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whitechapelTitle: Façades
Fandom: Harry Potter
Genre: Gen (unless your eyesight is hoyay/20)
Characters: Regulus Black, Remus Lupin
Length: 384 words
Summary: Nobody is that nice for no reason. [originally posted 2005.11.21]
Remus Lupin is the living manifestation of a good-boy stereotype. He comes off as earnest, pleasant, and friendly; he tutors younger students in Defence Against the Dark Arts, holds doors open, helps carry people’s books, and makes a point of smiling and saying hello whenever he passes someone in the hallway. With strangers, at least, he is so overwhelmingly nice that it’s almost insulting, and at the slightest implication of an ulterior motive he behaves as though he’s genuinely hurt.
Most people who play people the way Lupin does at least have the decency to slip up occasionally, as a warning to anyone who might otherwise have been fooled. From Lupin, though, there is only a steady stream of calm politeness and absolutely nothing to indicate what’s going on inside his head.
Regulus can’t stand him.
The worst thing about Lupin, he thinks, is the fact that his inscrutability is a permanent question mark. Hating James Potter is much easier, because Potter is easy to read; Regulus can tell why Potter behaves the way he does and he can understand his own reasons for loathing him, and except when some sort of conflict turns up, Potter is more or less a closed case. But Lupin is persistently opaque, and all Regulus has as grounds for hating him is a nagging irritation with that opacity. It makes him seem more irrational than he particularly wants to be, and it’s maddening.
What Regulus would really like to do—and often daydreams about doing when Lupin tries to be friendly at prefect meetings—is force Lupin to stop being nice. Anything would do, really, even something as simple as just hitting him across the face. What would be even better would be some sort of silver-bullet confrontation, something to make Lupin so angry that the patronizing smile disappears completely and he loses all illusions of control. It would strip away his carefully cultivated varnish, make him act like a person instead of an ideal, and he’d finally start to make sense.
He never does it. Regulus cares too much about his prefect badge to risk it on a stunt like that. Perhaps a more powerful deterrent, though, is the fact that Lupin’s walls are built so high that Regulus almost doesn’t want to know what’s behind them.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Genre: Gen (unless your eyesight is hoyay/20)
Characters: Regulus Black, Remus Lupin
Length: 384 words
Summary: Nobody is that nice for no reason. [originally posted 2005.11.21]
Remus Lupin is the living manifestation of a good-boy stereotype. He comes off as earnest, pleasant, and friendly; he tutors younger students in Defence Against the Dark Arts, holds doors open, helps carry people’s books, and makes a point of smiling and saying hello whenever he passes someone in the hallway. With strangers, at least, he is so overwhelmingly nice that it’s almost insulting, and at the slightest implication of an ulterior motive he behaves as though he’s genuinely hurt.
Most people who play people the way Lupin does at least have the decency to slip up occasionally, as a warning to anyone who might otherwise have been fooled. From Lupin, though, there is only a steady stream of calm politeness and absolutely nothing to indicate what’s going on inside his head.
Regulus can’t stand him.
The worst thing about Lupin, he thinks, is the fact that his inscrutability is a permanent question mark. Hating James Potter is much easier, because Potter is easy to read; Regulus can tell why Potter behaves the way he does and he can understand his own reasons for loathing him, and except when some sort of conflict turns up, Potter is more or less a closed case. But Lupin is persistently opaque, and all Regulus has as grounds for hating him is a nagging irritation with that opacity. It makes him seem more irrational than he particularly wants to be, and it’s maddening.
What Regulus would really like to do—and often daydreams about doing when Lupin tries to be friendly at prefect meetings—is force Lupin to stop being nice. Anything would do, really, even something as simple as just hitting him across the face. What would be even better would be some sort of silver-bullet confrontation, something to make Lupin so angry that the patronizing smile disappears completely and he loses all illusions of control. It would strip away his carefully cultivated varnish, make him act like a person instead of an ideal, and he’d finally start to make sense.
He never does it. Regulus cares too much about his prefect badge to risk it on a stunt like that. Perhaps a more powerful deterrent, though, is the fact that Lupin’s walls are built so high that Regulus almost doesn’t want to know what’s behind them.