remus john lupin does not love chocolate.
of course, if you were to offer him a piece of chocolate, he’d take it. he’d thank you. he’d eat your chocolate and he’d enjoy it. he’s not a fucking psychopath, alright? he likes eating chocolate once in a while. he loves eating free food even more. but he doesn’t love chocolate. he doesn’t crave it when he’s hungry. he doesn’t pine for it in his idle hours. if you were to offer him a pouch full of galleons and send him to honeydukes, he sure as hell isn’t getting a basic fucking bean bar you could find at any shop in england for less than 10p.
there are people in this world who love chocolate. this is perfectly reasonable.
then there are individuals who take things they love and turn them into obsessions.
they won’t merely enjoy chocolate. they attempt to inhabit it. it becomes a sugary substitute for a genuine personality, a quiet admission of mediocrity for those so devoid of internal complexity they’ve decided to make a fermented bean their entire identity. they wrap themselves in the aesthetic of the cocoa bean because without it, they might be entirely transparent, constructing a fragile persona out of foil wrappers to distract from the lack of substance within. they demand it in every dessert and drink. they will defend it with a smudge of shit-brown on their chins, insisting it is the only sophisticated choice for a mature palate. they cling to that foil-wrapped mediocrity like a life raft in a sea of actual flavor, terrified that if they tasted something with a little teeth, the whole facade of their curated, beige existence would come crashing down around their air-filled heads.
remus understands this level of blind loyalty, but he reserves his for things that actually matter. david bowie, for example, could singlehandedly decimate the world’s population of diricrawls and remus would defend that man with his goddamn life. the diricrawls were a biological redundancy. their extinction is a curated silence in the symphony of evolution. david isn't a killer; he’s an editor of the natural world, and if you actually listened to low, you’d understand the necessity of the void.
oh no, why are you crying? what’s that? bowie burned your house down? he’s forcing you into a cycle of rebirth! he’s burning away the dross of your personality! pull yourself together you fucking walnut, this fire was an invitation to rise from the ashes. you can’t become a diamond dog while you’re still clinging to a floral print sofa from ikea.
so now, wobbling precariously on a chair as hordes of rabid sugar-high chocolate defenders claw at his legs and poke at him with pitchforks, he will present his defense. he doesn’t love your simple, comforting chocolate. he likes sweets that do something.
“do something?” you cry in outrage. “what is this, a dog show? is the lolly going to jump through a hoop?”
the answer to the second question is yes. but the lolly isn’t the dog here.
remus grew up in wales. not the idyllic postcard villages of wales, but rather the middle of bumfuck nowhere wales, where hippo-sized sheep ruled the lands, garden gnomes roped him into gang wars, and welsh greens shat on his roof. and his childhood was spending a frankly unreasonable percentage of the calendar year in some stage of suffering.
there were the full moons themselves, obviously. twelve transformations a year. twelve nights of turning into something violent and starving and wrong. but people always forget the surrounding damage, as though he simply wolfed out for an evening and clocked back into society on monday morning with a jaunty little cough and perhaps a tasteful scratch behind the ear.
there were the days before, where his bones started aching like they were trying to escape his skin. where every sound became too loud and every smell became unbearable and his temper sat inside him like a live grenade with the pin halfway out. then the days after, feverish and shredded apart, lying in bed unable to move properly while his body attempted to negotiate terms with reality again.
because lyall and hope lupin loved their son desperately, but love sharpened by terror becomes something strange. careful. clinical. they kept him hidden because the world was cruel, and because they were frightened of what would happen if anybody knew. so remus grew up in this bizarre half-feral rhythm of confinement and recovery, learning very early that pain was something to be managed quietly.
there were healer visits too, secretive and humiliating in equal measure.
grown adults discussing him in lowered voices while pretending he couldn’t hear them through the door.
remarkably well-behaved, considering.
as though he were a dog that hadn’t bitten anyone yet.
sit. roll over. drink the potion. stick out your arm. stay.
and that does something to a child. specifically, it gives him the very specific psychological profile of a raccoon trapped in a church attic. feral, exhausted, and deeply suspicious of anything pretending to be wholesome.
so no, when someone hands him a neat little square of milk chocolate and acts as though they’ve bestowed upon him the divine generosity of the fucking heavens, he does not collapse to his knees in gratitude. what is he supposed to do with that?
“ah yes, thank you kindly for this smooth and emotionally repressed rectangle. i can truly taste the colonialism.”
he’s tired of hollow sympathy and pitying smiles and false comforts and playing it safe until one day he finally manages to tear himself apart completely.
so if selecting a tooth-rotting hazard disguised as confectionery was the single act of absolute autonomy he was granted in his micromanaged locked-down life, then by god he was going to take his freedom and swallow the pain.
he wants sweets with intent.
sweets that arrive in your life with the energy of a cryptid sighting.
he wants a sugar rush that feels like a localized atmospheric event.
you know what he likes? acid pops. shit that feels like they were invented by a disgraced alchemist with the mentality of willy wonka on crack cocaine who lost his medical license for ‘reckless enthusiasm.’ whizbees that fizz so violently on your tongue you briefly achieve spiritual enlightenment and can hear colours. pepper imps that punch you square in the throat like they’re trying to collect a debt and leave you pissing fire for a week. blood-flavoured lollipops that stain your mouth red and get the howling in your head to shut up.
this, naturally, horrifies people.
particularly the sort of people who think ‘salted caramel’ is an adventurous personality trait.
but if your confectionary experience does not carry at least a mild threat of injury, then what exactly are we doing here dolores? why even eat at this point? ram a fucking feeding tube up your arse and save us all from the second-hand embarrassment.
madam pomfrey, meanwhile, insisted chocolate had medicinal properties.
not in the whimsical “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” sort of way, either. no, she said it with the exhausted conviction of a woman who had witnessed seventeen separate concussions before breakfast and was one improperly supervised cauldron away from personally throttling the student body.
“chocolate helps stabilise the nervous system after magical shock. it’s a certified remedy,” she’d tell him whenever he inevitably turned his nose up at the slabs she pressed into his hands after difficult moons. “one day, mr lupin, you will learn the value of accepting comfort where it’s offered.”
remus, age eleven and already spiritually eighty-seven years old, had stared at her with the deep suspicion of an escaped lab rat being handed government-issued cheese. this particular rat did not trust the medical advice of a lady who’d dropped biology in year 6.
comfort was all well and good in theory, but most comfort arrived wearing the face of pity. most comfort came soft and careful and unbearably gentle, as though he might crack apart in someone’s hands if they held him too tightly. chocolate was the edible equivalent of being tucked into an itchy granny blanket by bitches who looked at him with wet eyes.
and then sirius black ruined everything.
sirius black, unfortunately, was one of them.
one of the deranged cocoa evangelists haunting this earth with brown sticky fingers and unwavering conviction.
but sirius approached sweets with the intensity of a man making direct eye contact with god.
sirius didn’t eat chocolate delicately. he devoured it like he’d been raised by wolves with a severe vitamin deficiency. he stole honeydukes stock by the fistful and sprawled across the gryffindor common room surrounded by wrappers like a recently divorced king amid the ruins of his empire.
dark chocolate was “pretentious victorian garbage.”
milk chocolate was “reliable.”
white chocolate should “legally qualify as a hate crime.”
chocolate frogs were acceptable only because “watching it attempt to escape improves morale.”
he said all this with the confidence of a man who had never once in his life considered the possibility of being wrong.
remus found it insufferable.
which, regrettably, also meant he found it fascinating.
because sirius loved things so completely it bordered on catastrophic. not politely. not carefully. never halfway. sirius attached himself to joys with both hands like the world might try to confiscate them if he loosened his grip for even a second.
music. motorbikes. flying. stupidly dangerous ideas. regulus. james. for some unfathomable reason; remus.
especially chocolate after full moons.
at first remus thought it was coincidence.
a square pressed into his hand after transformations, a cup of overly sweet hot chocolate shoved against his chest while sirius loudly complained about how criminally ugly the hospital wing curtains were, bits stolen from honeydukes appearing in remus’s pockets like some sort of sugary infestation.
“you look half-dead,” sirius would say.
“you didn’t have dinner last night.”
“yes i did, you made me eat that chicken wing”
“eat the bloody chocolate.”
“fine. die of starvation. see if i care.”
and then five minutes later sirius would split the bar in half and take ruthless advantage of remus’s recently mended bones by tackling him to the floor and cramming the entire chunk into remus’s mouth. and as remus choked and writhed on the floor, sirius would start eating the other half himself as though he hadn’t just attempted homicide.
that was the unbearable thing.
sirius never handed him chocolate like he was fragile.
he handed it over like it was obvious.
like of course remus deserved warmth. like of course someone should sit beside him afterward. like surviving something painful wasn’t shameful or monstrous or deserving of careful silence.
eat the chocolate, moony.
and somewhere along the line, against all reason and personal principle, remus discovered the horrifying truth:
chocolate tasted different when it came from someone who loved him like a disaster instead of a burden.
he still doesn’t love chocolate though.
just putting that out there.
his tastebuds are yet to undergo such a serious character degradation.
he started doing it accidentally.
not consciously. not with intention. certainly not with any kind of emotional significance, because remus lupin is, above all else, committed to the lifelong practice of aggressively misunderstanding his own feelings.
it begins sometime in fifth year when they stop by a little muggle corner shop during christmas holidays and he notices a stack of cadbury bars near the register. sirius is beside him, bitching about muggle newspapers.
“look at this,” sirius says, holding up a copy of the sun with visible outrage. “this entire publication reads like it was written by a drunk mountain troll.”
the cashier looks frightened.
remus, meanwhile, stares at the chocolate.
not because he wants any.
but sirius had spent twenty straight minutes ranting about how wizard chocolate was superior because muggles “lacked whimsy.” which is exactly the kind of statement that made remus want to commit small acts of violence.
not thoughtfully. certainly not fondly.
“you’re wrong,” he says later, tossing the dairy milk onto their bed.
sirius squints at it like remus has handed him a cursed artifact.
“you— you bought me chocolate?”
sirius tears open the wrapper. eats it. stops speaking.
remus watches the exact moment religious revelation strikes him directly between the eyes.
and unfortunately that’s that.
afterwards, remus can’t seem to stop.
every time he passes through a muggle village, he picks something up.
those weird orange chocolate sticks sirius becomes obsessed with for three months before declaring them “too emotionally intense.”
he starts carrying spare chocolate in his pockets because sirius is constantly hungry in the way large dogs are constantly hungry. there is no bottom to him. remus has personally witnessed sirius unhinge his fucking jaw to eat a whole loaf of bread at two in the morning while maintaining eye contact with him the whole time like it was a threat.
and sirius always finds the chocolate.
remus will forget it’s there until sirius, sprawled upside down on the common room sofa like an exorcism gone wrong, suddenly goes:
“you have a flake in your left pocket.”
remus checks his pocket. he pulls out a flake
“you crinkle when you walk.”
that’s the thing about loving sirius black. it turns all your possessions communal. remus could carry goddamn uranium in his coat pocket and sirius would still go digging around in there looking for snacks.
by sixth year, it’s instinctive.
chocolate becomes attached to sirius in his brain like a behavioral trigger. he’s been pavloved
natural. horrifying. deeply embarrassing.
he hates how domestic it feels.
not in the soft cardigan way. in the deeply intimate way. the way sirius sits on remus's legs without him asking because he knows pressure helps with the pain. the way remus has to wrestle with his tie and shoelaces for a good ten minutes but can expertly braid sirius's hair in every possible way hair can be braided. the way both of them sleep better if sirius attempts to strangle remus with all four limbs and several determined strands of hair and if remus can feel sirius's heartbeat against his cheek, though neither of them ever mention noticing.
the way sirius accepts every piece of chocolate remus hands him like it was always meant to end up there.
like they have all the time in the world.
which is funny, in retrospect.
because then the world ends.
and afterward, remus still carries chocolate.
at first he doesn’t notice he’s doing it.
he’s standing in some grim little corner shop two weeks after his three best friends fucking die by the hands of his lover, staring blankly at a rack of chocolate bars while the cashier asks if he’s going to buy something or continue haunting the confectionery aisle like a traumatised victorian ghost.
his hand has already picked up sirius’s favourite.
his body still behaves like sirius exists somewhere accessible.
like he might appear around the corner any second, loud and alive and free and infuriating.
remus buys it before he can stop himself.
then he carries it around for three days.
doesn’t throw it away either.
it just sits in his pocket while the world rots quietly around him.
people look at him strangely now.
not openly accusing. that would almost be preferable.
this is pity sharpened by suspicion.
old order members, people he would’ve died for, avoid his eyes during meetings. conversations stop for half a second when he walks into rooms. nobody says sirius’s name anymore, as though speaking it aloud might summon something ugly.
and underneath all of it sits the unspoken thing
as though friendship itself were now evidence.
as though loving sirius black had become a kind of moral failure everyone expected remus to apologize for.
some of them still suspect him. he can smell it on them.
enough to step slightly farther away.
enough to watch his hands.
enough to look guilty for doubting him while still doing it anyway.
remus finds he almost prefers outright hatred. at least hatred has the decency to look you in the face.
at least, that’s what he told himself.
there were protections on privet drive almost immediately after the funeral-that-wasn’t-a-funeral. layers upon layers of old magic wound tight around number four until the place practically vibrated with dumbledore’s paranoia. blood wards. fidelius-adjacent enchantments. anti-apparition charms. repelling hexes calibrated specifically to keep random well-meaning wizards from materialising in the hydrangea bushes and traumatising the neighbours.
which, frankly, was fair.
the wizarding world had developed a deeply concerning habit of treating harry potter less like a child and more like a recently discovered religious artifact.
remus learned very quickly that if he wanted to see harry, he had to do it the muggle way.
he knew how frightening strange men could look.
especially men who were one bad night away from looking dug out of a grave.
he stayed at distances. across roads. near shop windows. behind newspaper stands.
and once—only once—inside the chocolate aisle while petunia dragged harry through the supermarket.
harry was tiny. his fringe kept falling into his eyes while he looked around with this solemn, alert little expression like he already understood the world could turn ugly without warning.
remus stood motionless beside stacks of dairy milk and penguins and tried very hard not to have a nervous breakdown beside the confectionery.
harry pointed at something near the till.
petunia shook her head sharply.
harry immediately stopped asking.
that hurt worse than crying would’ve.
then dedalus diggle came bustling around the corner wearing a violently green bowtie and the expression of a man moments away from combusting with excitement. he approached. not subtly either. not with caution or common sense or even the faintest awareness that they were in the middle of a tesco surrounded by confused pensioners buying yoghurt. he just marched straight up to harry and seized his hand with both of his like he’d encountered the second coming of christ beside reduced-price salami.
“an honour,” diggle said emotionally. “an absolute honour.”
every muscle in her body locked instantly. fear transformed her face so quickly it was almost horrifying.
she knew exactly what he was.
diggle, meanwhile, continued enthusiastically shaking the hand of a deeply alarmed child while petunia gathered herself with the rigid fury of someone about to commit homicide in the frozen foods section.
“come on, boy,” she snapped suddenly, wrenching him away.
harry twisted around slightly as she hurried off.
for one horrible second his eyes passed directly over remus.
an odd-looking stranger standing beside the chocolate.
then petunia disappeared around the corner.
remus wanted to strangle him with the nearest multipack of twixes.
“you fucking idiot,” he hissed.
“oh! lupin. didn’t see you there.”
“well,” diggle said defensively, “i was only paying my respects.”
“you scared the shit out of her.”
“she’s a dreadful woman.”
diggle’s expression shifted slightly then. not guilt exactly. more the uncomfortable awareness of someone remembering remus lupin existed in contexts beyond tragic rumours and war stories.
“you still watching over him?” diggle asked.
and then, with all the tact of a falling piano, diggle said:
“you know, harry’s probably better off away from all that.”
“he deserves a proper childhood,” diggle continued hurriedly, mistaking silence for permission. “normality. stability. people who can provide for him.”
“he’s starting a new life,” diggle said gently. “and children shouldn’t grow up carrying everyone else’s grief.”
the werewolf-shaped absence in every conversation.
diggle looked uncomfortable now, aware he’d stepped somewhere dangerous but too committed to retreat.
“you understand,” he added carefully. “it wouldn’t be good for him, being dragged around by—”
he didn’t say it. cowardice rarely announced itself directly.
but remus heard it anyway.
dragged around by someone unstable.
someone whose friends all ended up dead.
remus stared at him for a long moment.
sometimes laughter was the only thing that stopped bitterness from curdling into violence.
“you think i don’t know that?” he said softly.
diggle opened his mouth. then his will to live kicked in and closed it
remus looked toward the end of the aisle where petunia had vanished with harry. then down at the chocolate bar still sitting in his hand.
always somehow sirius’s favourite.
“he’ll never even remember me,” remus said.
diggle, wisely for once in his life, said nothing.
remus walked away before he could do something humiliating like hope.
remus has never been afforded the luxury of dramatic exits.
jobs come and go. most end badly once people notice the monthly disappearances or the scars or the temper held together by exhausted self-control.
eventually he falls in with the werewolf packs because there are only so many places monsters can safely go before they start congregating out of necessity.
the wolves are half-starved, paranoid, violent in the pathetic way abused animals are violent.
fenrir used to keep them hungry on purpose. hunger is easier to control than hope.
and one evening remus returns from some miserable little village shop carrying a paper bag full of muggle chocolate almost entirely on instinct.
the others stare at him suspiciously.
remus nearly says for sirius.
the words rise automatically before he strangles them.
which is technically true.
but then one of the younger wolves, barely eleven, hands shaking from the aftermath of transformation, takes a cautious bite of a crunchie and starts laughing.
bright and startled like she’d forgotten she could.
and something inside remus’s ribcage twists painfully.
after that he keeps bringing more.
cheap things mostly. nothing fancy.
those tiny caramel squares that glue themselves to your teeth with the commitment of a blood oath.
the wolves begin expecting it.
they don’t trust good things to arrive twice.
remus never tells them where the habit came from.
he thinks sirius would’ve liked that.
people still look at him oddly sometimes, caught between distrust and sympathy. remus has become very good at making both uncomfortable. there’s a particular kind of humour born in people who survive too long, dry enough to crack teeth.
he sees harry again, meets harry properly, and exhaustion has settled into his bones so deeply it’s practically structural.
harry has lily’s eyes and james’s expressions and sirius’s devastating talent for looking at remus like he’s worth listening to.
the dementors affect him badly on the train. worse than the others.
remus knows that sort of cold. the kind that drags memories out by the spine.
so afterward, while the compartment still trembles faintly with shock, remus reaches automatically into his pocket.
“eat this,” he says. “it’ll make you feel better”
harry takes it, trusting in the simple unquestioning way children sometimes do before the world teaches them better. he takes candy from a stranger who should’ve been his uncle.
and for one awful second remus sees it all at once:
sirius shoving chocolate into his mouth after full moons.
sirius sprawled across dormitory beds covered in wrappers.
sirius stealing sweets from his pockets with criminal efficiency.
sirius laughing with his whole chest.
and all he sees is a boy, furious and grieving and doomed
it is, remus thinks distantly, deeply ironic.
sirius is technically responsible for harry needing the chocolate in the first place.
which feels exactly like the sort of cosmic joke the universe would make. it's only fair he should have a piece of his godfather with him. that man needs to pick up the fucking slack
harry eats the chocolate.
colour slowly returns to his face.
remus has lived with grief long enough for it to become almost conversational. they're friends now. he thinks:
at hogwarts it becomes a sort of legend.
not intentionally. remus has never intentionally cultivated anything in his life except self-loathing and a caffeine dependency severe enough to concern medical professionals.
but somehow, by october, students start associating professor lupin with chocolate the way small children associate saints with miracles.
a third year ravenclaw burst into tears after a boggart lesson because his boggart had turned into his dead grandmother and, honestly, that feels above the pay grade of a thirteen-year-old. before remus can even think, he’s already reaching into his coat pocket.
“here,” he says gently, handing him a wrapped square. “eat this before you faint dramatically in front of all these witnesses and get me fired again.”
the kid laughs through the tears.
the next week, a hufflepuff with exam shakes gets one.
then a gryffindor who dislocated her shoulder trying to recreate a quidditch move “for scientific purposes.”
then a slytherin who quietly had a panic attack outside the great hall after receiving a howler from home.
remus doesn’t ask questions. he just hands over chocolate like a strange woodland cryptid distributing emotional support cocoa products.
eventually students begin seeking him out for it.
not openly, obviously. teenagers would rather die.
but he notices the patterns.
students lingering near his classroom after difficult letters from home.
kids suddenly appearing beside his desk after particularly nasty detentions with snape.
children hovering around him after dementor encounters looking pale and hollow-eyed.
and somehow remus always has enough chocolate in his pockets.
he doesn’t know when that happened.
at some point his coat simply evolved into a confectionary ecosystem.
there are mars bars in one pocket. dairy milk in another. sugar quills tangled beside marathons (no, he will not be calling them fucking snickers). once, while searching for spare parchment, he finds three melted caramel cubes and what appears to be half a flake fused permanently to the lining.
he blames sirius immediately. he’s more mad about this than he is about the whole mass murderer shit
lee jordan starts calling him “the patron saint of emotional recovery.”
fred and george escalate this into a school-wide operation.
“rough breakup?” fred says solemnly to a fourth year.
“academic crisis?” george adds.
both twins point dramatically down the corridor.
“seek the chocolate man.”
remus deducts five points from gryffindor for this.
they thank him politely and ask for a twix.
the bribery becomes a problem.
not morally. logistically.
because remus discovers very quickly that students are significantly less inclined to report the suspiciously recurring disappearance of slytherin house points to snape if they are being quietly compensated with confectionery.
“professor,” says a smug slytherin year prefect one evening after curfew, “i couldn’t help noticing our hourglass is looking a little lighter.”
“truly devastating investigative work.”
“it’s almost as though someone has been docking a few points from slytherin every single night since the start of the year so nobody would notice”
“alright, what exactly are you getting at here?”
“i’m simply saying my memory could potentially improve with financial encouragement.”
remus stares at her for a long moment before sighing and producing a crunchie from his pocket like a weary magician performing a deeply humiliating trick.
“you kids are bloody vultures.”
“and yet,” the prefect says, already unwrapping it, “you continue feeding us.”
there are rumours eventually.
students swear professor lupin can identify emotional distress by smell alone.
others claim his office contains an infinite magical supply of chocolate hidden somewhere behind the bookshelf.
one particularly unhinged second year becomes convinced he’s being sponsored directly by cadbury.
remus neither confirms nor denies any of this.
mostly because denying it sounds more exhausting than simply allowing the mythology to develop naturally.
madam pomfrey, meanwhile, thinks this is the funniest thing she’s ever witnessed. not openly of course. pomfrey’s humour exists exclusively in the tiny upward twitch of her mouth when someone else is suffering.
remus suffers constantly.
“ah,” she says one afternoon as he arrives in the hospital wing carrying an armful of confiscated cursed necklaces and three traumatised third years. “mr lupin. come to dispense your sacred cocoa remedies?”
“i’m beginning to regret teaching children basic emotional association.”
“nonsense. i’m delighted.” pomfrey peers over her spectacles while one of the third years clutches a chocolate frog with religious devotion. “a professor who finally understands the medicinal value of chocolate. took you long enough.”
“i understand bribery. different field entirely.”
“whatever helps you sleep at night.”
pomfrey snorts so hard she nearly drops a blood-replenishing potion.
the truly irritating thing is that she’s smug about being right.
years ago she’d stood over an exhausted half-feral boy in the hospital wing insisting comfort wasn’t weakness.
now half the school associates professor lupin with warmth and safety and sugar wrappers.
which feels deeply unfair.
he never meant to become comforting.
he especially never meant to become the sort of professor students trust.
but there are worse things to be.
late at night, he catches himself automatically restocking the chocolate in his desk drawer before full moons.
he watches harry unwrap a square after a dementor lesson.
a student smiles at him with startled relief after receiving a single tiny smartie and remus understands.
just simple undeniable proof that surviving deserved tenderness too.
and christ, that’s unbearable.
remus john lupin still didn’t love chocolate.
but he’ll always love sirius black.
dededos
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