Harry Potter Everyday and Ordinary

_**Summary**__: For the past six months, Remus Lupin has lived something close to a normal life. Every day is much the same, an oddly comforting routine that obscures, even if it cannot erase, the past. Remus-centric. Former Sirius/Remus._

_**Other Notes**__: written for barefootboys prompt #6: map of the London underground_

_**Disclaimer**__: I do not own Harry Potter, any of its characters, including and especially Sirius and Remus, or any of it settings._

**x**

For the past six months, Remus Lupin has lived something close to a normal life. He wakes up in the gray shadows of early morning, has a simple breakfast (black coffee and toast, usually), reads the previous day's paper. He showers under water that is more cold than warm and dresses in the same worn clothes he owned during the war. Then he walks three blocks to the entrance to the underground, drifting along the same route every day, resurfacing again only one street away from the tiny corner bookstore where he shelves novels, biographies, collections of poetry, and points people to the self-help aisle. He eats lunch in the back room. He lets the underground take him back to his small, unassuming flat, where he ignores his hunger, his loneliness, the photo albums on the shelves and the wand in a box under his bed.

Every day is much the same, an oddly comforting routine that obscures, even if it cannot erase, the past. He does not even have the wolf anymore. At least, not like he used to. The growl of him is muted. The taste for blood is gone. Remus lies down calmly on his bedroom floor and stares at the round disk of the moon through the part of the curtains; he feels the fur bristling over his body, runs his tongue over his new sharp teeth, and wonders how he has gone so many years, knowing this animal without feeling him.

He does not miss the wolf. Yet he feels an acute and precise ache where that instinct used to be. He lines it up with every other hole in his life, compares his missing pieces, tries to project a day when all of those phantom aches will finally leave him.

Until then, he takes comfort in the everyday, the ordinary.

It's been a long time.

**x**

The ride on the underground is both the most comforting and most terrifying part of his day. Comforting, because he does not have to worry about the rent, or if Snape will remember to send the Potion this month. Terrifying, because he never knows where his thoughts will end up when his mind wanders away into the past.

The woman across from him is staring. His scars, he imagines. There is a new one right at the corner of his eye, over the eyebrow—garish now but it will fade, with any luck, in time. He thinks he sees her eyes stray to it. She is maybe 23, 24. Pretty. Not much younger than Remus, but when he looks at her, he feels old.

He finds himself wondering what Sirius would do now. Smile at the girl, maybe. Or just ignore her, watch her only out of the corner of his eye—a game to him like everything else. Or maybe Sirius wouldn't even see the girl in the first place. He always was the type to be noticed, never to notice.

Thoughts of Sirius always lead back to the same place. Flash cuts of memory and dreams. The trial he couldn't watch. The rubble of the house he never visited. The last days of the war, how they sat in dark rooms because they couldn't be bothered to light any of the lamps, how they slept with the whole bed between them and coiled away from any accidental touch.

The past plays out like a dream, too scattered and aching to be real, and he snaps out of it as from sleep. All around him, his fellow passengers hold meaningless conversations, read newspapers or magazines, wait impatiently for their stops—oblivious to him and to the war that still eats away at him like acid.

Sometimes, he can go days without remembering, without thinking about it, without wondering. He lives wholly in the present. He checks the map of the underground before he gets on, even though it is the same route every day and every day his routine is unchanging. But when he sits down and waits for the familiar slide of motion to overtake him, he can never be sure where his mind will take him.

Sometimes he wonders about alternate realities. If somewhere there is another him, no scars and no disease to scar him, living in a world where there is no magic and no wizards to misuse it, no war and no casualties, no still bodies and no mutilated minds.

Is this other version of him happy? Does he have friends? Is he in love? Does he—at least—have the capacity to love? Remus hopes. He can't be sure. But some days he can't stand the thought of living the rest of his life like he is now.

For a moment, he is so lost he isn't sure if this is his stop, or if he has missed it completely.

No—he thinks—next one.

He almost doesn't notice the two boys stumbling on. It's their laughter that alerts him. Everyone is watching them but they don't seem to care, or even notice; one is holding up the other, but Remus isn't sure even they know who is who or which is which. They fall down into the seats next to Remus, and the darker haired one asks the other if he is all right.

"Yes—yes—I'm fine," he answers, even though he's much too thin for this to be the truth.

"You sure?" the first one asks. He is still shaking with the last of his laughter, but he is gripping his friend's hand tightly, and his concern is still clear in his voice.

"Yes," the thin one answers, just as they quiet and become still. There is a pause—uncertainty between them—their hands still grasped together from the frenzy in which they ran in—and Remus is flooded with memory so strong that he has to look away.


End file.

Harry Potter