For as long as Remus can remember he's had a hard life. Constant monthly mutilations of his skin, a absent father, and the trepidation of his blush inducing crush on Anastasia Fox. Anastasia Fox, who flirts with everyone, has matching fainter scars...
Remus walked a path back to the cottage. The sun had just barely set, the sky still a teetering lavender.
After a buffet of sandwiches, fizzy drinks, crisps, and tongue changing popsicles. They had planned to start the fire.
Remus had to inform the very proud, well-born, affluent, moneyed James and Sirius that the twigs and branches that were still wet from yesterdays rain were not going to in fact make the fire.
Sirius whined, asking him why he hadn't told them while they were scouring the woods, picking any fallen piece, how his arms were turning sore.
Remus had been distant from the boys all day with drawn to contemplation. Insecurity.
They had turned into animagus' over third year. Playing a month long sport of the silent game. Weeks of work to help their friend just to be by his side. Be conscious, have to spend a whole night with a beast, once a month.
Remus was usually too torn and scarred at the end of it to worry if he had done something too monstrous. Of course he worried for their safety, but how he acted, how he looked- no.
But after the monthly breaking of his bones, the contort. He wasn't aware; he wasn't Remus; he didn't know the feelings of blood-thirst or canines scents.
As if it those nights never really happened- he had scars to show them they had, gauges of how bad it had gone- but no memory for it.
On top of the tangled necklace of Anastasia's fear. Seeing the boggart had added another page to his diary.
Remus never really fathomed that that was what his friends saw. What he looked like.
He played most of the day, punishing his thoughts.
That's what I look like.
He felt unfairly exposed that he needed 10 more layers to cover up.
That's what his closest companions knew him to look like. These were the people he held so fond, he loves.
You never want the people you love to see a part of yourself that you fear, despise, reject. It was all very disturbing.
He apologized to Sirius, snapping him out of it, feeling awfully guilty for his lack of presence and attention to the people who had done more for him intentionally or not than what the average person received, much less an usually grumpy werewolf.
He said he would make the short enough trip to his house, 'that they had fire wood in a box of an attachment to the shed.'
"I'm worried about James." Remus jumped. He was halfway to the cottage, and hadn't heard Sirius running up to him.
