Gryffindor is clearly the House of courage and bravery. But beneath the light can hide terrible shadows that no one can even imagine.
Remus carries a dark wolf within him who sees Hogwarts as his own flock. So do his two best friends, chosen as alph...
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1975
In his fourth year, Remus loved Sirius and James as young people do.
He loved them the way people love a clear blue sky after endless days of passive-aggressive gray clouds. The way they love the vegetable fat of chocolate melting in their mouths. The bedroom. Their thoughts. The smells.
Remus loved them like friends love each other, without the obligation to do so, and that's exactly why he loved doing it.
But most of all, Remus loved Black and Potter the way girls and boys in love do, and that's where it got complicated.
Remus wasn't alone in his adolescent and conflicted entanglement. After all, it was common at Hogwarts for classmates to catch a glimpse of Black and Potter behind their books in the common room and have a season-long crush on them.
Sirius had that fierceness in every feature of his face and that elegance that followed him like a shadow wherever he went, alternating that state with assimilated reserved aristocracy and scholarly rebellion.
As for James... Well, James was more of an enigmatic firebrand. He didn't seem as overbearing as Sirius but was rather reserved, charming everyone with an endearing composure or just pretending to be passive, only to end up conquering those who succumbed to his secret charms.
If you think about it, James had a way of looking that always seemed to be one step ahead of him, and because he was ahead, he had everyone in the palm of his hand.
Potter and Black were the idols of Hogwarts in early 1975 and were idolized by many students. The two were the popular boys, creating adolescent fantasies in boarding schools with cold beds.
Remus was very close to both Black and Potter as friends. The fact that Sirius and James became idols in this school ecosystem, while he and Pettigrew remained extremely ordinary and invisible to many, was just a detail.
At the end of the day, like good comrades, they drank a butterbeer together in the Gryffindor common room and balanced labels that were nonsense. Bullshit!
So, why did Remus feel a little left out since the middle of fourth year, like he did when he thought his friends had left the Express without him?
It wasn't that Remus thought he had the right to interfere with Sirius and James' popularity, nor did he harbor any hope that Black would match his secret love, let alone that Potter would feel a hidden attraction for him as well. None of the above.
But Lupin had been losing friends for some time. And as always, when this feeling overcame him, he put a little more effort into his studies, delving into his intellectual world of formulas and logic to avoid thinking so much about the world of popularity and values.
Not that it wouldn't have hurt Lupin to feel like the not-so-attractive or uninteresting friend who's being let down a bit.
