The Fifth Element (Wolfstar Oneshots)

The Five People Who Told Sirius Not to Love Remus

Evans (Who didn't mean to tell him)

Lily Evans found out near the end of fourth year.

All his friends were girl crazy . . . except for he and Remus. No one expected level-headed Remus Lupin to lose his marbles over a girl anyhow, but he really showed no interest. Still, no one paid too much mind to him when he didn't start on sonnets and love letters. No one really started to catch on that Sirius himself wasn't taking on any of his admirers (probably because he had so many) but Lily Evans did, because most of his admirers were her friends and she had to listen to almost everyone complain about it.

'Why doesn't he like me?'

'He can't stand two minutes being with someone else other than his little group.'

'I was sitting with him last night and he just wanted to know where Lupin was! He walked into the room - right as I was about to ask Sirius out, no less - and Sirius's face lit up!'

And after that, it wasn't hard to put things together.

True, they spent so much time together that it was hard not to just call it quits after that fact. But Lily was never one to give up on a mystery and the challenge just seemed too sweet.

First, she studied the way they looked at each other. Lily's mother loved books as much as she did and there was always at least three new novels laying open around the house each week, and in the summer, Lily drank it all up. She noticed how when the two people in love looked at each other and interacted, there would be paragraphs and pages filled with subtext between the two. And, Lily figured, Sirius was the biggest drama queen of all time (everyone knew that). If anyone were to look at anyone they loved for forty lines, it would be Sirius.

Lily didn't notice much at first, but after a week, she had a little notebook filled with dates, times, and ways that Sirius looked at Remus when the sandy-haired boy wasn't looking. It filled her with butterflies, really; the way he looked at Remus. It was all messed and crazed. It was similar to the way James looked at her in potions and it unnerved her, to the point, sometimes, to where she felt like she was looking in one something private.

And, you know, it wasn't just Sirius looking at Remus. Remus studied him when he thought nobody was looking. Lily had a study date with Remus late one Saturday afternoon, and when Sirius crashed it, demanded that he was bored enough to hang out with Remus in the library, the boys face, though masked with paternal annoyance, 'lit up', if one was not to be picky about specific or greatly descriptive adjectives.

And when one studied closely the relationship between Sirius and Remus, yanking back layer upon layer after every conversations and every extensive stare, one would need to make a bullet point list in order to be specific.

But after a while, both stares began to change. Lily waited about a week after they did, but somewhere along the way, Sirius began to look at Remus longingly, like a rain cloud to a man wandering the desert. He'd not only look at him like that when Remus wasn't looking anymore, but instead of masking the looked completely when Remus did ever look at him, there was instead a smile replaced by a frown.

"What do you think of Sirius?" Lily blurts out one night during one of their thrilling study parties. The two Hufflepuffs and Slytherin they had been studying with had apparently not heard about Lily and Remus's stamina when studying, and had long since abandoned the two teens to head to their respective common rooms.

Lily and Remus were close. Close enough that Lily thought she knew things about Remus even James and Sirius did not. For example, why Remus Lupin had never gone girl-crazy but, instead, had a poster of James Dean tucked away somewhere in that mysterious trunk of his that Lily wouldn't even know about if he wouldn't have blushed every time someone called Sirius Black a rebel without a cause.