He Wished a Lot of Things

He saw them first in his second year as the boy stepped out of the showers, a towel wrapped around his waist and his chest entirely exposed. Beneath the long black hair, whose water-dripping tendrils had been strategically placed over his chest, Remus Lupin could have sworn he had just laid his eyes upon two long, red scars.

The image kept him awake at times. He never asked; he knew Severus Snape was touchy to talk to in the first place, and scars — which he knew from personal experience — were even touchier. So he kept himself quiet, feeling different about the boy from then on, wondering about the newfound mystery of him every time their eyes met from across a classroom. But the question remained, and so did the scars.

'How did you get them?' he scrawled eventually on a piece of parchment after weeks of grappling with the thought, passing the letter casually across the long table in the Charms room and slipping it under his thin fingers. It took what felt like years to get a simple reply; one in such elegant cursive that his own handwriting looked like aimless ink above it.

'Get what?'

Such a fruitless answer. But Remus wasn't expecting much else. He tagged along almost every day as his friends taunted the boy; of course his responses would be slow and guarded.

'The scars,' he wrote back, and then, because he knew that Severus was more often injured by others than by accidents, he revised his question. 'Who did it to you?'

He watched in anticipation as Snape contemplated the words, scribbling something below them but not giving the square of parchment back. The wait was endless. The class was the longest Remus had ever attended.

But he was answered when they left the classroom as the hour marked the end of the lecture, Severus catching him by the door and shoving the piece of paper back into his grip.

"Biology did this to me, Remus," he said plainly. "Now get out of my way."

Snape pushed past Lupin, his green-accented robes flowing behind as he hurried down the hall. Remus watched in puzzlement, slowly unfolding the parchment and wondering what the boy's answer was even supposed to mean. Biology gave him scars? He couldn't have been born with them; they looked far too fresh.

Looking down at the parchment, Remus gave a small laugh. Severus had taken the past thirty minutes to draw a werewolf in the bottom lefthand corner, tongue lolled out, heart-eyed as it reached up at the moon. The moon, which Remus noted with another charmed giggle, wore a subtle frown in its center.

He didn't ask about the scars again for years.

—

He saw them again in the courtyard, but really only because he was looking for them. They had faded a lot since Year Two, and he wouldn't have noticed had he not previously known.

James Potter had picked another brawl with him, and, in embarrassment after realising that he was losing, had hexed the boy's shirt off. His hair, shoulder-length now, wasn't long enough to conceal the traces that were left, and Remus found himself staring. Studying. Almost forgetting where he was. He tried to piece together the puzzle of the two faint red lines across Snape's ribs, following them from left to right, over and over, looped like a scratched record.

And this didn't go unnoticed. Severus Snape, trying his best not to squirm under the humiliating attention, stared back.

Remus looked away.

—

"Why do you have scars?"

He had found him in the library, sitting in the farthest aisle from the entry, completely empty aside from the two of them and the slight traces of a mild mouse problem.