Chapter Text
Well, as a child I mostly spoke inside my head.
I had conversations with the clouds, the dogs, the dead.
And they thought me broken, that my tongue was coated lead,
But I just couldn’t make my words make sense to them.
If you only listen with your ears… I can’t get in.
The grass crunched beneath little toes as Remus ran with the dogs. They weren’t his dogs. They were the neighbors’ dogs. He wasn’t allowed to have dogs of his own, but these dogs did just fine. They understood him, ran and played with him just as they did with each other. He ran down the edge of the woods until his lungs burned. The dogs leapt on him when he stopped, and he smiled and patted their heads, then lay down in the grass with them to catch his breath.
Remus was six years old, nearly seven. He had a bright mind for someone so small, but every idea that came to him was only between himself and the dogs. Remus couldn’t speak.
He couldn’t recall his parents ever yelling at him, but he always felt that they were disappointed that they hadn’t been blessed with a normal son. He could catch it in his mother’s eyes, on stormy days when he had to stay in with her, and he could see it when his father refused to look at him during dinner.
But Remus could spend hours staring at the sky, memorizing every star or cloud that passed by. He wasn’t ashamed of the way he was. He knew that he was worth something. He only wished that he had been born to parents who could celebrate the things he enjoyed, and that his parents had instead received a perfect baby boy, with a voice.
When he had lain on his back for about half an hour, the dogs got up to head home, and so he followed them. They walked back up the hill to Remus’s little home, where his mother was hanging laundry. She glanced at him when he came into sight, then looked away again. “Wash your hands for dinner, Remus,” she told him, her voice empty of emotion.
If Remus had a voice, he thought, it would always have emotion embedded in it.
He did as he was told, then sat at the table until his parents eventually came to join him. They didn’t speak to him, hardly recognized him there at all, and didn’t even speak to each other aside from simple commands to pass a dish. They cleared the table and went to bed, leaving Remus sitting there by himself.
He missed the dogs when he was at home.
Remus stared out the window until it was dark, then quietly went outside to lie on the lawn and look at the stars. He liked to imagine he was one of them, and that the stars surrounding him loved him unlike any other. He stayed out until the moon was high. He may have stayed out all night, if his mother had not come to speak sternly from the front door.
“Remus. Go to bed.”
So he did.
In the morning, instead of going out to meet the dogs right after breakfast, Remus went back upstairs to his room. He sat down on the wood floor with a stack of paper and began drawing out everything he liked about his current world. He drew the dogs, and the hills, and the kitchen window. He smiled and folded the drawings neatly in half, the stood to dress himself in his favorite clothes, his red sweater and his most comfortable shoes. He pulled the case off of his pillow and stuffed it with his few valued possessions. He slid his folded drawings down the side. He took one last glance around, then carried his pillowcase downstairs and outside.
He didn’t run into his mother, and he certainly saw no sign of his father. The dogs barked and ran at him, following him down the path to the edge of the forest they took most every day. They walked with him along the trees as far as they had ever gone, then stopped and started to head back the way they had come. Remus paused to watch them, repeating his goodbyes over and over in his mind. Then he turned away and kept walking.
So, then one afternoon I dressed myself alone.
I packed my pillowcase with everything I owned.
And in my head I said goodbye, then I was gone,
And I set out on the heels of the unknown
So my folks could have a new life of their own.
The Mute - Radical Face