Remus Liked To Read
There is something extremely pitiful about a boy who steals books.
Books, essentially, are worthless. Paper and ink, that's all they are. They're just words strung together. And words are meaningless. They can't keep you warm, or feed you, or do anything to change the fact that your life is dismal, and will be for the rest of the foreseeable future. They simply tell stories. Stories, as everyone with a grain of common sense knows, are another word for lies. This view on reading mirrored exactly the opinions of Remus's parents on the subject. And because ever since he was bitten Remus had been used to lying about himself almost automatically, he thought he'd take a look at a book and see how well other people did it.
His parents' book collection came to a grand total of twenty-three volumes. Four of them were cookery manuals, nine were self-help books, and three were written in French (his mother's native tongue). The others had words like 'transubstantiation' and 'amalgamation' in them and none were less than six hundred pages long. It was no place for a child to grow up.
The first book he stole was a book about vampires. It was the very first one he picked up and flicked through in the bookshop. It was a Muggle author, who had no clue what real vampires were like, and told a rambling tale of swishy black cloaks and Transylvanian accents, but Remus loved it instantly. He loved it so much that he 'forgot' to pay for it, and simply walked out of the doorway, clenching tightly it in his clammy fist.
Other boys of Remus Lupin's age, that precarious age between the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence, stole different things. Sweets, chewing-gum, comics. Shoplifting was hardly uncommon. They might perhaps have glanced upwards at the 'girlie' magazines in the newsagents, the ones which displayed lurid pictures of blonde models, posing provocatively at the camera. They didn't attempt to steal those, though. They weren't quite ready to handle the potential consequences of their mothers discovering 'filth' in their bedrooms, and anyway, most of them weren't tall enough yet to slip the magazines into their pockets discreetly. So they made do with the sterile underwear catalogues their sisters pored over, and smoked their first cigarettes in dark alleyways, making sure to consume whole packets of mint-flavoured gum before making their sullen way home.
Remus Lupin didn't care much for sweets, and the buxom beauties on the top shelves of the magazine rack didn't interest him. He supposed they were pretty, in an aesthetic way, but they didn't provide a distraction from his normal life. They didn't soothe or calm him. They didn't really seem to do anything other than pout in various states of undress. Remus couldn't have got his hands on an underwear catalogue if he'd wanted one; his mother had worn the same brand of white cotton briefs since she was twelve, and had no interest whatsoever in frills and lace, thankyouverymuch. Cigarettes made him cough. So he engaged in the one act of rebellion he could stomach at the time – literature. In the beginning he stole paperbacks from the small shop at the end of his road, and later, when he came to Hogwarts, he occasionally helped himself to the extensive collection at the library. When Remus originally thought about starting to read, he'd never considered actually building up a collection. And he certainly never intended to like them. He didn't like rebellion, as a rule, it made him even more different from everyone else.
Sirius was all for rebellion, and together with James he engaged in several acts of debauchery in their years at Hogwarts. Underage drinking topped the list, closely followed by what the pair called 'sessions' with girls. These usually took place in dark corners at parties, on grassy knolls by the lake, and, famously, one occurred halfway through an otherwise tedious History Of Magic lesson. Sirius was a boy that James's mother would most likely describe as a 'free spirit', and who Remus's father would most likely describe as a 'hooligan'. He simply didn't understand why Remus had to read all time.
"It's not as if all those words make you any smarter," Sirius would point out, rolling a joint expertly, his head against a pillow. "You're still nearly failing Potions. And for someone who changes into –you know- so regularly, you're crap at Transfiguration."
Remus would turn the page of his stolen book serenely, and say nothing. He'd pilfered this one from the gift-shop in Hogsmeade. It was woefully bad, a romance novel about a 18th century heroine with an ever-slipping bodice and a tendency to brew up defective Love Potions, but he'd already read the biography of David Brent, Auror, and he needed something to pass the time in the run-up to full moon.
"Leave him alone," James would admonish Sirius, leaning over Peter to take the joint from Sirius's lips. "He's not bad at Defence. Or Charms. And there are loads of other things he's better than us at."
"Like what?" Sirius would cry indignantly, sitting up. No-one would say anything, and then Sirius would roll his eyes and relax again. "Oh. Arithmancy."
Remus found reading to be very useful. Well, if not useful, then interesting. Scraps of knowledge like the range at which a Boggart could successfully detect a person's greatest fear, or the environments in which Gillyweed thrived simply stuck in his memory. Books themselves also had their benefits: as door stoppers, table wedges, shields from missiles thrown by the other Marauders.
Books helped ease the pain of what was happening in his life. Books made the long, painful hours healing after his monthly transformation almost bearable. Books helped him block out the deaths, the betrayal. Books helped him fade reality into the background.
Remus liked to read.