TWO SLOW DANCERS, remus lupin

Remus, 1981

It was like this since the funeral.

He reeked of whiskey; dried tears of ichor indented into his cheeks from how often this routine occurred. His breaths were even as he dreamed on the hardwood floor, the lambs and shepards in his unconscious mind distracting him from the slaughter going on around him. It felt as it he was drifting into the alternative abyss, letting someone else take the wheel, steering him through reality on autopilot.

The air took on a grey film. It felt like a lucid fantasy; the murky off white color tinging everything in it's path. The walls, once filled with jovial laughter and color, the same walls he painted with her months before, were covered in a grey tint.

His eyes peeled open, a blurry lens shielding his corneas from the mid-winter sun. He knew she was in their room, probably staring at the grey ceiling underneath their grey bedsheets, laying her head on their grey pillows.

Grey. Everything was grey now. Everything alive and dancing with color was now drained into mundane nothingness like Hades sucking the soul out of Atlas.

He ran his hand across the wooden panels beneath him, imaginary pins and needles poking and prodding his joints as he pushed himself from the floor. It felt as if he had bricks for bones as he finally got to his cracked feet, his frozen hand still clamped around the steel flask James had gotten him for his eighteenth. It hurt to use, but it felt like he was holding the hand of his lost friend when he took generous sips of the numbing liquid.

Step after step, it felt as if the gentlest of waves could capsize him. The soft December sun shone through the grey curtains, making the wood glow beneath him. He knew this heavy feeling well; each month it would drain him of all life before turning him into the monster he was familiar with from the age of four. She was still back there.

His eyes drifted to the dark green front door, the one they painted together. They ran over the coat rack hanging over his combat boots he's had since sixth year, as well as her trainers he had gotten her for her birthday. Her.

His eyes almost magnetized to the body shaped dent in the wall left of the coat rack.

Her.

She was asleep in their room. Go to her, Remus. She's mourning too. She misses you. Go to her.

Her.

His eyes finally stopped on the golden band on his left finger, a symbol and tradition from Ancient Rome telling both him and his sharer that their love was eternal, never ending. Just like the 360 degrees of gold on his hand.

He hadn't spoken more than two words to her in two months.

What was there to say? The only words he could think of for the past weeks were James, Lily, dead, Harry.

Their post-best-friend-death routine worked around the other's. He drank himself through the endless days and nights, eventually drunkenly pressing his cheek to the floor in slumber. The only thing that interrupted his sailor routine was his furry little issue, and it was almost as if the monster inside him knew that the deer, the dog, and the rat that would chase him around were no longer there.

She would awake, put his breakfast he never touches on the mahogany dining table, and go to the Ministry on weekdays to keep the Lupin house afloat the treacherous waters of the post war economy.

This morning it was a homemade blueberry scone with a glass of water.

He poured the glass in the sink. He threw the pastry away. She was asleep in their room.