Little Things

It was the whimpering gasps that gave him away. Try as he might he couldn't stop them escaping his lips, even when he knew that they would hear him. That any minute his friends would burst in and see him with tears streaming down his cheeks. And he didn't want that. Didn't want them to see the red puffiness of his eyes, or the nail marks in his palms where he'd clenched his fists so tight to stop himself from fucking crying again. He wasn't sad, he was frustrated, and it was the kind that made him want to punch through a window or lash out at someone; anything to make the hurt tangible.

He knew that what he was would never change, that it would always be a problem, that he would forever be a… werewolf. He knew that but it didn't make it easy to accept. And sometimes he just wanted to scream at the world, to use words that would make his mother hit him round the back of the head. But when he felt like that he always cried. Always. It made him feel weak, which infuriated him even more, til he got to the point where he was crying because he couldn't stop himself from crying. And it was the gasps that he couldn't contain that meant he would rub his eyes until they were raw, trying to get it together before walking out of the bathroom, back into their dormitory.

They weren't in there. They had been but now they had disappeared, and Remus was so grateful that they hadn't heard. That his friends hadn't heard his weakness. He threw himself onto his bed, then frowned as he realised he had sat on something. He picked up the object to find it was a pack of men's handkerchiefs, with a note scrawled in Sirius' handwriting. For when you realise we used all of yours to carry dungbombs.

Remus smiled, not caring anymore that his friends had obviously heard him. It was the little things like this that made him realise they didn't mind that he had a problem. And even if he felt weak, they still cared.