l'osservatore della bellezza | wolfstar

and perhaps, some things can't be undone

My Dearest Sirius Black,

I expect that this letter may be unwelcome to you, which is entirely understandable, due to all that occurred between us and all that I have done. But I am a shallow, selfish being, so I secretly pray that you will read it all the same.

I suppose this is an explanation (or an excuse) for why I made you leave. It is not an easy thing for me to regale it, but I feel you deserve to know what made me the way I am.

Up until the age of sixteen, I lived a life of wonder. You may not be able to imagine it - I barely can myself - but I was happy, and unafraid of loving, and even regularly kind to those around me. The world was rosy and good, and nothing could mar my perspective on it.

At sixteen, Fenrir Greyback, my father's friend, visited us at our home. I'd met him before, but he'd never treated me as anything other than a child. Something changed this time, however, and when he saw the paintings I'd been aimlessly creating he asked my parents if he could mentor me at his home. They agreed, so away I went.

He was kind to me, if often perfunctory. His dismissiveness merely pushed me to try my best to hold his attention, and show him that I was far more mature than I appeared (this wasn't true). Maybe that was his plan: to have me amuse him by making a spectacle of myself. I feel ashamed, even now, by how I acted. I won't detail all I did. Perhaps another time? There's more pressing matters at hand, after all.

My father sent me a letter, a few months in, relating the news that my mother was sick and asking me to return home. I wanted to, but Fenrir advised against it. He said that it would be too depressing for me, that I couldn't be of any help, so why go? My father sent me many letters, begging me to come home, but I couldn't. I even ended up believing that I didn't want to.

Eventually, my father, disgusted with my apparent apathy, wrote to say that my mother has passed, and that he would no longer write to me. I read this aloud to Fenrir, crying quite heavily I must admit, when I saw that my father had also written that Fenrir had 'made me into the spitting image of himself'.

Fenrir pulled the letter from my hands and told me my father had gone mad with grief. I didn't exactly know what my father meant, since at the time I still saw Fenrir as a kind, good man, simply wanting the best for me. I still don't know what my father wrote, since Fenrir used the letter as kindling for the fire.

I don't want to go on with this story. To put it briefly, I grieved for months, he comforted me, we drunk quite a lot of wine one night, and then he took me to bed.

And I loved him, Sirius. I really loved him. And I finally had his whole attention, I wasn't a child to him anymore, I was his lover (although I was never quite his friend). I even imagined that he loved me, too. Maybe he might have done, if the world were a different place. Who can say?

You are aware of what happened next: many months of love-making later, he and his friends tried to kill me. He obviously never told me why, considering I never saw him after that, but I think it's possible that he was scared that I'd blab about our affair to someone and get him in trouble for being a sodomite. Or, maybe he'd gotten bored of me, and didn't know how to get rid of me. Maybe he was just insane. I don't know, I don't know, sometimes I don't want to know.

Since then, I have not been at all willing to fall in love again. I wished to never be hurt, physically or otherwise. Love was a weakness to me, and I wanted never to be weak.

I have spent the last four or five years under a veil of mistrust. Frankly, I was often proved correct in my scepticism surrounding beauty and goodness. Nothing has ever been revealed to be as lovely as it first appears to be. I believed that beauty and ugliness were two entities, two sides of the same line, found together in an endless, brutal war. And always the worst parts of people seemed to win, cracking through their spun-glass exteriors. Everyone was both beautiful and ugly; everything was a distressing battle with a violent ending, an inevitability already written out, long ago.

But then... you?

Darling, you showed me that underneath your beauty, yes, there was ugliness, left behind from the childhood you have suffered and the life you have struggled through. And I heard it, and I felt its craters, and I looked at you and searched for a sign that you were a facade too, and all I saw was you. Beautiful. Ugly. Both in perfect harmony, writing a melody that seemed to shatter me and made me more terrified than I have ever been in my life.

You are, without irony, despite your pretty name, walking through stardust and moonlight. You are my candle, my light, my world. You are my pyre, and I willingly lay upon you, letting who I became burn so that I may be with you as the person I used to be - the one who loved without fear. There is a strange absence of logic in how I feel, and I adore it: I wouldn't have it any other way.

These last few years, I have found myself holding my breath, waiting for someone to make my life fall to pieces around me. That someone turned out to be you. What I didn't count on was for you to also put me back together, even if I failed to realise at first that you had made me happier than I had ever presumed I could be.

There isn't a lot more to say. I do not demand your forgiveness: you are to judge whether I deserve it. I long for it, yes, but there is never any obligation. You might not trust me anymore, as it is. No, I do not expect you to do anything; I simply wish for you to come back to me, and to feel your love, and to love you in return.

Because I do love you, Sirius Black. Inescapably, endlessly, entirely. I love you, and that love fills me with an emotion that, in my mind, not even the greatest writer could describe.

So please, come home. I miss you (inescapably, endlessly, entirely). I can only hope that you still love me, and maybe, you miss me too.

I remain (without regret),
Most ardently yours,
Remus J. Lupin

***

The problem, unfortunately, was that Remus wasn't completely sure where Sirius was living now, after he'd left. He reckoned that James would know, though, so he addressed the letter to his home, with a note asking that it be sent on to Sirius.

But Sirius hadn't told James where he was, or even what had happened between him and Remus. In fact, James hadn't heard from Sirius in over a month.