"You made us feel ashamed of ourselves."
Chapter Fifteen: Casting Stones at Driftwood
It took another week before Remus returned to classes. This time he bore no real wounds on his body. Though, he did hold himself like a tired old man and failed to complete his homework on his first two days back because he was simply too exhausted. Most of the teachers seemed to go easy on him like McGonagall, which surprised all of the others severely. Flitwick also had no problem with it saying simply that he understood. This made Sirius and Peter a bit more paranoid about the whole werewolf situation, which they were still not willing to believe. Overall Sirius and Peter tried their best to act normal around Remus, and for the most part they succeeded. James, though, made pretending nothing was wrong an art form, and he hated that fact more than the others would ever know.
He had watched Remus closely over the next few weeks and found nothing new. He was still just the same boy with the exact same problem that he had had from the beginning. The same disease that they had befriended him with from the beginning, only thing was that they hadn't known that Remus was indeed a dangerous beast come once a month when they had made friends with him. This ugly fact had, in turn, changed the way they looked at him, the way they acted around him; it made him different. This in turn secluded Remus even more than he already tended to isolate himself anyway. Yet, he was still their friend, first and foremost, and nothing should have the power to change that, no matter how devastating it was.
He glared at the flames in the mostly empty common room's fire, as he absently poked at a hole in the comfy couch's seam. He couldn't even blame Sirius and Peter for acting differently around Remus, for this was how the wizarding world conditioned people. People were supposed to hate anyone or anything that was even a little different than themselves. This was how children were raised in their world, to fear one another, to think they're somehow better than other people. Either way it was wrong in James' eyes. Then again, there was a similar hatred in the muggle world against wizarding folk. Racism had derived from that foolish muggle fear.
He slouched further into the couch, still absentmindedly pulling at the gradually growing hole in the couch, letting his mind wander, and trying to comprehend what it would be like to live in Remus' shoes. He kept running through different ways to live Remus' life and every time he tried a new way around the werewolf issue it tended to end the same way. The people he had learned to love would eventually find out the truth, like James had, and then they would either leave him or treat him like he was a smoking Howler waiting, unpromisingly, to be opened.
James sighed heavily to himself on the verge of either yelling out in frustration or crying out in despair. He didn't want things to end that way. He couldn't just let things fall apart. Remus was not going to get away that easily. James wasn't ready to let him just slip through the cracks, whether or not Sirius or Peter liked that idea. Yet, it wasn't really his resolution to make, ultimately, it would be Remus' decision to continue with their friendship or not.
He groaned loudly in frustration and put his feet up on the coffee table stretching his legs. He immediately noticed that Lily was standing over him looking intently at his face, which was screwed up in exasperation. He felt his mouth turn upward into a small but sincere smile as she climbed over his outstretched legs as she went to sit down next to him.
"So what's wrong, Mr. Potter?" she asked with a sly grin as soon as she had sat down.
He stared forward into the flames that were dancing to their own music in the fireplace. That seemed to be a very funny question to him at that moment. What was wrong? He knew exactly what the answer was to that question. A simple word could easily sum up the whole thing but as he thought further he found another word come to the surface of his thoughts and he knew immediately that it fit the situation quite nicely. "Friends."
"What? Did you and Sirius have a row? Because I think you two were quite the best of friends when you cleverly put those Filibuster Fireworks in Severus's Potion." Lily alleged with a frown. James knew she hated the way they treated him but he stood by his beliefs that dear old Snape deserved everything they did to him.
He laughed despite himself as he thought of the look on Snape's face when his perfect potion had exploded all over him but James quickly stopped when he saw Lily's face. He sat upright on the couch so he could look into her emerald eyes as he remembered he had to answer her question. "No, it's more of a problem with Remus," he answered truthfully without ever looking away from her eyes. He thought it was a little strange how well she could hold her face in a never changing unreadable expression, while her eyes did exactly the opposite as they radiated with her sudden comprehension.
"Oh," she frowned slightly. "I've noticed how he sort of drifts."
James nodded silently to himself. Drifts covered Remus's personality flawlessly.
"Yeah, he just separates himself sometimes, but now it's worse than ever before because--" he stopped not wanting to tell her Remus's secret. He thought for a while on his choice of words and quickly found a way to say what he wanted in a safer way, "because Sirius and Peter are treating him differently." She cocked her eyebrow upward but said nothing. James stared at her trying to read what she was thinking but when he couldn't, he continued: "Remus isn't daft. He notices it too, so I figure he feels a little unwanted and he keeps drifting further and further away from us." He furrowed his brow as exactly what was bothering him filtered into his head and before he could stop it he found it spewing out of his mouth; uncensored. "And I don't want to lose a friend over something that's... that's ..." he looked at her suddenly realizing what he was about to say and finished his statement, "like a scar."
She didn't say anything as she stared at him, trying to comprehend what exactly he was getting at. No matter how much he actually wanted her to understand he knew she never would. However, it was true. The problem with Remus was that his Lycanthropy was like a scar. A person couldn't see it unless they looked for it, yet it was always there. It was an eyesore and something that made a person somehow different from the other people they were around daily, though, unwillingly. He stared back at the flames ignoring Lily's silent thinking.
"I don't understand and I won't try to," she said suddenly cutting through the short silence they had fallen into. James turned back to her. "But I will say this. It sounds like Sirius and Peter are casting stones at Remus. I don't know if I'm right on this but give me a break, James, you're being quite cryptic. But if my thinking is correct the only thing I have to say is: don't let them do that. Because when people do cast stones they don't bother to look at the actual person, just the flaws on the surface." She smiled weakly at him and stood up to join Christopher Weasley and his sister in the corner of the room obviously done with the conversation.
James looked at her as she walked over to them with her eyes sparkling and wide smile. He thought of her words as he stared at the group of red heads in the corner without really seeing them and smiled. He somehow thought she might not have been talking just about Remus but tried to ignore the other possible person she had been alluding to in her simple message. He got up and walked upstairs to his dormitory where he knew Peter and Sirius were hiding.
The room was quiet as he entered. He quickly noticed Sirius and Peter sitting on the floor working on their homework and both of them looked slightly relieved when they saw that it was only James who had entered. James sighed deeply instantly irritated with both of their behavior and just went into what was on his mind not really caring how the other two reacted to it. "You guys have to try and treat Remus like he's normal."
Sirius looked up from his History book straight at James and held his gaze, never wavering, and spoke softly. "I know that, but he, according to what you said just a few weeks ago could very well be a bloody werewolf," he said this very calmly, which only raised James's frustration even more.
"So what? He's still our mate."
"We can't change it if he is a werewolf James! So what's the point of keeping up the friendship? We can't exactly help him."
"We can try!" James yelled.
"How?" Sirius retorted, matching James's volume. Peter stared in horror as the two yelled at each other. This was only the second real row Peter had ever witnessed between the two boys and he obviously wasn't enjoying a second of it.
"Just try to accept him. Act like nothings changed. Treat him like he's our friend," his voice slowly came down to an acceptable tone.
"He is our friend," Peter said in a slightly affronted tone from the sidelines.
Sirius' face changed as he suddenly realized someone else was in the room and he looked to the ground in thought then he turned upwards. "James, I'm trying."
James stared at him for a moment taking in the boys black hair hanging in his eyes, to his pleading expression. "I know, but please, don't seclude him. He doesn't need that. He does a fine enough job of that on his own."
They fell into a long silence as Sirius smirked slightly to himself but never said anything in return, before he went back to his work. James joined them on the floor and started to work on his own homework for the evening. They heard the door open from behind them and they all looked up as Remus came into the room with his backpack full of books from the library where he'd retreated to earlier that afternoon to go work on his History essay. He stared at all of them as they watched him enter and he chuckled uneasily to himself as he dropped his book bag on the floor by his neatly made bed. He walked over to the center of the room where the three boys had made themselves comfortable on the floor working on their own essays and smiled at them as he sat down next to James. "So, what have you guys been up to while I was gone?" he asked hesitantly.
"Nothing," the three boys answered in unison, beginning yet another night covered in sweetly poisoned lies.