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The second day after the full moon was an uncommonly beautiful day for a Scottish April. After weeks of rain, today there were only clear blue skies, the earliest hint of summer on the air. Up in the Owlery, there was a gentle, cool breeze floating through the window, bringing upon it the smell of earth and pine and dew from the forest. Remus Lupin sat on the window ledge and contemplated death.
If he fell from here, it would be onto a roof below—a huge hassle, possibly, for whatever happened to be beneath that roof, and potentially not even far enough to kill him. He was staring down at that roof, attempting to triangulate what would lie below it—hadn’t he and his friends gone and mapped the entire castle? what good had that done him?—when someone entered the Owlery, and every muscle in his body tensed.
“Remus!” came Lily Evans’ voice.
Remus did not turn.
Lily was—well, no, not the last person he’d like to see at the moment, and in fact, he reflected, she wasn’t even that high on the list. But he really didn’t want to see anyone at all, which was exactly why he was holed up in the Owlery in the middle of a class day.
“You all right?”
There was undeniable concern in her kind voice. If she knew, she’d hate you, and she’d be right to, Remus thought, savagely. It was her best friend he’d nearly killed. Her best friend he’d been sicced on as the wild beast he was. He wanted her to move on. To attend to whatever business she had in the Owlery as if he weren’t even there, and then to carry on with the rest of her day like she’d never seen him at all.
He turned his gaze to the Astronomy tower, visible at his periphery. If it had the effect of blocking Lily from seeing anything but the back of his head, that was only a bonus. The Astronomy tower was the highest in the castle, and had a clear fall to the ground. Would he do that? No, likely not. He was a coward in this as all things. He wouldn’t really do it. He couldn’t imagine he would. But neither could he imagine going back to his dorm, waking up each morning and going to class, and carrying on as normal.
Last evening, he’d begged Madam Pomfrey to let him stay in the hospital wing an extra night, and for the first time, she’d actually let him. Which must have meant he was in a real state, if even Madam Pomfrey took pity on him. When the morning came, however, she’d said she had no reason to keep him any longer and his absence from classes would only grow more conspicuous. He hadn’t argued, but when she turned him loose, after a breakfast he took over an hour to eat to her satisfaction, in time for the second class of the day, he hadn’t gone. He couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t imagine sitting beside— And as that name crossed his mind he willed it not to, clenching his hand where it rested on his thigh, feeling his fingernails dig into his own flesh even through his robes. He couldn’t imagine sitting beside James, either, noble, good James who’d saved Snape from Remus and Remus from the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. Poor James, poor noble James. He’d never asked for a werewolf for a roommate.
The simple fact was, he had no way out. This was his life— He was a werewolf, he would always be a werewolf, and nothing more. His friends could conspire and scheme to use that in any way they liked—they could run amok as illicit Animagi or bait their enemy into a trap—but they would always share in a level of carelessness that Remus could never, ever touch. They would never understand that he was here—at Hogwarts, in their lives, in real life—on borrowed time, that Dumbledore had let him come to the school as a huge act of charity, that Dumbledore had allowed him to stay now but it was no guarantee of anything, that if anything, anything at all ever happened to make it known, the best he could hope for was to be expelled, and that if that night had gone the way it almost did, he would be in a cage at the Ministry right now, about to be put down. They didn’t realize. Or they did and didn’t care. He didn’t know which was worse.
He hadn’t seen his friends since the evening, pre-moonrise. They had evidently shown up to the hospital wing, but on Remus’s request, Madam Pomfrey had turned them away. Remus didn’t know what awaited him when he finally saw them again. He wasn’t in a rush to find out.
“Remus?” Now he could hear Lily coming towards him, and felt her robes brush his ankles as she perched herself by his feet. “What’s wrong?”
He cleared his throat before he spoke, but his voice was still rough when he said, “Nothing.” The wolf had howled itself hoarse the night before last. At least it gave credence to the lie that he’d been ill.
“Oh, nothing’s wrong?” Lily said. “Then what are you doing in the window? ‘Cause when I walked in you looked like you were planning to throw yourself out of it.”
Remus still, stubbornly, did not look at her. He rested his head against the rough stone. He wished she would go away. “Why aren’t you in class,” he grumbled. It was Potions, now, Potions with the Slytherins. Why would Lily Evans ever skip Potions? Just to torment him?
“What are you, a prefect?” She giggled at her own joke, and Remus resolutely deepened his sour expression. “I dunno,” said Lily. “Just wanted to clear my head.”
“Then that’s what I’m doing,” said Remus. “Clearing my head.”
“How would you feel about clearing your head from safely inside the building,” suggested Lily airily, “with two feet on the floor?”
Remus finally looked at her, then: Her smile slipped slightly when she saw the new claw mark arced across his cheek, closed up and beginning to scar but still puffy and telltale red. Lily quickly recovered and Remus wished she wouldn’t—wished she’d come right out and accuse him of what she must have realized on her own, even if Snape hadn’t told her, which he almost certainly had. Things he could never say drummed against his skull with an incessant beat: I could have killed him. Your best friend, I could have killed him. Or infected him, and then he’d be sentenced to this miserable life I lead. Your best friend. I could have torn out his throat. You wouldn’t look at me like that if you knew. You would push me out the window with your own two hands. You should push me out the window. And why didn’t she know? Wouldn’t she be the first person Snape would tell? Dumbledore had assured Remus that Snape would face expulsion if he let it slip to anyone, but Remus didn’t half believe the threat was credible. Who would go first, if the secret got out—the bloodthirsty werewolf, or the student who told the truth about him?
“All right, come on,” said Lily, breaking Remus out of this latest thought spiral. She was getting up. She clapped him on the shoulder. “We’re going for a walk.”
“What?”
“It’s a beautiful day,” she said, “and I don’t fancy spending it inside. I was going to go for a walk around the lake anyway. Would you join me?”
Remus, searching for any excuse, said, lamely, “I’m still not well.”
“Well, then, let me walk you back to Gryffindor Tower and you can get some rest.” When Remus, unthinkingly, scowled at this proposal, Lily grinned and said, “I thought that might be it. Come on. Let me just send this and then we’ll be off. Fresh air. It’ll do you good.”
She borrowed a school owl to send her letter—an order form, she explained, for a new pair of saddle shoes from a mail-order catalog, which was such an adorably boring explanation for her presence that Remus nearly forgot to be annoyed—and then they left together, despite all of Remus’s best instincts.
It really was a gorgeous day. The grounds were empty but for a Care of Magical Creatures class in the distance, and anyone who passed Remus and Lily need only glance at the shiny prefects’ badges on their chests to be put at ease: these were not simply skivers, but prefects on business. Perk of the job.
As the Whomping Willow came into view, Remus’s stomach lurched. For a moment he thought he might really be sick, right there on the grounds, right there in front of Lily. Maybe that would be a useful deterrent, like a squid that inked, a skunk that sprayed. Get her to leave him alone. But he held it together. He would not fall apart, could not fall apart, not in front of her or anyone. Wasn’t that essentially what Professor Dumbledore had told him, yesterday morning, after he’d woken up in the Shrieking Shack, alone, confused, more torn up than he’d been in months. Sitting beside Remus’s bed in the hospital wing, Dumbledore had entreated him, Mr. Lupin, you can rest assured that all involved parties are to behave with the utmost discretion, and I trust I do not have to tell you that the plan requires a certain amount of discretion on your part, as well. Remus had nodded woozily, fighting the pain potions that usually put him right to sleep. Discretion. Sure, he could be discreet. He could go on being exactly as discreet as he’d been for five years and evidently it wouldn’t matter, not one bit. He didn’t say that. He said, his voice shredded to bits, Discretion. Yeah, all right.
Dumbledore had smiled rather sadly at him, then, and said, My dear boy, I hope you know that though there have been moments of pain, I do not regret allowing you to come to Hogwarts, and I should not think I will ever regret it. You’ve proven your worth as a wizard many times over. And wasn’t that just like Dumbledore, to say something that kind, after all that he’d done. Remus owed Dumbledore his whole life. It was an entirely insurmountable debt.
“I have the notes from Ancient Runes the last few days whenever you want them,” said Lily, patting her messenger bag.
“Thanks,” Remus said as he watched his feet trample the brownish grass.
“It’s just terrible luck,” she went on, “to be so ill so close to OWLs. Missing all that class. If there’s anything I can do to help—”
“I’ll be fine.” Remus’s voice sounded as hollow and sharp-edged as an old tin can. “I’ll deal with it. I always do.” And then he elbowed her. “You’re missing class too.”
Lily shrugged. Clearly she wouldn’t give up any more information. Instead, she changed the subject, asking casually, “Are you having a row with the boys, then?”
Well, yes, he supposed he was. But two could play at the cagey game. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“All right,” said Lily. “But whatever Black and Potter have done this time, I’d happily kill them for you. Just so we’re clear. I could make it look like an accident.”
The sound that escaped Remus at this was neither a laugh nor a sob but something terribly in-between. He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Not James,” he said. “James didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Just Black, then.”
Just Black. Just stupid, headstrong Sirius Black, who didn’t think, who never thought, who would have let Remus become a murderer if James hadn’t come to the rescue. If James had been just a minute later— Remus felt again like he might vomit. After a breath, he managed to say, “Lily, I really don’t want to talk about it.”
They walked in silence for some distance along the quiet lake path until finally they came to a little rocky outcropping under the shade of a large oak tree where Lily sat down. Remus lowered himself carefully, leaning against the tree trunk, his gammy hip not pleased with him, and together they looked out at the glittering surface of the water, the tiny rocky islet covered in birch trees. “Pretty,” said Remus, because he felt he ought to say something.
Lily fumbled in her pocket for something and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. She stuck one between her lips and then held it out to Remus. “Fag?” she offered. “You look like you could use one.” When he hesitated, she rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t gawk at me like that. You boys haven’t got a monopoly on rule-breaking.”
Remus really could use a fag. He took it, and she lit it for him with her wand. “Perfect Prefect Evans,” he said. “I never guessed.”
“No,” said Lily, “and you never asked.”
Well. He supposed he hadn’t.
They smoked, as they had walked, in silence, then. Remus sat against the oak tree and watched Lily’s back; Lily sat by the edge and watched the water. In the shade it was downright chilly, and Remus sat in a childish curled-up posture with his thighs to his chest, resting his chin on his knobbly knees. After a few minutes, Lily began, slowly and methodically, to remove her shoes and socks, and then she scooched closer to the edge, hiked up her robes, and dangled her feet into the water.
“Is it cold,” he asked the back of her ginger head.
“No, it’s lovely,” she replied, her voice pitched up half an octave. Of course it was cold. She looked back at him, and laughed. “Are you cold?”
“No,” said Remus unconvincingly, which only made Lily laugh harder.
“It’s ‘cause you’re so skinny,” she cried. “You disappear when you turn to the side.”
“I do not.”
“Yes you do! Like a sheet of paper, you are!”
He smiled despite himself, and then asked, “So does Perfect Prefect Evans skive off to smoke a fag pretty often, then?”
Lily exhaled a plume of smoke through pursed lips. She really was pretty, Remus thought—her round, freckled face, the gentle curves of her back—and then he thought back to their conversation a few weeks ago, when she’d egged him on to ask Dymphna Sullivan out, insisting Dymphna had a crush on him and a fetish for Welsh accents. He hadn’t done it, of course. But he’d thought about it, for far longer than Lily probably realized. Not because he was all that interested in Dymphna—she was brash and loud and had this grating, screeching laugh he couldn’t stand—but rather, he’d considered with unromantic pragmatism what it might do for him, and if there was any way to accomplish it without too much risk. Because it would stop people calling him a poof, wouldn’t it? It would prove them wrong. On the other hand, people who were calling him a poof weren’t calling him a werewolf.
It was useful, he had always thought, to be loony, loopy, swotty, bent Lupin, to direct his classmates’ mockery at other explanations for his oddness. If people suspected he had a secret, but they thought the secret was that he was a giant queer, they’d write it off as solved without looking long enough to notice he missed class every full moon, which wasn’t, strictly speaking, a trait of homosexuals. This was how he’d kept himself alive and at Hogwarts for five years, this over-intellectualizing, these logical strictures with which he’d built a wall of secrets around his worst, deepest secret— But now he’d found his walls as flimsy as a house of cards in the hands of Sirius Black.
Maybe he should’ve taken Dymphna on a date. He might have enjoyed it. It was what teenagers were supposed to do, and he might not have much longer to do what teenagers were supposed to do.
Lily said now, “How could I? Not when I’m always getting the notes for you, you truant.”
It took Remus a moment to remember what he’d actually asked her— And hot shame rose in him, too, coloring his cheeks, and he said, “Sorry.”
“I’m only teasing,” said Lily. “But really, how often you miss class, you’d think you were dying.”
“‘M not dying,” he said. “If you want to be rid of me that badly you could just say so.”
“Aw, never.” Lily looked back at him with a smile that tore at Remus’s guilty conscience. “Wouldn’t want to do prefect rounds with anybody but yourself, love.”
He smiled back. Or he tried to. He hoped it looked convincing, because it didn’t feel it. He remembered, all over again, that Snape was Lily’s best friend, that less than thirty-six hours ago he had come within inches of tearing out his throat.
“You are okay, though, Remus?” she asked, tentatively, and despite the phrasing of the question it was clear she didn’t know the answer. “I mean, you would tell me if you weren’t?”
It was all Remus could do not to laugh right in her face, not to say, Not bloody likely. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her, or like her. He did, both. He took the last long drag off his cigarette to avoid answering. He tipped his head back and exhaled a slow, controlled stream up to the canopy of leaves above, before dropping the butt on a rock and grinding out the flame with his shoe. And, finally, he said, “You know me. My wretched immune system.” The lie was so hollow, but it was all he had. It was rather a surprise it hadn’t been questioned more in five years. Remus coughed, as if to lend credence to the lie.
Now, more than he had since first year, he felt like a ticking time bomb. He felt one inch, one wrong move, one wrong word away from disaster. He looked out over the lake, thinking vaguely that he ought to memorize the view, that this might be his last chance.
“Right,” said Lily. “Yeah, I know.”
A scream rose in Remus’s throat like bile. He wanted to shout at her, to shake her, to scream SAY IT! because she knew, she had to know, and he was so tired, he was so goddamn tired of knowing silences and secrets and leverage and never being quite certain who knew what and what they thought of him. But there was no way out. There was one way out. There was no way out, and shame on him for thinking that.
Lily didn’t say it. She changed the subject. She lounged on the sunny rock outcropping, now laying down on her stomach, and told Remus about the latest gossip from the girls’ dormitory, something about Mary MacDonald’s Ravenclaw boyfriend and Dymphna Sullivan snogging his best friend at a party, which Remus understood was a slight, but was as opaque to him as so many normal teenage social mores.
He asked, “Did he happen to be Welsh, the friend?”
Lily grinned at him. “I don’t think so, which might be why it was only a snog.” She reached to poke his shin with one finger. She had burgundy polish on her fingernails. “You never followed through on Dymphna. I was waiting.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Slipped my mind.”
But Lily, damn her, saw right through him. “Nothing ever slips your mind. You’re preternaturally thoughtful. It’s uncanny.” She shook her head. “It’s all right. Dymphna’s a bit of a slag, really. I don’t blame you.”
“It’s not about that,” said Remus. “It’s … I can’t.”
Lily pouted, and, deepening her voice, going all mopey and self-serious, and doing a singsong mimicry of his accent, said, “I’m sorry, Dymphna. It’s not you, it’s me.”
“I do not sound like that.”
“I do not sound like that.” Lily giggled, and rested her head on her forearm on the ground. “I don’t know why you can’t,” she said in her own voice again, listlessly tracing the shape of a daisy into the soil by her hand. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you’re kind and you’re clever and you’re not half bad looking, and I think you’d make a better boyfriend than almost anyone in our year. Not for me,” she clarified at Remus’s raised eyebrow, “I’m not interested, but I’m speaking generally.”
Remus didn’t know why she was pushing this right now but he didn’t trust it one bit. “I dunno, Lily,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
There was a pause, in which Remus’s stomach tied itself in knots. Lily was looking resolutely at her daisy in the earth and so Remus was looking there too, at the dark brown soil against her dark red nail against her white skin. She twirled her finger an inch above the ground and a thin layer of soil lifted and formed itself into a daisy, with fluttering white petals, which she held, gently, in her palm. And then, lightly, she asked, “Is it true, what they say about you, then?”
Remus’s insides turned to ice. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t hear anything over the rush of blood in his ears. He felt trapped. A caged animal. He sat very still, as if this would somehow save him, and he enunciated very clearly when he asked, “Is what true?”
Lily still wouldn’t look him in the eyes. “Are you, you know—?” She paused, looking at quite a loss as to how to phrase the question. Remus thought he might vomit. Remus wanted to vomit, if at least it would redirect the conversation. But then Lily continued, “Because it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t mind one bit.”
“Lily,” said Remus, breathing as deeply as he could, trying very hard to keep his voice steady, “what do they say about me.”
Her ginger eyebrows crinkled. “Oh, Remus,” she said, very gently, and Remus wanted to die.
“What?”
And then she asked him the question: “Are you a homo?”
“O-Oh.” Cold relief flooded his limbs, and then, without meaning to, he laughed, a strange, humorless huff of a laugh, which in turn made Lily laugh.
“It’s a silly question,” she said, with a nervous giggle, “I know, but I just was thinking— Oh, I don’t know— I don’t believe gossip like that, I swear, I never believe a word of it, but the way you were talking just now, I don’t know, I thought maybe—”
“Maybe,” said Remus, latching on to her word. “Maybe,” he repeated. It felt like walking out onto the surface of the frozen lake in winter, testing, shuffling, ears pricked for the low, creaking cracks beneath your feet. He had never admitted it. Who would he have told? Not his friends, surely. Not his parents, it would break their heart, more than he already had. Well, Lily was his friend now, if she hadn’t been before. “Maybe I am.”
Lily’s eyes widened. “Are you really?”
“If that’s all right,” he said, stupidly, like he was asking for a favor.
Her smile was as sunny as the uncommonly beautiful day. “If that’s all right? Listen to you, you daft sod. Of course it’s all right. It’s great. I think it’s great. I think it’s right cool.”
Despite himself, despite everything, Remus felt himself smiling, and for the first time in days he didn’t feel like a wolf baring its teeth. He felt silly. He felt daft. He felt, strangely, like things might be all right.
She shook her head. “Merlin, you looked like you were headed for the execution chamber. What did you think I was going to ask you?”
Remus’s stomach dropped. “Er—” slipped out of his throat, a choked noise as it tightened right back up.
Her eyebrows crinkled again, in confusion. And then he watched as the realization slowly dawned on her face—her smile slipping, eyes widening again. “You don’t mean—” At whatever expression his face made, unbidden, in response, her mouth fell into a round O, and she sat up. “Is that true?”
“Who told you.” His voice was rough. Whatever warmth there had been between them completely evaporated. “Did Snape?” Did someone else?
“He— But I never believed it— I thought he was mad, I never thought— I—” She was still looking at him with those wide, bottle-green eyes, as if to take in all the signs: his pallor, his scars, his complete and total aloneness. “Maybe I thought,” she said, “with the prefect meetings and all, and how often you’re out of class, but you’re just ill, you’re only ill—”
Remus felt himself standing up, his head spinning with sudden movement, his mouth forming the words, “I have to go.” He set off back down the path the way they came.
Of course. Of course in the moment he’d let his guard down it all had come crashing down around him.
“Remus, wait.” Footsteps behind him. Lily catching up. Lily’s hand on his shoulder— He shrugged her off, and there came a strange, wounded sob from behind him but he didn’t concern himself with that. “Remus,” she said, “where are you going?”
He would go back to Gryffindor Tower. He would pack his belongings. He would hand over his wand to Dumbledore to have it snapped in two. He’d pictured this a thousand times, a million times, and he felt only hollow, putting one foot in front of the other.
“Stop!” Lily cried. “Stop and just listen to me!” She laid a hand on his shoulder again and finally he whirled around to face her, keeping his expression as deliberately stony as he could manage. Lily was not doing the same: Her eyes were bright with concern, her eyebrows knit together. Plaintively, she asked, “You don’t think I mind, do you? I don’t mind, I’m not horrible.”
“You should,” he said, gruffly. “I’m not like you. I’m not human like you.”
“Yes you are,” Lily insisted. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, yes, you are exactly like me. I’m not some ignorant, bigoted— I did my reading. When—well, when Sev started talking about it I went to the library to find out about—about them—about you— I just wanted to know.”
“You just wanted to know?”
Lily looked at him reproachfully. “Well, I knew the stuff we were taught in Defense class was bullshit.”
The library wouldn’t have been much better. Remus knew what every book in the library had to say about werewolves— He’d done the reading himself, in his first year, sneaking books into corners of the library so he wouldn’t be seen with them. “So what did you learn? That we’re all heartless, bloodthirsty monsters who prey on kids?” That our life expectancy is forty? That registered werewolves aren’t allowed wands? That no werewolf has ever, in a thousand years, graduated from Hogwarts?
“That you pose absolutely no danger to anyone twenty-nine out of every thirty nights,” said Lily. “Which I already knew because I’ve spent five years living next door to you and going to class with you and being your friend and you’ve never hurt me. You’ve never hurt a fly. And I know you never would.”
“I would, though,” said Remus. “I’d kill anyone who came too near me on the moon, don’t you understand? I’m not human, I don’t— I don’t think when I’m like that! I’d kill you! Or I’d bite you and turn you and then you’d be—” His voice broke, and he pressed his wrist to his eyes, willing his tears not to fall. “If any Wizarding parents knew I was at Hogwarts, they’d raise hell to get me expelled to protect their kids, and they’d be right!”
“No, they wouldn’t be right.“ Lily’s eyes were fierce. “No, not at all. Because you have an illness?” Remus pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes and breathed, as steadily as he could, which was not very steadily at all. Lily said, “Some Wizarding parents would have me kicked out for being Muggle-born. Are they right?”
“That’s different.”
“Not really,” said Lily. She laid a hand on his shoulder again, and this time she wouldn’t be shrugged off. “Not at all, actually. Remus.” He peeked out from his hands and she was peering at him with so much sympathy he didn’t deserve, and she said, “I’m glad you’re at Hogwarts.”
Remus bit back a sob and turned away from Lily before the tears spilled over, hot, angry tears. He felt unbalanced, his breathing savage. He hid his face in his hands, which didn’t help at all, and now his palms were covered in tears and snot and he hadn’t cried at all, couldn’t even remember the last time he cried, and now to be doing it in front of Lily Evans, snotty and self-hating and pathetic, keening and whimpering like a trapped animal—
And then he felt Lily’s arms around him. Lily’s hands rubbing slow circles into his back, Lily’s head tucked into the juncture of his shoulder and his neck. She held him tight as he shook with sobs. It was the weight of everything, not merely what had happened with Sirius and Snape, but everything, all the fear and secret-keeping and his bloody hip which bloody hurt— Why was he doing this to her? Making her comfort him. She didn’t need to do that. He wanted to tell her that but couldn’t catch his breath, couldn’t stop sobbing long enough to speak. He tried to shrug her off but she didn’t budge. Just kept holding him tight.
“It’s all right,” she was saying. “It’s all right. Breathe, Remus, love, breathe.”
He tried. He was trying. Something broke inside him, something snapped and he sagged into Lily’s embrace, buried his snotty face in the shoulder of her robes and held onto her for dear life, and she held him tight and kept murmuring things like that, telling him to breathe, telling him it would be all right. Because she lived in a world where things really would be all right, a world where girls cried over boys and boys didn’t cry at all and no one became a bloodthirsty monster and certainly no one cried over such a thing.
Lily held him for a while, until he caught his breath, until his sobs subsided into hiccups, and when he could stand on his own she conjured him a white handkerchief.
“Eurgh.” He wiped at the snot on his hands. “I’m sorry. This is vile.”
She giggled. “It’s all right. Happens to the best of us.”
Well, that was a foolish thing to make him well up. This couldn’t get much more humiliating. He tried to hide it by dabbing at his eyes but he probably wasn’t successful. And then he saw how the shoulder of Lily’s robes was soaked with his tears, and he reached out with the handkerchief and started dabbing at it, and she laughed at him—“Stop, stop, let me—Tergeo.” And then her shoulder was clean.
“Oh,” said Remus, stupidly. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right, you daft thing,” she said. “Come on, let’s sit for a while more.”
So they did, against the oak tree, side by side. She cast Tergeo again on his hands because they were really, disgustingly, covered in snot, and he felt utterly spent, wrung dry, with a bit of a headache building behind his eyes. Lily got out two more cigarettes and handed one to him.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated.
“Shut it,” she said, and then he couldn’t speak because she was lighting his cigarette.
As they smoked, she rested her head on his shoulder, and he looked out over the lake. They didn’t speak for a while. He didn’t know what there was to say, still quite embarrassed by his lapse.
Finally, she said, “Remus, can I ask you something?”
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
“How long,” she asked, “have you been, you know,” she made a vague little gesture that meant nothing, “infected?”
He exhaled. “I was four.”
Lily let out a little squeak. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t remember anything different.” It was true, he didn’t have memories, real memories, of anything before he was bitten. If he really tried, he could come up with vague images: a blue-and-green quilt which he thought might have been on his bed, and which he hadn’t seen since; his father in his Ministry robes, kissing Remus and his mother goodbye while the fireplace raged green with Floo powder; a floral sofa and a soft-spoken woman who must have been his Muggle grandmother, whom he also hadn’t seen since. No way to explain it to her, or to any of his mother’s Muggle family. They’d moved out of their terrace house in the coal-mining village in the Valleys where his mother had grown up, to places remoter and remoter until finally winding up in that seaswept cottage on the northwestern shore. As far as he knew, his mother’s family might have thought he was dead. His father’s wizarding family certainly acted as if he was.
Lily was silent for some time, and Remus hoped he hadn’t upset her. The weight of her head on his shoulder felt like a divine responsibility, like a test that he was determined not to fail.
“There was one book in the library,” said Lily, speaking slowly, carefully. “I mean, all the rest of them were all the same, like you said, the same stuff from class, the same horrible rhetoric. But there was this one book. A memoir. Written by someone—someone with lycanthropy. And it was so awful to read everything that poor man went through, for no fault of his own. It broke my heart.” Lily put her hand on Remus’s knee. “It’s called Hairy Snout, Human Heart. Have you read it?”
That book must have been new, at least new since their first year. He certainly hadn’t read it. Hadn’t heard of it, hadn’t seen it at Flourish and Blott’s when he’d gone for his schoolbooks that summer or noticed it in the library stacks. He would’ve remembered. “It sounds like I might not need to,” he said.
“Right,” said Lily. “Yeah, maybe, I just thought, you know—” She waved her hand vaguely again, and sighed. “And there was one night I was reading it in the dorm, and honestly I was sitting there trying not to cry, when Marlene sees what I’m reading, and she asks me what it’s about so I tell her. And she said— She said something horrible about w—”
“Werewolves,” said Remus. “You can say it. It’s not a bad word.”
Lily took a trembling breath, but when she spoke her voice was steady. “I’m sorry. I should spare you. I just— It was Marlene. I never thought I’d hear something so ugly from her. It was awful. But it was everything from the book, I mean, it was exactly what that poor man had heard from witches and wizards all his life. It was so awful.” She shook her head. “When I finished the book, I thought I should write to the author. I don’t know what came over me, I don’t know what I thought I was going to say, but I just wanted to—to say something, to thank him for writing it, I don’t know. Say you’re not alone.” Her hand, still on Remus’s knee, gave it a fortifying squeeze. “I don’t know. Something. But then I noticed it was published anonymously. So that was it, then.”
Remus didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what she wanted him to say, if she wanted him to say anything, or if she was only getting something off her chest. There was a part of him, quashed as soon as it had lifted its head, that had also wondered who the author was, and if he might write to him too.
“Which is all to say, I suppose, that I do understand why you have to keep it a secret and as much as I wish you didn’t have to deal with all that shit, you do—” Here, now, she lifted her hand to find his and she tangled her fingers in his and her hand was soft and steady and Remus didn’t dare breathe—“and I promise, Remus, I’m here for you. I mean it.”
He squeezed her hand because he didn’t think he could speak. It was so like what his friends had said to him all those years ago, and how that had come apart— but somehow, he believed her nonetheless, and maybe that was his problem, maybe he believed the best of people too easily, and trusted, and though he wanted to stop himself, he felt himself trusting again.
Tentatively, then, he leaned his cheek against her soft hair.
“You know,” he said, and his voice was hoarse but didn’t falter, “this is my first time holding hands with a girl.”
Lily chortled, a genuine, bright laugh that buoyed something bright in Remus’s chest. “Well,” she said, “is it everything you imagined?”