Nox (The Marauders, Wolfstar, Jily)

7: everyoneisgay

The healing process. Bruises, and cuts, and all kinds of injuries, and how our bodies healed by themselves, in scars and scabs, and how, without you even thinking about it: sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but always eventually, your body fixed itself, you healed, and everything went back to normal.

Remus was learning an awful lot about the healing process first hand, with the great scar across his face: slowly healing, slowly getting better each day he looked in the mirror. Yet, of course, for Remus, each day he looked at that scar, was another day closer to the day of the full moon - of his transformation: of that night that would cause him to inflict more bruises and more cuts upon his skin, and with nothing he could do about it.

Remus was learning an awful lot about vicious cycles: about the way everything was destroyed, and over a month it slowly pieced itself back together again, only to be torn down and thrown back to square one. Remus was noticing how the scars didn't heal fully anymore before they were reopened, and he found himself waking up in the hospital wing once a month; Remus was noticing how it was all getting worse.

And naturally, he was worried, and he was fretting over books and herbs and remedies, and all hopes of alleviating any sort of pain and damage to himself, because he came to accept that last month, with the scar across his face - it had been close, so very fucking close to blinding him, and now, with only a few days until the full moon, it was anything but close to healing properly.

It wasn't that it wasn't trying: it wasn't that there wasn't effort on his body's part, because there was, and it was the most effort he could have possibly exerted, it just, it just wasn't enough. It was draining him, and it was only going to get worse, and Remus sat with that realisation and the heavy weight of acceptance every morning as he glanced him in the mirror, and muttered something under his breath about the healing process.

Because what he wanted to believe was that the human body was miraculous, and indeed, it was, but just not miraculous enough, because as long as there was no way for him to speed up the healing process, he found himself cursed and generally hopeless, but indeed hoping: clinging onto to the last shards of optimism he found inside himself, as he kept his worries securely behind locked bathroom doors, because these were absolutely not the kind of thoughts he wished to trouble his friends' heads with.

They had enough on their plates already, especially Sirius, who was a terrible liar, and even worse when it came to knowing when to just trust people and offer up an explanation. And honestly, the agony in watching Sirius bear the weight of just whatever it was that was troubling him everyday was killing Remus, because he'd started noticing, and once he'd started noticing he just couldn't stop: it had come like a tidal wave, and suddenly pieces were clicking into place from all angles, and he couldn't step away; he couldn't just leave it be, but still, there was nothing he could do to help

He'd learned that the healing process was really not the same for emotional wounds, because although an insult or an argument looked far easier to overcome than a painful cut in your side, it really wasn't the case, because sure, your body could work miracles and wonders in the field of healing and self preservation, whereas your mind could conjure nightmares and construct all kinds of falsified hells for yourself: unnecessary convictions, and twisted thoughts that ensured the kind of pain you felt up in your mind was nowhere near as quick to heal.

It was something to do with the way the pain you felt in your head, in your emotions, in your heart (figuratively) was easier to hide and lock away in dark corners and distant thoughts; it didn't brandish your skin, and it didn't catch the eyes of others as you walked past - it lay unnoticed, secretive, but so unbelievably omnipresent. You needed distance from pain, you needed distance and you needed closure, and such things were perhaps impossible to achieve when the pain itself was inside your own head.