or probability, untroubled by the charismatic Quidditch star, comatose in the bed adjacent to his, vying for the affections of the same girl.
The moon had climbed above the canopy of the Forbidden Forest by the time Remus let his slumberous thoughts overtake him. He wasn't the only one dreaming of blue, figure-hugging jumpers that left little to the imagination.
So I know this isn't the most exciting chapter, but stick with it because it all happens in the next two!