The Substitute

Chapter 1

Watching

He watched the two of them dancing closely together. They made a striking couple, with her long red tresses and bright, mischievous eyes, his messy black hair and glasses, the way his eyes lit up when he smiled. They especially lit up when he smiled at her; he had no eyes for anyone else.

However, she wasn’t the reason he was watching the pair of them. His eyes followed the black hair on the dance floor, watching his best friend, the man he loved. The best friend who would never know how he felt.

Weddings are so depressing, he thought, looking around for more champagne. He wanted to get as drunk as possible so he wouldn’t imagine his best friend turning away from her, turning to him, his arms sliding around his neck, his lips coming ever closer....

Remus danced by. He was as handsome and laughing as ever. Remus knew how he felt, but had promised not to say anything. Remus had been very sympathetic, but that didn’t change anything. Sympathy wasn’t going to wrap around you in bed every night, and it wasn’t going to walk by your side through life. Sympathy wasn’t a substitute for having your unrequited love for your best friend finally requited.

He had watched him for years, surreptitiously, hoping the scrutiny would not, in turn, be scrutinised. He had watched him play Quidditch, zipping over the pitch, his excuse being that all eyes were on Potter. He’d watched him from very close quarters under the Invisibility Cloak as they crept around the castle after hours, risking detention. He shivered, remembering that closeness.

He looked at the Potters again. It was strange to think of them that way. The Potters. And someday they’d have children and he’d be a godfather. They’d promised. But that wasn’t really what he wanted, even though he’d pretended to be flattered about it. Godfather really meant--second-best. A consolation prize. Did he know?

Never fall in love with your best friend.

Hermione knew the problem with that one. She and Remus passed again; her voluminous white dress belled out as her groom twirled her, her face laughing until she saw the best friend she’d once loved. He’d once had himself convinced that he loved her too, and had even been jealous over Viktor Krum.

When Hermione saw him, her face clouded over, and he wondered whether he should have come; a bride should only think happy thoughts on her wedding day, after all. He’d made her very unhappy, in one way or another, for too many years. Was it his fault that Veelas could make men (even men who didn’t normally look twice at women) behave so stupidly? All right, he’d looked twice at Madam Rosmerta, at the Three Broomsticks. But she was practically a veela; her very presence in a room seemed calculated to make teenage boys think lascivious thoughts. And was it his fault that he didn’t immediately think of a nag as his ideal date for the Yule Ball? Now, now, he thought immediately. That’s ungenerous. Yes, Hermione’s nagging had helped him and Harry get through school. Useful, that.

He continued to watch the bride and groom dance. Remus and Hermione. It had taken them long enough to get together. She blamed Ron in part, for the amount of time she’d had to take to get over him. It hadn’t helped that Remus was grieving over Tonks as well. But after knowing each other for nearly ten years, the two ships in the night had finally come into the same port.

You’d think she would have realised, as clever as she is, that I wasn’t fighting with her constantly as foreplay. But she hadn’t. She wasn’t very adept at seeing what was right before her, sometimes. House elves were one of her notorious blind spots. Ron was the other.

Emotional range of a teaspoon, indeed. If she only knew....

And yet--he couldn’t blame her. In those days, even he was still blind to what was really going on. It was Luna who’d awoken him. After he and Hermione had had their great and final row, in seventh year, he’d thought, I need to be with someone who is Hermione’s polar opposite.

No one was further from being like Hermione than Luna, he had thought. And he had been aware of her having spent the better part of his fifth, sixth and seventh years watching him closely. She called him Ronald every time she saw him and tended to go about singing “Weasley is Our King.” (The good version of the lyrics.) What he hadn’t realised was that observation and singing ditties wasn’t the same as blind obsession. It was easy for him to be confused about this, as the object of his blind obsession was also his object of constant observation:

Harry.

Luna had known this from the start, when he’d carelessly asked her out. (As though it didn’t matter at all: “Are you going to Hogsmeade on Saturday? Me too...”) But, being the even-tempered and unflustered person that she was, she had gone along with equanimity. When she had announced to him, on their first date, that she didn’t mind pretending to be his girlfriend so that no one would know he was in love with Harry, he had had a mouthful of butterbeer, which he promptly spit all over her. Even this she took in her stride, calmly cleaning herself while he sat and watched her, shaken to the core, feeling like he was the one drenched head to foot in a freezing cold blast of naked reality.

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