#remus lupin’s birthday
Tainted | R.L
Paring: Young!Remus Lupin X Fem!Reader
Summary: Remus realizes his love for a girl.
Word Count:.5K
A/N: A little late but in honor of Remus Lupin’s 62nd birthday :)
Paper is just paper until a pen touches it with its scarring ink. It’s like taking a person’s nails and digging them into someone’s skin until they bleed. The canvas is blank until someone taints it. The tip of the quill touches the ink with a subtle clink, and he’s the one who ruins the canvas. Truth be told, it pains him to do so.
Because he knows firsthand what it’s like to be tainted by an unknown power.
Maybe she was the parchment, the canvas, the skin. Everything she touched seemed to blossom and bloom. She never tainted a single soul, but the minute his quill touched the delicate parchment, it felt ruined.
Maybe he’s being overdramatic because it is just notes on Transfiguration, but for some reason, he can’t help but wince.
He can still hear the ringing in his ear from the previous full moon less than forty-eight hours ago. It feels like a fly constantly buzzing in his ear. It’s a constant annoyance. Maybe that’s what draws him to her like a moth to a lamp in the London streets.
She was never the constant buzz of a fly or the noisy honking of a car in the busy streets. She was the birds in the morning or the snow that absorbed all the sound. She was the welsh countryside where he grew up. The humid air and the summer heat. The blissful storm to wash everything away.
Perhaps that’s why he loved her so much.
They sit beside each other in Transfiguration, replicating each other’s actions. He glances at her scarred parchment. Somehow it looks like a summer day. Everything is flourishing and blossoming like it’s meant to. He looks at his parchment to see the usual winter appearance. The look of everything dead and departing. The stream of birds that flee to the south for warmth.
Suddenly he feels embarrassed. His robes feel too tight, and his white button-up beneath them feels clammy. He can only hope that it’s not protruding any scent. The quill threatens to escape his now sweating palm, but he tightens his grip causing a line across the parchment.
Tainting it, if you will.
She sits beside him in silence. Her eyes lingered on Professor McGonagall with a fondness that he almost felt as if he was intruding on them. Her gaze only falls when something flies and hits him directly on the right cheek of his face. She turns and threatens to smile at him. A smile that he adores and loves to see on her face. He thinks it’s lovely.
But he knows that he needs to pick up the piece of paper that is now lying beside him on the ground. It’s crumpled, and the parchment has lines of where it’s been folded and crumpled to shreds. Carefully, he opens it, so he doesn’t rip it after being too impatient. Inside it has curly, calligraphy handwriting that one comes from a pureblood.
The note itself is outrageous and makes Remus exhale extra hard. The boy who’s given him the note is smiling gleefully from his right. Remus rolls his eyes and crumples the paper back up into his bag. The girl doesn’t say anything. In fact, she’s actually writing again following what Professor McGonagall has on the board. Without realizing it, she slips her hand into his.
Remus knows, little by little, she’ll continue to put him back together and help him bloom once more like he did when he was four.
