NOTHING GIRL || Remus Lupin

-Thirty Three: Impermanent-

Helia and Remus fell into an easy rhythm over the next few weeks. Secret smiles and bedside notes and moonlit conversations, sometimes in the cold open air of the Astronomy Tower, and sometimes wrapped in the casual safety and familiarity of the Room of Requirement, became their comfortable norm. Defence Against the Dark Arts was like a competition to see how many shared glances they could sneak without attracting the attention of their fellow classmates or progressively more angry Professor.

Helia had laughed more in the last fortnight than she had in the six years before. Letting go of what she had now with Remus was becoming less of an eventuality and more like a piece of homework that no one would notice if she put off. It was a bad thing to do, but somehow she couldn't quite find the strength to say goodbye to Remus Lupin.

Remus, meanwhile, was blissfully unaware of Helia's struggle. He went around in an almost permanently star struck state. Every time Helia smiled at him, he would become lightheaded and dizzy, happy surprised by the fact that Helia freaking  Blacksmith was smiling at him. James and Sirius did not miss the opportunity to make fun of the constant goofy grin on his face, though Sirius did so with a slight wariness about him and a point behind the mocking tone of his voice, like a continuous reminder of his stance on Helia.

"Moony." the rebel child of the Black family said to Remus one afternoon, catching his friend by the elbow and pausing him on his way out of the common room. Sirius ran a hand through his hair. "Look..."

Remus sighed. "Padfoot, I know you don't approve of Helia, but I honestly don't think she's as bad as everyone says. I think-"

"Do you trust her?" Sirius stared at him with a kind of intensity that Remus had never seen on his face before.

"What?" Remus asked.

"Do you trust her?" Sirius repeated carefully, enunciating each syllable.

Remus felt his eyebrows pulling together in a frown. "I..."

"Just..." Sirius ran another hand through his hair. "Just answer the question."

Images flickered behind Remus's eyelids: Helia offering him a phone, looking slightly nervous, as if scared he would hit it away; Helia glancing up at the ceiling to the quotes that she begged a secret room to carve onto it; Helia smiling as starlight lit up her eyes; Helia winking at him across a breakfast table, startling him with the crackle of fire it sent through him. Remus drew himself up.

"Yes." He said, staring Sirius straight in the eye. "Yes, I trust her."

Sirius nodded once, and then again, as if to confirm the first nod, and then turned around and left the common room, leaving Remus stood in place with only a newfound belief that lit his insides with a kind of warmth he hadn't felt before.

...................

"Alright, listen up, you lot!"

Professor Scamander surveyed the bored looking school children in front of him with the kind of glare that told them he had wanted to use a word a lot less appropriate for a classroom than 'lot' to describe them. There was an unusually shaped, large cupboard balanced on the desk that appeared to be shaking ominously. A large, brass lock was fastened securely onto the front. Helia's knee brushed Remus's under the table and Remus had to fight to keep his face neutral when Scamander's infamous look of disgust scanned it's way over him.

The teacher was once again pacing the front of the classroom, cane balanced on shoulder as he walked. Remus didn't think that, in the entire time he had been taught by the pensioner, he had ever actually seen Professor Scamander use his cane to help him walk.