maple syrup | remus lupin [1]

25. a secret message

TW! SMALL MENTIONS OF POSSIBLE SUICIDAL THOUGHTS.
hotlines:
www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines

ily<3

REMUS WAS IN the library on a Tuesday afternoon as he searched for another book. And luck was that he found just the one book that would change things in the long run.

You see, a pale book stood out from the rest since it wasn't pushed into the shelf as much as the rest of them. That made it easy for it to attract Remus' interest. As he picked it out, he saw that it was a familiar one, "The Little Prince", which caused the boy to smile at the thought of nostalgic childhood memories with his parents.

"The Little Prince". The same book Claudia had read as a way of remembering her aunt the previous weekend.

"Verba Quaerere," the boy uttered with his wand tapped against the cover of the book, and then he opened it to see if Claudia had annotated it or not.

It seemed that she hadn't. At least, that was what the boy believed as he flicked through pages that included no trace of Claudia's special ink. Until suddenly, an entire page at the end was covered in her handwriting.

"Dear Gemma," it started, and that's when Remus realised that this Gemma was the person who was supposed to see it all in the first place.

Mystery solved.

Remus knew what he was doing was an invasion of privacy, so he quickly decided to not read whatever Claudia written. He had been doing it for so long, and there was no denying that the boy felt like he should've stopped a million times. But he liked everything she wrote so much, from her witty comments, to her annoyed reactions. Her reviews and her way of interpreting things.

It was completely uncharacteristic of him to continuously do something that was such a big invasion of privacy, that was true. But how much could it truly hurt her, if she never knew?

Little did he know that it would both save her and hurt her.

This time around, it did somehow feel even more wrong to read something that was so obviously for one person and one person only. But, Remus' decision of putting it down was soon changed as he saw something else when he moved to close the book.

"I don't think I can go on for much longer."

He closed the book with a bang as if the page was a bomb waiting to go off.

What did she mean by that?

Remus' eyes widened as he repeated the same thing in his head;