Chapter Text
Just like every morning, Remus was jolted awake by the harsh, blinding flashing of his alarm clock. He groaned, eyes squinting against the piercing light as he reached out, fumbling to find the button to turn it off. God, did he hate that thing. It was a terrible way to wake up, but he didn’t hold his breath for someone to invent a gentler method than being assaulted by brightness every morning.
He stared at the ceiling, waiting for the dark spots to disappear from his vision, and wondered if he was truly ready for another day. He finally dragged himself out of bed with a resigned sigh, his lower back aching as it had done ever since he'd passed thirty. He stretched until he felt the satisfying pop that echoed louder in his bones than it ever would in his ears.
Thirty-four wasn’t really that old, he knew. But Remus’s body had always betrayed him in one way or another. He'd been so young when the accident happened, he couldn’t quite remember a time he’d woken up without any pain at all.
He reached down and absently rubbed at his bad hip - the one that had been crushed by the car and had caused him the most grief over the years.
The first rays of the rising sun bathed his room in orange. It was early spring, but the last remnants of winter lingered in the early morning air, nipping at his skin as he got dressed. He pulled out one of the woollen jumpers that his mother had knitted for him and put it on over his collared shirt. He fingered the loose thread that dangled from the hem, and his throat tightened - the memory of his mum humming to herself as her knitting needles clicked away flooding his mind. Silently, he vowed to be more careful with her work. She couldn’t make him another one, after all.
Remus finished getting dressed and grabbed his cane. He leaned on it heavily as he made his way to the bathroom. He brushed his teeth, shaved, and ran a comb through his greying hair, he seemed to be blessed in one aspect of his life at least, it wasn't thinning yet.
He made his way downstairs, moving with quiet deliberation, careful not to make too much noise. This was especially difficult because he couldn’t hear whether he was actually making any.
Once in the kitchen, Remus set about making breakfast – eggs and tomatoes with bacon and buttered toast. All of it low fat and turkey bacon, since his father’s doctor had said he needed to start watching his cholesterol. His tad had made a face when Remus had actually taken the advice to heart and started changing his cooking.
He’d started frying the eggs when his tad came lumbering down the stairs. Remus didn’t need to hear him to know exactly when he entered a room. His father’s footsteps were heavy enough that Remus could feel them in the floorboards whenever he moved around the cottage. It was an odd thing, the way his father moved, as though he wanted to make sure Remus knew where he was at all times.
As he turned the bacon, a hand, warm and solid, tapped twice on Remus’s shoulder. His father, wishing him a silent good morning. He’d never learned proper sign language, following the doctors’ advice that it would only hold Remus back, and that they should make him speak and lip-read to communicate.
It had always made communication between them difficult, but there was one person who’d always understood him: his mother. She’d quickly caught on that lip-reading and trying to speak wasn’t working for him. And despite what the doctors said - and his father’s disapproval - she had refused to force him to get by on it.
She’d adapted, instead of forcing him to.
And in doing so, they’d created something that was just theirs. Over the years, Remus and his mother had developed their own version of sign language, changing and adapting it to fit their needs - something that he’d later learned was a form of ‘home signing’.
His father, though, had never understood. There had always been a tension in the air whenever he entered a room where Remus and his mother were signing to each other. His father would stand at the edge of their conversations, arms crossed, a tight frown tugging at his lips.
He’d always insisted that Remus speak to him and read his lips if he wanted anything. And every evening over dinner, he’d make Remus tell him about his day at school. And Remus would try , his mouth struggling to form the vowels and words, to speak in a way that made sense . But his words were never quite right. Never quite understandable. Not enough.
While Remus had been lost in thought, his tad had started on the coffee. They had this routine of theirs down pat. It was the same every morning. Remus would start breakfast, and his father would come down when it was nearly finished and make coffee. It was a ritual that had settled into the space between them - familiar, comforting even, though devoid of much else.
They sat down and Remus knocked on the table (wishing his tad a nice meal), even though he knew it would earn him a look . They ate in silence, each of them taking half of the paper, skimming through the articles before they exchanged sections without a word.
Sometimes his father would work on the crossword puzzle, occasionally pushing it over to Remus and tapping a word that he was struggling with. Without a sound, Remus would pluck the pen from his father’s fingers and fill it in for him before going back to his reading.
Around age twenty-five, when he’d just returned from uni to help care for his mum, Remus had put his foot down and refused to speak. Ever since then, day-to-day communication with his tad consisted mostly of singular hand gestures, a lot of tapping, and meaningful looks . They got by, but they never really told each other anything - not about their days or their lives. They just… existed in each other’s space. And while, on the one hand, Remus thought that they knew each other through and through, it also often felt like they were strangers in all the ways that truly counted.