Player alias: MJ Character Name: Remus Lupin Canon: Harry Potter Setting: POTTERVERSE. Tag/Prompt: This is a header so I can make you shove multiple threads under it.
It was a new moon last night, but Remus is still here, sprawled out on his stomach in a hospital bed and only recently awake. It was Madam Pomfrey's idea, after the mess with Snape. Hide the pattern better. Disappear to the hospital wing every time he has the sniffles instead of only during full moons. If he saves it for the weekends, he doesn't have to miss classes.
And it's quiet. No one wakes him up jumping on his bed shouting about revenge on Slytherins or plans to woo Evans or the giant squid. He wakes up in bits and pieces, until he's slides out of a lucid dream and straight into watching William. He isn't watching-watching; his eyes opened and William was there in his line of vision, is all, doing something or other with jars and vials, with his hair naturally tousled the way Remus suspects James is always hoping to accomplish.
Remus has grown three and a half inches since this time last year. His ankles and wrists stick out of his pajamas, and he has entirely too much elbow, and his curls are flattened and lopsided on one side. He thinks about turning his face down into his pillow and going back to sleep.
But Remus can see William's eyelashes from here, and one of those jars is very close to the edge of the table.
"Careful," he says hoarsely, and pauses for a second to cough and rub his eyes clean. It gives him time to try to remember—seventh year, Hufflepuff—"William."
"Fuck," says William, startling, interrupted in the middle of mumbly rote memorization of an intensity specific to people of Chinese descent who missed out on generations of mental acuity in this tedious department but nonetheless could really use it. "What the cunting," You don't hear Muggle curses very often in Hogwarts, but if you're around William much, you hear them a great deal more often. They sound natural too, as far as the range of potential effect goes; Purebloods rarely seem to have the hang of it the way that the ones with Muggle parents do. And so it goes, "son of a b--"
The Hufflepuff whirls and snatches at the jar. Succeeds primarily in knocking it off the lip of the table with his fingertips, secondarily in catching it, and finally in leaking a bit out of the rim. It slops off onto the floor, then when it lands, does something that makes William's eyes go huge, but the event is hidden by the edge of Remus' cot so. so-- then William makes what must be an irritated noise in the back of his throat. It could also be that he's clearing out phlegm, but he'd be the one laid up sick then.
"I can sort it," he says. "I know how." He knows things because he's studying for the NEWTs, and mundane sorts of seventh year things that you probably don't have to worry about when you're mates with James Potter's hair and Sirius Black's debonair rebellion je ne sais quois and Peter's around. (also when you're only sixth year, that probably matters too.)
It occurs to William around then he's being snappish at a lad who's looking terribly frail, so he adds, "Don't worry," as he starts to stoop, tugging his robes up from his feet.
dude you don't get to "ohno he's cute" at me and use that icon at the same time
Remus isn't worried. Remus is folding his forearms under his head, coiled in tight so he can hide his smile in the crook of his arm. The smile is a little bit like a post-prank smile, a little bit the silent equivalent of laughing at William instead of with him, but mostly it's something else. In any case the specifics of the smile are lost behind his ample amount of elbow, along with what little crispness his muddy (but melodious! and maybe charmingly rustic) Welsh accent ever had.
"Good one of us does," he says. "I'm rubbish at Potions."
Most of his consonants are indistinguishable. His crinkled-up eyes give away the smiling thing. He gives up and lifts his chin up onto his forearm and tries again, watching what bit of the action he can see, which is mostly William's head.
"No," William retorts, the top of his head bobbing in and out of view. "The floor's charmed against all sorts of things." He ends up picking another jar and upending some of its contents-- powdery, some vegetable matter-- optimistically on the offending spot. There's a mumbled kind of confession, relegated to a side-note: "It might be a bit different color is all."
When he reappears from his squat, he looks reasonably calm. But maybe he forgot he had an audience, because when he meets Remus' eyes his neck turns a bit red where it meets the heavy fabric of his garments. (In reality, he had not forgotten. You might try some unlikely excuse about body temperature and exertion, but it's not that either.)
"Are you supposed to be bringing up your marks then, while you're laid up?" he asks, holding onto the foot of Remus' bed, then letting go, then holding onto it again. "You don't look like you're too ill to use your eyes."
Remus deliberates that proposal while he rolls over onto his back—all the better to watch William without straining his neck, my dear—and lifts up onto both elbows in silence, looking thoughtful. Then he lifts one fist to his mouth and coughs into it. It's a very fake cough, with some mild but dramatic wheezing tacked onto the end. He is terribly ill. How dare you.
"It isn't anything I'd improve by reading," he adds, flaumping back down onto his pillow, now that he's done making a point. He doesn't give William's flushed neck any particular attention, but he does notice. It will be there in the back of his mind if he needs it later. "It's the cutting and stirring and—keeping track of time. I can't do it. Last week I got so convinced I'd done it wrong, waiting for my Wiggenweld to turn turquoise, I tossed in an extra lionfish spine."
He mimes an explosion with one hand. A very small one. No one died. If anyone had died Remus wouldn't be smiling or—not flirting. Werewolves don't flirt. He's just smiling.
It seems like a Gryffindor trap. What is a Hufflepuff to do, besides spent a split-second in bemused paralysis, scrutinizing Remus from between the aforementioned eyelashes. Why is Remus' hair so curly? And if he hasn't got a cough, why is he in here at all?
Probably something to do with the unmanageable development of limbs. The quantity is normal, but other metrics are above-average, a severity of coltishness that not even robust wizardly physiology can support. William stops looking at the blankets and trying to imagine Remus' legs. What. oh. His eyes cut between the erstwhile manual explosion and Remus' face. He immediately forgets about Remus' diagnosis, letting go of the bedpost once and for all. He'd already stopped thinking about his exams some minutes ago.
"Depends," he says, his mouth starting to twist, trying to make up its mind about something, but his stare is decidedly accusatory if absent any kind of malevolence. "On if you knew it was like to explode, or if you thought it'd speed up Wiggenweld."
Remus opens his mouth as if to say something redemptive, like of course I knew it would explode I'm not stupid or I thought I might have forgotten one of the quills so it wasn't completely and entirely unreasonable, but all possible redemptive statements would be lies, which—whatever. He is probably going to lie to William twenty thousand times before all is said and done. But this particular lie would be pointless, so he turns his opened mouth into a lopsided smile and shrugs.
"I hoped it would do something other than sit there bubbling," he says, "and it did."
And James and Sirius thought it was brilliant. So it obviously was.
"Are you very good?" While he talks he checks his forehead for warmth with an overgrown puppyish hand he will never entirely grow into. He did have a fever when he came in last night, but Madame Pomfrey fed him something that tasted like fresh grass cuttings to get rid of it. He could probably sneak back to his room now, if it weren't for the inconvenient Hufflepuff witness and his inconvenient eyelashes. (One admires what one lacks.) "You must be either very good or very bad if you're studying on a Saturday."
"I'm," William starts to insist he's good, but the superstitious side of him takes over abruptly. It seems unwise to boast about one's skills so close to the biggest most telling bitch of all exams. He makes a face. "I won't jinx it. Everyone studies on Saturdays this close to showtime, anyhow. Well, those of us who consider ourselves mere fucking mortals."
He's not exactly being passive-aggressive in the direction of Remus and his friends, in that-- yes maybe a little but there's no real toxic resentment under it, no Implication to twist or darken his tone. Some of us have to meet the neurotic mundane pursuits quota and populate the minor character cast of Hogwarts. We can't all have flippy hair and main storylines. He doesn't seem as harsh as he could be, anyway, because he is walking forward through this, coming around the edge of the bed.
One hand out too, to check Remus for a fever. Even if the werewolf doesn't have one, his fingers will be cool. "I probably ain't good enough to sort what you had," William says, a little doubtfully. It takes a lot to put a wizard into bed at all, and something like a fever is somehow less common than. you know. petrifications and smashed limbs and growing scales and all that. "You feeling worse?"
William's hand is cool and also enviably proportionate to the rest of his body, but Remus can only endure it with frozen terror that has (for once) nothing to do with imagining the revulsion all of his classmates will feel if he's ever found out, I let him share my butterbeer and he used the prefect's bath and now I touched his disgusting lycanthropic forehead with my bare hand, and everything to do with being—worse than a werewolf—a sixteen-year-old boy who is not particularly spotty but also not exempt from adolescence and who hasn't yet washed his face for the morning.
This is stupid, obviously. He doesn't need to impress William. He doesn't need to impress anyone at all. It's a benefit of being mates with James and Sirius. They do all the impressing, apparently enough of it to make even seventh years with charming noses a bit jealous, and Remus and Peter are somehow both popular and barely noticed by virtue of their proximity. It's worked very well for Remus these past nearly-six years. This is no time for him to start trying to endear himself to Hufflepuffs.
"Better," he says, the word bursting abruptly out of his horrified pause, "but Madam Pomfrey won't let me leave yet. I'm ill, you know." That's the story being passed around. And the more specific story, refined for his increasingly knowledgable classmates: "All the time. It's spell damage from when I was small." That's almost true. "Every time I sneeze, she thinks it's the end."
It isn't the end. It's at least twenty-two years from the end. He's deceptively hardy, for someone with such visible ribs, and he's probably talking too much. He shuts himself up with a sheepish smile that could either mean he isn't dying or mean he's being very brave about it.
He is definitely trying to endear himself to a Hufflepuff.
William, who is hopelessly susceptible to anyone try to endear themselves to him (and sometimes those who also are not trying at all), immediately sits down on the side of Remus' bed! He almost gives in to an unpremeditated gesture of a little press of his hand to his chest, in shock, but it winds up being an abortive flicker. His whole face is my goodness me though! Or at least some version with more fucks.
"Holy fucking shit," like that. "What sort of a cunt does that to a baby? I hope they found the bloke. Or lady. Or if it was some sort of an unsexed magical creature, I hope they dealt with that too." No other options rally forth due to his rather limited insight into these social matters. William surveys Remus a bit woefully, but mostly angrily. Oh no a popular mischievous high-school boy who also has a tragic past. Yes MJ we're pretending for a few minutes that it requires all of the above or an even higher standard to get William twisted up. Pretending is good and you're an RPer you know how.
"Not that I'm about to go Madame Pomfrey on you," he adds hastily. "Yeah, I'm trying to become a Healer. But my parents was muggles and I grew up around them, so I was always taught this stuff about holistic perspectives and shit. My neighbor's a doctor-- a physician, a Muggle healer-- and he's always banging on about Eastern and Western medicine, but taking the long view as well. So," he tries to get to the point even though Remus doesn't have a lot of options other than to nod and smile. "I know Muggle medicine don't really apply that much, but--
"A bit of a sniffle is probably good for you. Build up your immune system." Is Remus still listening. William was looking straight at his face but he blinks once or twice and tries to actually see him. "Muggles worry about that kind of shit.
"And vitamins, and exercise. Like going out for jogs or walks. I mean, not now-- not while you're unwell."
He should have said something sooner. For example, while William was cursing his attacker, whom as far as Remus is presently aware was no one in particular, just a werewolf who did a poor job putting up containment spells, perhaps, or who was caught out of doors by accident, or whose big-mouthed hot-tempered idiot friend set loose to scare someone. It was an accident, he should have said, to spare William the anger and whomever-it-was the negative vibes. They didn't mean to. For fairness' sake.
But fairness is a Hufflepuff value, and this—having someone with good hair and a nice smile be indignant on his behalf instead of repulsed, coming closer instead of backing away, and then, you know—is something straight out of Remus' boring vanilla daydreams, even if it's built on lies. (And even if it's a boy. There are too many things about himself that bother Remus for him to devote any more energy to being bothered by that. David Bowie and Elton John say it's all right, anyway.) So he's listening, yeah, and maybe looking abnormally pleased to be on the receiving end of William's backstory and medical advice and attention, until he echoes that last bit, jogs, with a touch of incredulity.
He also sits up, propelled by teenage insanity. He isn't as much taller than William as he will be when he's done growing, and most of his height is in his legs, so he's nearly eye-level, propped up by his arms. "My mum's a muggle," he says, which is not only relevant to the topic at hand but also relevant to friendships in general in the current political climate, "but she's never made me go run around in circles. She hardly lets me go outside."
Though William hadn't known about Remus' parentage, the Marauders' political stance is known to most people (most of whom don't even know them by that particular name). William might have been cagier with someone else.
Most people also know (believe) that Sirius Black has a Muggle tattoo somewhere on his person, Peter prefers Chocolate Frogs to the more variegated and outlandish-tasting offerings of the candy store, James Potter has got a unicorn hair threaded into the tail of his broom for luck that has evaded all sorts of professors' detection efforts over the years. and Remus. is said to favor the color blue, possess an extraordinarily large signature for someone who is otherwise generally unprepossessing. and he's the nice one who isn't Peter.
Most people don't know how cute Remus is close up. Not even the kind of cute that you have to think about for a few minutes, or approach from a specific angle. William decides to think about health and the kinship of Muggle parents instead. "That's a pity," he replies, scooting his butt a bit up the bed. "I mean I'm sure her heart is in the right place. It must be really different for you here, then." The limitations imposed against wandering around the forest when it's late are not very hard limitations. The grounds are enormous. Even the space inside the castle is enormous.
"Maybe some point, you should," at this point, William reveals why he had scooted closer. It'd been unthinking, completely unpremeditated. And unthinkingly too, unpremeditated, wildly unconsidered, does he now reach around the back of Remus' head to pat pat his hair into being round curls instead of weirdly flattened to asymmetry. He gets about three pats in before realizing what he's doing and "sorry"ing and withdrawing into a protracted instance of mortified silence.
Remus lets the silent protract, unhelpfully, with his lips tucked in between his teeth to keep from smiling in a way that might have been—not unkind, but easily misunderstood. His eyes still crinkle at the corners despite his efforts, though, despite the fairly ruthless math he's doing behind them. Seventh year. A couple more months and William will vanish into the world of adulthood and professions and grown-up relationships. It's a world Remus knows he'll be largely excluded from, and—if Voldemort doesn't win, if they don't all die—maybe he'll see him in passing, in Diagon Alley or something, but he'll never really have to explain himself.
Also: hormones.
So before the silence goes from awkward to unbearable, he shows mercy.
"Are you," he says, but even if David Bowie and Elton John walked in and personally loosened his collar and told him to relax, he wouldn't be brave and progressive enough to outright ask if a near-stranger was queer. Option B: "Maybe when I'm not sick and you're not studying, we could go for a walk." He grins, hopefully. "For my immune system."
David Bowie and Elton John would not have loosened his collar, they probably just would have said something Britishishly sarcastic along the lines of Isn't it obvious.
"Yes," William says, not too quickly.
Voldemort might win. His muddy blood might be expunged from the planet along with his declassé Muggle swear words. He might end up jobless and thus instantly and irretrievably homeless, which is what many Chinese descent children are raised to believe. You don't get a lot of queer wizards anyway. He questions for a couple seconds if maybe this baby wizard doesn't know what he's doing, or is doing something different, because sometimes the cultures are so different. But surely.
I mean the Marauders don't really go on walks. You don't even have to have read the books to know this. "For your immune system." He rubs his hand on his robe to get rid of curly hair sensations e_e "There's also a theory of learning I should be giving my brain a rest now and again, so I'd be keen." Approximately one point three seconds later, William decides that sounds stupid and starts to turn colors again. Why do they wear such voluminous robes. That are BLACK. it's so hot in here.
Remus just stares at him for a beat, but not for any particular reason. It's only a mismatch of rhythms, like knocking elbows with James when they're paired together in class. Is there something coming after that well, Remus has no idea, he doesn't want to interrupt—no.
"Tomorrow?" he says. Possibly this is overeager of him, still held up by his lanky arms and smiling at William while he retreated, but he doesn't care. It will take more than some unabashed interest to deplete the reserve of Cool he's built up over the years, mostly by standing beside and slightly behind James Potter and Sirius Black with his hands in his pockets and a mild smile on his face. It's a large reserve. The only thing that could possibly destroy it would be starting Seventh Year without ever having snogged anyone, and what's where William's pink neck comes in. "If you've got time before dinner. I'll be up and about by then."
"I-- yes," William says. This time it is kind of fast, a touch off-balance but more focused, and he smiles afterward in a way that doesn't try hard enough to hide anything. Tomorrow is soon. Seems like code less mistakable for anything else, and while the increasing certainty of it seems very unnerving for other reasons, it's at least a lot more manageable than a rumpled Remus Lupin smiling up at him from a bed. Literally a bed. A public bed, which makes it worse somehow, like a trap. Being seventeen-years-old doesn't get much more unwieldy than this.
Clutching his pearls/decency, William purports to straighten his robes with his hands. "I can meet you here, or along the Viaduct." It's pretty there. And possibly long enough to constitute a walk, with you know, more private places conceivably to be found on either end. Obviously, William's grasp of the secret locations of Hogwarts isn't nearly as comprehensive or scandalous as that of some of this presently involved in this conversation.
"Viaduct," Remus says, and, "five o'clock," with a decisiveness that he hasn't earned through any experience whatsoever. He knows he's cute. His self-esteem issues have nothing to do with not understanding that he's cute. And sort of charming. And definitely going to snog a handsome Seventh Year who will never have to know anything important.
He flops back down and pulls the blanket up over his eyes, so William can go back to studying without feeling watched. But he is being watched, for the record. The blanket has little holes through the knitting.
There's nothing to do on the Viaduct. It's merely a place that connects a rather popular hang with the rest of the grounds, so it's a little bit of talk as they go along, understated and easier now because going side-by-side is much less taxing than
whatever they were doing in the infirmary. Heavy with the scent of petrichor, the air is cool with the promise of spring. It steals by in gusts between stone columns, makes noises you might mistake for creatures if you hadn't studied here through years of vivid and vocal seasons. The passage of the wind messes up Remus' hair (even more) insufferably, stings pink into William's nose, and flirts with their robes in a rhythm different to the approximate match of their paces.
William talks about nothing. He's quite good at it. Remarks about the Quidditch season, the Billywigs that started multiplying in the nook of the astronomy tower roof. Explains about the how to clip this or that -wort to make this or that draught, which eases the pain of regrowing skin after burns. Medicine that's got fennel in it will give you shitty dreams, but that's a Muggle thing, apparently. He'd had some when he was five, for an 'influenza,' and dreamed about a game of football, except the balls had had mouths, and if you landed a kick wrong it'd humiliate you with some daft secret. And spit out teeth.
They aren't all the way to the boathouse before William concludes his last story with an "um" and touches Remus' sleeve with his hand and Remus' mouth with his mouth. The lichen-clotted turn of stairs obscures the Entrance Courtyard from their view. As such, one may imagine that the two young men are obscured from anybody at the higher vantage as well, if one happens to be imagining anything in particular, when William's tongue darts out shyly to test the line of Remus' lip.
He has his eyes closed. He apparently knows this is the etiquette, even if the angle and. other stuff. are a work-in-progress.
It's fine. The angle. Or if it isn't fine, Remus doesn't have anything to judge it against, or any attention to dedicate to evaluating it independently, preoccupied as he is with surviving a sudden swoop of vertigo without doing anything stupid in the process, like clutching William's shoulders with both hands (he only clutches with one) or sucking in William's tongue into his mouth in addition to a quiet breath.
He kisses the same way he made friends: by mimicking whatever William does, changed just enough to mask the mirroring, and pretending he's done any of this before. When the tip of his tongue touches the side of William's, it so disgusting and thrilling that he's briefly on the verge of giggling, then equally briefly wishing with bizarre clarity that people had two mouths, so he could use one of them to explain that he isn't actually terrible at this (or he won't be, once he's had more than a few second's experience, surely, just give him a minute). Then he ruins it—both the confidence and the clarity—by trying to step sideways and shift his book bag strap higher on his shoulder. He stumbles a little, a stuttering buckle of one knee, and comes horrendously close to biting whatever part of William's mouth is currently nearest to his teeth.
"Sorry," he says, but he isn't very sorry or too horribly embarrassed, pink-cheeked but still smiling and still very close. "Sorry," he repeats, and pushes his smile back against William's mouth, and drops the hand from his shoulder to find his lower back through the billow of his robes.
William's head jerks back about half an inch when Remus starts to tip over sideways. Maybe it's to avoid teeth that wouldn't have gotten him anyway, or. Or maybe he'd just been trying to get a better look and help, mistaking Remus for nearly falling over, his hands now grasping the fabric of Remus' robes quite firmly. If Remus were to have started falling, William would have been here to hoist him back up, wandless, just good old-fashioned muscle-power, very quick and strong. As Remus is not falling over, it probably just looks quite authoritative in the context of continued kissing.
Which he's glad they're still doing. He winds up smiling too, which fits the damp shape of Remus' mouth pretty well when he says, "'S fine," eyes half-lidding already. In truth, he notices Remus isn't really great at this but this is exciting too. Not separately exciting, but in sparking connection with the fact that Remus is willing and hot and sweet. in that order. which isn't a bad list of priorities at all when you consider the fact that Remus' highschool affiliations are not currently on William's mind at all. Even better in the context that William can't read the less sweet thoughts going through Remus' mind, so by nature the whole of his opinion counts as flattering right now. Surely it's not a poor thing either, that he thinks, I'm a better first. First, one of, close enough. A better first than what some of us get.
Birds tweet overhead while William sucks face with a werewolf. Hopefully not an unregistered animagi.
When he disengages, he doesn't bite. Nobody falls. He has gone pink around the middle of his face this time instead of under his collar, blinks unsteadily in the half-light of the falling dusk. "Do you want to go down," he says. The boathouse is down. "Or do you want to go up?" That's the castle. Dinner is probably important for your immune system.
"Down," Remus says, with hardly a glance castle-ward, in a voice he wouldn't believe was his own if he didn't feel it coming out of his throat—not his voice, not his wet mouth or dark eyes. They all belong to someone else, someone to whom this sort of thing is supposed to happen and who isn't being unforgivably stupid when he crowds William's personal space even further, chest to slightly-lower chest, to force a step toward the boathouse.
Dinner is important for immune systems, and also for werewolves whose metabolisms outstrip their stubbornly omnivorous diets. He'll need to eat later. But the house elves know him, like him, and won't mind if he stops by the kitchens later, with or without William in tow. He's got a book in his bag so he can claim to have been studying, when his friends ask where he was, and the Map so no one can prove he wasn't. He's got William gripped by the back of his robes, and William's got the darkest eyes Remus has ever spent any time looking into and those eyelashes that go on for several rule-tics longer than eyelashes have any right to go.
"If you'd like," he adds, belatedly, and it makes him feel more like himself. That's something he would say. If it isn't any trouble, if William wouldn't horribly mind, Remus would like to go to the boathouse and back him into a corner and investigate his neck. He smiles again. Please.
Okay. "Okay," William says, looking tremendously pleased about sssomething, which is to say that his smile breaks out over his face like sunlight forking through an overcast sky, transient but transformative too. He leans sideways slightly, without freeing himself from Remus' grasp at all, grasps the younger boy's knapsack and hoists it up over his shoulder. He is all casually gentlemanlily about it. Is there a culture of highschool casual gentlemanliness with the book bag carrying in Europe?? If not then we are setting trends in this xxsecretxx inbox for sure.
"Come on then."
Cut to the boathouse. It's quiet, smells of water and wood and the quiet lives that begin and expire unseen within them, the algae and the fishes and the tadpoles gathering on the moss-furred edges of carpentry charmed to withstand the elements. There is an opaque treatment to the glass of the windows, which is helpful; there is are actual boats, which William ignores. Having apparently forgotten that kayaking and other more strenuous kinds of exercise are also beneficial to the immune system, he instead ditches Remus' bag down by the wall and wraps Remus' neck in his arms and kisses his mouth for a short time before letting Remus do his own neck thing. If he still wants.
For the second or fifth time in Remus' company, he feels like his robes are a bit warm. But he is already providing sufficient encouragement for Remus' interest, he thinks, and he doesn't want to come off weird or desperate or anything, so he sticks to what's being done: the light scrabble of his thinly-shorn fingernails on the back of the werewolf's neck, hitch of breath, the whole leaning back on the wall thing while arching into Remus thing. It's not weird. And may qualify as urgent, but definitely not desperate.
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no subject
Character Name: Remus Lupin
Canon: Harry Potter
Setting: POTTERVERSE.
Tag/Prompt: This is a header so I can make you shove multiple threads under it.
Hogwarts, 1976.
And it's quiet. No one wakes him up jumping on his bed shouting about revenge on Slytherins or plans to woo Evans or the giant squid. He wakes up in bits and pieces, until he's slides out of a lucid dream and straight into watching William. He isn't watching-watching; his eyes opened and William was there in his line of vision, is all, doing something or other with jars and vials, with his hair naturally tousled the way Remus suspects James is always hoping to accomplish.
Remus has grown three and a half inches since this time last year. His ankles and wrists stick out of his pajamas, and he has entirely too much elbow, and his curls are flattened and lopsided on one side. He thinks about turning his face down into his pillow and going back to sleep.
But Remus can see William's eyelashes from here, and one of those jars is very close to the edge of the table.
"Careful," he says hoarsely, and pauses for a second to cough and rub his eyes clean. It gives him time to try to remember—seventh year, Hufflepuff—"William."
ohhhhhhhhhnoooooooo hes cuuuuute B(
The Hufflepuff whirls and snatches at the jar. Succeeds primarily in knocking it off the lip of the table with his fingertips, secondarily in catching it, and finally in leaking a bit out of the rim. It slops off onto the floor, then when it lands, does something that makes William's eyes go huge, but the event is hidden by the edge of Remus' cot so. so-- then William makes what must be an irritated noise in the back of his throat. It could also be that he's clearing out phlegm, but he'd be the one laid up sick then.
"I can sort it," he says. "I know how." He knows things because he's studying for the NEWTs, and mundane sorts of seventh year things that you probably don't have to worry about when you're mates with James Potter's hair and Sirius Black's debonair rebellion je ne sais quois and Peter's around. (also when you're only sixth year, that probably matters too.)
It occurs to William around then he's being snappish at a lad who's looking terribly frail, so he adds, "Don't worry," as he starts to stoop, tugging his robes up from his feet.
dude you don't get to "ohno he's cute" at me and use that icon at the same time
"Good one of us does," he says. "I'm rubbish at Potions."
Most of his consonants are indistinguishable. His crinkled-up eyes give away the smiling thing. He gives up and lifts his chin up onto his forearm and tries again, watching what bit of the action he can see, which is mostly William's head.
"Has it burned a hole through the floor?"
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When he reappears from his squat, he looks reasonably calm. But maybe he forgot he had an audience, because when he meets Remus' eyes his neck turns a bit red where it meets the heavy fabric of his garments. (In reality, he had not forgotten. You might try some unlikely excuse about body temperature and exertion, but it's not that either.)
"Are you supposed to be bringing up your marks then, while you're laid up?" he asks, holding onto the foot of Remus' bed, then letting go, then holding onto it again. "You don't look like you're too ill to use your eyes."
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"It isn't anything I'd improve by reading," he adds, flaumping back down onto his pillow, now that he's done making a point. He doesn't give William's flushed neck any particular attention, but he does notice. It will be there in the back of his mind if he needs it later. "It's the cutting and stirring and—keeping track of time. I can't do it. Last week I got so convinced I'd done it wrong, waiting for my Wiggenweld to turn turquoise, I tossed in an extra lionfish spine."
He mimes an explosion with one hand. A very small one. No one died. If anyone had died Remus wouldn't be smiling or—not flirting. Werewolves don't flirt. He's just smiling.
"Do you think I'm hopeless?"
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Probably something to do with the unmanageable development of limbs. The quantity is normal, but other metrics are above-average, a severity of coltishness that not even robust wizardly physiology can support. William stops looking at the blankets and trying to imagine Remus' legs. What. oh. His eyes cut between the erstwhile manual explosion and Remus' face. He immediately forgets about Remus' diagnosis, letting go of the bedpost once and for all. He'd already stopped thinking about his exams some minutes ago.
"Depends," he says, his mouth starting to twist, trying to make up its mind about something, but his stare is decidedly accusatory if absent any kind of malevolence. "On if you knew it was like to explode, or if you thought it'd speed up Wiggenweld."
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"I hoped it would do something other than sit there bubbling," he says, "and it did."
And James and Sirius thought it was brilliant. So it obviously was.
"Are you very good?" While he talks he checks his forehead for warmth with an overgrown puppyish hand he will never entirely grow into. He did have a fever when he came in last night, but Madame Pomfrey fed him something that tasted like fresh grass cuttings to get rid of it. He could probably sneak back to his room now, if it weren't for the inconvenient Hufflepuff witness and his inconvenient eyelashes. (One admires what one lacks.) "You must be either very good or very bad if you're studying on a Saturday."
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He's not exactly being passive-aggressive in the direction of Remus and his friends, in that-- yes maybe a little but there's no real toxic resentment under it, no Implication to twist or darken his tone. Some of us have to meet the neurotic mundane pursuits quota and populate the minor character cast of Hogwarts. We can't all have flippy hair and main storylines. He doesn't seem as harsh as he could be, anyway, because he is walking forward through this, coming around the edge of the bed.
One hand out too, to check Remus for a fever. Even if the werewolf doesn't have one, his fingers will be cool. "I probably ain't good enough to sort what you had," William says, a little doubtfully. It takes a lot to put a wizard into bed at all, and something like a fever is somehow less common than. you know. petrifications and smashed limbs and growing scales and all that. "You feeling worse?"
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This is stupid, obviously. He doesn't need to impress William. He doesn't need to impress anyone at all. It's a benefit of being mates with James and Sirius. They do all the impressing, apparently enough of it to make even seventh years with charming noses a bit jealous, and Remus and Peter are somehow both popular and barely noticed by virtue of their proximity. It's worked very well for Remus these past nearly-six years. This is no time for him to start trying to endear himself to Hufflepuffs.
"Better," he says, the word bursting abruptly out of his horrified pause, "but Madam Pomfrey won't let me leave yet. I'm ill, you know." That's the story being passed around. And the more specific story, refined for his increasingly knowledgable classmates: "All the time. It's spell damage from when I was small." That's almost true. "Every time I sneeze, she thinks it's the end."
It isn't the end. It's at least twenty-two years from the end. He's deceptively hardy, for someone with such visible ribs, and he's probably talking too much. He shuts himself up with a sheepish smile that could either mean he isn't dying or mean he's being very brave about it.
He is definitely trying to endear himself to a Hufflepuff.
"Do you want to be a Healer?"
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"Holy fucking shit," like that. "What sort of a cunt does that to a baby? I hope they found the bloke. Or lady. Or if it was some sort of an unsexed magical creature, I hope they dealt with that too." No other options rally forth due to his rather limited insight into these social matters. William surveys Remus a bit woefully, but mostly angrily. Oh no a popular mischievous high-school boy who also has a tragic past. Yes MJ we're pretending for a few minutes that it requires all of the above or an even higher standard to get William twisted up. Pretending is good and you're an RPer you know how.
"Not that I'm about to go Madame Pomfrey on you," he adds hastily. "Yeah, I'm trying to become a Healer. But my parents was muggles and I grew up around them, so I was always taught this stuff about holistic perspectives and shit. My neighbor's a doctor-- a physician, a Muggle healer-- and he's always banging on about Eastern and Western medicine, but taking the long view as well. So," he tries to get to the point even though Remus doesn't have a lot of options other than to nod and smile. "I know Muggle medicine don't really apply that much, but--
"A bit of a sniffle is probably good for you. Build up your immune system." Is Remus still listening. William was looking straight at his face but he blinks once or twice and tries to actually see him. "Muggles worry about that kind of shit.
"And vitamins, and exercise. Like going out for jogs or walks. I mean, not now-- not while you're unwell."
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He should have said something sooner. For example, while William was cursing his attacker, whom as far as Remus is presently aware was no one in particular, just a werewolf who did a poor job putting up containment spells, perhaps, or who was caught out of doors by accident, or whose big-mouthed hot-tempered idiot friend set loose to scare someone. It was an accident, he should have said, to spare William the anger and whomever-it-was the negative vibes. They didn't mean to. For fairness' sake.
But fairness is a Hufflepuff value, and this—having someone with good hair and a nice smile be indignant on his behalf instead of repulsed, coming closer instead of backing away, and then, you know—is something straight out of Remus' boring vanilla daydreams, even if it's built on lies. (And even if it's a boy. There are too many things about himself that bother Remus for him to devote any more energy to being bothered by that. David Bowie and Elton John say it's all right, anyway.) So he's listening, yeah, and maybe looking abnormally pleased to be on the receiving end of William's backstory and medical advice and attention, until he echoes that last bit, jogs, with a touch of incredulity.
He also sits up, propelled by teenage insanity. He isn't as much taller than William as he will be when he's done growing, and most of his height is in his legs, so he's nearly eye-level, propped up by his arms. "My mum's a muggle," he says, which is not only relevant to the topic at hand but also relevant to friendships in general in the current political climate, "but she's never made me go run around in circles. She hardly lets me go outside."
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Most people also know (believe) that Sirius Black has a Muggle tattoo somewhere on his person, Peter prefers Chocolate Frogs to the more variegated and outlandish-tasting offerings of the candy store, James Potter has got a unicorn hair threaded into the tail of his broom for luck that has evaded all sorts of professors' detection efforts over the years. and Remus. is said to favor the color blue, possess an extraordinarily large signature for someone who is otherwise generally unprepossessing. and he's the nice one who isn't Peter.
Most people don't know how cute Remus is close up. Not even the kind of cute that you have to think about for a few minutes, or approach from a specific angle. William decides to think about health and the kinship of Muggle parents instead. "That's a pity," he replies, scooting his butt a bit up the bed. "I mean I'm sure her heart is in the right place. It must be really different for you here, then." The limitations imposed against wandering around the forest when it's late are not very hard limitations. The grounds are enormous. Even the space inside the castle is enormous.
"Maybe some point, you should," at this point, William reveals why he had scooted closer. It'd been unthinking, completely unpremeditated. And unthinkingly too, unpremeditated, wildly unconsidered, does he now reach around the back of Remus' head to pat pat his hair into being round curls instead of weirdly flattened to asymmetry. He gets about three pats in before realizing what he's doing and "sorry"ing and withdrawing into a protracted instance of mortified silence.
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Also: hormones.
So before the silence goes from awkward to unbearable, he shows mercy.
"Are you," he says, but even if David Bowie and Elton John walked in and personally loosened his collar and told him to relax, he wouldn't be brave and progressive enough to outright ask if a near-stranger was queer. Option B: "Maybe when I'm not sick and you're not studying, we could go for a walk." He grins, hopefully. "For my immune system."
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"Yes," William says, not too quickly.
Voldemort might win. His muddy blood might be expunged from the planet along with his declassé Muggle swear words. He might end up jobless and thus instantly and irretrievably homeless, which is what many Chinese descent children are raised to believe. You don't get a lot of queer wizards anyway. He questions for a couple seconds if maybe this baby wizard doesn't know what he's doing, or is doing something different, because sometimes the cultures are so different. But surely.
I mean the Marauders don't really go on walks. You don't even have to have read the books to know this. "For your immune system." He rubs his hand on his robe to get rid of curly hair sensations e_e "There's also a theory of learning I should be giving my brain a rest now and again, so I'd be keen." Approximately one point three seconds later, William decides that sounds stupid and starts to turn colors again. Why do they wear such voluminous robes. That are BLACK. it's so hot in here.
"Well." William stands up.
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"Tomorrow?" he says. Possibly this is overeager of him, still held up by his lanky arms and smiling at William while he retreated, but he doesn't care. It will take more than some unabashed interest to deplete the reserve of Cool he's built up over the years, mostly by standing beside and slightly behind James Potter and Sirius Black with his hands in his pockets and a mild smile on his face. It's a large reserve. The only thing that could possibly destroy it would be starting Seventh Year without ever having snogged anyone, and what's where William's pink neck comes in. "If you've got time before dinner. I'll be up and about by then."
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Clutching his pearls/decency, William purports to straighten his robes with his hands. "I can meet you here, or along the Viaduct." It's pretty there. And possibly long enough to constitute a walk, with you know, more private places conceivably to be found on either end. Obviously, William's grasp of the secret locations of Hogwarts isn't nearly as comprehensive or scandalous as that of some of this presently involved in this conversation.
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He flops back down and pulls the blanket up over his eyes, so William can go back to studying without feeling watched. But he is being watched, for the record. The blanket has little holes through the knitting.
Hogwarts, 1976 +1 day.
whatever they were doing in the infirmary. Heavy with the scent of petrichor, the air is cool with the promise of spring. It steals by in gusts between stone columns, makes noises you might mistake for creatures if you hadn't studied here through years of vivid and vocal seasons. The passage of the wind messes up Remus' hair (even more) insufferably, stings pink into William's nose, and flirts with their robes in a rhythm different to the approximate match of their paces.
William talks about nothing. He's quite good at it. Remarks about the Quidditch season, the Billywigs that started multiplying in the nook of the astronomy tower roof. Explains about the how to clip this or that -wort to make this or that draught, which eases the pain of regrowing skin after burns. Medicine that's got fennel in it will give you shitty dreams, but that's a Muggle thing, apparently. He'd had some when he was five, for an 'influenza,' and dreamed about a game of football, except the balls had had mouths, and if you landed a kick wrong it'd humiliate you with some daft secret. And spit out teeth.
They aren't all the way to the boathouse before William concludes his last story with an "um" and touches Remus' sleeve with his hand and Remus' mouth with his mouth. The lichen-clotted turn of stairs obscures the Entrance Courtyard from their view. As such, one may imagine that the two young men are obscured from anybody at the higher vantage as well, if one happens to be imagining anything in particular, when William's tongue darts out shyly to test the line of Remus' lip.
He has his eyes closed. He apparently knows this is the etiquette, even if the angle and. other stuff. are a work-in-progress.
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He kisses the same way he made friends: by mimicking whatever William does, changed just enough to mask the mirroring, and pretending he's done any of this before. When the tip of his tongue touches the side of William's, it so disgusting and thrilling that he's briefly on the verge of giggling, then equally briefly wishing with bizarre clarity that people had two mouths, so he could use one of them to explain that he isn't actually terrible at this (or he won't be, once he's had more than a few second's experience, surely, just give him a minute). Then he ruins it—both the confidence and the clarity—by trying to step sideways and shift his book bag strap higher on his shoulder. He stumbles a little, a stuttering buckle of one knee, and comes horrendously close to biting whatever part of William's mouth is currently nearest to his teeth.
"Sorry," he says, but he isn't very sorry or too horribly embarrassed, pink-cheeked but still smiling and still very close. "Sorry," he repeats, and pushes his smile back against William's mouth, and drops the hand from his shoulder to find his lower back through the billow of his robes.
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Which he's glad they're still doing. He winds up smiling too, which fits the damp shape of Remus' mouth pretty well when he says, "'S fine," eyes half-lidding already. In truth, he notices Remus isn't really great at this but this is exciting too. Not separately exciting, but in sparking connection with the fact that Remus is willing and hot and sweet. in that order. which isn't a bad list of priorities at all when you consider the fact that Remus' highschool affiliations are not currently on William's mind at all. Even better in the context that William can't read the less sweet thoughts going through Remus' mind, so by nature the whole of his opinion counts as flattering right now. Surely it's not a poor thing either, that he thinks, I'm a better first. First, one of, close enough. A better first than what some of us get.
Birds tweet overhead while William sucks face with a werewolf. Hopefully not an unregistered animagi.
When he disengages, he doesn't bite. Nobody falls. He has gone pink around the middle of his face this time instead of under his collar, blinks unsteadily in the half-light of the falling dusk. "Do you want to go down," he says. The boathouse is down. "Or do you want to go up?" That's the castle. Dinner is probably important for your immune system.
ooo mr tsang so strong so forceful
Dinner is important for immune systems, and also for werewolves whose metabolisms outstrip their stubbornly omnivorous diets. He'll need to eat later. But the house elves know him, like him, and won't mind if he stops by the kitchens later, with or without William in tow. He's got a book in his bag so he can claim to have been studying, when his friends ask where he was, and the Map so no one can prove he wasn't. He's got William gripped by the back of his robes, and William's got the darkest eyes Remus has ever spent any time looking into and those eyelashes that go on for several rule-tics longer than eyelashes have any right to go.
"If you'd like," he adds, belatedly, and it makes him feel more like himself. That's something he would say. If it isn't any trouble, if William wouldn't horribly mind, Remus would like to go to the boathouse and back him into a corner and investigate his neck. He smiles again. Please.
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"Come on then."
Cut to the boathouse. It's quiet, smells of water and wood and the quiet lives that begin and expire unseen within them, the algae and the fishes and the tadpoles gathering on the moss-furred edges of carpentry charmed to withstand the elements. There is an opaque treatment to the glass of the windows, which is helpful; there is are actual boats, which William ignores. Having apparently forgotten that kayaking and other more strenuous kinds of exercise are also beneficial to the immune system, he instead ditches Remus' bag down by the wall and wraps Remus' neck in his arms and kisses his mouth for a short time before letting Remus do his own neck thing. If he still wants.
For the second or fifth time in Remus' company, he feels like his robes are a bit warm. But he is already providing sufficient encouragement for Remus' interest, he thinks, and he doesn't want to come off weird or desperate or anything, so he sticks to what's being done: the light scrabble of his thinly-shorn fingernails on the back of the werewolf's neck, hitch of breath, the whole leaning back on the wall thing while arching into Remus thing. It's not weird. And may qualify as urgent, but definitely not desperate.