#dorkorific

The Shoebox Project by dorkorific & ladyjaida in Audio and Video by greeniron

'I like to remember everything,' Remus says, very quietly, so as not to wake him. 'As it was.Because moments by themselves aren't enough; they're just—they're like photographs. They move a little, they wave, but they aren't everything. You can look back on a moment and say, "In that moment I was happy," or, more often than not, "In that moment I was sad," or "In that moment we were all berks," but you can look back on everything and think, "That was good." Because when all the moments come together, when all the songs meet up with one another, you get something whole and complete and wonderful, people you loved and people you hated and a fondness for them you may not be able to recapture but everything you remember about them being somehow more than they really were, because that's what remembering everything does. When I'm old, I think, I'll look back on this and I won't remember, "That time Sirius thought, if he lit a fart on fire, he could make a star come out of his arse," but I'll probably remember the stars themselves. I won't think, "He nearly choked me when he grabbed onto my tie," but I will think about the stupid doggy noises you're making even right now, even while you're sleeping. It probably means remembering everything and not jumping from moment to moment like life is a game of leapfrog and should be taken experience to experience like lily pads is foolish, because I won't remember you're often a berk and James is often a berk and Peter can be impressively inane and I am such a wet blanket with such a large nose it's a miracle you don't hate me. I'll just remember that I talked for five minutes to a friend who was already sleeping and I was happy anyway.' Remus pauses, sighs, and thumbs the side of Sirius' jaw, not noticing the path of his fingers. 'You're not going to remember any of this. Which is probably good, since this, my friend, is definitely babble. I hate Gillyweed. It makes you think everything is profound when, in reality, you're talking to yourself and no one else can translate the language that is You.'

"Basically this: I wish you were around so I could throw quiche on you."

Remus has read plenty of novels in his lifetime. Big, fat ones, Muggle and magic alike, and all of them full of love and death and noble sacrifice, some of them quiet, some of them thunderous and agonizing. He’s read about lovers crippled by death, sobbing for weeks on the floor; and about men who dwindle, go dark behind the eyes, who stop feeling altogether. But none of them, he realizes now, ever really got round to explaining the everyday weirdness of loss: the way things get quiet, and bright, and far away, and how everything is slightly out of focus, mis-timed--except when they aren't, sometimes, some things that make no sense. The enormity of his hands, up close, and the sharp lines on his fingers; and the sense, not that time is moving slower, but that he is somehow more strangely, distantly aware of every second that goes by. Every movement in his chest and stomach exhaling, inhaling. The soft muscles on his eyelids contracting. The shallow, rucked pattern on the sofa, tiny blue cross-stitch hairs rough against his cheek and huge close to the eye.

He likes—in theory—the smell of butter frying, and the hiss and pop of sausages, and in practice he likes the way the pilot light flickers like wings crossing. What he cannot afford he imagines, because this is the way Remus Lupin lives his life, because he cannot really afford very much.

'If I didn't take hopeless cases, Prongs, I'd've locked you out the second you got here, and I'd've kept all the tea for myself.' He's had to train himself to wickedness, as well, a mischievousness that isn't quite his own. It's a refined job at patching James' and Sirius' habits together and adopting them, a third nature grafted over his second nature, which stands tall ever, cement and concrete and marble and so much stone, over the first. Those are instincts he wasn't born with, but they're entirely his own. He positions himself resolutely against them. It's a constant struggle that can't afford Sirius shaking water over him, touching him with wet fingers along marred skin, remnants of past moonlight.

Sirius watches the dark door where Remus has gone, absently shrugging off his jacket. He is not a particularly deep thinker when it comes to other people -- their tics, their surprises, their strange animal needs, all seem to him something of a waste of time and much better communicated by straight talk or at least straightforward deceit -- and so it unsettles him that he is so much aware of every part of Remus's existence. There are times when Remus's presence in a room makes him feel like the sun, and then there are times like this, when Remus makes him feel large and clumsy as a blind elephant. Sirius, who has been trained to move elegantly since he could barely move at all, cannot decide if this off-footedness that Remus inspires in him is horrible or fascinating.