Marauders - Always - Part One

Figures Class

Remus was late to class.

He was running down the pavement from the closest place he dared to apparate in from East London at - but granted Remus Lupin running was about as fast as a snail moving up hill - and his bag of art supplies thumped against his hip as he ran into the front doors of the college, skid on the tile and paused outside the door of the art classroom, peering in the little window cautiously. When the professor's back turned away, he slipped through the door and into his seat next to Stewie.

Lula was absent.

"There you are," Stewie whispered. "Hells bells, I thought you weren't going to show and I was going to be all on my own back here."

"Sorry. Slept in." Remus was unpacking his things. Truth was, he hadn't slept in. He'd actually been up early. He'd been digging around in his old Hogwarts things until he'd found an old envelope that Newt Scamander had given him over a year ago, after Ned Veigler had been murdered, and he'd spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to talk himself into breaking the seal and reading the letter... So long, in fact, that he lost track of time and, well, here he was. "What'd I miss?" he asked, quickly flipping through his sketchbook to the next blank page. "What're we drawing today?"

Stewie raised an eyebrow and his eyes darted to the front of the class. "Well, we have our first model today."

Remus followed Stewie's gaze and gasped.

Sitting on a stool on top of a table at the front of the class was a man - dressed in nothing but a very small pair of underpants. He was a very good looking man, granted, a bit older, with salt-and-peppered hair but still rather toned. He reminded Remus of an old-fashioned movie star with the cut of his jaw. He stared out the window, not looking toward the people who were clustered about the room, focused on drawing him.

Remus stared. 

Stewie laughed. "We're starting figures for the rest of this term and part of next."

Remus's hand clutched his sketchbook. 

"Get yourself together while they're modest, Rey. Eventually they'll be nudes," Stewie murmured, and he turned back to his sketchbook, where he was working on drawing the side of the man's face, his pencil making deft swishes to shade in the curves of the ear.

Remus glanced up at the man, then back to Stewie's drawing, and he took a deep breath and selected a pencil and started sketching out a very basic form. When he'd got the bare bones of his drawing laid out, he turned to Stewie and whispered, "Where's Lula?"

"We had a row last night," Stewie said quietly, staring at the paper in front of him carefully. "She said she didn't want to see my face this morning."

"A row?" Remus asked. "What about?"

Stewie shrugged. "You know girls... I said something dumb and I'm going to regret it 'til my dying day."

Remus thought of Sirius and the melodramatics that he, himself, often faced when Sirius got going and he nodded, then turned back to his sketchbook, trying to decide what part of the figure ahead of him to focus on. A quick glance around the room and he could see everyone was working on some different aspect of the man who sat on the stool up front. Stewie was concentrating on drawing and redrawing the man's ear, trying to get the curve and the ridges just right, while the girl directly in front of Remus was very carefully drawing the man's hair, one long stroke of the pencil at a time.

Remus decided to draw the legs - for the man had chosen to sit with his knees bent and his ankles crossed beneath the stool at an interesting angle. It also meant Remus didn't have to look any higher, and he could keep his head down - which was very important because just thinking about what was happening was making him flush.