Fic: As We Are Wont, 19
Lupin:
Should I applaud you for your self restraint? An Order of Merlin at the least. I take my tea with milk, no sugar, and I will not make you curry. Do not mistake this for more than what it is. I may consume a thousand children, and you may find yourself regretting any desire to take on more. I do not need another vow.
Perhaps I do not take because I do not want to have. What good is wealth if one never had a choice in receiving the inheritance? You presume that your gift to me is great for the fact that you will give it-- no. A gift is measured by how easily it may be thrown away. I am forced to keep everything: promises, pretenses, positions, potions. Am I free to throw this away, Lupin? You force yourself on me like a stray dog in want of an owner. Will you blame me if I dispose of you with the rest?
This fortress is like a compartment built to hold beetles. Consider the Dark Lord, the great insect enthusiast, gathering crickets to feed to his praying mantis. The Headmaster himself loves cockroaches and wasps, loves to to inflict wasps on the roaches. His Queen secretes a substance that numbs the cockroach mind, renders it zombie, and she lays her eggs upon the roach. Later, the egg hatches and the greedy larvae breaks the exoskeleton in a search for food. And the roach is still alive. I leave you to decide who is whom.
Would we ever be able to meet as men, comport as men, love as men? I doubt this: you are not a man. I do not take my attraction for you as a given thing. Were we both Ravenclaws I would not have found anything remotely interesting about you. Perhaps we might work on assignments together and drink a round of butterbeer. Then it would be running into each other at Diagon Alley with brief conversations that end with promises for meetings we neither intend to keep.
Don't search for a different past, Remus, nor for a bright future. These meetings and our letters exist now and nowhere else. How they came about I do not care to dwell on. It is the only way that I am able to live so recklessly and forget the strangeness that now characterizes my daily existence. I take only what I can bear to throw away. The rest-- I cannot afford to keep.
SS