Presented as the contents of an old shoebox under Remus Lupin's bed, The Shoebox Project tells the story of Marauders-era Hogwarts through letters, photographs, and diary entries.
"This story will lift you up and make your life a little better, and...
Part Twenty-Four: Four Final Days, Some Socks, One Photograph, Sneezing, a Note and a Map.
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Thursday Afternoon.
It is like slugs. It is like slugs in his nose. Or perhaps only one slug, and it alternates nostrils. That is the worst part, the alternation of the slug-nostril. Remus has taken to writing his paper with his head leaning all the way to one side. It has, not surprisingly, given him a truly awful crick, but the slug-nostril is on the verge of shifting to the other side. He can feel it. At present it is about to slosh into a position that will allow him at last to gingerly lean his head to the other side, and begin the entire process once more. The whole procedure tempts him sorely to switch paper topics and write instead a convincing and impassioned screed as to why in hell wizards can turn people into ferrets or make them dance like spiders with a single swish and flick but cannot, it seems, actually develop something to cure the bloody common cold. Someone had his priorities on backwards and the tag was showing.
Of course, none of this would be troublesome had Remus written his seven inches of parchment (his final seven inches! The last inches of his academic career!) as he was wont to write it: seven days early. That left him time to get sick and still edit the ridiculous thing, make sure all the sentences followed one another sensibly and didn't trail off into a morass of odd punctuation or, horror of all the horrors, become a fragment or a run-on.
Normally Remus would have gotten this over with, not to mention with days and days to spare. But he hasn't. There is a reason why, a solid reason. It smells like dog and it has a name. That name is, also not surprisingly, Sirius Black.
It isn't that they spend any more time together than usual; it is just that somehow the time they spend together is less conducive to writing essays than it was before. There are fewer exchanges of the "Sirius, please stop putting jam in my hair and let me write this," variety, and more of the "Sirius, please stop..." and then a sort of vague trailing-off and loss of all motivation.
The whole thing is stupid. It is so very, very stupid that Remus has to consciously force himself not to think about it, which is hard, since apparently some part of him -- a part of which he firmly does not approve -- wants to think about it all the time. He can be sitting in class, genuinely fascinated by a lecture on techniques for the production of sentient publications, and then all of a sudden the professor will use some randomly unfortunate word, something like "hedgerow" and for no reason Remus goes all lightheaded and is completely unable to focus until he has somehow got Sirius into a stairwell and kissed him for a while, at which point he is able to get on with his day. It is utterly illogical. Kissing! Alien tongues! Spit and undignified noises and dog-smell! Diseases! What about these things can possibly be appealing? Spending so much time so close to Sirius's face makes him uncomfortably aware of Sirius's pores and smacky saliva noises and the spots on his chin, not to mention terrifyingly conscious of his own spots and noises and unwanted hairs. And yet they continue to have at it. They should both be arrested for gross corporeality.
