Boys Will Be Bugs

Chapter 107: Surgery

Remus returned to the clinic every day before his surgery, mostly because Kay was very good at alleviating his fears, and he needed all the comfort he could get to stop himself from freaking out and bailing on the surgery entirely. Regardless of what Kay said about the transformations not affecting his surgery scars, Remus still couldn't shake the idea from his head of something going terribly wrong on the night he transformed. If it took people on average one or two months to fully recover, Remus was certain he would take longer. His body was already weakened by the strain that being a werewolf put on it, he couldn't even walk for long periods of time without the use of a cane, so how was his body supposed to recover before his next transformation? He talked through all of these fears with both Kay and Madam Pomfrey once she had been informed about the situation, and they tried to reassure him that they had a number of spells and potions to help his body heal. Remus just had to trust them, although he would have preferred having confirmation from an actual werewolf; despite Kay revealing that he had other werewolf patients, Remus had yet to meet any of them. He was starting to get a little desperate.

Outside of the clinic, he had his friends to talk to as well, though he reserved them for actually getting to talk about how excited he was, rather than how scared he was, and they were all just as happy for him.

"You'll be there on the day, won't you?" he asked them, and they promised that they would definitely be there waiting for him. "It's long," he continued. "You'll be there for a while."

"We don't care," replied Sirius. "You need moral support, and we're here to give it."

"Yeah, as if we'd just ditch you," said James. "What kind of friends would we be if we did that?" Remus was sure they wouldn't mind, but he was asking quite a lot from them, especially when he asked them the weirdest sounding question he had ever asked, and possibly ever would ask.

"Can I measure the size of your nipples?" Predictably, they were speechless, until James burst into sudden peels of laughter.

"Is that your attempt at flirting or something?" he gasped. "Shit, Remus, take me to dinner first." Peter and Sirius were in similar states of shocked hilarity, and Remus had to hurriedly explain himself.

"It's for my top surgery," he said. "Apparently I have to choose the size of my own nipples, and I have no idea how big they're supposed to be." James looked confused.

"They give you new nipples?" he asked.

"No, they just have to reduce the size of them, but I need to choose what size. I don't know what size they're supposed to be, so... can you measure yours for me?"

"Yeah, okay!" James lifted his shirt up with very little prompting, which made Remus laugh.

"You don't have to do it right now in front of me," he said. "Just get back to me." In the meantime, Remus thought he was more or less ready for the surgery once he had spent enough time talking to Kay. He also got to see other patients sometimes when he entered the clinic, including Leen and their friend Tommy. Sirius was quite fascinated by both of them when he visited along with Remus.

"You don't use male or female pronouns?" remarked Sirius, after Leen explained that they didn't identify as a man or a woman. "I didn't even know that was a thing."

"Well, I kind of just figured it out myself because neither he nor she seemed to fit me." Sirius was intrigued, and he leant over to Remus after a few minutes chatting with them and whispered:

"Do you think I could do that, too?"

"What, use they instead of he or she?" replied Remus. Sirius nodded. "Sure, I mean... I could get used to that."

"But you can still use the other ones, too." Remus laughed.

"You're collecting pronouns like they're a hobby."