Title: Sometimes
Author: Ex-Professor Remus Lupin
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Angst/Tragedy
Era: Post-OotP
Pairing(s): Remus/Sirius
Summary: Sometimes it just hurts to breath.
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
Author's Note: This is just…something that came to me in the middle of the night while I was washing the dishes. It's nice to know my own personal tragedies come through in my writing.
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Sometimes, he'll wake up in the morning and it will all seem so surreal. As if it were nothing more than a faded memory or even a dream. He can manage his usual polite smiles easily as he arrives at the meetings. They'll notice his shabbier appearance, the gray in his hair that hadn't been there before, but they won't say anything until he's at least out of the room. It isn't as if he can't hear them when he's in the other room.

He will stand there outside the door, staring at the floorboards, still filthy from eight years of neglect and listen to their worry and pity. He hates this house almost as much as he did. He hates the memories it brings every time they come to it and the fact that they had tried – in vain he knows now – to bring laughter and life into it's hollowed walls.

There are other times when he can't seem to find the strength to get out of bed and the reality of it all it so painstakingly real that all he can do is lay there gasping for breath and fighting back the tears and sometimes it just hurts to breath because any breath without him shouldn't be allowed. But, like all ways, the tears and the breath always come, as does the sympathy, though they couldn't even begin to understand. And he wants so badly to be able to scream at them, to just howl at the unfairness of it all.

Sometimes, he thinks it would be so much easier to just let the wolf win on those nights under the full moon, to let the beast tear his heart out for daring to let it break again. He wishes sometimes that he had the courage to do it, but he won't though, because Remus J. Lupin is a man, not an animal, no matter how wounded he may be.