Chapter Text
Imprinted as it was with the recognisable four-part crest of lion, serpent, eagle, badger, the letter on the untidy cabin desk was not penned in the precise, inscrutable cursive Remus knew as belonging to one Professor McGonagall, but instead in handwriting touched by whimsy. Which, being fair, suited the letter well. It was a fine summer night for a harmless joke, if albeit unseasonably hot.
LUPIN, REMUS JOHN
1 AUGUST 1978
DEAR REMUS,
It is my personal pleasure to inform you that your application for a place with our three-year postgraduate-level program at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry has been accepted. You may be pleased to learn I discovered your thesis proposal in a long-confiscated trunk and examined it myself. It is delightful magic, Remus.
If you would be so kind as to indulge the curiosity of an ageing Headmaster—one who so seldom has the opportunity to write a personal letter to a prospective scholar—I would ask how your time with the denmothers has treated you. They were most kind when they allowed you to stay with them, and I expect you’ve afforded them the utmost respect. I hope you have made the most of your time there, as this is an opportunity of which many have dreamed and yet a dream very few could ever hope to entertain.
Should you have already accomplished that which I asked of you, then I encourage you to enjoy the remainder of your summer holiday however you wish and use it to consider this offer.
If not, then please do consider that we live in such ephemeral times. It is, I imagine, entirely possible that the denmothers will no longer be able to host guests, should our already fraught lives take a further turn towards the dark. It is imperative that you make haste, Remus. Everything ends.
As I am sure you well remember, term begins on 1 September, and while often we would await your response no later than 31 July, we recognise your unique circumstances and have adjusted accordingly. Simply reply before term start to accept or decline this offer.
If you do not receive a reply immediately, do not be distraught. I find myself with less and less time to spare each passing day, and yet conversely more and more in need of it.
YOURS,
ALBUS DUMBLEDORE
Absent were the usual titles and adornments.
Remus watched the letter the same way a mother might her child if her child were playing with a large untrained hound. Or three hounds. Cerberus, perhaps. Cerberus would, however, make him a terrible mother, because if you thought about it and ignored the mangled metaphor laying in the corner, letting your child play with one hound was much easier to forgive than one with such notoriety. The former was simply irresponsible. The latter, much like this letter, was an attempted assassination. A Grecian joke of sorts. A Grecian joke so ha-ha funny it could kill.
Remus thumped the untidy desk with his thigh.
Then, frowning further, he muttered a quiet apology to the desk, which being only simple oak did not reply. An old habit, not uncommonly developed when you’d spent your formative years wandering a quasi-animate castle.
The ink of his own letter was still drying. All of the formalities had come back to him, even if his already-sprawling penmanship looked yet more immature after three years of atrophy. He’d left a blank space wedged between "IT IS WITH THE UTMOST REGRET THAT I MUST" and "YOUR OFFER" for reasons unknown to him. In fact, he’d already tried once to decline the offer, but his hand had shot out so quick, he’d not only overturned his inkpot but also attempted, unsuccessfully, to stop it falling with a wandless incantation. The bedside chamois rug bore the dark blotchy scars of that disappointing effort on its svelte brown hide.
He had many reasons to reject the offer, of course. He’d never taken his OWLs, let alone his NEWTs, let alone finished his fifth year due to the extenuating circumstances of attempted lycanthropic murder—all things the Headmaster ought to know. You did not in your right mind offer a prestigious postgraduate position to a ne’er-do-well werewolf who’d left school at fifteen. One who, mind, hadn’t submitted any requisite documents, essays, or thesis proposal. Except, of course, the Headmaster did know. Pointing out those glaring facts would be equivalent to insinuating that Albus Dumbledore, Order of Merlin &c. &c. was an idiot.
Which Albus Dumbledore certainly was not.
He thumped the side of the desk again.
He apologised again.
In practiced sequence, he: threw back his head, closed his eyes, inhaled, deep, and blew a raspberry at the mountain pine trusses above him, just as he had done for many nights before. And, just as he had done on many of those same nights, Remus imagined he was somewhere else. Someone else. A different time or place or person, where he could lose himself in something or someone or somewhere else far less interesting. The dogeared novels and battered cassettes that lined his bookshelf called to him. So too did the distant Village further down their well-wooded mountain: wherever books failed to entertain his troubled mind, Remus had learned that another warm body could sometimes be more vivid, more tactile, more enthralling than any written word. They weren’t so different. Tragedies, opportunities, and paradises lost, the lot of them. And if his humble, squeaky bed greeted him in the morning empty of his (albeit unlikely) guest, the only trace being the reek of sex staining the cabin and Remus’s dehydrated hangdog expression in the mirror, he’d at least have dragged himself over the finish line of noncommittal.
He smelled a hint of burning pine somewhere. A bonfire maybe. Far away—the scent was weak, and the smoke had done little to quiet the drone of night-bugs outside. In turn they quieted the noise of the Village. Mostly. A distant, unintelligible shout cut through the night and the walls of the cabin, though it apparently went unanswered.
As Remus had learned, celebrations among werewolves tended to be raucous affairs. Not quite as risqué as a Bacchanal, but vulgar, prompting the kind of hot-headed displays from boys—or men, actually, he was a man, now, allegedly—that involved reckless stunts, the removing of shirts, tussling and scrapping and drinking far too much wine, the sorts of things that left Remus sitting by the bonfire with a tea mug in his lap and his long legs crossed, trying to pretend he wasn’t curling his toes with palpable, flushed envy. Mm. Quite unpleasant. Or he could stay in and be unrequitedly gay in his cramped, untidy cabin alone all night, staring at a letter from a school he hadn’t seen in nearly three years. Like the night before, and before that, &c. &c.
Perhaps he wasn’t being fair to the simple one-room cabin. It’d served him well over the past three years. It was warm and dry. Private. It had a bed that bore the terrible if infrequent things done on it without complaint, a comfortable chair not unlike the bed, and a desk not unlike the chair. If he’d wanted for anything else—within reason—he could’ve asked one of the denmothers and had said je-ne-sais-quoi for himself in a manner of days.
In the beginning, the prospect of returning to a cosy cabin every night had been enticing on its own. An imprivate lifetime of mostly libraries and pastries had prepared him poorly for the hours he spent helping out in the Village—a task to which Remus had taken immediately, if only to distract himself from other, curlier thoughts—and had left him wanting nothing more than to collapse on the firm mattress and sleep, which is precisely what he did for the first few weeks.
When he’d built up some stamina, that, too, was whisked away reconnoitring the mountain forest terrain, with its beech and fir and poplar trees and still winters and a hundred sights more to make him forget there was a world outside the wood.
Until the first letters arrived to remind him, of course.
The inside of Remus’s left eyelid itched.
They were neatly stacked in an old shoebox that Remus handled with the care of an amateur bombmaker—moving his hands with a precise efficiency, as though acid or silver lined its contents and might bite at his skin should he handle it too long or too wildly. It was his own fault, really. He put them off at first because he hadn’t the words and because new ones kept arriving. Once months had passed and the letters slowed, however, he found he lacked the words to justify not having replied sooner—and now, nearly three years later, he’d written the whole thing off as an impossible task made doubly as fruitless because they’d stopped arriving altogether.
Then Chima had delivered him three new letters at once. The denmothers’ infrequent trips away had an insulating effect on the Village. Remus had tried, vainly and selfishly, to keep it at bay by requesting copies of the local muggle post, but the stories—the stir over a woman newsreader on BBC1, a historic summer drought with water rationing, the death of Marc Bolan, and rising support for Thatcher—struck home with enough familiarity to bleed guilt from Remus.
It was not lost on him that he had the unusual fortune of forgetting that they were living through a War. Which, perhaps, was why he hadn’t yet felt the shock or upset that he assumed one usually would, having received the next two letters, both of which he’d read many times over.
LUPIN, REMUS JOHN
13 AUGUST, 1978
MR. LUPIN,
It is the Ministry’s duty to inform you that sixteen minutes past nine o’clock this morning, 13 August, 1978, Aurors Apparated to 26 Broomhill, Port Talbot, after reports that the Dark Mark had been seen above a muggle domicile. The structure on the property had suffered great damage, and, insides its remains, Aurors discovered Lyall Lupin, then unconscious. He was transported to and is currently receiving care at St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries in critical condition.
As Aurors have been unable to locate Hope Lupin, you remain his eldest known living relative. For this reason, it is advisable that you arrive at St. Mungo’s in a timely manner if you wish to have any input as to his medical treatment.
Some of the destruction of the property itself has been reversed. If you require additional services from the Ministry with reference to your estate, please do not hesitate to contact us. If you require assistance, or are otherwise unable to transport yourself to St. Mungo’s Hospital or the Ministry of Magic, please contact us, and arrangements can be made.
BEST REGARDS,
RUFUS SCRIMGEOUR
AUROR OFFICE, MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Remus carefully rolled up the letter. This one was not entombed in the shoebox, no. It and its belated twin deserved a new box. A more secure cage for a more dangerous kind of creature. He kept the parchments rolled up and tied off with twine on the mantle, as though to remind them they were mere letters, and that if they did not change themselves by his next read over, they would find the outcome unseasonably warm and very unpleasant. Of course, Remus had never been the best at reining in the unruly. There was a turn of phrase: all bark, no bite. The trick was following through.
Not his precise area of expertise.
With practiced nonchalance, Remus flicked his wand, bringing a thrice-rewarmed mug of tea to his hand. He gingerly sipped once. Twice, although it left his mouth dry and tasting of ash. He blinked his eyes three times, scratching his itchy eyelid from the inside. It was the smoke bothering it. Yes. He was probably downwind.
LUPIN, REMUS JOHN,
15 AUGUST, 1978
MR. LUPIN,
We regret to inform you that fifteen minutes before four o’clock this afternoon, Lyall Lupin succumbed to his injuries sustained two days prior despite the best efforts of St. Mungo’s staff. I have been assured by St. Mungo’s staff that he did not suffer unduly.
You have our sincerest condolences, Mr. Lupin. As you have not yet responded to our letter or visited St. Mungo’s in person, we will be assigning you a representative to guide you through the processes following the death of Lyall Lupin.
Aurors have as of yet been unable to determine the location Hope Lupin. As such, and as you are of age, their estate will remain in your control until such time that Hope Lupin is located.
If you require additional information or services from the Ministry, please do not hesitate to contact us.
BEST REGARDS,
RUFUS SCRIMGEOUR
Remus overturned his tea mug and chair as he bolted for the fireplace. Into it he hurled the two rolls of parchment, which went up like flash powder. It hadn’t been aflame before, but it was now, and roaring. The heat of it choked him. He couldn’t breathe. He staggered for the door.
As though announcing him to the world the door swung open before his touch. Another little joke. It left him unsteady. He doubled over, dry-heaving, panting, rivulets of sweat gluing shaggy hair to his forehead and stinging at his eyes—the panic wracking his body and adrenaline flooding his veins was a fire Remus had never tamed. One hand atop the inside frame where his nails dug painful grooves in the wood, one braced against his knee, Remus held onto the doorway like a broom in a thunderstorm. Prospero in a Tempest.
The drone of the crickets and reeking smoke numbed Remus to time.
Yet still, an eternity later, he straightened his back and did small arithmetic in his head until his breathing matched his pulse—even and steady, if somewhat shaky. He dug his toes into the cool packed earth below him, dark and damp. Every instinct he’d cultivated compelled him to run off into the forest and scream, to find the bonfire and cast in Albus Dumbledore’s letter, or to ignore it all once more. To run away again.
Remus slammed the cabin door behind him hard enough to bungle its brass hinges—followed instantly by murmured apology.
He wasn’t being fair to the cabin.
He wasn’t being fair to anyone.
He certainly wasn’t being fair to the forest, which had grown quiet around him with the slam.
Or, well, hold on, that wasn’t fully true, as Remus knew for a fact that the forest had heard louder and much, much worse. The French Pyrenees teemed with life. They breathed life. The nightbugs and wise owls and soft-rustling martes whatevers of the underbrush should have resumed their buzzing and hooting and rustling by now in the same way that one resumed a rudely-interrupted conversation without acknowledging the source of its disruption. Instead, however, they remained quiet—a sure sign that, in the wee hours of the night, the dense forest had picked up on a threat that Remus had not. The Waldeinsamkeit, that quiet, swallowing isolation and seclusion that so many forests projected like the rubbery skin of a balloon had been suddenly and unceremoniously perforated.
That acrid stench of burning pine was stronger, now. Remus peered up past the dark treetops. The waning half-moon was shrouded not by clouds but by the paler haze of woodsmoke. It painted it a deep, bloody orange. To the southwest, the treetops were not so dark, glowing ashen like the smouldering end of a cigarette, and the sky, there, simmered a faint yet menacing red.
He looked to the path down from the quaint cabin reflexively—his only path out—and nearly overturned himself again when a figure emerged from the narrow forest road. Her hair curled off from her head in tight spirals as determined as her demeanour, and the moonlight painted her a deep blue from head to toe, clothes and skin alike. She wore a simple grey smock, and she stepped over and between dry, unsnapped twigs with not a sound to her footfalls.
The denmothers had a habit of sneaking up on you.
“Très bien,” she said. “You smell it.”
“Chima?” said Remus, still recovering. “What, fire? Is there—”
“Oui. You have to go. We are evacuating,” said Chima, who rattled off her French so fast that Remus could scarcely follow. “It is no longer safe for us here.” She closed the distance to them quicker than her shorter legs had any right and tugged on his arm like he was a small child. On reflex he went with her. “To the forest’s edge, and then away. You cannot take your things.”
“Wait! Wait,” said Remus. He pulled back—she was stronger, he was taller—and earned a disapproving noise from Chima. “Just—my wand, it’s in there,” he said, with some reassurance to placate her, “and then I’ll be out. I promise.”
She considered it for a second. Probably weighed the time lost arguing.
“One minute,” she said, letting go. “One trunk. Light. Do not use your wand.”
Remus called a series of gracious merci merci merci’s to her as he ducked back into the cabin and fetched his wand up from the tea-soaked desk, tucking it, haphazard, into his right pocket. The remainder of his minute was spent pulling a small trunk out from under his bed, which he filled with the old shoebox and a random smattering of clean clothes with a single sheet of wet parchment pressed flat between them. He paid one last glance at the left-behind cassettes strewn across a table or the shelves full of poetry books—Keats, Larkin, Les Fleurs du mal; cried a single tear for the Carroll and the Kate Bush; ditched the rolled cigarettes, which he really oughtn’t have been smoking anyway; and spared one glimpse at the heap of ash sitting, cold, in the unlit fireplace before running out once more.
The steely determination with which Chima scanned the forest around them was probably the only thing that kept Remus from panicking even harder. As he exited the cabin for what he reasoned would probably be the last time, Chima placed a firm hand on his back and pushed him off like a springboard. She spoke in French, but the essence of it was thus:
“You better run, Remus Lupin,” she called, and as ordered, he did.
***
Running full-tilt down a well-forested mountainside in the dark at a not-insignificant decline was something only one part of Remus enjoyed. A part that was never unbalanced by a trunk. Stray branches snagged and tore the rolled-up cuffs and sleeves of his shirt, while pine needles stung his calloused bare feet and found their way up folded hems of his jeans, where they clung and itched. He was sweating, the already-uncharacteristic summer heat worsened by gusts of torrid, choking wind from the distant inferno. The stinging where sweat crept into broken skin told him he was almost certainly bleeding. Forearms, ankles, his left collarbone. Earlier he’d caught a hefty branch to the face and now he tasted iron thick in his throat. His upper lip was hot and wet. Nosebleed as well, then.
That was good. Bleeding things were very rarely dead things.
They had talked about it. The denmothers never made him practice, but Remus rarely forgot instructions, even if he wasn’t always keen to follow them. Be quick first, be quiet second, and only use magic if you really had to. Magic left traces.
The curve of the mountainside evened out underfoot, stealing away that additional wild speed you could only feel when moving downhill. Breathing was getting harder. He wasn’t pacing himself—fleeing from mortal peril wasn’t a time to pace—and the smoke, worryingly, was picking up. He didn’t dare lift his head to look for the wildfire glow or back over his shoulder. With his luck, he’d impact bodily on a tree and lose his trunk, or break his ankle, or neck, or impale himself on a branch.
When Remus breached the forest’s edge some uncountable time later, he did so by accident and fell over right afterwards. He’d squeezed sideways between two briars patches at a jog and on instinct pushed the trunk through with both hands to shove aside whatever was behind it, yet met, as it happened, no resistance.
Making the executive decision to twist as he fell, Remus landed in the tall wildgrass with an interrupted series of quiet thumps, landing hard on his left wrist and rolling his ankle on the same side. Clever of him to break his fall like that. At least he hadn’t kept going and overrun the ridge, whose edge, admittedly, lay some twenty or so metres from his current position in the clearing. A nightbird unfazed by the wildfire sang a series of low, ominous beats, like it was laughing at him. Remus flipped over onto his back and—when his ankle protested in agony—let himself lay still for a moment. He swore at the bird. It eased the ache.
The sky was bright, and the treetops fought to their valiant end to hold back the apocalyptic red. Behind him, at the edge of the ridge, stood an imperious old pine with a distinctive set of marks clawed into the bark that no real animal could produce. Sap still oozed from the deep gouges in the bark.
Righting himself, Remus groped for the wand in his pocket. It wasn’t broken. While he and Jesus had agreed to see other people, that one moment was almost—almost—enough to make him reconsider. He fetched his trunk and hobbled over next to the claw-marked tree, trying to keep the weight off his bad ankle. Stared at the marks, and then focused.
Destination. Determination. Deliberation.
The world spun, darkness swallowed him, and Remus had the oddest sensation of being stretched and slurped through a plastic straw. Such was Apparition—neither, alas, as instantaneous nor comfortable as a younger Remus had hoped magical teleportation might be.
When he landed on a cushion of unmown Welsh lawn, air no longer mountainous but instead tanged with salt and fields of earthy summer heath, his ankle gave out again and Remus instinctively swatted at his whole body as though he were being attacked by bees. He still had all of his fingers; all of his toes; his hair; eyebrows; and then finally accepted he hadn’t Splinched himself, left something behind in another bloody country. In truth he ought’ve picked somewhere closer—Bordeaux or Toulouse, even gay Paris. When it came to Apparating, the further you aimed and the poorer your focus, the more likely a Splinch. Not to mention he’d only been at it a few years. Foolish. Lucky, nevertheless. Remus allowed himself to exhale.
He breathed in. He breathed out. Sums and figures assembled themselves as he did simple, soothing arithmetic in his head. In time Remus began to enjoy, really, the growing ache in his strained muscles and the hot swelling in his ankle and the cooler, staler, bay-fed air, the brightening sky, which had much fewer stars than the mountain’s one due to ambient light pollution. He drank in those feelings and the helpless regurgitation of unimportant facts by his still-alive brain, even as something squidgy and many-legged crawled over his bare foot on its way across the lawn. He was alive!
Celebrate! Do a jig!
Not on that ankle, of course. And not at all, because the sun would soon rise on Wales and, if he craned his neck about, he could see lights flick on across the street and faces peering out through windows. Investigating why they had heard a sharp crack followed by the unhinged laughter of a young werewolf in wee hours of the morning, no doubt.
They would never get their answer.
A few minutes later, long before the sun wholly rose over the fire-damaged house on #26 Broomhill, Port Talbot, Wales, the laughter was cut short by another sharp crack.
Nearly 300 kilometres away, Remus Lupin limped out of a dark alleyway and onto Charing Cross Road, still bruised and bleeding and swollen but in a cleaner set of clothes, and on the lookout for someone with ink and a pen.
He had a letter awaiting reply, after all.
Notes:
I am on Tumblr but very honestly I don't really understand how to post there, or how to tag, or anything about it at all, but if someone is willing to give detailed instructions on how exactly you turn on 'asks' (if I have not already enabled them here), I will do my best to use it beyond lurking and reblogging.
I am much more active on Bluesky, a Twitter analogue better known for its furries, gay bears (who sometimes are also furries), pups (the gay furry-adjacent kind), hole pics, dick pics, and large trans communities, usually in some combination of the above. Please keep this in mind before you follow me or reach out to me on Bluesky.
One final disclaimer: if you don't already understand why there is a strong disavowal of J.K. Rowling, as lately as February 26th (the time of writing this lengthy introduction), Rowling was reported by LGBTQNation as having donated £70,000—seventy-thousand pounds, or $81K euro, $88K USD, $120K CAD, $135K AUD, $1.5 million pesos MXN, ¥13.3 million yen, again all conversions determined at the time of writing—to a group that seeks to undermine the already-fraught legal protections that are afforded to transgender people (often, transwomen) in Scotland. For more information on the subject, I'll direct you here, here, and a bonus one here.
Trans liberation now. <3.
Chapter 2: Book I: Any Port
Notes:
or the one in which Remus takes the train.
Chapter Text
A ghost of a smile haunted the train porter’s youthful if unusually pale face as he took Remus’s luggage. It was supposed to be friendly, accommodating even, but the Kissed had never failed to set Remus’s teeth itching, and his time away in the Pyrenees only served to remind Remus of how alien the Kissed were in their pliancy. Or, perhaps the spider up Remus’s back came from the porter’s dark, close-cut curls. In another life, one with forgiveness, they might’ve framed the porter’s face in messy cascades like a certain boy Remus couldn’t stop remembering. A second ghost on the train platform. His fingers were pale and crooked and faintly plum-bruised at the knuckles. Nothing about his face could suggest pain or the capacity to feel it.
The porter gave a gentle tug on Remus’s luggage to break it free from his’s grasp and then turned away without a word to disappear into the bustling crowd of emotional, overexcited families and a light fog from the readying steam engine. Remus excused himself with a quiet, late thank you—a useless gesture to the Kissed, he chided—thanking Christ the porter hadn’t shared Sirius’s eye colour: a haunting blue so pale it looked grey in most lights, and boarded the train.
Finding an empty compartment in which to seclude himself proved frighteningly easy. A sombre and sobering reminder of the times he’d missed.
More families each year were withdrawing their children from Hogwarts. As a half measure—for safety, and from what Remus assumed about educative systems, for keeping attendance within the Ministry’s minimum requirements—those travelling great distances or with other appropriate circumstances would arrive just outside the castle grounds by Portkey. Such had been the case in fifth year, in any case. He doubted the situation had improved three years thereafter.
Remus had declined that option, and as was evident from the gaggle of students gawking at him through his platform-facing window, adorned every so often by an ochre toad or plump brown rat perched on their impossibly-small shoulders—Christ, children were tiny, weren’t they?—so too had many a family. As much as parents and/or guardians had pulled away from the public face of Magical Britain, so too had they pushed for their children to spend more and more time away from home. Aurors were, according to the Prophet, a familiar yet fleeting sight at Hogwarts, and people, on average, were cleverer than Remus thought they were often given credit. Most had put two and two together. Hogwarts was as safe a place as one could hope to keep their loved ones. So, Remus reasoned, the train would be safest, although safety in getting to school shouldn’t have been something a student had to consider at all.
And hadn’t that been the way in nearly every war novel he’d read: the children, by which he meant a chosen few children of course, were all sent to the countries and the estates, far far from the trenches and the London Blitz. Hogwarts enjoyed a similar sort of détente: though the country was at war with itself, with arguably fascism primeval, even fascists hesitated to drop bombs on their own children.
When he’d been in school, fifth year had set a record for students staying during winter holidays. That record would probably break again this year. The faculty, as Remus fondly remembered, was up in arms: so many unruly, unsupervised students roaming the castle with no structure had effectively denied the school’s resident professors a holiday of their own. Remus had resigned himself to a similar fate, being then a school prefect—spare him, he was rubbish at it—only for his eleventh-hour rescue at the hands of one James Potter. That too broke a few records: a tragic copy of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs trod on by Sirius and Peter in the upper bedroom of the Potter Estate, the longest Remus had ever been allowed to stay away from home, and the happiest he’d ever been.
How funny: here he was on the very same train, wishing and not wishing they were correlated. If there were fewer students still, now, then surely, quite quite surely, he would be happy again by winter. Q.E.D.
There was neither knock nor peek in the remaining half hour it took for the train to finish boarding. In the hour that followed, Remus saw only giggling first-years flit by the foggy glass doors in short-legged sprints in pursuit of fleeing Kneazles and other forgotten familiars. Their light woollen cloaks billowed on a youthful breeze despite the humid beginnings of an autumnal storm outside. High-pitched giggling, compartments slamming shut and flying open, cheers ringing out as old friends reconvened after the summer. A pitch, a static charge in the air that came with excitement and magic, the ozone smell of sorcery. The Hogwarts Express was timeless in that manner, dragging him back like a boat upstream down to the very chocolates in his pocket melting terribly in their wrappers just as they had years ago. If he closed his eyes, he might be just another student again, terrorising his friends and racing up and down the corridors.
Nostalgia warmed him enough for a smile and to remind him that, amid all his other preoccupations, he was, as he understood it, something approaching a member of the professoriate, and this was a moving train, thank you, so he should probably do something to curb the students’ infectious enthusiasm.
He put on his best glower and let his imposing height do the rest of the heavy lifting. His ankle was mending nicely, neither sprained nor broken. However, it had left him a small limp, which Remus thought only enhanced the overall effect. His wounds from the Pyrenees, those woodland scratches and cuts he’d accumulated on his hands and face had scabbed over nicely, and when he caught his reflection in a compartment’s windows he dared to say that they made him look dangerous and dignified rather than scrappy. Entering a carriage alone was enough to make the younger students slow to a polite if terrified walk. Heads swivelled, and in that terrifying manner that only children could manage, they leaned over conspiratorially to one another and spoke under their breaths. If only they knew that he could hear them across the carriage.
One older student whispered to another, much younger, that That, you see, that was the new Defence professor.
Oh, the sorrows of lycanthropy. Remus did nothing to discourage the idea. He was busy.
The prefects would be meeting at this time. That much, Remus remembered, if only because he was ambling towards the head of the train in search of the postgraduate one. He imagined it must, though some anxious part of him grew worried that he’d inadvertently stumble into a carriage meant only for the supervising professoriate, or one, presumably, where the Kissed converged for the duration of the trip. He had only been in the prefect carriage once, at the start of fifth year, becoming the one and only exception to Sirius, James, and Peter’s attitude on authority figures mostly because they knew he’d let them get away with almost anything.
For Sirius, anything.
If it had been Professor McGonagall’s hope that Remus would tame their more chaotic tendencies, he supposed that fifth year had thoroughly disabused her of that notion. Not that he blamed her—or anyone else, for that matter. Three years would be a long, long time to hold a grudge. And even if he did have a grudge or three—if, if—his former colleagues had nevertheless finished their seventh year that past June, and the postgraduate program had only a square four spots for intake each year.
It was highly unlikely that he’d ever have the chance to entertain them here, which is why, when Remus slid open the door to the postgraduate’s carriage and found himself staring at the curious yet stoic face of Lily Evans and her plaited red hair, Remus chided himself for not realising that highly unlikely had all but guaranteed it would happen.
The postgraduate carriage was not terribly wide but instead like a long gallery, and filled with exactly nine people. A host of backless cushioned chairs crowded wide circular tables which abutted the chestnut-brown wainscotting of the walls and which were themselves filigreed with ormolu; rucksacks and purses and few cups of tea decorated their surfaces; a breakfast banquet had been overrun; crumbs decorated the turquoise quatrefoil carpet; the bright wall lights had been dimmed to a soft gold glow against the green fleur-de-lis wallpaper; the ceiling vaulted; a gaudy tiered chandelier loomed over them and dangled so low Remus wasn’t sure if its lowest jewels would tickle his hair; and eight people (including Lily) were taking in his roughed-up appearance, his muggle clothes, his shaggy hair, the limp to his step.
Behind Lily sat what was, in James’s frequent and loud opinion, the ‘unmistakeably-greasy’ dark mophead of hair belonging to one Severus Snape, a thin, weaselly sort of boy who’d managed to grow into a thin, weaselly sort of man. His eyes were dark and pitiless and yet oddly strained, which was not, admittedly, altogether an unexpected reaction to seeing Remus. Although as far as he knew there was no requirement to wear them as a postgraduate, both Lily and Severus chose to wear smooth dark robes reminiscent of their studies for reasons, Remus thought, that were as evident as why he kept his hair shaggy or why he wore bovver boots, a white button-down, and drainpipes distinctly with no braces. Even among Wizards, your manner of dress spoke your politics.
In the absence of House colours, Lily wore a neutral grey the shade of marble to accent her robes along with an ascot to match her hair. Severus in contrast wore a very faded shade of green. High neckline. No embellishments. His robes were fitted and he sat with a natural rigidity atop one of those backless cushions.
Autumn thunder rumbled as Remus slid the door shut behind him.
“All right, Remus,” said Lily with a curt nod. She had clear green eyes, a touch colourless, that tended to startle, as it gave her bright face an uncharacteristically-haunted look.
Her head swivelled back to the other presumed postgraduates before her, where, perhaps to make a point, she cleared her throat. “Is one of you lot going to get this thing started?” she asked. That had the added benefit of drawing their eyes away from Remus to her instead. A small mercy.
“Cheers, Remus,” whispered a tall, willowy witch coming up from the crowd’s rear. She had the beginnings of a tight afro and had been a year ahead of him, which is why it took him a moment to recognise Mary Macdonald in her conspicuous ruby-red robes. His face felt flush: of course she’d remember his name before he hers, how embarrassing. In school she’d been a cool, lofty sort of girl, indifferent and clever and possessed of an icy temper, the sort of social elite with whom only James and Sirius were permitted to hold court. It was no shock that she was here. At the end of his fourth year, he’d heard that she’d managed to put on a full face of makeup, matched down to her faux-jewellery and manicure, each and every morning through her OWLs. A feat which, being honest, became much more impressive once Lily had explained to him what that actually entailed. It conveyed a concise message: anything they could do, Mary Macdonald would try backwards and in heels.
“Good to know I’m not the only late one,” continued Mary, throwing him a wink.
“I’m known for my dramatic entrances,” whispered Remus. “Looking ace as always,” he added, with a vague gesture to her makeup.
“Lupin, you flirt.”
“Fine. We’re overdue to start as it is,” began a bespectacled witch, a frown the only crack in her fired-clay complexion, who Remus liked on instinct because she saved him the embarrassment of explaining himself. She tucked a pale silver pocket watch back into her robes. “For those four of you who’ve returned this year: welcome back, it’s all uphill from here. For those four of you who only joining us this year, I would like to formally welcome you on behalf of the Hogwarts faculty to your first day in Hell. We,” she continued, gesturing broadly to the athletic witch and wheelchair-seated wizard on either side of her, “are the upper-form, third year postgrads. My name is Gloria Ahmed, but you may call me ‘the greatest witch upon whom I ever laid eyes’, or, failing that, ‘Ahmed’ is also acceptable.”
She pronounced it Ah, like a trip to the dentist, and with an Aussie twang, and wore robes so boring Remus suspected they were purposefully nondescript. The only thing that stood out about her was the Kneazle at her ankles. Jet-black—a classic familiar.
“Do we really have to do introductions?” asked a wizard in the front with an Irish clip. “And, follow-up, are you going to introduce your ego separately?”
“It’s for the firsties. Obviously.”
“We’re also not actually all here,” said a witch from the corner. She went back to her book. Remus tilted his head to read the spine, which for a moment dazzled him like a linguistic hand grenade. Aurea Catena Homeri oder: it was a title in both Latin and German.
Remus looked up. Inaudibly, every other postgrad in the carriage began to look and count.
“Ahem,” called Ahmed, snapping their heads forwards. “Now that everyone important and who isn’t late is here,” she continued, unbothered, “If I could please have your undivided attention. Over the summer, I coordinated with the postgraduate board to screen the incoming firsties and assign them someone who can actually speak intelligently about their specific focus area.”
“Was that before or after the Headmaster made you queen?” called the Irish heckler in the front. As tall and broad-shouldered as he was unruly and contrarian. Odd qualities for a postgraduate, although, in fairness, Remus’s tongue too was often just long enough to trip himself with.
“Shove it, O’Neil,” said a shorter English witch beside him. “No, not you! Other O’Neil—”
“Thank you,” said Ahmed, voice raised a notch. With true nonchalance and not its ersatz imitation, she flicked her wand and a stack of narrow index cards began distributing themselves among the postgraduates. “Now, while I am queen,” said Ahmed, teasing, “you may behead me in a week, when we have our first proper meeting. Until then, firsties have been paired with an upper-form postgraduate to help them dig their own graves, and I’ve taken the liberty of including our meeting schedule on the back of these cards.”
“We should at least hear their names, shouldn’t we? For their funerals?” asked the wizard in the chair, a bookish boy who hadn’t yet lost the youthful roundness to his jaw.
“We can’t well do that,” muttered Lily, who sounded uncharacteristically sour. “We’re missing one of the lower postgraduates.”
Ahmed put up a hand to quiet them. “We’ll find them,” she said, and the frustrated edge underlying her voice cut at Remus’s ear. “First, however, there are a few announcements, if there are no further questions that must be answered immediately.”
Remus caught the click-of-tongue following someone opening their mouth, but a well-placed elbow silenced them.
“Wonderful,” said Ahmed. “Just like last year, we will have two Aurors visiting and patrolling the boundary between the castle and the Forbidden Forest, and the Headmaster has asked that we make sure none of the students bother them with trivial matters. Students bother prefects, who bother you, who bother professors, who, as an absolute last resort, will bother them.” A general assent came from the crowd, so Ahmed continued, “Additionally, per the request of the Ministry and schedule permitting, each postgraduate will be assigned a vocational task this year—”
“Oh, that’s rotten!” started Mary.
“Merlin’s sake!” cried the book-witch seated by the edge of the carriage. “Could we all shut it for one second, let her finish one bloody sentence without interruption?” After a brief pause, she added, “Please?”
“Thank you,” said Ahmed, terse, “Rucha. Now, some of you already know, but Emily Leach has withdrawn unexpectedly from the postgraduate program this year, and I’m sure we’ll all miss the satisfaction we would have felt grinding her perfect, early-entrance-worthy academic performance into the dust where it and she belonged.” There came a smattering of nods and tuts from the room. “However, we also have been blessed by her replacement, a waitlist applicant arriving this year from the Pyrenees mountains of France,” said Ahmed with careful enunciation, “who, as I understand it, must have attended Beauxbâtons since it’s in that region, although frankly it’s odd they didn’t specify. Please, everyone, give a warm welcome to Remus Lupin.”
Remus swivelled his head left and right as he and the others applauded politely, only for Mary to nudge him forwards and part the small standing crowd. A pause filled with only the clatter of rain on the train’s roof followed as Lily and Gloria Ahmed shot him furtive glances, both willing him to say something. By sheer reflex he clapped his hands together once as though the gesture might usher forth some kind of reasonable address.
Yet, when Remus opened his mouth, a screeching keen filled the carriage and several postgraduates, Remus included, tumbled over as the train made an abrupt stop.
As postgrads untangled themselves and Remus thanked his new disposition to not don his robes unless absolutely necessary, a ringing air of confusion grew loud outside the postgraduate’s carriage.
“Please find your pairings,” called Ahmed, tone measured even in a crisis, “and let’s go calm all the ickle children down. And remember! No one steps a foot off the train!”
Remus spotted a familiar name listed on his index card. Mary glanced up from her own to meet his eyes with a warm nod, and, suddenly struck by a pressing thought, she raised her voice.
“Who’s paired with Benjy Fenwick?”
“Right here!” called Lily, who had grown paler but not taller in the time since Remus had known her.
“Fantastic,” said Mary, leading her over to Remus. “Come on, then!” she cried, moving for the back half of the train, but before grinning at Remus and adding, “You did say you were one for dramatic entrances.”
“Been waiting all my life to be thoroughly upstaged,” said Remus, who wished he was still in the Pyrenees.
Ahmed received no further questions as postgraduates poured out of the room.
***
Remus, Mary, and Lily overtook the mixed-deluge of prefects and postgraduates in a matter of minutes despite their late start. This was due in part to their collective athleticism, although none of them truly looked the part. Mary’s absurdly long legs, Lily’s quiet determination, and Remus’s furry little secret were subtle advantages, but the biggest advantage afforded to them was the reckless abandon with which Mary charged forwards and Remus’s beaten-down reluctancy to resist a strong leader.
The term hadn’t quite begun and as such there were no points to dock—not to mention the first years, many of whom did not understand points and all of whom had no assigned House. Thankfully, however, the majority of students glued themselves to their compartment windows, staring out at the relative gloom of the Scottish countryside and attempting to spot anything interesting in the heavy autumn rainfall. The hills had vanished into a thick, grey stormy fog shadowed by oncoming evening. You could hardly see the sides of the track, let alone any detail, but as they passed broad window after broad, rainstreaked window, Remus swore he caught a glimpse of something moving outside. Or perhaps that was his paranoia.
It was all something of a scandal. Never in his years had Remus known the train to stop.
As far as students had said, no one was as of yet unaccounted for, save for a misplaced toad or someone swiftly retrieved from their ill-timed trip to the loo. Remus’s looming presence coaxed tacit agreement from a few more inquisitive Ravenclaws, while the good will Mary had apparently constructed with rebellious students—Gryffindors, mostly, ones who reminded Remus too often of James, Sirius, and even Peter—helped convince them to stay put until a professor or an Auror arrived. They prevented disaster when they found a compartment of first years, swaddled in their huge cloaks like wee babes, asking a train door to politely open: they’d assumed, oblivious, that the train had arrived at its destination. Thank Christ they hadn’t tried the door handle.
All in all, Mary only had to claim to be the new Defence professor once. She’d timed her words with the distant thunder, thoroughly convincing her antagonistic teenage audience.
Lily had otherwise remained quiet and observed for the most part, which, Remus supposed, was exactly what Ahmed had instructed the firsties to do. Her muted reactions were a welcome foil to Mary’s bravado, but years with Sirius had given Remus a discerning eye for storms brewing. Unfortunately, years with Sirius hadn’t also given Remus a good way of dealing with those storms. For the moment, Lily’s head count remained accurate, so Remus set it aside.
Only one carriage, mostly-deserted as it had been when Remus inhabited it earlier, remained before the luggage compartment, but a number of small terrors grew inside Remus like insects under his scalp. They hadn’t yet encountered the missing two postgraduates, which unsettled him, given one was lower-form and one upper.
Then, there was the lack of Aurors or professors encountered, despite the train having been stopped for nearly ten minutes. Worries wrestled in his head like stags, dogs, and werewolves, casting every imaginable horror out of the brawl.
Perhaps the train had been taken by dark wizards and they were all about to die.
Perhaps someone had discovered his secret and Aurors would take him away to Azkaban.
Perhaps they’d finally discovered that he hadn’t actually sent in any form of thesis proposal, and Remus would be forced to leave school for a second, much more embarrassing time.
Remus slid open a compartment door with its privacy blinds drawn shut and popped his head in, which dispelled some of his fears and grew new ones in their place. An older berobed Asian boy looked up from his sketchpad, adorned with various sigils, and blinked twice at Remus, as though the werewolf wasn’t truly there. He had the look of a lonely dog chained up outside the house.
“Hullo, Mr. North,” said Remus, his tongue remembering before his brain. The gangly boy had been a year below Remus and only caught greater notice when every other Gryffindor boy in his year was withdrawn. Sirius and James had taken him under their wing some time thereafter. “Is there anyone else in this carriage?”
The heavy clattering of rain filled the compartment as Nathaniel North’s thick brows furrowed, relaxed, and furrowed again.
“Hi Remus,” he started, parsing his words slowly. He made eye contact with the rain and countryside and none of the three postgraduates before him. “Are you a prefect right now?”
“I think so,” replied Remus, “yes, because there might be an emergency.”
“Might be?”
“Don’t quite know, if I’m honest.”
“If you’re a prefect, then there’s no one else in the carriage,” replied Nathaniel, staring back down at his drawings. Remus winced as lightning flashed outside the window. “Check the loo,” he continued, “if you like.”
“If they’re still on the train, that’s good enough.”
“I’m sorry, Remus, there’s no one—”
“Nate,” interrupted Mary, gentle, “sometimes the bravest thing you can do is tell the truth.”
Rain rattled. Nathaniel North flipped his sketchpad and took his pencil to the other side.
“Sirius,” he said, oh, bloody joy, “said they were going for a smoke off the back of the train.”
“They? Two of them?” asked Mary, holding up as many fingers, and the boy confirmed with a small nod. “Thank you.”
Remus closed the compartment behind himself and winced again as he saw Lily stood quiet in the hall, observing from behind her green eyes, but in an unspoken agreement, both agreed to pretend nothing was happening with the other. Remus rather liked Lily, for that.
“Why isn’t,” called Mary, now inspecting the final compartments, “the luggage compartment locked? Are we all that trusting now?” Then, after a pause, she added, “Or are postgrads just keyed in, which would also be odd?”
Remus wandered to the back of the carriage, where he crouched by the handle and frowned at the series of light scratches where the lock met frame. “Please trust me when I say this isn’t as serious as it sounds,” Remus started, “but the lock’s been picked with a knife.”
“Pardon me, Remus?” asked Lily. She crouched beside him. “Are you a detective?”
“Yes,” replied Remus. Her whole demeanour had changed, quick as a twist, which puzzled Remus. “I was also once close with several anarchists.”
“Is that why you reek of smoke?”
No,” said Remus, “that’ll be the lung damage. Shall I lead the way?”
Lily gave a sharp laugh and a snort. “By all means, chase after the knife-wielding maniac on the stopped train in a thunderstorm, Lupin. I’ll be right behind you.”
Behind the two, Mary cleared her throat. “Sorry to add to the pile of problems,” she said, sliding the last empty compartment shut, “but I know at least one more student isn’t where they should be.”
“How do you know that, Macdonald?” asked Remus.
“’Cos I left my sister here when I went off for our meeting,” said Mary, “and she’ll barely put her books down to eat.”
“And,” Remus continued, connecting the pieces in his slow, slow brain, “you’re certain you didn’t see her on the way here.”
“Correct.”
“Do you two want to double-check?”
Lily cocked her head to the side. “And leave you here alone with the knife-wielding maniac?”
“Point taken,” said Remus. “Hopefully your sister is…”
“…off smoking with the knife-wielding maniac,” Mary finished. “She’s only eleven.”
“In all fairness, it’s only a penknife.”
“You go first,” said Lily.
“I go first,” replied Remus.
***
There were lights in the luggage compartment, and they did not flicker. In previous years Remus had sneaked through to the back of the train at Sirius’s request, but the rattle of rain cluttered Remus’s ears and the stillness of the engine gave it a stagnant, eerie air. Worse still, the storm’s wet cold leaked through the open back door of the break van, cutting straight through the cosy warmth of the passenger compartments behind him. Dozens of owls variegated in all colours slept, head-under-wing, in the section behind him, though a few curious ones bored their large eyes into the back of his head from behind their sundry cages and pricked his neck like paranoid spiders skittering over it. A tiny brown owl screeched incessantly, though he had no sense of whether it was his presence or something else that was bothering it.
Remus kept his wand lowered. He was no duellist, and firing off a panicked hex at a shadow in the luggage compartment would spell disaster for everyone involved, as although there were fewer and fewer students each year, each student brought, understandably, more and more. Fewer holidays and Hogsmeade visits for those still given permission by their parents necessitated it. The result was an overcrowded labyrinth of shelves, luggage, trunks, and cages, patterned or metal or battered or gilded. There were approximately, if he were to put a precise number on it, an arseload of nooks and crevices in which an ambusher could lurk unnoticed, and one narrow carpeted corridor between it all that led out to a storm.
Lightning flashed through the break van’s open door, and yet Remus saw no curly-haired boy perched over the railing with fresh-skinned cigarette in hand. His ears, however, picked out muffled, enthusiastic sounds over the din of the rain. A familiar musky scent crept over Remus’s keen nose as he inched forwards, however, and dispelled the eeriness as quickly as it put fire flushing his cheeks. The sorrows of lycanthropy.
Ducking his head back, Remus whispered, “Lily, could you take Mary and wait outside a moment?”
“What?” whispered Lily with a frown. “What do you see?”
“It’s not what I currently see,” replied Remus, tapping his nose, “it’s, well—it’s something you two oughtn’t.”
“Got,” said Lily, swivelling, “it.”
Remus waited for the pair to exit, then, in short sequence, cleared his throat, raised his voice, and called, “Sirius?”
A thud cut through the rain-rattle as a few unfortunate luggage cases were overturned.
“Give us a—”
“Understood,” Remus interrupted, turning his back and waiting for the fumble-clinking of belt-buckles to subside. “The trains stopped,” Remus called, wincing, “although you probably gathered as much, but we’re asking all the postgrads to help wrangle the students.”
“Right,” said Sirius. After another moment, Remus turned to watch him step out from behind a rack of loose luggage, long black curls messier than usual and pale cheeks slightly flushed. Three years had made his face longer and pulled his cheekbones even higher, while his chin and mouth showed a new dark stubble that was unfamiliar to Remus and just as inviting. Still with that same haughty poise, although he’d dressed himself down in muggle clothes. Or up, what with his punk boots, Stuart tartan trousers, and a shiny white silk shirt befitting a titled European lord. Lesser-titled, probably. Still needed a few more buttons done up.
“Right,” said Sirius again. Always uncomfortable with the silence.
“Is there a—did you see anyone else down this way? A younger girl, dark hair, probably with a book or two? Looks like a smaller Mary Macdonald?”
“No, sorry. Only us,” replied Sirius. He looked off behind another unseen rack, then back to Remus. After another long pause, he began, “Remus—”
“I’m going to,” said Remus, gesturing over his shoulder, “go now.”
Sirius’s reply was cut down by a high-pitched shrieking that rattled Remus to the bone, followed by a muffled cry that came from the carriage behind them. In the second it took for both their bodies to unclench, Sirius called for a temporary truce with his grey eyes. Remus nodded. Wordlessly, they both doubled back through a mess of startled, screeching owls for the passenger carriage in time to see Lily climbing out the now-open train door.
“Macdonald, wait!” she cried, ducking her head on her way out.
Mary was nowhere to be seen.
Ahmed was going to have them expelled for negligence, presuming they survived.
Sirius took hold of Remus’s sleeve, and out into the storm they leapt.
Remus landed afoul of flat ground, and his boots were swallowed to the ankle in sucking brown mud. He sputtered and cursed himself for letting his hair grow out shaggy as it whipped about his face and blinded him in the howling wind. Sirius, both landing better and being more experienced with the perils of long hair, flourished his wand and conjured a faint screen around them. The wind stilled in Remus’s button-down, the icy needlepoints of rain stopped stabbing into his skin, and, a moment later, Remus had the most curious sensation of being underwater. He wiped the storm from his face.
Through the refracted screen and its rivulets of rainwater, Remus saw the blurred figures of Mary and Lily a short distance away, still and unharmed, as well as a third tiny witch clutching them on either side whom he surmised to be Mary’s sister. The fog was thick around them, and growing darker. Thunder boomed, muffled by Sirius’s protective bubble, but much louder than it had been on the train.
Beside him, Sirius evened his breathing—loud and clear, within the confines of the screen—and tilted his wand skyward, forming from his bubble a simple screen umbrella. The first rush of autumn wind chilled Remus to the core and yanked the breath from his lungs. His breath did not return when, further down from Lily, Mary, and her sister, a set of tattered black cloaks glided along the train, heralded by slow-forming ice and quieting the storm behind them. Though they did not touch the ground, the mud itself froze in uneven waves wherever they passed. A frost condensed along the side of the train.
Sirius’s umbrella sputtered and rain began to fall on Remus again, but he was long past feeling the sting of rain, by then. The world of warmth and comfort grew further distant until Remus could no longer remember what it had felt like to be inside the train. Some part of him, a part always more aware than the rest, howled for him to move and get back inside the carriage as the Dementors continued their silent approach. Yet, Remus’s body resisted. He couldn’t run—couldn’t flinch. He had seen small rodents hypnotised before the eyes of a garden snake before, when he was littler and less aware of why animals acted as they did. Perhaps this dread emptiness was the same felt by those little wild mice. Perhaps, Remus thought, it wouldn’t be so awful to become one of the Kissed.
A hovering ball of silvery light coalesced in the air before Mary, her sister, and Lily. Painful cold surged up Remus’s fingertips and into his bones, shocking him awake, as the silver light took on the form of a large translucent doe. It was a startling light that banished the fog and storm around it like a torch, though the ice remained. The Patronus Charm could give no true warmth: that, alas, was on you.
Beside him, Sirius staggered and crouched to collect his muddied wand.
“We can’t leave them there!” cried Remus, drawing his wand. He knew the theory behind the charm, of course, but his confidence wavered and mind drew blank searching for a strong memory.
Mary turned her head, spotting Remus and calling out, her words choked by the storm raging about them, while Sirius waved his arm to beckon her forwards. Their retreat managed only a few steps before the emptiness crept over Remus again. Spinning around, he saw yet another Dementor gliding around the train’s break van. Surrounded.
Levelling his wand and willing his teeth to stop chattering, Remus called, “Expecto Patronum!”
Nothing came. Remus took a half-step in front of Sirius and incanted again, yet still nothing came. As the adrenaline froze in Remus’s veins again and defeat crystallise, he wracked his brain for ideas. Lily couldn’t send her Patronus to them without exposing herself and the others, but perhaps they could run, or try again, or—there had to have been something he was missing, a clever idea or solution that he was forgetting. Remus had tried very little and found himself out of ideas.
“Sirius,” whispered Remus, “please shift and run.”
Never one to heed instruction, Sirius squeezed Remus’s hand, and a little warmth returned to the world.
In the corner of Remus’s transfixed eyes, the dark-haired Kissed porter from earlier stepped off of the train and into the frozen mud underfoot. Despite the raging winds and needling rain, the same ghostly smile rested on the porter’s face as he crossed to the intervening space between them and the Dementor, which fell still and hovered in open air as the porter drew near. He like Remus was not dressed for the weather, his porter’s uniform soaked through by the storm, though it refused all frost. He’d lost his hat and his short curls tousled, giving him a young, almost boyish look. Sirius’s nails dug painfully into Remus’s knuckles.
In size the porter was childlike, standing before the Dementor, yet also much like a child, he took the Dementor’s hand and began to lead it away with little care for the thrashing world around them.
“Oh my goodness!” said a voice from the train. As the porter and Dementor vanished about the break van, Remus’s eyes snapped to a bald witch preceded by a floating silver lobster. She resembled a very old scarecrow being worn by a very smooth mannequin. On an instinctive level, she disquieted Remus. On a reasonable level, however, Remus recognised a saviour when he encountered one, so he nodded as she added, “Oh my word! Are you all right?”
“Others,” cried Sirius, pointing in Mary’s direction.
“Thank you, young man!” said the bald witch. With a gesture of her wand, her lobster Patronus swam through the storm aglow with its bright spectral light while she beckoned to both Remus and Sirius. “Back on the train, both of you, now,” she said, waving her free hand, and a gentle force began to propel the two up and forwards as she stepped into the mud. “I’ll be with you in but a moment.”
Remus and Sirius clambered back onto the train and collapsed in a pile of trembling knees and chattering teeth. Awaiting them was the tall the athletic witch whose names Remus had never caught.
“It’s bloody lashing out there,” she said, furious and wrapping a thick woollen blanket about Sirius’s shoulders, “and you lot decide to hop off the train? Off your yonkers, are you?”
“Let’s save the bollocking for later, Vance?” said another unrecognisable wizard wearing a frown. When Remus’s shaking hands flubbed a Hot Air Charm for the second time, the boy—a sort of boy-next-door bloke, not much older than Remus, who wore an argyle waistcoat and matching navy tie and who smelled alarmingly, somewhat overwhelmingly like rosewater—performed it for him with surprising precision and no wand before wrapping Remus with a blanket of his own. He introduced himself as Benjy Fenwick, the missing upper-form postgraduate. Remus was pleasantly surprised, though he couldn’t quite put his finger on why.
“The Defence professor mentioned Dementors,” said Vance—Emmeline Vance, that name rang a bell. “Is it true? Did you see them?”
“That’s the Defence professor?” asked Sirius, aghast. He had shifted opposite Remus in the corridor, and Remus away from him, too, as the reminders of their mortality passed.
“Aye,” replied Emmeline. “At first, I thought she was an Auror, from the look of her, but—”
“I am an Auror, young lady,” called the bald witch. She boarded the increasingly-cramped carriage with Lily, Mary, and her sister in tow, all, to Remus’s relief, unharmed if a touch shaken. “And might I add, your help has been most invaluable. Would you kindly find some chocolate for these poor souls, Miss…?”
“Vance,” said Emmeline. “Right away, Professor.”
“Excellent,” said the bald witch. “Perhaps it would be wise if you joined her, Mr. Fenwick.”
“Ah—yes,” said Benjy Fenwick. He pulled his hand from the small of Remus’s (admittedly-blanketed) back. “Let’s get a move on, then.”
As the carriage door slid shut with a thud, the dull tampering of rain filled the silence. Remus became acutely aware of his heavy breathing and Sirius’s eyes darting on-and-away from his face. Mary’s impenetrable confidence had wavered, and poor Lily looked as though she were ready to evaporate on the spot.
Mary’s sister buried her face in Mary’s ruby-red robes.
“I will spare you five a lecture,” said the witch, “as I believe an encounter with a Dementor is perhaps more dire a warning than I could ever hope to give.” She adjusted the crook of her floppy gunny-sack hat, cut from Hessian like a scarecrow’s, which Remus realised had stuck firm to her bald head despite the storm outside, before continuing, “Yet, I cannot emphasise enough that your actions—however heroic you intended them to be—put not only you, but your colleagues in grave danger.”
“I understand, Professor,” said Remus and Sirius together.
“Might I be correct to assume you all once belonged to House Gryffindor?” she asked. When the four of them met her words with a nod, she grimaced and said, “Then, while I’m afraid it will not ingratiate you to the students, I must dock fifty points at the start of term for the recklessness of your actions. Each of you.”
Remus recoiled, which he recognised was an absurd reaction, but shock, he assumed, had absurd effects on everyone. Sirius—no stranger to lost points, and, arguably, equally in shock—didn’t flinch.
“Ms. Evans,” said the bald witch, “for your outstanding use of the Patronus Charm, I will spare you such a penalty, but request that you meet with me in my office at your soonest convenience.
“Of course, Professor,” whispered Lily.
Ducking her head and furrowing her eyebrowless-brows, the witch crouched to inspect Mary’s sister. “You look very frightened, young lady,” she said, looking between the pair. “Might I ask what compelled both of you to abandon the train?”
Mary’s sister broke out sobbing and clutched tighter to Mary, who managed only a whisper muffled by the tampering rain.
“Pardon me?”
“She thought she saw our brother,” repeated Mary, hoarse. “While she was reading, he passed by her compartment, and so she went looking.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” said the witch. Remus shuffled away, feeling suddenly as though he was an intruder spying on someone’s fresh scars. Sirius and Lily mirrored his shuffling.
“Our brother was Kissed late last year,” whispered Mary, growing ashen. “He was—he’s a porter on the train. Led a Dementor away from us on our end.”
“I see,” said the witch. A shadow fell across her smooth features and silence across the carriage as Remus and Lily stilled, while Sirius instead made a choked noise. After a long pause, she added, “I cannot imagine how difficult that must have been for the both of you. Please, come away with me, now—someplace warmer and drier, and far more private.” Turning to Remus and the others, the witch straightened, tall again, and blinked. “Oh, goodness, my apologies for the lack of introductions. I am—”
Just as it had done when it stopped, the train began abruptly with the screech of metal and by throwing Remus into his fellow students. The sudden motion ripped another shrieking sob from Mary’s sister, and the Defence professor usher both her and Mary out of the carriage as the train gathered speed.
The door slid shut with a gentle thud.
“I didn’t catch her name,” said Remus.
“Neither I,” said Lily, directing her piercing stare away towards Sirius and arching her brows. “Since when did you add knife-wielding to your list of crimes, Black?”
That Sirius hadn’t fired back a retort told Remus he had learned to curb his sharp tongue in the last three years or that he was still perturbed, both of which worried Remus. What worried Remus more, however, was his fretting over a boy with whom he hadn’t exchanged a word since he’d left for the Pyrenees.
“I’m going to go have a lie down,” said Remus, “and wait for the others to return with sweets.”
“And I’m going to go give the abridged version of this to Ahmed,” said Lily. Extricating herself before yet another soon-to-be-painful conversation sprung up around her was her true priority, Remus assumed.
With the bang of the carriage door, she was gone.
“Remus,” started Sirius, dropping his haughty air.
“Please, Sirius,” interrupted Remus, squeezing at his temples. “I don’t—I’ve the energy to do little more, today, but there’s still so much left,” he explained, dread blossoming across his worn face. “We’ll talk. I promise.”
“But not tonight?”
“But not tonight.”
“Okay,” said Sirius, quiet. “You promise?”
“I do,” said Remus. “Goodnight, Padfoot.” Yet, in the pause where Remus should’ve shuffled to his compartment—which, Remus realised, was only meters from Sirius and North’s own compartment—the full chronology of the afternoon’s events struck Remus like a torrent of water from a broken dam. Remus looked up from his feet, met Sirius’s eyes, and said, “Padfoot?”
“Yes, Remus?”
“I’m glad you’re alive.”
“I’m glad you’re alive, too, Remus,” said Sirius. They swapped middling smiles, earnest in their fatigue, before Remus sequestered himself away for a nap and prayed for a short Sorting before the feast.
And, though Remus kept his promise, he would not do so for nearly two months.
Chapter 3: Stalling
Notes:
or the one in which Remus reshelves books.
Chapter Text
As it so happened, the Sorting of 1978 would go down in the annals of Hogwarts history as an auspicious occasion in which there were no less than seven Hatstalls.
Unrest and unease hovering like dark stormclouds over the wizarding world was likely to blame. That much was clear to Remus—even at age eleven, few children could afford the luxury of ignorance. The vague-but-ill tidings of the Prophet and the hushed whisperings of schemes and schism surrounding Remus as he’d grown up at Hogwarts were gone, replaced by a much more palpable sense of foreboding. War may not have had the school in its cold grasp, but even Hogwarts could no longer take the word off its students’ lips. Yet, for all its sombre severity, at present all this meant for Remus was that the start-of-term feast would begin late and end early to accommodate the Hatstalls, and the usual the introductions and speeches were tossed to the wayside to stop a fomenting riot. Remus enjoyed that. His brush with death on the train had left him both famished and nauseous.
Time was spared only for a brief warning about wandering the castle grounds alone and respecting the authority of Aurors before the feast proper began.
An unfortunate side-effect of their time-saving measures was, however, that Remus was unable to catch the name of the new Defence professor over the clatter and silverware and roar of raucous Gryffindors and, of course, the squeals of unsuspecting first-year students lifting ornate tray covers only to discover the silvery-transparent and grinning head of a ghost beneath one. Worse still, a mandatory post-Dementor exposure examination with Madam Pomfrey had made them late, forcing them into the limelight once more as Remus, Mary, Lily, and Sirius scarpered in through the wide doors of the Great Hall. Four enormously long tables stretched down the gallery, each long enough to hold forty students and dressed in an assortment of roast-skewered sausage and racks of well-herbed lamb, gravy boats, towering trays of frites and basket troughs of spiced dinner rolls, bowls of salads that threatened to be sweet or tart or rich or earthy or hot or cold or with seafood or without. Some one-hundred twenty students, give or take—take, probably, probably take—looked up like a moving waveform as they sheepishly found their place at the head table, up a short stair, where, evidently, it was expected they’d sit for the next three years.
The students—particularly the younger ones—had no compunction for whispering and pointing. In fact they seemed to have no concept that, just as they could see Remus, Remus could see more or less the entirety of the Great Hall from up here, lit brightly by its torch sconces along the walls and a sea of floating candles that lingered several metres above the students’ heads. A disproportionate amount of the attention was aimed at him, or so he was gathering. It left him on edge. Remus spent as much time fidgeting with the sleeves of his shirt as he spent eating, leaving him both hungry and paranoid when the feast came to its premature end. His foul mood did neither Remus nor anyone else any favours.
Ahmed’s index cards had included a set of directions from the Great Hall to the purported postgraduate lounge on the fourth floor by the North Tower. Near the library, as it so happened. His unfamiliarity with Hogwarts’ mercurial geography, however, forced him to lag behind Lily and Sirius, who, in violation of all laws known to Remus, exchanged casual small-talk with one another as they walked, which gradually evolved into what might even be called a pleasant, natural conversation.
All three of them sped on without a word or waiting for Severus. Remus’s whining ankle was a worthy sacrifice for that.
Due to the abrupt end of their carriage meeting, however, none of them had received the password, a fact they only uncovered once they had arrived at the featureless stone wall sheltering what was supposed to be the entrance to their fabled exclusive lounge. The stares they exchanged with one another were as embarrassed as they were withering.
After some fruitless brick-prying with Sirius’s knife and a woeful attempt at cryptography by Remus and Lily—all the while harangued by a grand portrait so faded it no longer bore an inscription, which insisted, in her hawkish, repetitive tones, that the standards at Hogwarts were slipping—it turned out to be Severus, moving with the slow certainty of someone whose arrogance had finally been validated, who opened the passageway without a word.
Literally. The passage appeared when you thought the password and opened the door for you.
In the end, Remus had snapped twice at passing students on the way to their common rooms and given at least one undeserved detention, for lip, no less, that he would have to later retract, seeing as he wasn’t yet sure he had the authority to give detentions at all. No doubt that cemented the rumours that Gryffindor was home to insensitive prats and barking lunatics alike, students and leavers alike.
The lounge itself reminded Remus of Gryffindor’s common room, albeit with a higher domed ceiling that’d been painted with an elaborate cosmological map, like a fresco interpretation of spiritus mundi. Perhaps because it was a later addition to the tower, attached like a leech to the library, tall bookshelves lined almost every wall with duplicates of frequently-requested titles. There was a calling card system. There was a grand fireplace with a marble mantelpiece out of whose hood a seven-headed marble hydra had been carved. There were more common working bureaus than sofas and sitting tables, and all bereft of the gold-and-crimson-and-maroon styling that had so defined his earlier years at Hogwarts. Each of them, to Remus’s delight, could claim a workstation as their own. Shelves, book rests, a vast L-shaped expanse of smooth wooden finish. The drawers were bigger on the inside. The swot was coming out in him again. He seized one spot by a large, fat-silled bay window (of which there were no less than three) where no one had staked their name and spent nearly ten minutes arranging the fancy quills and pre-supplied stationary.
There were six small doors for dormitories and two larger pairs. They’d come through one of the larger ones, and the other, presumably, descended to the library, for which postgraduates had their own personal entrance. It was a nice touch. Much crueller, however, was the knowledge Mary bestowed to Remus.
“Two to a room each. Divided by focus area, so—”
That was how Remus learned that he and Sirius would share a dorm and focus together. His thesis proposal, apparently, also had to do with Charms. Remus, who had been content to steep in discontent, boiled until even that had soured and turned into bitter self-loathing.
Sirius had waited up for him, but looked very peaceful curled up on his side of the dormitory, so Remus let alone the sleeping dog to lie and went to bed.
So began a familiar pattern for Remus. Though the Sorting and feast had landed on a Friday, that year, it became clear Ahmed hadn’t been lying when she called the program Hell. The first days were consumed in a flurry of introductions, staff meetings, faculty advisors, postgrad scheduling, and, to Remus’s chagrin, flagrant rumour-mongering. Heads swivelled in the corridors wherever Remus walked, as, he gathered, his sudden departure months before end of fifth year had been something of a scandal. Remus cringed at the thought.
Twice, younger students whose names he could scarcely remember had asked him if he was really Remus Lupin—word had got around, as was evident, that he had died during fifth year and the school was covering up the scandal. Worse were the pitiful glances and eyeballed apologies from those with family working in the Ministry and who knew that talking about the War only dredged up painful scars. His father, regrettably, had once been a public figure. He ought’ve suspected that it would make the Prophet. He ought’ve checked. By the afternoon, Remus had grown adept at accepting condolences and redirecting the conversation to summer holidays, where he could speak both truthfully and joyfully of the French Pyrenees—minus all of the pertinent details, of course—instead of being reminded of his late father.
The first weekend also marked the first time he would be tasked with directing his own studies and research. Beginning his Wissenschaft, to put a precise German word on it, in earnest. It was a feat for which he and Lily considered themselves woefully underprepared.
Between sorting out interdepartmental meetings, Mary’s cavalier approach to what ‘upper-form guidance’ meant for a first-year postgraduate, re-acquainting himself with the castle grounds and ghosts and ever-shifting architecture, Sirius hovering like a startled horse, Lily’s insistence that Remus help her reform their OWLs revision group, Gloria Ahmed directing him to Madam Pince for his librarian assistant training, several younger students seeking out Remus as a tutor due to his apparently-survived reputation as a swot, and several more, usually older students doing the same in search of loose tobacco after he’d been caught smoking a hand-roll atop the Astronomy tower in a fit of nostalgia, Remus found himself drawn and twice-quartered by Sunday, and he hadn’t yet unpacked his trunk.
While he had intended to spend Sunday doing exactly that—along with figuring out where to begin with Sirius and whether fleeing back to the Pyrenees was an acceptable option—at quarter nine, Rucha Nagar, the book-nose witch from the train, trudged into the lounge with her usual bored expression and a message.
“Remus,” she said, “Ahmed’s in the Great Hall and wants to see you.” Then, perhaps pointedly, she stretched her arms wide, gave a theatrical yawn, and sprawled out over one of the squat camelback sofas before the fireplace. “I believe everyone does. How is it you’re so popular if you were alleged to be dead? And, is that why you smell of a wildfire?”
“No one says a bad word against the dead,” said Remus.
“My advice? Stop talking to people,” replied Rucha. If she cared he’d dodged the question, she didn’t show it. “No one’s said a word about me, good or bad, in seven years.”
“Except Ahmed, I gather.”
“Except Ahmed, yes,” said Rucha. “Someone has to keep her on her toes.”
“If nothing else,” said Remus, shutting his smoke-stained trunk with a frown, “at least you’ll produce some fantastic research. Cheers, Nagar.”
“Cheers.”
He made it past the middle courtyard and across the windy stone viaduct without being stopped, but in his rush to climb the moving staircases before they moved again, he narrowly avoided collision with Lily Evans, who carried roll after roll of faded parchment and a hefty tome covered in skittering gold runes. Remus did not get away with his mumbled hullo-howareyou-goodbye.
“Oi, Lupin!” she called.
“Sorry, Lily!” replied Remus over his shoulder, although by all means he should have been watching his step. “Bit of a rush, but I haven’t forgotten about the—”
“Oi, Remus Lupin!” she called again, voice echoing through the hollow tower to the chagrin of the older portraits. “This isn’t about my bloody group-swotting! The new Defence professor wants to see you.”
That froze Remus in his step. Sheepish, he climbed back up to look at Lily, peeking his head about the banister. She stood taller than usual with her unwieldy load of reading material. At the top was an unfamiliar text entitled Aldaraia. Distantly Remus recalled its epithet: the Book That Kills.
“Pardon me?” he said. His eyes skated off the book back to Lily’s green eyes, which, as it happened, also could kill.
“Something about the train. And France,” added Lily, “because she mentioned wanting to hear about your time in the Pyrenees, and—oh, right, right, you’re in a rush,” she muttered, noting Remus’s pained, something-wicked-this-way-comes expression. “I told her you were an excellent student in the time I knew you and that your academic performance was impugnable.”
“Really?” asked Remus. “That’s very kind, like.”
“Anything for a friend, Lupin, and, also, good luck.”
“Oh bugger,” said Remus, glancing back down the many flights of stairs. “Or, rather, thank you, but I already have to meet the—”
“I also told her you were drowning in obligations and would probably show up at half past noon.”
“How did you know I’d be drowning?” asked Remus.
“Aren’t we all?” asked Lily. “And how do I know that the Augustine runic formation describes the base components for all post-Patristic cognitive charms?” said with a smile and wobble. “I’m brilliant, Remus Lupin, and you now owe me!”
“Top of my priorities!” called Remus, beginning his descent into madness again. “Just under—”
“—everything else!” called Lily. Her cheerful cackling echoed through the tower long after she’d departed, which served as a nice reminder to Remus that he was not the only one losing his mind so early in the year. And yet, Remus could help but feel uniquely victimised when he’d only skirted the entrance hall before being assailed once again.
“Ah, Mr. Lupin, there you are,” said Professor McGonagall in her normal Scottish lilt. He felt an old, old fear reawaken, hearing her say his name. “Professor Dumbledore wishes to see you in his office immediately.”
Remus opened his mouth to protest, perhaps out of reflex, but shut it soon thereafter and only nodded. “Yes, Professor.”
“Splendid. Come right this way.”
***
Remus had no measure of how often the average student visited the Headmaster’s Office in their seven years at Hogwarts, but he knew, at least, that he was far, far from the standard. Sirius and James to a lesser extent had made certain of that, yes, but there was more. Dumbledore had since Remus’s tenth birthday taken a keen interest in his education and well-being, which had continued for six years in the tradition of sporadic informal chats, start-of-term meetings, and, on occasion, tea with Madam Pomfrey where Remus was asked a series of odd but non-intrusive questions about his recent transformations. For the first time in seven years, however, Remus knew exactly what would be discussed with Dumbledore, and yet curiously that very foreknowledge was the source of all Remus’s unease.
Which was why Remus was perched on the last stone stair before the office’s heavy oaken door, still fist curled around the iron doorknocker as if to rap. Ignorance had a certain charm.
“I know you are there, Remus,” called Dumbledore, voice gentle despite the thick wood. “Please do come in.”
Remus flushed and straightened as the oak door swung open of its own volition. The distance to the Headmaster’s claw-footed desk stretched as Remus crossed it, as though his legs grew shorter, and each echoing step took him back in time until he was a squat, pudgy eleven-year-old again, walking their back garden beside an impossibly-old man with a snow white beard so long it was tied off like a ponytail. An old man who offered him sherbet lemon and asked Remus—something of a rarity, those days—if he would like to study magic.
Ticking, whirring, and chimes came from the study far behind Albus Dumbledore, who, still seated, peered down at Remus with warm and whimsical eyes.
“How do you do, Remus?” asked Dumbledore, brows arching with the mildest concern. “I hope I haven’t caught you at an inopportune moment—I must admit, you look rather ill.”
“Start-of-term stress, Professor,” said Remus, and it was not a lie. He resolved nevertheless not to touch his tea.
Dumbledore set down an ornate quill and leaned, if only slightly, forwards to examine Remus before his expression smoothed. “You have always been a bright student, Remus, but if you feel you have overestimated yourself this year, do not hesitate to let me or Professor Flitwick know. Even the most accomplished witches and wizards must enjoy the aid of others on occasion. I would recommend Ms. Ahmed as one such aid—her thesis proposal is an intriguing and grand subject, if one has the head for it.”
“Pardon me, sir?” he asked, brows knitted together in confusion. “Do you mean to say our proposals are similar?”
“Heavens no,” replied Dumbledore with a chuckle. “Ms. Ahmed is writing a treatise on the nature of the Kissed. You might do well to ask her about it, if you are at all curious about what happened that autumn afternoon on the train,” he added. Then Dumbledore rose and circled about his desk, and instantly the flutter growing in Remus’s chest became growing embarrassment. “I would like you to see something, Remus, if you would.”
“Of course, sir,” said Remus.
With the Headmaster, sometimes a request was difficult to discern from an order.
Professor Dumbledore led him to an alcove whose walls were bursting bookshelves. Books of standard spells were bookended neatly on either end by nonstandard charms and volumes of curses, while the shelf below held at least one wriggling tome so squat and thick it was more doorstop than reading material, and below that, titles wholly unfamiliar: Sadducismus Triumphatus, De Lapide Philisophico, three texts in what might’ve been Arabic, and, oh, below that, what appeared to be the luxurious and leatherbound mammoth of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth edition. Rolls of parchment tied with simple cords were layered atop inch-thick worn journals and battered grimoires restored three times over. Between the walls was a large, flat lectern, comically wide for its narrow height, and penned underneath its clear pane of glass was a familiar map.
Names paired with footprints crawled like ants across its surface.
Remus refused his first instinct to look for Sirius’s name.
“It is simply ingenious, Remus,” said Dumbledore, inscrutable as he watched the names move and the geometry shift. “One day, I must ask you for the tale behind its inception, and for how it ended up in a confiscated trunk instead of our usual receptacle for thesis proposals.”
“Professor,” started Remus.
“Today is not that day. Now,” Dumbledore continued, “you must know I cannot allow you to remain in possession of your proposal material, as it would be, I think, a violation of privacy to all who live at Hogwarts. Even if wielded in good intention.”
“Of course, sir.”
“However, as it would be detrimental to your studies to deny you access to your early prototype, a compromise has been made,” said Dumbledore. “You may study the charms and enchantments you placed upon this map under the supervision of Professors Flitwick, McGonagall, or myself,” he explained, turning away from the lectern without a word, “as we currently form the circle of your faculty advisors. I believe that should be sufficient. Don’t you agree?”
“Of course, Professor.”
“Then be at ease, Remus,” said Dumbledore, returning to his desk with a flourish of his ancient and embroidered pale grey robes. He gestured for Remus to do the same.
“I’m sorry, sir,” began Remus, wincing. “I—well, a lot has happened.”
“The search for your mother is still under way, Remus,” said Dumbledore, gentle, “but in all the time I have known Hope Lupin, I have always known her to be as clever as she is kind, and so I believe she may yet be found alive.”
Remus gave a slight, if obligatory nod at that. For the many reported missing since the War began, far too few had ever come back.
“Had I known the events that would befall your family,” continued Dumbledore, a new, unfamiliar weariness in his eyes, “or that news would arrive to you so late, I hope you know there is much I would have done differently, and the weight of that will carry with me forever. I shall spare you my sorrow, however,” he added, “for I imagine you have had much opportunity to hear that of others and little to hear your own. And so, I will simply say that Lyall Lupin was a fine man, and that he was, by all accounts, a far greater wizard.”
“S’pose that sums it up, yeah,” said Remus, slouching in his seat.
Dumbledore, ever a creature of mercy, did not further pursue that line of inquiry. He did, however, incline his head.
“If you would like to ask—”
Remus shot up in his seat. “I would, yeah, yes,” he said, correcting his colloquial tone for the formal one. “Are—did anyone make it out from the Village?”
“Many,” said Dumbledore, and warm relief loosened the knot in his chest that had lingered since his last night in the Pyrenees. “The denmothers have informed me that, while the colony was destroyed, all of its inhabitants are alive and well, if scattered to the four winds.”
“Chima?”
“Alive and well.”
“That’s,” started Remus, who then shut his mouth.
“That’s good,” said Dumbledore, his expression uncommonly forthright. “Even in dark times such as ours, Remus,” he said, and, correcting himself, added, “and perhaps especially in such times, I find it is important we celebrate any accomplishment, no matter how small it may seem.”
“Good. S’good.”
Dumbledore smiled one of his wizened half-smiles.
Shifting in his seat—the chair was comfortable, but Remus had often found himself tangoing along the fault-line between formality and informality with the Headmaster—Remus sat straight once again, folded his hands in his lap, and, clearing his throat, said, “I completed the task you gave me, I believe.”
“You believe,” replied Dumbledore.
“Well, I—there wasn’t a particular clarity to the instructions,” he started, and too late realised there was no way to phrase it without assigning some amount of blame. “I had to piece most of it together myself. May I ask something?”
Dumbledore nodded.
“If you knew about the ritual, and how it would help me—”
“Why then did I not simply help you perform it myself?” asked Dumbledore, smile never fading. “Again, Remus, I feel my position as the old Headmaster of an ancient school has made many overestimate my abilities.”
He lifted a wrinkled hand adorned with many rings of odd metals to halt Remus’s reply, indicating, in some abstract way, that he was acting in the role of a professor in this moment, and so accordingly Remus should act the student.
“You will find, Remus, that we scholars,”—Remus felt a warm pride flush in his cheeks as the Headmaster spoke—“spend far, far more time searching for answers than we do with the answers themselves, and are as often as not unsatisfied with what we find. I did not know that the denmothers had a ritual to calm a werewolf’s mind, but I did suspect, and I also suspected that I would forever remain an outsider to their ways. As is their right to decide,” he added. “I only hoped that they might trust you, and you them.”
Tick. Whirr. Chime.
Remus fidgeted. Stuck a hand in his pocket only to feel the warm, gooey lick of melting chocolate on his fingers where it’d melted out its wrapper. He wiped it off on his trouser leg and coughed once.
“May I ask something else, Professor?”
“I would have preferred to sit here in silence while our tea grew cold,” said Dumbledore, wry, “but you may, Remus.”
“When—after I went away,” he began, groping with his words and unsure why he was even asking them, “did something happen to Sirius? Was he—he wasn’t punished too harshly, I hope?”
“Ah,” said Dumbledore, “Mr. Black. I hope, Remus, that you don’t assume I invited you both to Hogwarts in an attempt to resolve—”
“—no, ’course not,” interrupted Remus, spine suddenly straight. “I was just curious, is all.”
“I must refuse your curiosity, Remus,” said Dumbledore, half-smile still hidden on his mouth, “for even if I were privy to all the sundry details of my many students’ social lives, you know that I cannot discuss the disciplinary history of one student with another,” he explained, and Remus nodded downwards if only to hide his flushing cheeks. “If, however, the thought is truly burning in your mind, then I might suggest asking Mr. Black about it himself. Perhaps he may enlighten you.”
A quiet clockwork gear clicked in place from behind Albus Dumbledore, whose expression had, once again, become indecipherable. For a minute, neither said a word.
“Think I should be going, sir,” said Remus, careful not to overturn his chair as he stood.
“A pity,” said Dumbledore after him. “Sitting in a moment’s silence is, I find, one of life’s great joys.”
Remus bid him a hasty goodbye and, once the heavy oaken door swung shut behind him, swore he could hear a quiet chuckling.
***
Dumbledore had been correct.
In the early months of his stay at the Village—his preferred simple name for it, as werewolf colony both sounded pejorative and belied the depth of community that the denmothers had built—Remus had yearned for many a thing. Sweets, chocolate in particular; rolling papers; cigarettes; the boys who smoked them; his mother, often and deeply, until he returned home for a week and nearly went mad, only to miss her again the moment he left; the fresh cockles that had made James and Sirius gag and Peter vomit; a library that could match the pace at which he read when upset; and, perhaps most of all, the music he’d grown into when Sirius would bunk off his lessons after the moon and do nothing but flip records on his player while Remus dozed or sometimes slept. Now returned to Hogwarts for a single week, however, Remus found his strongest, most burning desire was a moment’s silence.
To his abject horror, Remus discovered himself undergoing a new, darker transformation into the birdlike harrier of library-going students he had once feared and reviled. His dreams of developing his thesis while doing vocational work—a thesis for which he had no outline or direction or predetermined ambition, mind you, unlike every other postgraduate there—were thoroughly and regularly dashed by younger students requesting books, or returning books, or leaving books around on secret corner tables when they weren’t breaking their spines or dog-earing pages. Never mind that there were only five copies of De Furtivis Literatum Notis circulating in all of magical Britain, as Irma Pince told him—apparently the book did not like magical transcription and needed to be copied by hand, which was worsened by its habit of changing while you read it—one of the horrid little buggers had left a water stain on it and the book was inconsolably upset.
Indeed, that he worked in the library only worsened his mood. Unlike Lily or Rucha, who were subject tutors, or Sirius, who co-instructed Flying with Emmeline Vance, Remus was taunted every minute of his vocational existence by the thousand unread books in the library. Remus could hardly be blamed for growling when a student dropped an ancient tome or cried out above the permitted volume with juvenile glee. He soon, however, mastered the ability to stroll up behind such students without a noise, giving the impression that he had manifested from thin air.
They called him the Book Boggart. Less commonly, and more often out of genuine dislike, a few of the older students whispered 3L, short for Loony Loopy Lupin, behind his back. Remus had a good idea as to who had revived that one.
Madam Pince, or ‘Irma’ as she’d insisted, had revealed herself by contrast to be a witch of good humour if also dangerously acidic sarcasm when unburdened of frequent menial labour. Although severe in appearance with her fitted robes and hair done up in a sleek black bun, she gave him frequent advice on how best to pre-arrange his reshelving, reminded him of forgotten duties with mirth, and even shared with Remus a locator charm of her own devising that found not books, but emptied spots on the bookshelves themselves. The charm intrigued Remus, who relished the idea of toying with it if ever he escaped this fresh Hell.
“My,” said Irma Pince, “are those all your colleagues, over there in the corner?” She held a set of ancient and interesting-looking scrolls with the unparalleled grace of a seasoned librarian, but still managed to gesture with her narrow chin. “Good thing you’re almost finished, then.”
The book cart was of course still half-full, and acquiring new additions from departing students faster than Remus could re-shelve them.
“Almost,” replied Remus, wry, “but I haven’t found the mummified remains of the last person to try this job. Have you seen them?”
“Oh, they’re on the bottom, underneath the atlases,” she said, before leaving for the Restricted Section, where, as rumour had it, only the professoriate could find Albus Dumbledore’s seminal paper on the Twelve Uses of Dragon’s Blood, though Remus knew not in earnest why it was Restricted or what uses Dragon’s Blood might have. How he longed to join her on her probably fascinating bibliothecographical journey.
Two hours later, after the library had closed and when Remus replaced the last atlas, he did indeed find beneath his mountain of reshelving a crumbling human skull. Presumably it was a fake.
“Well, well,” called Mary as he approached the corner table. Even her voice was quieted by the library. “If it isn’t the Book Boggart himself.”
“No, please,” said Lily, ducking her head and presenting him with a History of Magic textbook, both arms outstretched, “have mercy! I’m sorry I shelved it under Bagshot, B., when it should’ve been Bagshot, B., O.M., oh please, spare me!”
Remus tossed the rope onto their table, rolling his eyes and his head like. “Very funny.”
“Laughter is the way to banish a Boggart, didn’t you know?” said Lily, who then promptly deflated. “I know it sounds rude, but—”
“—oh, no, by all means, please be rude.”
“I don’t understand them,” said Lily. She took a seat beside Mary, further from Remus, and had a look on her pale face like she was about to confess to murder. “Were we this awful? First, they come all the way to you with a question, but they don’t even bring the bleeding book with them, so when you waddle them all the long,” she continued, exasperated, “long way back to their desk or corridor or wherever else, you see that it says the answer in the book right there, and when you point it out, every student with them goes, ‘Ohhh,’ and nods like you’ve made it make sense, when you really haven’t done anything at all. If I have to tell a student how to banish a Boggart one more time…”
“Never have children, Lils,” said Mary with a snort.
They exchanged knowing looks yet inscrutable to Remus and Lily lifted a textbook as if to cuff Mary with it. Lily didn’t, of course, because she was joking, and because the book was so large and voluminous a single blow might’ve killed her outright. The Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm was not to be casually used as a weapon of war.
Remus heard footsteps behind him and scented both soap and sweat.
“Remus,” said Sirius, whose stupid arrogant endless grey eyes Remus met with the slowest and most casual turn-of-head he could muster. He was holding an odd combination of books on the properties of advanced charms, many at which Remus had longingly stared as he reshelved the stacks, and, atop those, a dozen glossy automotive magazines from the Muggle Studies section. Remus had never seen the appeal. “Hiya.”
“Hullo.”
Lily coughed a pointed cough. “Black? You find those motorbike rags you were looking for?”
“With those very,” started Mary, before miming at her chest, “very voluptuous birds who seem to love posing with them?”
“They’re instructive,” said Sirius, wry, before moving to set his things down. On reflex he and Remus stepped out of each other’s way, moving like dogs circling one another at a first meeting. “For educational purposes only.”
“I’ll bet they are,” replied Mary.
“Lend ’em to you after, huh?”
Sirius took a seat opposite her, threw up two fingers, then wanked the air off with said fingers. Mary pulled a rude face and Remus was suddenly in early fifth year again, although very clearly missing all of the necessary subtext one could only acquire by not missing three years of social developments. He sat down—at the head of the table, neither beside nor opposite Sirius, of course—and rested his head on his palm to look at Mary, who watched him back with an amused expression, her own elbow perched on the table. The exhaustion hit him all at once. It was worse than running the forests of the Pyrenees.
Without breaking eye contact, Mary flung a tiny folded paper star at him. One folded, probably, by use of some obscure Tiny Paper Star Folding Charm she’d either re-discovered in an old text or invented, because she was Mary Macdonald and she was rum at Charms.
“Riddikulus,” she whispered, sliding forwards until their foreheads were near touching. He could hear her heartbeat this close, slow and steady, a fact of lycanthropy which always perturbed him. “Come on, now. What’s with the face, Lupin? Don’t like your cushy new job?”
“I think we were that bad,” whispered Remus. Lily frowned out the corner of his eye. “I think I might be worse than Madam Pince, and yet somehow I still feel I’m being nice to them, like.”
“Do you ever think about your first-year essays?” asked Lily. She, too, was resting her face on her hand, and had budged over to meet Remus and Mary. When they gave the smallest of nods, she frowned, harder, and continued, “Could you imagine having to assess forty of those? Weekly?”
Mary’s eyes went wide and she frowned as well. “No.”
“No,” said Remus, “I couldn’t imagine. No.”
“It is currently my job,” said Sirius, who, too, joined the frowning chin-on-fist association by climbing bodily onto the table and laying sideways across it as though he were posing for a rude portrait. “My job, my job, as Sirius Orion Black, to make sure first years don’t fall off their brooms and play fair at Quidditch,” he continued, and then budged in closer until his long curls tickled Remus and Lily’s cheeks. “I have never once in my life played Quidditch fairly, and I spent most of my days on the broom trying to knock James off of his.”
“Cheers for trying to kill my boyfriend, Black,” said Lily. She nudged Sirius’s shoulder, which nudged Remus’s, which nudged Mary’s, which nudged her own. That was about the time it took for Remus to process her words.
“You and James are—?”
“—oh, we’re still the worst!” cried Lily, throwing her head back and thereby breaking the sanctity of their circle. Everyone pulled back at once. Parting, such sweet sorrow, &c. &c. “Look at us. Four Gryffindor leavers who’ve returned to bloody school and still are congregating only with other Gryffindors.”
Sirius narrowed his eyes. “Oh no.”
“You’re,” started Remus, sputtering, “and we’re—”
“We’re like those Quidditch captains who still come back to watch their old team play,” said Sirius, who’s forehead thumped, gentle, against the sturdy wood of the table. “I’ve become the very thing I suggested James would become.”
“Don’t you worry,” said Mary, cryptic. “That’ll all change soon.”
“What does that mean?” asked Sirius. “Mary?”
“She can tell us on the way,” said Lily. “We’re going to miss the postgrad meeting, and it’s only next door.”
“You’re dating James Potter?” Remus finished. The three of them swivelled to look at Remus, and yet he was able to muster only a single word. “Why?”
That sent Lily and Sirius into peals of laughter, which was disquieting and strange, and that was, he realised, perhaps obvious only to one of them, because Sirius stopped laughing and watched Remus very carefully, as though he were a lizard in a terrarium or a falling knife.
“Right! Come on, now, then,” said Mary, waving them up and back onto their feet despite Lily’s laughter and Remus’s aching bones. “I can’t have you being late for Ahmed’s first execution, now, can I?”
“When you say ‘execution,’” began Remus, “do you mean her own, as she suggested on the train, or—”
Mary shooed him off with a hand. “Onwards, be brave, et cetera et cetera. Don’t let her scare you,” she explained. “Gloria Ahmed is a kind soul when-stroke-if you get to know her.”
***
“First thing’s first, you lot,” called Gloria Ahmed, basking in the throne from which she ruled with an iron if myopic fist. “Revision groups are non-negotiable.
“This isn’t some namby-pamby Ivy-league muggle school in the Americas. Real magic—original magic—requires focus, dedication, and a certain je-ne-sais-quoi at least one of you will lack. Not only will your workload double, but because the nature of postgraduate research is self-directed, you’ll also feel immense, crushing guilt every moment you aren’t working,” she said. Then, with a wide, indulgent grin, she added, “And for those of you who coasted through your pre-graduate days on the graces of your intellect alone, this will be even harder, because none of this comes naturally to anyone. Your revision group will shore up your weaknesses and be the ball-and-chain holding you back if you try to leave them behind. Which brings me to my next point.
“Forget everything you knew about your schooling system. Houses, points, examinations—poof. You have only one family, your focus area. There’s Theory,” she said, gesturing to the three students around her, Lily included, and then herself, “which is where your proposal matched if it was uniquely masochistic. Theory challenges our fundamental assumptions about magic and the world itself, which is why it’s also home to most of the inevitable shooting stars.
“Those of you who actually remember what the outside world looks like will have your proposal matched with Fieldwork. Say goodbye to your beauty sleep, ladies,” she said to another group of four, two of whom were men. Rucha Nagar and Severus Snape were among Fieldwork’s ranks. “Regardless of your subject matter, you’ll likely spend as much time outside Hogwarts on trips to the Bulgarian mountains, or maybe even the magical lands of Cardiff. Hope you enjoy Apparating to and across so many time zones your internal clock starts running backwards, provided you don’t Splinch yourself first.
“And, finally, if you had neither the brain for Theory or the stomach for Fieldwork, there’s always Practical Applications,” Ahmed continued, a mocking lilt to her Australian accent. Mary and Emmeline Vance had the decency to look offended, while Remus and Sirius were both too confused and too pre-occupied with ignoring the Hippogriff between them to do much else. “Charms, charms, charms—woohoo, you’re inventing a fancy new spell that might be useful to someone twice before the end of your natural lifespan.”
Ahmed met Mary’s shocking string of cursing with her own rude gesture and a two-finger salute to follow before fanning out both hands to calm the lounge.
“Here’s one thing to remember: each year, Hogwarts accepts one proposal for Theory, one proposal for Fieldwork, and one for Practical Applications. If you are here,” Ahmed continued, a more stoic silence falling across her flock despite the obvious question her statement provoked, “then it means you beat out every other applicant for the position. It means you represent the brightest and boldest and most devilishly-clever of your discipline, and you would do well to remember that every time you start to doubt yourself.
“Unless, of course,” she added, malice alive in her grin, “you’re the fourth applicant they accepted that year. Due to the large possibility of flunking out—and, yes, you can flunk out, and will if you don’t revise—the postgraduate board always invites a fourth student for one focus area. If you can do the maths,”—and Remus, to his horror, could—“then you’ll realise that, not only does that mean they’re the weakest scholar here, but if you’re the firstie who beat them out,” she continued, grin splitting wider, “then the board thinks you’re the most likely to flame out.”
“But how,” called Emmeline Vance, despite it being obvious she already knew the answer, “do you ken which one is the fourth applicant, and which is the shooting star?”
“It’s been left as an exercise to the reader,” said Ahmed.
A few paired noises rang out across the lounge, likely from those with the aforementioned rivalries, or those sick of Ahmed’s speech. Remus looked out the corner of his eye at Sirius, who sat, frozen, and was watching Remus out the corner of his own. How silly of him, really, to have thought that his twisted fortunes would end with sharing a postgraduate program and a room with Sirius. Why stop there? Of course Remus would be, more or less, in direct academic competition with Sirius Black.
Below all but their own notice, Remus and Sirius shifted half an inch away from each other.
“Now,” continued Ahmed, “if there are any questions?”
Silence greeted her.
“And who would like to facilitate our next meeting?”
At that, the postgraduate lounge erupted in noise.
***
Noise was the second thing after scent that drew Remus around the Forbidden Forest. Like running the Pyrenees, this was colour television to the black-and-white simplicity of walking about the world as a human. Indeed, the human thing in Remus reasoned that he might’ve got used to it and perhaps flipped the order, but as it was, he was a werewolf, a fast and strong one of incomprehensible keen senses, and it was a marvel of which Remus thought he’d never tire. Humans picked up on many things they refused to notice. Remus was no exception—he had learned early on to try and ignore the insistence of his senses, both to avoid questions from others and questioning himself. As a transformed werewolf, however, Remus had no such compunction and all the required faculties for investigating them.
The trees lost their formal classifications and dissolved into ontological goop. The question was never what, but who or where. Fallen leaves and rot; trunks thicker than his torso all ringed with stiff woody half-moons of fungus, a constant damp trickle from overhead to accompany the nocturnal cries of night-birds and other less-discernible creatures. The tree moss was only important insofar as it smelled like a friend and its night-water trailed north, deeper into the woods, and the wind rustling through leaves and Remus’s fur was a compass to his nose. He had always heard there were werewolves—other werewolves—in the Forbidden Forest, but the not-so-gentle guidance of Padfoot, Prongs, and Wormtail had always kept him safe and corralled. They’d never heard or seen another one besides Remus. Or so they’d said, and Remus had believed them.
Now, though, he smelled it. Them. Another.
Theirs was a difficult scent to pick out—only ever downwind when the wind blew crosswise through the forest, meaning they were somewhere in its heart—and it was subtle and old and masked, most keenly, by the familiar dog whose saliva Remus could’ve identified by blind taste, let alone smell. He hadn’t asked for Padfoot to come for the moon—he hadn’t need of it, anymore, and a single shaggy black dog was hardly a Pack, no matter how big that dog was—but both to spare Padfoot’s feelings and the earth-shattering suspicion it would rouse, he pretended it was helpful.
Or he tried to. That much was difficult for Remus, who, understandably, had no real memory of his transformations at Hogwarts. Padfoot would run ahead and bark or nip at Remus’s heels when he went the wrong way, and stare at him in that uniquely dog-like way as if to ask, Are you all right? What’s wrong? to which Remus could not reply, for obvious reasons, with any intelligence, because he was supposed to be an unintelligent werewolf.
The howling, however, was nice. Although it sounded forlorn, Padfoot’s howl soothed a deep, deep scar in Remus’s psyche—so much so that he broke character and nuzzled Padfoot a moment after he heard it the first time.
Padfoot stared back at him, dog-jaw slack open. His tail, however, told a different story, with its wild wagging. It was a feature he had long wished Sirius would keep in all his forms.
The morning following the full moon was in its mercy a Sunday, saving an exhausted Remus the need to explain his absence to any and all supplicants. Since the denmothers’ ritual in the Pyrenees, the transformations left his bones aching and joints swollen for only a few hours before that, too, mended, and all that remained was the fatigue of an all-nighter.
Madam Pomfrey, one of three professoriate members to know of Remus’s lycanthropy, had accepted his refusal of her post-transformation care with the unmatched politeness of a healer whose terminal patient was refusing medical advice. Remus hadn’t been sure how she would react to his significant improvements for a condition that in all known literature only worsened with age. Perhaps she’d have stayed quiet. Perhaps not. Trust was in short supply, these days.
Which was why Remus hadn’t kicked Sirius out from their shared dorm in the morning. Even if he was being annoying.
In their three years apart, Sirius had taken, at some point, to styling his wardrobe after the musicians to whom they’d often listened, which meant his current loungewear attire was a thin cotton vest and short trousers, just as white as the vest and short enough to be worn by the likes of Freddie Mercury. He hadn’t matched the music from his record player to the outfit, which was a blessing, and, Remus thought, the correct choice. The mood was too tired for rock, but perfect for the psychedelic folk of The Beginning of Doves. Remus by contrast had swaddled himself in bedclothes—he wasn’t naked, he had on drawstring trousers and an unconscious reflex to conceal his skin wherever possible—and wobbled, with none of Sirius’s apparent confidence, between using this moment to talk or enjoying the silence.
It mattered little, because Sirius made the decision for him.
“Remus?”
“Mm?”
“Don’t be mad.”
“Mm.”
“I may have against my better judgement went out last night as Padfoot,” he said, quick and uneven, “but you were…different,” he continued, “than you usually are. Were.”
“Mm?”
“I suppose we never tried individually running with you,” said Sirius. “S’pose we thought we’d need all three of us to wrangle you.”
“Mm.”
“You were nicer. More doglike.”
“Mm?”
“And as it was, it felt less like we were a pack,” he added, quick, “and more like a team. Partners. Two dogs against the world.”
“Mm,” said Remus, sitting up in his bed. “Sounds nice, like.”
“He speaks.”
“He does.”
“Does he want the breakfast I nicked—”
“—he does, very much so.”
Sirius let him eat in silence.
Their dormitory, although still in a long, and perhaps for the foreseeable future, endless time of transition, had taken shape over the two weeks and come to reflect the madness within. While there was a barren no-man’s-land in the middle where neither of them dared add any embellishment or presume a shared resource to the table and chair—let alone the loo—Sirius’s effortless precision had made a slow encroachment on the border, and so, too, had Remus’s organised chaos. Remus had cleared away everything from his far wall, shunting his bed, bookshelves, and writing desk forwards, to accommodate a large cork-board upon which he’d pinned a sheet of parchment as tall as he was and twice as wide. His smoke-stained trunk was locked open and used as its own station. Books on charms ranging from cartographical to predictive orthography toppled over every available surface, while some—L’Image du Monde and a set of pseudo-de Metz—hovered in mid-air, patient and awaiting Remus’s return to the exact page he’d left off of.
It wasn’t a flat—that would’ve been Hell—but Remus had come to realise that sharing the dorms and lounge was not an sich unlike sharing one very large, very sprawling flat with eleven other people. Which, Remus reckoned, would soon become Hellish in its own unique way.
“Padfoot?”
“Yeah, Remus?”
“You can call me Moony, you know,” he said, quiet. “If I can call you Padfoot—”
“I hadn’t thought I had the right,” replied Sirius. “After what I’d done, I thought the name might remind you…” he trailed off. “We called it The Prank, though after everything we weren’t much for pranks anymore. I told James it was all my idea. My fault. He doesn’t blame you, y’know. No person in their right mind would ever believe you’d wanted this.”
“Remind me?” said Remus, incredulous. Sirius shrank at that, so he lowered his voice. “Sirius,” he continued, trying to lighten his tone, “if a missing word was enough to make us forget something, I should hardly think we deserve to be postgrads here. And, it could be argued—”
“—not using the word has an equal reminding effect,” finished Sirius. He gave a helpless shrug. “I know. I spent all of first week wrestling over whether to use it or not. Drew a pro-con table, I’ll have you know. My research is a shambles.”
“Whenever hasn’t that been the case?” said Remus, wry.
Across the room, Sirius hurled a crumpled-up sheet of parchment at Remus’s bed. It fell short. Significantly short.
“Well, that was pathetic.”
Sirius threw another one, which made it further and tapped the foot of the bed.
“Really?” said Remus. “Peter threw harder than that in third year. He sent James’s glasses out the window.”
“Sorry, Moony,” said Sirius. “Heart’s not in it today.”
“Well, that’s quite all right, Padfoot,” said Remus. “We’re swots now, after all. No longer yobs.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Sirius.
In third year, he’d heard Remus—who’d by then grown vocal around the Marauders—cursing up a storm after a bad transformation and had taken all the curses he hadn’t recognised to mean some unbelievably filthy things. ‘Jesus Christ’ had been one of them, and the more Remus had tried to explain it, the more confident Sirius became that Remus was trying to have him on, because obviously, ‘Christ’ was a multipurpose pseudo-verb with the same functions as ‘fuck’. In the end, Remus had given up, and Sirius never dropped the habit.
“Jesus Christ,” repeated Sirius. “James would be so ashamed of us. Gutted.”
“And Peter.”
“And Peter. How did this happen?”
“Don’t ask me, said Remus with a beleaguered shrug. “I just turned up to the train at start-of-term. Never applied at all to the program, come to think of it.”
Sirius laughed at that hurled a third wad of parchment and at last found his target, even though, of course, Remus’s words had been entirely true.
When they fell silent again, it was a comfortable one, the unspoken tension between them not broken, but for the moment on a welcome sabbatical. Sirius had fetched an automotive text from his organised shelf without his wand and kept it levitating above his nose as he lay back and read. His perfect dark curls spilled outwards and off the edge of the bed, and every time Sirius twitched a long, crooked finger and turned the page, Remus wasn’t sure if he wanted to murder Sirius or be him.
Sirius’s decorations had been much more thorough than Remus, who, in place of one single trunk, appeared to have brought most of his possessions from the Potter residence, including the old maroon armchair left to him by his late uncle Alphard. He’d charmed the drapery and sheets of the bed to match it and the embroidered patterns to crawl at a snail’s pace, which gave Remus the oddest sensation of once again being in the Gryffindor dormitories. As the record spun and music played, Remus watched an embroidered lion charge from one bed post towards the next, moving perhaps an inch across the fabric each minute. He felt stoned.
Just as the lion reached its finish line, however, Sirius bolted up in his bed, a pensive thought growing behind his grey eyes. The book flew across the room and slapped against a wall with a loud, papery scream.
“What? Sirius, what is it?”
“A year and a day ago, today,” said Sirius, “Marc Bolan died.”
“Cheers for that, Pads. Really makes a bloke feel better.”
“I just remembered.”
“Gathered that much for myself, actually.”
“No,” said Sirius. “I just remembered.”
Remus blinked, then gave a sharp inhale when he understood. “It’s okay, Padfoot.”
“Is it?”
“Well, no, not for Bolan, like,” he continued. “For us, however, yes. Professor Dumbledore once told me that it was just as important to celebrate small things as it was to remember the bigger picture.”
“But,” said Sirius, blowing an uncharacteristically out-of-place curl back into its perfect position, “I’m not celebrating Marc Bolan’s death.”
“That would be rude.”
“It would, honestly.”
“I think it also stands, then,” started Remus, choosing his words with inexact purpose, “that forgetting the small things is also sometimes okay. Especially if it helps us better remember the bigger picture.”
“Clever fellow, that Dumbledore.”
“Mm,” said Remus. He yawned and stretched. “How’d we get him as one of our advisors?”
“Dashing good looks, innit?” replied Sirius, his stolen grin returned to its rightful place on the art gallery wall of his face. “Seduced him with my thesis proposal. Nearly did the old sod in, actually.”
Remus snorted at that and yawned again and was soon thereafter asleep, waking only when Sirius crossed the room to fuddle with the record player. If he squinted very, very carefully in the way you could only do when dozing, Remus swore he could see Sirius’s wagging tail.
Chapter 4: All Hallow's Well
Notes:
or the one in which Remus attends a staff party.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Since meeting with the new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor their first week, five more had gone by and yet Remus remained clueless as to her name. By that point, he felt too silly to ask anyone, let alone her.
It so seldom came up that he could almost ignore it. The annual pace at which Defence professors came and went at Hogwarts made it common to refer to them by title—at least until they proved themselves by surviving a few months without quitting, vanishing, or being sacked. The latter was most common. Most any witch or wizard competent enough to be a prospective Defence professor had more pressing concerns in such a time of war.
To Remus’s great relief, while she was indeed competent, and he was not alone in meeting with her. Given she was an Auror and him an unregistered werewolf, and given that she’d asked, just as Lily had said, after his time in the Pyrenees and the events of the train, Remus had long dreaded that she held some suspicion as to his condition. As it turned out, however, her reasons were far more benign. Another relief. The Defence professor met once a week with every individual postgraduate from start of term to drill them in the art of wandless magic.
Remus was convinced he was dead awful at it right up until the end of their latest session, when she told him that, starting Monday, they would meet twice weekly instead of once to accelerate their lessons.
“Goodness,” said the bald witch. Her Hessian hat, floppy crook and all, twitched of its own accord and her impossibly-smooth features drew taut. “You look surprised, Mr. Lupin.”
The dome-ceilinged classroom in which they practiced had ample ventilation, and yet the fringes of Remus’s hair were damp with exertion and his sleeves translucent and wrinkled by sweat. Part of that was the impending moon—his skin always itched for three days before and three days after—but most of it was that he’d worn longer, thicker clothes to hide any incriminating scars. Buttoned his sleeves up to the wrist, his neckline hidden behind a tie. One always had to be careful around Aurors.
Before Remus was a simple white swan feather and a series of elaborate hoops. Hoops which he’d attempted, unsuccessfully, to the thread with the feather for nearly six weeks now.
“S’pose I am,” said Remus, gripping his knees and exhaling hard. “Thought I’d be at the bottom of the class, given my dreadful performance.”
“You are, Mr. Lupin,” she replied, gentle, “but that is inevitable in a class of two.”
“Two?”
She crouched beside him, limbs folding in towards her core as though they were packed with straw and not bone.
“Yes, Mr. Lupin, two. Among the incoming postgraduates, only you and Mr. Black show enough aptitude to continue this line of study. Oh, goodness,” she continued, a thin frown on her thinner lips as Remus made a choking noise. “It’s not too strange, you know. Wandless magic is excessively difficult. Very few witches and wizards have the bend for it.”
“Do you mean to say,” said Remus, between pants, “it’s something you’re born with?”
“Goodness, no. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
Remus wasn’t sure if that made him feel worse or better.
“There are diverging theories,” she continued, “but common to all of them is that one’s life, from early childhood to now, is what shapes one’s knack for wandless magic.” She paused, rising without a noise, and then added, “Although the circumstances of one’s birth will invariably limit one’s life, I imagine it is the navigation of those limits that directs one’s magic.”
Remus slapped his knees once more and straightened. “So, the fact that I’m struggling—”
“—it should be taken as a sign of progress, not one of ineptitude. A feeling,” she added with a mischievous wink, “that is very alien to many a postgraduate, I’m told.”
Remus recalled—with a new envious fury—the many times he’d watched Sirius levitate objects in their dormitory without the slightest struggle. A fury he couldn’t blame as he usually did with Sirius on some unearned twist of fate. He considered it.
“Are some people better at doing certain things wandlessly than others?” asked Remus, finally using his brain. “Even if those things ought to require the same amount of effort when using a wand?”
“Very good, Mr. Lupin. Yes,” she explained, and as if to demonstrated outstretched a hand towards the feather.
The feather glowed a bright orange light that stung at Remus’s eyes. When that light began to fade, he saw the feather was quickly becoming translucent and on its way to transparent, like molten glass settling in an invisible feathered frame.
The Defence professor smiled another thin smile. “You will increasingly find that magic does not so neatly fit into the frameworks you’ve been taught. I have met a witch whose only wandless talent was conjuring fire, and I have met another who could perform every manner of household task across several disciplines without ever having picked up a wand in her life. Think of a wand like a lens, and you will understand where we come from,” she continued. “Think of yourself as the light, and you will understand what we might become with practice. As you are no doubt aware, there are some places in the world where using a wand is considered gauche, or even immature—and that’s never minding the creatures for which magic is an essential part of their being.”
It was an obvious conclusion—multiple wars had been fought, after all, by wizards to restrict non-humans from owning and using wands—and yet those last few words still chilled Remus’s spine. He didn’t dare look at her and instead watched her wandless work. She levitated the feather off its resting place and towards Remus, who watched the hot-air ripples coming off it with wary eyes.
“Very rarely there are magical adepts who seem limitless in their capacity for wandless magic. Albus Dumbledore is one such person,” she explained, “but I would caution against drawing any conclusions from that. He’s had nearly a century of practice, after all.”
The feather cooled and, with gentle insistence, nestled itself into Remus’s open palm. The crystal was still soft like down to the touch.
“Thank you for explaining, Professor,” said Remus.
“It was my pleasure. Oh, goodness,” she added, pulling a pocket watch from her scarecrow pocket, “look at the time. I’ll be late for my class.”
“My apologies, Professor,” said Remus, but she shook her head and tutted.
“What a polite young man you are,” she said, ducking her head to clear the doorway. “And, remember! First thing Monday morning,” she called.
A moment later, she was gone.
A moment later still, Remus lay down on the floor and dissolved into sweat and exhaustion and relief. He plucked a sweet from his pocket and frowned, for it had melted so terribly you had to lick the chocolate off its wrapper, but nevertheless it gave him comfort. His secret remained just that—at least for now, and at least from her. Remus busy himself with other worries.
Worries like the coming moon, and the dogs that played beneath it.
***
Sirius was growing suspicious. This much was evident to Remus. He’d erred in his lycanthropic pretending and forgotten, somehow, that three years had passed and that Sirius was a much more formidable student than he’d yet been.
Padfoot was testing things. They were playing and running and howling, yes, and with an increased fervour Remus liked very much, but Padfoot was, as he understood it, doing research. Giving Remus more independence, less prompting, and, as it appeared on one occasion, letting him off the proverbial leash to play hide-and-seek. Such research was disastrous to Remus, of course, who was a spoiled subject and in accordance with that fact regularly spoiled Padfoot’s science. It was not unkind to do—Remus would alternate his responses at random, but never snarled or swatted at the shaggy black dog testing him—and yet nor was it kind, because he could see the frustration plain on Padfoot’s tired doggy face come morning light. He was growing suspicious. That frightened Remus. Not as a friend, but as a purported competing academic.
James and Sirius had always been at the top of their classes and Remus beside them, but Remus had had revision groups and lived for hours each day in the library. At least James had the excuse of planning their pranks, many of which related to whatever material they were studying. It was a kind of studying, turning their lessons into weapons. Sirius, on the other hand, appeared to have perfect recall. So too did Peter, of course—none of them ever came close to beating him at chess, wizard’s or otherwise—but Peter had explained his academic strategy only once to Remus, and once had been enough. If you did well but not too well, nobody bothered you, whether to praise you or yell.
And, so, Remus could understand why this Sirius—as a Sirius who actually studied and applied for things like postgraduate studies—found his lack of fruitful data to be so disconcerting.
Not that Remus was in the interest of easing that frustration. Padfoot was proving to be a source of that to him, as well—there was the most intriguing scent, familiar and old and subtle, that called to him as the sign of kin, but Padfoot was none too keen to let them away too deep into the woods. Most creatures of the Forbidden Forest would give a wide berth to a werewolf, but that was never the problem. The problem would come when Remus found himself skinned and naked and with swollen joints in the middle of a dark forest with nothing but a shaggy dog to protect him. So, Remus obeyed and let himself be herded from the forest’s heart. He resigned himself to other means of contact.Yet every time he and Padfoot howled, Remus paused for a reply that never came. Padfoot took note and tried to reassure him with sad whines and new games, which distracted him a while.
A moment before he let Padfoot corral him back through the doors of the looming, lonely Shrieking Shack, he nuzzled the dog once more without any prompting. A reward, he supposed. One last poisoned bit of data.
The sheer look of canine outrage and confusion on Padfoot’s muzzle stayed with Remus well into the Monday afternoon, when Remus fell asleep in the stacks after hours. As he’d heard it told, Sirius had done the same on his broom at about the same time, although with such gentle grace that even Emmeline Vance had thought it was a joke. Until, of course, she’d had to shake him awake. He’d drifted to the ground and was slowly, inexorably floating from the Quidditch pitch towards the distant Forbidden Forest, a place that constitutionally turned dreams into nightmares. Still it was a better outcome for him than Remus, who Mary had found and levitated onto one of the squat beige sofas in the postgrad lounge.
He awoke with half a dozen post-its stuck to his face and shaggy hair that read, “WHAT ARE YOU AND BLACK PLANNING?” or some variation thereof in half a dozen different handwritings, which was when Remus made perhaps his worse decision yet in his haste to crush any brewing rumours.
“ALL WILL BE REVEALED SOON,” read Remus’s chaotic sprawl. He charmed several post-its, which stuck themselves to any unaccounted-for spot on each postgrad workstation. It bought Remus time.
“DEAR MOONY STOP,” read one reply stuck to Remus’s pillow, disgusting in its calligraphy. “WHAT ARE WE PLANNING STOP MARY IS ASKING AND I CRYPTICALLY TOLD HER IT WAS A VERY COOL AND VERY ON THING WE WERE PLANNING STOP BUT I DO NOT KNOW WHAT IT IS I AM SUPPOSED TO BE PLANNING STOP SEND HELP STOP LOVE PADFOOT STOP.”
“DEAR PADFOOT,” began Remus’s next note. He’d floated it to stick to Sirius’s forehead early one morning before he was awake and shrunk it to be the size of a mole—to be discovered quick, of course, as Sirius’s porcelain skin had no moles. “GLAD TO RECEIVE YOUR CORRESPONDENCE. WILL SEND NO HELP. AM PLANNING TO SNEAK THE POSTGRADS OUT TO HOGSMEADE FOR POST-STAFF STAFF PARTY. RESERVATIONS MADE AT HOG'S HEAD. LOVE, MOONY.”
While—what else—reshelving books in the early evening, a few minutes before the library was set to close, a tiny paper bird dive-bombed Remus twice before he could swat it from the air to a table, where it promptly unfolded into the simple legible lettering of one Lily Evans.
“TO: REMUS LUPIN,” it began. “ENQUIRING MINDS WOULD LIKE TO KNOW HOW WE ARE SUPPOSED TO 'SNEAK OUT' WHEN POSTGRADUATES ARE NOT BOUND BY CURFEW OR REQUIRED TO REMAIN WITHIN THE CASTLE GROUNDS. FROM: LILY EVANS.” There as also a postscript. “P.S. DO YOU LIKE ME CHECK YES OR NO, JAMES POSTED ME AND WANTS TO SETTLE A BET.”
Remus and Sirius spent fifteen minutes they could’ve spent on revisions conjuring up several stacks of post-its and thirty more minutes arranging them in large, blocky letters above the postgrad lounge mantle. Most of that was spent arguing about stylistic decisions. In the end, they compromised.
“WE ARE NOT SNEAKING AWAY FROM THE STAFF STOP,” read the wall. “WE ARE SNEAKING AWAY FROM THE STUDENTS.”
***
The All Hallow’s Eve staff party was, of course, organised by Professor Horace Slughorn and conducted on school grounds within reasonable hours. Every postgraduate at Hogwarts was expected to attend, and even those doing Fieldwork had been not-so-subtly encouraged to return for the night. To Remus’s quiet delight, Severus had declined said encouragement. That was a brawl and a storm he could do without.
Professor Slughorn, a toadlike man of greying hair and greedy fingers, had in accord with his bearing spared no budgetary expense on the occasion. Each postgraduate had received an invitation of thin-penned cursive informing them that there would be a loose but discerning dress code, which became all the more complicated when Gloria Ahmed instructed them to coordinate outfits within their revision groups. At first Remus had thought it something of a joke. Ha-ha, yes, very funny, &c. &c., yet as Emmeline Vance and Mary—the two upper-form postgrads of Practical Applications to Remus and Sirius’s lower status—were eager to share, the staff party was no mere staff party.
“If you want funding, equipment, or access that Hogwarts can’t provide,” said Emmeline, an ambitious twinkle in her eye, “then you better schmooze it before you lose it.”
“See, Slughorn invites everyone that’s anyone,” explained Mary, excitement plain in her often unenthusiastic voice, “and anyone happens to include a bloody load of important berks from every institution you can imagine. The Ministry in all departments; Quidditch coaches, players, and organisers; and folk from Aurors to cursebreakers to dragonkeepers to wandmakers. Even the recluses like Damocles Belby—brilliant potioneer, if a touch mad—come out to play on occasion. He’s got hooks in everyone, that Slughorn.”
“It’s the who’s who of the post-postgraduate world,” said Emmeline. Remus and Sirius exchanged horrified looks—who knew that research would require so much socialising—before she snapped them back to attention. “And they know it. They smell it. So, we coordinate, we all look good, and I don’t have to make your lives a living Hell because you cost me my final chance at snagging a production deal with the best broom-makers this side of the Atlantic.”
Emmeline Vance had been a Quidditch player, a formidable one for Slytherin, apparently, and Remus did remember James talking about how Gryffindor finally had a chance to win when she left Hogwarts at the end of their second year, but as the story so often went, one nasty wipeout on the pitch had put an early end to her professional career. Sometime in the aftermath, she’d returned to Hogwarts for her postgraduate studies. Her thesis was on several approaches towards Unsupported Flight, which was befittingly ambitious for a former Slytherin, Remus reasoned. Few would try to tackle one of five Principal Exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration like that. Not that the other four Exceptions—with, of course, the exception of conjuring sustenance from nowhere—were particularly palatable or reasonable to attempt. Who truly needed to render dead flesh impervious to flame? To bottle love? And while many, yes, yearned to return a lost loved one from the grave, attempting that kind of impossible magic had brought about the swift, explosive end to many an overambitious witch and wizard.
Emmeline’s practical ambition was reflected in her appearance. Already a tall and athletic witch, she wore a daunting set of stilettos and a desaturated emerald-green dress that required no further embellishment than a simple ruby bangle of a bracelet to match her short bob of deep red hair and muscular figure. More importantly, perhaps, it showed that she knew that fact well.
Remus recognised a confidence in her that reminded him of Sirius, although he found hers more admirable than attractive. She was a beautiful witch, of course, but the beauty of witches had never done much for Remus.
Emmeline and Mary were identifying the figures in the decorated ballroom—which had for the evening been enchanted with a seamless mirrored ceiling such that if you looked up, you could spot the whole room at a glance, revealing dozens of sharply-dressed witches and wizards interspersed by banquet tables, ever-flowing fountains of punch, and the occasional ghost a noble come to chat with one of their distant relatives—one by one, including a member of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures that might be bigshot legislator Gwyn Selwyn himself, whom Remus immediately resolved to avoid. The last thing he needed was an encounter with a member of the bloody Wizengamot, of the Werewolf Capture Unit, of the Auror Office or Wizarding Examination Authority or MMPIS or DME or FASD &c. &c., where he wouldn’t realise to whom he was explaining his research until she introduced herself as the head for the Department of Et Cetera in the Office of Ruining Remus’s Charade.
That went for most of them, as it turned out. Not that he had much on offer if he were to speak to someone: he was two months into his thesis and hadn’t yet even a name for it. The others could wrestle for sponsors and suitors. Remus would watch, and happily so. Particularly if Sirius was involved, the more he thought about it.
Remus had also started drinking the punch perhaps a touch too early. It’d been a week.
‘Simple elegance’ was their theme as Practical Applications, chosen by Mary and Emmeline, of course. Monochromatic looks with few bold embellishments. They spoke for themselves: efficient, effective, and elevated, rather than diminished, by their simplicity. Mary, with her tall and willowy features, wore a sparkling all-white pantsuit, faux-onyx jewels from neck to earring to bracelet, all completed with a bedazzled top hat pinned neat, on a slight, whimsical tilt, to her short afro. Her thesis was, as he recalled, called the Polyadaptive Protection Charm, a title Remus rather liked. Mary called it a working one and was planning to pitch it as wide as possible to any and all potential players, which was on point for Mary, really.
“White dazzles,” she’d said, “and Lord knows I need to fucking dazzle.”
Each outfit had been transfigured from some other piece of clothing. Not only would it attest to their precision and aptitude—for those keen enough to sense the magic on them, of course—but it would prove useful later for the afterparty Remus and Sirius had been forced to plan. Except, of course, the trouble with clothes had been the entire reason Remus had had a week in the first place. That, and a number of other problems that had grown more prominent the further Remus was removed from his time in the Pyrenees.
They fell into patterns. Exhausted patterns, yes, but once Remus had met his hierarchical needs of not being discovered as a werewolf and not flunking out, in that order, other needs began presenting themselves. Often. And twice as often in embarrassing moments.
Any inquisitive thoughts as to what Sirius had been doing in that luggage compartment—and with whom—had been cut short by the near-lethal events that had followed. Once the immediacy of it had faded, however, they started joking about it. And when they started joking about it, Remus started thinking about it more and more. And when Remus started thinking about it more and more, the problems started, because Remus realised he hadn’t had sex or any form of intimate contact in the two months since he left the Pyrenees.
Sirius, on the other hand, very clearly had. Remus discovered that on accident.
One rare autumn night, Remus finished his reshelving early—a blessing that, as he ought’ve known, turned out to be curse in sheep’s clothing—and was fussing about their dormitory, drawing and redrawing maps of the library layout with his thesis charm, title pending. He was kilometres behind every other incoming postgraduate yet remained in equal parts terrified that they would realise something was amiss with Remus’s research, Sirius and his clever instincts most of all, so not only did he need to frontload an unbelievable amount of research, he needed to do so in private, i.e. not waste his time reading sad novels and/or having a wank whenever he had the dormitory to himself for an hour. He’d got a great deal done and worked until near midnight.
Sirius arrived flush and flustered and slightly out-of-breath in a way not unfamiliar to Remus, or to any of the postgraduates, really, because even when you fell into the swing of things, Hogwarts had a habit of keeping you on your toes with its left-feet dancing. Except it was midnight and even Sirius had nowhere else to be. Except beneath the sweat and soap that usually came with Sirius’s vocation was a familiar musky undertone of another bloke. Not that Remus often spent time thinking about the smell of Sirius Black, of course.
He took another goblet of punch.
The other bloke smelled of the sea and fresh parchment and also looked very handsome. Remus knew this because after spending six weeks in and out of the postgrad lounge, he knew and could identify as a consequence of his condition more or less everyone’s scents down to the individual notes therein, and this scent belonged to Benjamin ‘Benjy’ Fenwick. Everyone called him Benjy because he asked for that and was a nice, charming postgrad finalist bloke who, from the smell of it, enjoyed putting:
- his mouth and/or dick;
- on and/or in;
- the dick and/or mouth;
- of one Sirius Black.
There were a few combinations of that that probably didn’t work, and Remus had been kept up one night by the working-through of those problems.
Jesus Christ, he and Sirius shared a bathroom. There were shower baths where hot humid air stained the tiles and grout with his scent, and fluffy white towels that reeked of him. Of Sirius and Benjy Fenwick. Although both of them always dressed in privacy, the carefulness with which they were always acceptably clothed—Remus more than Sirius, always with his buttoned-up sleeves and drainpipe trousers, his worn woollen socks and fingerless cotton gloves and his patchy old House scarf with a width like his torso—only made Remus all the more curious to see what Sirius’s skin looked like beneath them three years later. Pale, probably. Pale and bony.
Feelings began popping up everywhere and anywhere. Remus wasn’t even jealous—it was as though three years of burying his feelings and two months of numbing shock had both vanished with an Irish goodbye, leaving Remus alone to host the orgy of his own angst, fatigue, and abject horniness.
It had taken him multiple days after smelling it to realise that Sirius was, indeed, copping off with another bloke, which painted the entirety of his and Remus’s late friendship in a new and much more embarrassing light.
God, how much he’d agonised. How much he’d pined.
Which was why Remus was drinking the punch.
“Wotcher, Moony,” said Sirius, appearing opposite him at the glass-beaded banquet table. His long, crooked index figure shot up as Remus choked on his punch, freezing the goblet and its near-spilled contents mid-air, and even the small drops beading on Remus’s chin. Then, with the slightest reverse-spiral of his finger, Sirius levelled the goblet in Remus’s hand and the spillage flowed in small globules back into their rightful place. At that, Sirius dropped his hand and gave a mock bow.
A light applause came from those around them until someone—a loud someone—whispered, “Malodora, no. That’s Sirius Black,” and Remus realised they were being watched.
Sirius inclined his head towards a side of the room, as if to say, You’re welcome, now let’s away from prying eyes, hm, Moony? and doing so wobbled his top hat. It was like Mary’s, also off-kilter, but the rest of his attire was inspired, no doubt, by the androgyny of his music idols, after whom Sirius was now styling most of his wardrobe. As such, he wore a chic dark-ashen dress with long silky sleeves and a dangerously short skirt that. The sheer confidence alone made him sex on legs, very, very long legs, which had been the purpose of the short skirt, according to Mary, whom they had asked for help. She, Remus, and Emmeline were all naturally tall and thus Sirius needed something to make him look taller. Mary had good taste like that.
Mary was also a much safer choice for working on the dress, as with the near constant flutter of Remus’s chest and/or crotch, he was afraid he might vanish the dress or transfigure it into something much more embarrassing. He’d done the sensible pair of heels instead.
Once they were away, Sirius sat on an embroidered cushion, one knee over the other. Which, to be noted, was his standard sitting posture whether he was wearing a dress or not.
“S’pose you’re having as much luck as I am?” asked Sirius, a mischievous grin on his perfect stupid face. He looked Remus up and down. “Think I know what your problem is, Moony.”
“Is it the lack of heels?”
“It is, good man,” said Sirius, sage, “it is. You don’t match the rest of P.A.”
Remus wore a waistcoat-tie combo with an accompanying jacket, all a deeper shade of lavender. Both Emmeline and Mary had accepted this proposal and his argument that his thesis—which, so far they only knew had to do with finding things in the library—would play best to the conservative crowds that managed things like archives, museums, and libraries. It was a good cover for not showing leg or forearm or any part of Remus’s body that was latticed with silvery scars. His scrawniness had lessened somewhat in the Pyrenees, too, although he’d progressed merely from beanpole to beanstalk.
“Nevertheless,” Mary had said, “the boy can fill out a waistcoat.”
The others had nodded tacit agreement, Sirius included.
“What about you?” asked Remus. “Is there no market for a charm—”
“—that plans to turn muggle motorbikes into hybrid magical means of transport?” finished Sirius. “Shockingly, Moony,” he continued, “there is not.”
“They know not what they’re missing.”
“They know not indeed. Neither do I, come to think of it. My research is still a shambles, and by happenstance I have to ask: do you happen to know anything about how automotives work?”
The ensuing conversation was nice. ‘Nice’ was the word for it. They laughed, they joked, they improvised stories for the other attendees and guessed at the contents of their conversations between goblets of punch.
“Why yes,” said Sirius, in an awful Australian accent, “I am Gloria Ahmed, the last great witch upon which you will ever set eyes. Now, remind me again: who are you? Follow-up: why do I care?”
“Oh, ah,” said Remus, “you see, Ms. Ahmed, I represent the Order of Merlin—”
“—boring! I have two of those awards already. Next.”
“Benjamin Fenwick,” said Remus, outstretching a hand, “but you can call me ‘Benjy.’”
“Oh, goodness,” said Sirius. “Is that suit made of fine, beautifully-folded parchment?”
The Theory group had themed themselves around writing for reasons obvious to everyone.
“S’tidy, like?” asked Remus, who could sound vaguely Welsh, being Welsh himself. “If you look close, it’s actually the entirety of my thesis, which I wrote on why you should give me your job and then retire.”
“I don’t even need to read it,” exclaimed Sirius, “it’s yours! Congratulations, Minister.”
They commiserated as Remus could not commiserate with anyone else over the snobbery from Theory and Fieldwork, against whom they had not yet fully formed a layer of thick skin. Privately—and now with Sirius—he thought that Practical Applications had its own appeal, a certain je-ne-sais-quoi of simple mortality. Quite quite frankly the other areas seemed to have a requisite masochism and insanity that Remus lacked. The sheer number of books Remus saw ferried from the library by Theory postgrads was alarming. More than once he found Lily entangled in a jungle of old thick doorstopper volumes stacked higher than her vibrant red ponytail. At least once a day there’d come a colossal groan of frustration from the lounge as someone overturned their collection and threw into ruin what was always an (allegedly) perfectly-sorted system. He was more or less convinced Lily would never forgive him in full after he tripped over her stack of jet-black grimoires known as svarteboken while creeping about at night.
Fieldwork by contrast required some of the above and a healthy indifference towards personal safety. Rucha Nagar, the bookish witch from the train, regaled him unprompted about a former Fieldwork legend by the name of Gurwinder Gudgeon, who—as the mythos spake—twenty-five years ago set his eyes on a thoroughly-cursed abandoned building down near Tottenham Court Road. The structure’s continued cursed existence was apparently a serious impediment to a number of important municipal developments. So cursèd it was, down to every last brick, that the board of directors approved his thesis. Yet even Gudgeon’s indirect research began to be met with building hostility.
Lifts jammed in the architectural archives when he went to find its original plans; the pigeons in the neighbourhood seemed to learn his face and took unimaginable dislike to his overcoats and hats and rain jackets; unlikely objects fell from windows; they missed him by only narrow margins; all this progressing to the point that, in his third and final year of postgraduate studies, Gurwinder Gudeon was killed kilometres away by the building’s coalescing misfortune when a loose falling bring was catapulted a city district away by a one-in-one-million probabilistic event. One-on-one-billion, perhaps.
Rucha, of course, had told this story with aspiration in her dark witchy eyes. She made it sound like something to aspire to, being taken down by your own research.
“Mm. Can’t say I agree,” said Sirius with a tut.
“No, nor I,” replied Remus.
Mary and then Emmeline found them and joined their conspicuous revelry after having finished their presumed schmoozing. It was enough to commandeer a wide, silk-clothed table and a fresh platter of wine goblets. They, in turn, attracted Lily and Jacob O’Neil, the Irish-sounding heckler from the train, who pulled the rest of Theory into their orbit with their papery formal attire. Speak of the devil. That left the lone Fieldwork postgraduate in attendance, Rucha Nagar, alone. None of her other focus area members had deigned to attend despite the warnings. She sat in the corner and had a book with her. Some pseudo-Geber, Liber Investigationis.
“In Fieldwork,” Rucha explained, very matter-of fact, “if you don’t already have six buyers fighting for what you’re selling by second year, you’ve done something wrong.”
She then went back to reading.
While their blob-like formation of postgraduates had the unique effect of repelling any reasonable approach, none of them complained, and being insulated from the rest of the garish festivities let them grow even more raucous and familiar. They whined, they complained, they drank punch, and above all they whispered rude things about the other attendees while smiling polite smiles.
Which made it all the more shocking when, moments after Sirius produced a spliff out from under his top hat and made the smokey-smoke gesture with two fingers at Remus and Mary, a witch neither of them recognised broke through their vanguard.
“No one in this room has talked to either of you yet,” said the witch, looking between Remus and Sirius, “which makes you the most intriguing people in the room. Hello,” she continued. “My name is Dorcas Meadowes, Order of Merlin, Third Class.”
Every postgrad head swivelled to watch them. Eyes went wide.
Dorcas Meadowes was known to Remus as the inventor of the Localised Temporal Compression Charm, which was actually several dozen charms woven into a single casting: some to strengthen your body, some to enhance your perception and mental processing power &c. &c. until you reached the culminating point of existing in a frame of reference that moved at exactly one and one-half times speed. It wasn’t just your body, however. It was your spellwork and their results as well. As such it was quite quite possibly the most involved individual work of Chronomancy ever successfully invented and performed without fatality, at least according to Chronomancer’s Chronicle, a journal made famous, academically speaking, for its snarls of dense, impenetrable theory and for being banned by Ministry decree from disclosing any practical elements of temporal spellwork.
The lengthy casting time made the Localised Temporal Compression Charm impractical for duelling, which appeared its most obvious use, but Meadowes had in writing explained her true intent: developing a reagent-free temporal charm that would allow other spellwork to be completed within exacting timeframes.
If, for example, a spell had to be cast within a minute of the stroke of midnight, you’d instead have ninety seconds on either side instead of sixty. The implications were boggling.
It had been hugely controversial in its time and remained a polemical thesis, as Remus recalled, because while in theory the charm opened up an entirely new class of spellwork, fuddling with Time was already considered very difficult magic, and the charm proper was already kludgy to the point that no one else could fully ascertain how or why it worked. It also had its downsides: once you released the charm, the caster fell into a kind of comatose stasis equal to the duration of time they’d borrowed, which made it even more dangerous to use in a research capacity.
Worse still, because it was a charm you could cast on other people, Meadowes had in her thesis suggested that multiple practitioners could learn the charm and then cast it in sequence on one another, theoretically mitigating the downside while still compounding its effect. If true, the backlash would remain linear while the accelerations grew exponentially faster.
Yet, as far as Remus knew, the Localised Temporal Compression Charm had only ever been cast once.
According to legend—urban legend, unverified still for reasons that would soon become clear—Unspeakables from the Department of Mysteries had attended her thesis defence to watch her cast it. Afterwards, beyond seizing all the particulars of her research, Remus had heard it told that they magically bound her and all witnesses such that they could never teach the charm to anyone else. Or something to that effect.
It made for a delightful if terrifying story, which was also how you could describe Dorcas Meadowes. Yet it was also such a big and daunting thesis that you couldn’t help but feel small in her gravity, a feat made all the more impressive because Dorcas Meadowes was a very short witch, barely 5’4. She wore an orange Banarasi sari with tasselled hems and her hair in a functional low-bun decorated with a pearlescent gajra, which gave her the immediate—and, Remus reasoned, probably desirable—effect of commanding a situation when she entered.
A situation such as right then, for example.
Except Remus had tip-toed past tipsy by that point, so he couldn’t quite figure out why all the postgrad heads were watching him, then, and not Dorcas.
“Jesus Christ, Remus,” whispered Mary.
“Bloody encyclopaedia, this one,” said Sirius after a beat. He stood, curtsied, and extended Dorcas a long pale hand. “Hiya. Sirius Black, family disgrace.”
“Good to meet you, Sirius,” replied Dorcas. She took his hand, curtsied as well, and released it. “I too was a family disgrace.”
“’tchu wanna…” he began, and then made the smokey-smoke gesture again and jerked his fuzzy chin towards the balcony. “With us?”
“No, but thank you. Enjoy your evening.”
They both exchanged curtsies again and Dorcas Meadowes went off, presumably to command another conversation. The other postgraduates were still staring at him.
“Jesus Christ,” whispered Mary again, “Remus, what the fuck.”
***
Under Mary’s careful guidance and in the half-hour it took for them to depart from the staff party, to transfigure back their clothes, and for Remus to run off for a piss, Remus had grown somewhat more sober and the others far, far less. His sulking was cut short by Sirius’s welcome revelation that he had yet another spliff and possibly more, although that would have to wait. Sirius did, however, spare Remus a flask in exchange for a few fresh hand-rolls from his own battered box. Thank Christ for Sirius. The rest of postgrads were vicious by comparison, and common decency nowhere to be found. Abandoning someone to the wolves of sobriety for the simple crime of having a bladder the size of a teapot was barbaric at worst and inconsiderate at best.
All those aforementioned inconsiderates arrived more or less as scheduled at the southernmost tower of the east wing, third floor, by the statue of Gunhilda of Gorsemoor, the One-Eyed Witch.
“She was actually a Hag, you know,” said Remus, who needed another piss, actually, “not a witch, but Hags are rarely afforded good press. Even when they cure Dragon Pox, apparently.”
“That’s our Moony,” said Sirius. “Wealth of fun facts, in’t he?”
“Fun facts,” whispered Lily, “like a secret passage to where, again?”
“Honeydukes.”
“You never!” whispered Lily, louder and aghast.
“I never,” replied Sirius. “We always paid.”
“This feels like a gross security breach,” said Mary, frowning. “You used this for what, again?”
Sirius and Remus exchanged blank looks and shrugged.
“Oh, now he’s out of facts,” said Emmeline.
“It takes an hour to walk to walk to Honeydukes,” replied Remus, “but only forty minutes to walk back. It’s very odd. Suggests the passageway is nonlinear, like.”
Hearing no further complaints, the six of them—the four P.A.ers plus Lily, and, for some bizarre reason, Rucha Nagar from Fieldwork—proceeded into the One-Eyed Witch Passage.
“I like to be included,” explained Rucha, “even if I don’t often participate.”
Perhaps it wasn’t so bizarre after all. Sirius, Mary, and Emmeline took her and rushed a small distance ahead, which left him and Lily to travel in the dark together. Sound in the passage worked in strange ways. Once they’d fallen far enough behind that the others were out of sight, even Remus could no longer hear them.
They were alone. Lily was wobbly.
Or perhaps Remus was.
One of them, certainly, and perhaps even both.
“Is Mary bisexual?” asked Remus, whose unabrupt inhibitions had been checked at the Hag statue. He puffed the end of his cigarette and breathed smoke at the dark ceiling above. From his pocket he pulled a lump of tinfoil concealing a thin slab of dark chocolate, freshly chilled, and halved it with a crisp snap. Offered it to Lily, and murmured, “I take it that’s not news.”
“No, Remus,” replied Lily, “it’s not. I hope I don’t have to give you a lecture.”
“’Course not. Sirius as well, then?”
“Not news either, I’m afraid.”
Remus hummed a hummy-hum.
“I hope that doesn’t change anything for you,” replied Lily, poor sweet Lily. “He’s still the same Sirius.”
“S’pose it makes a certain sense, like,” said Remus. He popped a square of chocolate in his mouth and rolled it about on his tongue. “Does James know?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“He only told us about two weeks ago. Sort of blurted it out for no particular reason while a few of us were in the lounge together working on separate things. ‘I fancy birds and blokes equally,’ I think he said.”
“And Mary said—”
“‘That’s very nice, Black, we’re very proud,’ I believe, and then everyone went back to their research. She’s been open about it since seventh year. I may have hexed a few horrid students who needed their mouths cleaned out anyway.”
“May have.”
“Maybe.”
“Good that you did, Lils.”
“Thank you, Remus,” she said. She was only as high as his shoulders, but Lily could be a hundred metres tall when she needed it.
“I’m happy you two talked and made up,” she said, after a short pause. “You and Sirius, I mean. Not you and Mary. Not that you and Mary were ever fighting.”
“Pardon me?” said Remus. He grew wary, and the chill sobered him. Sort of.
“They never told me what happened, not even James,” she replied, quick, because she was Lily Evans and she was perceptive and because Remus had just frozen like a dog hearing a noise in the night. “But you know I’m bloody brilliant,” she continued, “and I saw the way that your lot and Severus were acting. Pieced it together, eventually. For months they were whispering about some stupid trick gone awry.”
The Prank. Dangerous territory. “Lily, I really don’t know what you’re—”
“—I know it wasn’t your fault, Remus,” she said, and Remus felt a hot flush up his neck. “Severus ranted on and on about how Black tried to ‘murder him’—don’t worry, I never believed that—and they’ve both always been horrid to one another. You were just caught in the crossfire.”
Remus nodded, slow, very slow, as it bought his tipsy brain time to think. Bought more time with another long drag off his smoke.
“Lily,” he began, “would you mind telling me what you think happened? In full.”
Lily paused, with her fiery plaited hear a little frazzled and her cheeks reddened by alcohol and the spliff, to stare at Remus. The corner of her small lips stained with the slightest smudge of chocolate. Then she gave a small nod, as if to say, That’s fair.
“A lot happened the night before you went away, yeah?” she began, and Remus inclined his head, confirming that much as a matter of bare fact. Her heart was picking up speed as she began, whether from nerves or excitement at the chance of confirmation, Remus had little idea. “I slept through everything, but the gossip was everywhere. Someone saw James through a window, bloody half-dressed, wrestling Severus to the ground not far from the Whomping Willow, and Nathaniel North—you remember him? The Asian boy whose yearmates all withdrew—told me that everyone was running from the Hospital Wing to the Headmaster’s Office, back and forth, all morning after that night. Then you were gone, and Minerva—Professor McGonagall—told all the prefects that you’d been withdrawn.
“Sirius looked so gaunt. Felt like I was watching a ghost in the weeks afterwards. Even when James and Peter were laying into him, he sort of…he wasn’t Sirius Black about it. Took the brunt of it on the chin. Severus was even worse to him, cursing and hexing him whenever he’d get away with it, and that made Black angry. James and Peter too, even if they were angry with Sirius. That got messy. The professors had to step in, and we knew it because their war ended overnight.
“I think that’s what split us apart, me and Severus. He didn’t say anything, either, but he knew you and I had been friends. Then James got serious about his schoolwork and there stopped pulling pranks every other week, so honestly it came as no surprise that the following year he was a prefect, and after that, Head Boy. We’d already been dating by then. Were a couple by sixth year.
“Black took a while to grow on me, but he’s like a fungus, that one. Peter and I got on just fine. I think that’s how he liked it. Never one to step on toes. But Black—he had, I dunno, this tortured air about him and while James eventually forgave him for whatever it is happened, you could tell that he hadn’t forgiven himself. Oh, right—you asked what I thought it was, didn’t you?’
“I did, Lily, yes,” said Remus, who had drunk in that information with the face of a perfect stone. It helped that he was tipsy. “Continue.”
“Well, to be honest, I only became sure earlier this month. You remember when Mary levitated you into the lounge?”
“No,” said Remus, who’d then been unconscious, “but I did hear of it.”
“I was fixing your clothes—oh, don’t give me that look, Remus Lupin, you looked a mess on the sofa—and I, ah, well, I saw one of your old scars on your collarbone.”
Oh. “Oh.”
“It makes a sort of sense. I always thought that you lot had been out after dark together, up to no good as always. Either you found Severus, or he found you, and he and Sirius must have started sniping at each other. They’ve always been like oil and water, and forgive me, Remus, I know it mustn’t have been your fault, but even if I believe that you were never like that—and I want to, despite everything Severus has ever said—you never did try to stop James and Sirius from going after him. Sniping probably became more than sniping, probably a duel, and Severus and Black always took things too far, knowing all these nasty curses—and I’m not going to pretend to know who did it,” she continued, a helpless shrug on her shoulders, “but I gather that, somewhere in that mess, a vile, nasty, dark curse that was meant for Severus rebounded and struck you, or that you tried to block one for Black and didn’t fully succeed.”
“Which is how,” started Remus, following her logic, “you believe I ended up in the Hospital Wing and why I left Hogwarts thereafter.” He adjusted his sleeves and the collar of his shirt, and Lily put a hand on his to stop him.
“How’d I do?” she asked. She pinched her forefinger and thumb before her eye, one sharp green iris staring through the needle-gap at him. “Close?”
Time slowed to a crawl, and, in that eternity, years of Remus’s accumulated guilt wrestled with the wolf of his self-preservation. He hadn’t the slightest idea which would win out in the end. What a devilishly wonderful story she’d told: all the details squared away, Sirius’s lingering guilt established, James’s fury skirted, and all without leaving any of them at fault, least of all Remus himself. It couldn’t have been further from the truth. Of course not. If she knew, however—well, Remus, twisted up as he was, couldn’t imagine her looking at any of them the same again. She’d break up with James, probably. Never speak to Remus or Sirius again. He’d have killed the optimism in her bright green eyes much as he might’ve killed Severus all those years ago.
Time resumed.
Remus gave a long, burdensome exhale.
“Very close,” said Remus, “although not exact. But if you wouldn’t mind—”
“—I won’t pry, Remus. It’s been years and it’s not my story. And, like I said,” she continued, that endless optimism of hers returning to the surface, “I’m happy that you two made up. He seems happier, these days. Though he always has been a moody git.”
“S’pose I’ve been known to be one as well,” said Remus.
Lily laughed at that and took his arm, both for balance and to lean her head upon it as they walked. “You have, you have,” she said, “but that’s why we have Mary. Mary!” she called.
Then Lily Evans yanked his arm and the rest of Remus forwards, and they were shrieking and running through the dark to catch up with the rest of their inmate escapees with chocolate staining their fingers.
***
The Hog’s Head Inn was a nondescript establishment, with a very adjective bar, too many or perhaps too few chairs for its one main room, which reeked adverbly of sawdust and nouns. All that, together, Remus reasoned, made it the perfect place to go when one didn’t want to be bothered.
They had collectively absconded to the sitting area above, just in case someone might spot them through the windows that may or may not have been there.
“I cannot believe your first sex was a threesome,” said Remus.
“‘First sex’,” said Emmeline, who snorted. “Who says it like that?”
“I do.”
“Remus does,” said Sirius, “and why not?”
“Why not what?”
“Why can’t you believe it? It happened. Mary was there.” Sirius nudged Mary’s shoulder, not that it was necessary. The three of them shared a table, Emmeline took a sofa, Rucha the floor, and Lily stood by a wall pretending she was soberer than she was. “Tell them.”
“I was there,” said Mary. “I was part of—” she broke off giggling, and then looked to Emmeline.
“First sex,” she offered.
“I was part,” continued Mary, “of his first sex.”
“Shut it.”
“That was opposite the problem, actually.”
“All right, pedants,” said Remus, fanning out his hands in his own defence. “I can absolutely believe it.”
“’Course he can,” said Emmeline. “Weren’t you at Beauxbâtons? The French love their ménage à trois. Bet he’s had one himself.”
“No comment.”
“It was the end of my last year,” began Mary. She clutched both hands together and leaned against Sirius, sighing. “He was seventeen, I was eighteen, the other person was seventeen, and, now that I say that out loud, I think we may have committed a crime under Scottish law. Not that I care if we did.”
“Mary,” said Lily, scandalised, “weren’t you also Sirius’s first kiss?”
“I was, yeah. Fourth year.”
Sirius cleared his throat. “Second, actually,” he said, and Remus felt fear.
“Second?” said Mary, frowning. “No, it was fourth—oh. Black!” she continued, frowning harder. “But you said you hadn’t ever snogged anyone. Quite embarrassed about it, if I recall the flush.”
“Chuffed to hear you remember it in such vivid detail, love.”
“You’re all,” began Lily, who had teleported across to the room to stare at them, “missing the bigger question.”
“Who was the first?” whispered Mary.
Sirius’s impenetrable poise shattered. “Sounds like you're gonna hurt them.”
“Only if it turns out I played second fiddle to a lesser woman.”
“Then no hurting needed,” said Remus, seizing his window of opportunity. “I’m that woman.”
Every head at the table swivelled—Remus had a knack for it, it seemed—expressions ranging from shock (Sirius), to intrigue (Lily), to begrudging respect (Mary). The best way to handle a rumour, Remus knew, was to get ahead of the thing before it had a chance to get its pants on.
“S’pose it’s story time,” he said. He clapped his hands together once before him and recoiled at their sudden loudness. “Gather around, children.
“It was a dark and stormy birthday for a boy of dark and stormy demeanour, because it was November, and the autumn months of Scotland are known for their frequent storms and high precipitation. As he had theretofore been a student of diligent schoolwork and high moral scruples, Sirius Black had decided that, for his fifteenth birthday, he would become a fourth-year rebel and partake in some of that fine mari-huana he heard so often about from his more muggle-adjacent friends.
“Of course, being a fastidious and noble wizard, Sirius knew not where to find such a vice. Thankfully, one Remus Lupin—a true yob, if I’ve ever met one—had a muggle friend, an, er, older boy from Cardiff who dabbled in such things and had agreed to provision them. Which is how on that dark and stormy birthday night Sirius, Remus, James, and Peter ended up sharing a single spliff while they dangled their collective legs out the window of their dormitory room, which is really a horrifying image if you think about it. Jesus, we could have died.
“Now, not one of them had smoked skunk before, not even Remus the Yob, and it was not well-known to them then that your first time smoking pot could have varied and irreplicable outcomes. Also, that thing was massive. The person who skinned it up must’ve had massive fingers, and that person, without naming names, was Peter Pettigrew. Peter was also the first one to go out like a light, and James soon after him. Which left Remus and Sirius together on the windowsill.
“They had stubbed the thing out to save the rest for another birthday—perhaps their only wise decision of the night—and, I imagine, were kept conscious despite their immaturity and low drug tolerance by the sheer wet cold of the autumn storm that was blowing through their window. Again, how they did not fall and die is lost on me. Also, it may in fact be true that neither Remus nor Sirius had grasped the part where you have to take the smoke into your lungs and not just hold it in your mouth, but that’s neither here nor there.
“You see, Sirius had told Remus that the smoke made his lips all tingly, and Remus, ever the yobbish scholar, had decided to touch them and figure out for himself. It was mutually decided then, of course, that Sirius should touch Remus’s lips and see if they felt the same. Picture, if you will, two very stoned teenage wizards, forehead to forehead, groping each other’s faces like they’d never seen a face before, hair glued down by the wind and rain and a stupid bubbly look in his I mean their grey eyes.
“Yes, let’s keep that. That’ll do well in the novelisation.
“Sirius said something to the effect of ‘Your mouth is so soft,’ and then—and, Sirius, you can jump in here at any time if I’m off-base—literally licked Remus’s lips all the way around and then kissed him for an unspecified amount of time, et cetera et cetera. Then Sirius said—and, again, correct me if I’m recalling this wrong—‘Remus,’ and, after a very, very long pause, ‘you’re really, really bad at this.’ Corrections? No? Onwards, then.
“Remus and Sirius then went to bed and slept dead like rocks until Monday afternoon, as Sirius’s birthday had landed on a Sunday that year, and as such they were both given detention for skiving off. The end.”
There was a distinct pause in the room. Mary looked rapturous.
“I’m learning a lot about your storytelling skills, Lupin,” said Rucha.
“Sirius Black,” said Mary, “you slag. Remus Lupin,” she continued, “you hound.”
From the staircase that led back down to the bar, probably, a low and amused voice called out and said, in the voice of James Potter, “While I haven’t heard the context, I agree with that assessment.”
Lily overturned her chair and fell over, actually, while Remus and Sirius exchanged baffled looks.
Did you? mouthed Sirius, and Remus shook his head.
Did you? mouthed Remus.
James was just as tall as Sirius, whose eyebrows came up to Remus’s shoulders, but in place of glossy curls he had a short crop of wild black hair that flew in every direction and features rounded like his glasses. His brown eyes, albeit myopic, always saw the best in people, and three years hadn’t changed how at home he looked in his robes. Robes of the nouveau-riche: he hadn’t the monogrammed cufflinks of the Black family, but his robes were always fitted, pressed, and modern, with broad lapels and open necks to let him show off the underlying muggle-style clothing as well as his strategically-loosened ties and simple gold chain necklaces against his warm brown skin. And, apparently, muscle-stroke-definition that hadn’t been there before.
Behind James came the blurry figures of Peter—half a head shorter than James but with more mass under his simpler dark robes, much, much paler, and he wore his straw-y blond hair slicked back—and, for some reason, Alice Macmillan, who’d been five full years ahead of them as Remus recalled. She was—well, Remus decided he would get to that description at a later time.
Drinks were poured and toasted and poured again, even for and by Emmeline, who apparently knew all of James, Peter, and Alice better than she did Remus. That bit of information lodged deep in some alcohol-brined part of Remus’s brain for later examination.
Remus hugged James once, tight, and Peter three times and they sang Auld Lang Syne twice for some reason. There was a parade of activities taken to and quickly abandoned and then, no, darling, please forgive me, however could I have been so wrong as to leave you, O great and glorious darts board? Emmeline and James tied for first place; Peter second or third, he couldn’t recall and never much cared to; of course he and Lily were bottom of the pack but, then again, they’d also drunk the most drink, putting away a Herculean amount of alcohol between the pair of them. Much later he’d remember Mary and James catching up in animated fashion, braced on the bones of two rickety wooden chairs, James tempting fate by leaning his further and further back while Remus lay prone at their feet like a lazy fucking dog. James’s socks against his bare fuzzy stomach. A mean streak therewithin: his chair came crashing down and he kicked Remus hard, just once, but hard enough to leave a nasty bruise. He wasn’t very apologetic about it. Funny, that: an entire night dissolved by spirits and he retained vivid memory of how annoyed James was with him. Alcohol couldn’t quite cure everything, could it.
Only an hour or three later when he was outside in the street with Sirius—being drunk could sometimes be like Apparating, except through time—did he realise that that had been the first time James and Peter had seen him in three years.
And Alice Macmillan in six, but that was for reasons far less melodramatic.
“I do not,” said Remus, who was crouching by the cold, wet autumn ground with his ears beside his knees, “feel good at all.”
Sirius had adopted a similar pose. If Remus were a sculptor, he’d call it Regret. Sirius hadn’t dropped the spliff, yet. Nor had he stubbed it out.
“I hate this. I want to vomit,” continued Remus. His nose was bleeding. It was pissing rain. The coolness of the water felt good on his hot hot face, and he wished that someone had invented a way to put rain inside your body. “Please. If there is a God, let me vomit. I’ll feel better.”
“Hate this too,” said Sirius. “Don’t feel good. Awful,” he continued, taking a new drag off the spliff and wincing at the heat of it. “Bloody awful. Bloody fucking awful.”
Poor Padfoot. “Poor Padfoot,” said Remus.
“I’m scared, Remus.”
“Aw. Why’s that?”
“Reg.”
“As in—”
“—s’pose you weren’t there for it,” said Sirius, quiet. “Probably has his minions fetch his books for him now, ’tchu think? Never seen him in the library.”
“Padfoot?”
“He’s in with them. Death Eaters,” Sirius continued, and Remus realised he was doing that thing that drunk people and Remus did where you talked past someone instead of having a conversation with them, because you’d poisoned your brain for fun. It’d seemed like a good idea at the time. “Scared they’ll nick him for something,” he explained. “Give him the Kiss. Then I’ll stop running into him everywhere, ’cos it won’t be my dumb kid brother who won’t listen. He’ll be this—he’ll be gone and I’ll still have to see him walking around as one of the Kissed.”
Remus rocked back and forth on his heels.
“What kinda bloody system,” began Sirius, and then he vomited and so too did Remus.
Some unspecified time later, they were playing darts once more. Remus was definitely probably winning. Mary kept insisting that Remus let her tend to his shoulder, which was fine, mind you, just a bit tetchy, and also he wasn’t about to take his shirt off even though it was bloody hot out. In. Whatever. Lily braced James against a wall and was, as it appeared, trying to un-drown him, like. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. James’s unoccupied, surprised hands were hilarious. He looked like he was being electrocuted; he looked like an octopus, he of the hands with a mind of their own. Oh, there they finally went—straight to her arse. Near them, Peter was simultaneously smashing three people, all dead legless, at chess.
When all the liquid had evaporated from Remus’s body, he knew it was morning.
***
His throat cried out for moisture. A vague part of his brain recalled a substance known as water.
His wand was missing. The only sleeved shirt in the room had bloodstains on the collar. Remus crawled out of bed and tugged on a pair of unbuttoned trousers. Not his, apparently, as they barely made it past the thigh and only loosely covered anything indecent, though it would have to do as he wandered out of his boarding room. Sober and quiet.
All that remained in the dark, grimy sitting room above the Hog’s Head Inn were the signs of battle. Nine and a half chairs surrounded a knot-ridden oak table by a blackened hearth Remus hadn’t recalled was there. The windowless walls, slanting inwards on all sides, gave the necessary impression that the world was closing in on you and that this was an unsafe place to be. If, however, the angles of the walls weren’t enough to convince you, the haphazard darts embedded in them might have. Although the room was only a few meters across on all sides, it none of them had bothered to collect the old darts from the dirty walls and instead conjured new ones to throw, which made them the cleanest things there. Someone’s boots had been stuck to the underside of the oak table like discarded gum. Heel-first.
Remus drank from a pitcher of water in sips as quick as his aching stomach would allow. His throat tasted of iron and his lip was crusted with blood. He couldn’t remember when he’d last consumed something that hadn’t spent considerable time fermenting.
That was good. The very idea of food revolted him. Even chocolate was evil. Water, however, was soothing. It quelled his bile-stung throat. It revived his senses. If he closed his eyes, he could hear, through the wind-blown groans of the aging wood around him, the sounds of Hogsmeade awakening outside. Rats in the walls and under the floors finally going to sleep.
It was early morning, still, and a Wednesday. Good. That meant they had time.
There were voices, too, that sharpened in Remus’s ears as he sipped more water. Whispered ones. They came from below, curling around the old crooked staircase from across the bar. James’s voice had grown deeper since fifth year, but his posh manner of speech hadn’t been lost. Remus ought to know it well. Sirius and James would banter for hours. Remus too, on a good day.
“Again, I’m sorry, Professor,” whispered James. “I promise I hadn’t any idea they would be here.”
“You know I would have stopped him, Albus,” said another voice. A woman’s, melodic, familiar, less changed since he’d last heard it. Alice?
“Happenstance,” began the quiet, whimsical voice Albus Dumbledore, “makes fools of us all. Yet, I think, there is a lesson to be learned here.”
“We should be more careful,” said three voices in unison—James, Alice, but also Peter.
“We should,” replied Dumbledore, “and we shall. Now, back to your rooms. Rest. Recover. I fear we all have fewer rests ahead of us than we will well need.”
Remus refilled the pitcher to its former waterline—whether it was the threat of being caught eavesdropping or a well-reasoned attempt, he nevertheless did so wandlessly—replaced it, and then scampered back to privacy before the scraping of chairs being pushed away could end. Closed the door behind himself by the time James, or maybe Alice, took their first confident step up the stairs.
Remus turned around and let his back cool against the old rotting wood of the door.
He stared at Sirius a moment.
Sirius looked peaceful under the sheets, and, by the state of the small, clothing-covered boarding room, was quite possibly naked. Dark wisps of chesthair crept over the lip of the sheets. His curls were wild and glued by dried dribble in places to his mouth, which twitched every so often at the touch of dreamspun words.
There was no possible way to examine the chaos and determine whether or not they’d shagged, so Remus gently brushed the hair from Sirius’s face, lay back down on the soft straw bed, and went back to sleep.
Notes:
And that's a wrap on our first installment! From here on chapters will average about 10,000 words or longer.
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here.
The next chapter will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 15 November, a Friday. If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation is The Rosary by fluorescentgrey, a wonderfully-textured noir R/S fic set in the 1940s. I will probably keep up the habit of recommending a story or two each week—and if any author would prefer not to be included here for whatever reason, contact me and I'll remove you from here as soon as I'm able.
Chapter 5: Crimes in a Funny Hat
Chapter Text
Although Sirius’s nineteenth birthday fell on a Friday that year, they made no special arrangements for a party or Hogsmeade outing or anything of the sort. Too fresh were the alcoholic wounds from All Hallow’s Eve. This was true in particular for both Remus and Sirius, who were still nursing the fabled three-day hangover by the morning of 3 November. His bones felt like desiccated ruins in a blowing wasteland; his internal organs were like a dry, out-of-season floodplain, where the thirsty mud had hardened and cracked in a mesmerising tessellation pattern. For three mornings opening his curtains was like bearing witness to the birth of the sun. Yet this afforded neither him nor Sirius any pity, no. The other postgraduates were relentless sharks that sensed sick instead of blood. They heckled them with cries of oi oi, pisshead, although that day, they opted for the longer and more familiar happy nineteenth, you bleeding pisshead when addressing Sirius.
For his birthday, the only gifts that Sirius accepted were personal, inexpensive ones, and if you had made or altered it in some way, all the better for it. Grand gestures reminded him too much of his erstwhile family. His old monogrammed cufflinks, made from real Goblin silver no less, landed in a bin for donation the same as had his white silk shirts and his three pairs of Oxfords. The Potters saw his distress in keeping them and his distress in throwing them away, and they told him—or so he’d told Remus—that grief had a funny way of attaching itself to objects, so there was no shame in putting down that burden.
Perhaps because he’d never been allowed to be a child, Sirius gleefully tore off giftwrappings while sat cross-legged at the foot of his unmade bed still in his pyjamas. His drawstring trousers were a red royal Stuart tartan. Lily had charmed him a pint glass that turned its contents to water when your blood alcohol level was above an unspecified level, while Mary gave him a hairbrush that never tangled and Emmeline Vance—in her own words—had ‘fixed’ his broom. Gifts from James and Peter came in the form of posted muggle sweets with a wholesome card.
P—
CAN IT HAVE BEEN THREE DAYS ALREADY? HOW THE TIME FLIES I NEVER THOUGHT MY EARS WOULD STOP RINGING. DON’T LET IT GET TO YOUR COLOSSAL HEAD HOWEVER I THINK I MIGHT MISS IT. MSSR. WORMTAIL DISAGREES OF COURSE: SAYS HE FONDLY REMINISCES ON OUR 3rd YEAR VOW OF SILENCE. TRULY THE BEST OF OUR LIVES ARE BEHIND US
NEXT TIME WE FLY. NOT SURE WHEN ‘NEXT’ IS: SCHEDULE IS HECTIC. SEND MY POST VIA LILY OR DAD (DO NOT CHOOSE MUM I DON’T WANT HER READING YOUR HIDEOUS SMUT).
ALSO: MSSR. WORMTAIL & I FIXED THE MIRROR. SEE ATTACHED.
—&P
Remus recognised the mirror: the round compact sort that fit in Sirius’s palm like a sleek black clamshell. Another one of James’s odd family heirlooms. They’d passed it and forth during his time at Hogwarts, as the enchantments on the mirror and its twin compact allowed two-way communication at a distance, if albeit through a narrow lens. Combined with James’s cloak of invisibility—they’d always simply called it his Cloak so as to never alert polite company—and other tools, it allowed them to reign a not-insignificant amount of mayhem on the school while remaining innocent as a daisy in the eyes of the faculty. So it came as no shock that James would part with it, not to Sirius of all people. Indeed the only missing detail of the letter was that James had included no return address, which struck Remus as odd until Sirius explained it away.
“Right after we left Hogwarts,” said Sirius, shrugging down at him. Remus had, of course, taken the floor, the most logical place to be for reasons best left unspoken. “James said he got offers to do live-in tutoring for students who’d been withdrawn. Means he travels all over and can’t always get his post, so most of it goes to Lily. S’pose it’s one benefit of their arrangement.”
“And Peter?” asked Remus. James was a volatile subject, or, well, sort of, inasmuch as Remus could never decide if the idea of James being angry with him made him feel flightier and more panicked than talking with Sirius about James being angry with him, as though the very sentiment was contagious. Sirius glanced down from his compact mirror only briefly and scoffed.
“Sneaky git, in’t he?” replied Sirius, matter-of-fact. He was completely immune and, actually, unaware of Remus’s inner turmoil. Those winds did not touch his sails; he floated, as ever, effortlessly above the fray. “James brought him in as a business partner. One bloke’s suspicious, two’s a team, he said.”
And that had been that.
Before the events of All Hallow’s Eve, Remus had put together an enchantment that would allow for accessories to change size and warp based on the wearer’s form, which he then used on a dog collar, as Sirius had taken to wearing them lately. Something of a punk mode. He’d chosen leather, dark grey, because while spikes were arguably more punk an sich, he’d seen the way Sirius’s long curls snagged and knotted on the exposed metal: impractical for long-term wear. It was a private kind of gift—Sirius was still an unregistered Animagus, and most unregistered Animagi didn’t enchant their wardrobe for fear of the enchantments outing them. Magic wasn’t a clean, sterile thing: it left behind fingerprints. While, yes, some witches and wizards couldn’t muster that kind of passive magical detection, and many of those that could often didn’t because they were normal people and not paranoid, Aurors were exceptions to both of those statements.
Aurors were also, as Remus had heard, in the business of throwing people into Azkaban. Where, as it so happened, being an unregistered Animagus would land you, and for seven years, no less.
Which brought them back to the collar. Because it wasn’t meant to become part of the Animagus’s transformation—a common enchantment for those disinclined to public nudity or shredding their favourite jumper—and instead stretch and shrink to always fit Sirius’s form, human or otherwise, Remus hoped the collar wouldn’t trip any alarm bells. Safe. Harmless. A touch private. It had been the perfect gift up until they’d maybe possibly shagged, which meant that all the implications had changed and in some worlds became sexy. Less Hullo, Padfoot, here’s a collar, and more Hullo-o-o Padfoot, here’s a collar, wink.
So Remus stalled.
It didn’t help that he and Sirius hadn’t talked about it.
They’d woken in the boarding room for the second time, with Remus half-dressed above the bed covers and Sirius naked below. Bleary-eyed; overwarm; skin sticky with sweat and evaporated alcohol. In the familiar way they used to do in whenever there was a storm and Sirius was having his nightmares again, they dozed there together, half-awake, barely touching by a foot or fingers or any other patch of insensitive skin, and enjoyed the silence. A small point of contact in the merciless world of a hangover. It was the sort of casual touch that hadn’t been disavowed by all their five years of Boys’ Club learnings. Not a word was shared between them, though Remus could hear the quiet, rhythmic thump of their unsynchronised heartbeats.
Then Sirius had conjured a bin, vomited in it, and spent the next twenty minutes dry heaving until he vomited for a second time.
And that had been that. Which left Remus with a dog collar and a birthday to celebrate and no gift for Sirius. Yet, when he tracked Sirius down after finishing his reshelving in record time, something odd happened.
“Sirius,” said Remus. “About your gift—”
“—actually, Moony, yes, about that,” replied Sirius. A sheepish grin lifted the corners of his distracting mouth, and his cheeks flushed pink by the chill of flying. It was an odd blush: it crept up the side of his long, pale neck and seemed only to follow his cheekbone and jawbone, leaving the hollow of his cheek strangely pale. “I had an idea about that, if you don’t mind me postponing your gift until next year. There’s something I want us to do together,” he added, and Remus nearly fell over. “Something big, if you trust me, except I need some more time for it. I really wanna get it right for us. Sound all right?”
Remus nodded, perhaps a touch too eager, but he didn’t trust his voice.
“Brilliant,” said Sirius. “Ah, look at the time. Ta, Moony.”
Left alone in the corridor just off the Quidditch pitch, Remus’s heart hammered in his chest and he was fifteen again. When he was back to eighteen, however, Remus was just as hopeless. He was a bloody car crash. His thesis—he’d settled on the Comprehensive Locator Charm as a working title, although so far it only intuited maps of your immediate location—took a back seat to his new research topic: Sirius Black, and what time had done to him.
Some things about Sirius had remained the same in the three years since The Prank. That much was nice for Remus to rediscover. Sirius still only knew formal dance, not that it ever stopped him from trying the informal kind; he was still endless in his confidence; never optimistic; and Remus could still catch him preening his perfectly-imperfect waterfall of hair in any given reflective surface, though as of late he’d added the scruffy beginnings of a beard and moustache to his preening ritual. He had a temper to him, still, and a correlated-if-not-causal temerity, yet now that he too was something approaching an authority figure, Remus sometimes caught him visibly struggling in the corridors with whether to reprimand students when they inevitably started firing off spells at one another. He still preferred muggle clothing, neat grey trainers and long elegant scarves and a sturdy black leather jacket that he claimed was dragonhide. Remus offered to throw fire at it to check and Sirius threatened to throw him into a fireplace.
A week after his birthday, Sirius received not one but two new records in the post, and Queen’s Jazz became the new obsession of their dormitory. That, too, still hadn’t changed.
Sirius’s fascination with all things muggle, however, was no longer fuelled by his rebel attitude. He enjoyed them in earnest. Every conversation if allowed to drift led Lily and Sirius to animated overblown arguments about Tolkein or Le Guin or Lewis Carroll, the sort of ferocious debate that could swallow a whole evening in the postgraduate lounge. He listened at rapt attention whenever Mary rhapsodised about national muggle politics or Thatcher writ large. You couldn’t give him all the credit, no, of course not, though nevertheless Remus felt a quiet, warm kind of pride whenever he thought about his own role in nurturing that earnestness, which grew warmer in his cheeks whenever Remus caught Sirius at work on his thesis. Finding Sirius in their dorm room with his dark curls tied back and furtive grey eyes examining a set of automotive schematics felt embarrassing to Remus, like he’d walked in on Sirius having a wank. Or having sex. And, though Remus would never say it out loud, he nevertheless enjoyed that on some level, Sirius had chosen his thesis because of Remus.
Remus hadn’t been the one to turn him onto motorbikes, of course, but he had introduced Sirius to muggle music—Bolan, Bowie, and Mercury had soothed both of their teenage angsts, when Sirius was still an heir and Remus still a normal werewolf—and motorbikes were only a short lope further from that. The things were a vehicular deathtrap, and danger remained a magnet for Sirius’s interest.
Remus preferred not to dwell on what that meant for his and Sirius’s friendship.
Instead he dwelled on the way that, without James to equal him, Sirius’s competitive streak sought out new targets in the forms of Remus, Mary, and Emmeline. They all skirmished over and exaggerated the potential impact of their finished theses, with Emmeline surmising that breaching a Principal Exemption to Gamp’s Law would set the precedent for ending world hunger, while Mary claimed that her Polyadative Protection Charm could let her colonise the moon. Sirius of course said that his thesis would lead to an off-shoot version of Quidditch involving motorbikes in place of brooms, which, and here the votes were unanimous, would be very dangerously sexy.
Competition continued to rouse itself in all aspects of their lives: Emmeline and Sirius literally flew across the Quidditch pitch with one another as part of their vocational work. Their constant attempts to out-do one another was making waves among the student body. On weekends the stands were smattered with shivering students, most of them Quidditch players themselves, gazing up at their warm-up manoeuvres in plain aspiration.
By contrast the competition between Remus and Sirius was simple: wherever possible, using your wand was forfeit. Chickenshite stuff, like. Thus they made it their mission to do as much wandless magic as possible in front of one another, however unnecessary. It didn’t matter if the book was already within hand’s reach, or if it was a dusty antique, or if he’d flung it at the wall twice already by accident. Every new trick the Defence professor taught them was immediately and disastrously deployed in an effort to demoralise the other. Many a wine bottle died a sad and undrunken death at Remus and Sirius’s hands because of their attempts at a wandless uncorking, and at least two doors were blown off their hinges every week. These antics landed them firmly in the doghouse when it came to their other postgrad colleagues.
In private, a quiet, childish part of Remus—the only part of him still allowed to whine and to dream of unrealistic dreams—wished that he alone was enough to fill the gap left by James.
Remus had never fancied James Potter. Not really. Likely he never would. James was a stand-up kind of bloke and admirable in some aspects, or practically and historically speaking most aspects excluding his hair but including his radiant charisma and his personal exemption from at least outwardly experiencing shame, actually, but much of Remus’s burgeoning—a word that made Remus shudder despite its accuracy and earned him odd looks from the students in the stacks—burgeoning sexuality had been masked, he reasoned, by his inability to separate wanting to be with someone from wanting to be them, full stop, and there was no world in which Remus could ever be James Potter. Those doors were closed to him.
Pending a cure, of course.
James lived a charmed life: his family was independently wealthy, loving, and shared many common interests that they enjoyed both separately and together. Unlike so many others, Euphemia and Fleamont, his parents, understood who James was and were also his friends. They encouraged him, wrote him frequent letters to which he actually replied, sent him homemade flatbread and milksweets every month and gulab jamun on his birthday (later too for each of his best mates’). James himself was the darling of every class and every professor; clever, but never a swot; he’d even bloody been Head Boy as well as one of the better Seekers the Gryffindor Quidditch team had seen in ages, having more or less been born on a broom. Oh, to be popular and beloved. James was a classic Stehaufmännchen who had never truly been knocked down and therefore could, as the literal German translation went, always be that little man getting back up. Even when they’d ventured into the muggle world and James endure his first bewildering slur hurled from across the road, he’d shrugged it off after a minute. James was untouchable.
Sirius, too, had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but those who’d placed the spoon there also knew a dozen ways to maim the psyche using said spoon and yet leave no physical injury behind. His was a tortured soul.
While James was unattainable and never understood, really, that people could struggle, Sirius and Remus had found early common ground in their misery. Remus could relate to Sirius. And, how did it go? O, I have suffered with those that I saw suffer? Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; I am Heathcliffe? It was what had made him so intriguing at first and, later, so irresistible. Except Remus—the adult parts of him—knew you couldn’t sustain a relationship on pain alone, and the concept of losing Sirius was too terrifying to warrant the risk.
If it fell apart, well, he’d be just like Peter.
It was a mean-spirited thought for a boy he’d never known to be cruel to anyone, although that was the problem, really. While Remus was content to live in Sirius’s orbit, Peter, it seemed, made his cold home in James’s lunar shadow. The unwarm Warmduscher to James’s Stehaufmännchen, content to dusche in his tepid shower as long as James would have him. Peter Pettigrew lacked both the spine and a desire to grow one. Which, Remus realised, was a rich thought coming from the werewolf who couldn’t even remember if he’d shagged his long-lost friend or not and was too afraid to ask. Maybe that was why he started sleeping with Benjy Fenwick.
“Benjy fancies you,” whispered Lily, who shared a revision group with the bloke. They were shoulder-to-shoulder, reading at a desk in the lounge. She had a considerate-yet-knowing look to her—her pale red eyebrows were furrowed and her lips pouted in sympathy. A soft green side-eye. It was the manner of look you might give a puppy that’d just fallen over. “Asks silly questions after you all the time. He knows we’re close.”
“Oh,” said Remus.
“If it bothers you, I can talk to him,” she added, quick. “Let him down easy for you. You should take it as a compliment, really.”
“No. No, I wouldn’t say it bothers me, no,” replied Remus after a pause. He blinked. Oh. “S’pose I’m flattered, like? But perhaps I ought handle it myself—let Fenwick down easily, as you said.”
“It’s a bit cool, isn’t it?” Lily leaned closer in to his ear, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial if eager whisper. “I’ve known Mary for forever, but I’ve never really been friends with a gay bloke before.”
“Mm.”
Poor Lily.
For purely aesthetic reasons, it made sense. Benjy had that Welsh-boy-next-door look and shared with Remus a keen interest in muggle politics, hated the idea of Thatcher coming into power and, most surprisingly, had also fallen out with the punk scene when fascistic skinheads moved from fringe to centre. Benjy had the more obvious stake in that, being both Black and quasi-openly gay. While Remus wouldn’t have pegged him as punk, what with the cable-knitted jumpers and rosy argyle waistcoats and loose, flamboyant neckties that scandalised the faculty, he realised that the same could probably be said for Remus. Minus the ties. Another deathtrap.
Benjy Fenwick played piano, the sort of elaborate, tension-riddled pieces that probably came from years of classical training and which he usually laughed at, claiming that he was both rusty and a middling pianist at his best. They were the sort of pieces that Remus could watch and watch and listen to while smoking, rapt and fully-clothed no less, on the edge of Benjy’s bed. Still at the age of twenty-one he wrote a weekly letter to his mum in London. He was a wine enthusiast and always trying to engage Remus on the topic of muggle football. He was a Chelsea man. Mary loudly and frequently declared this his worst and most unforgivable trait and he took her constant ribbing with infectious good nature, the pair of them apparently having been lifelong friends. He was three years older than Remus yet never deigned to condescend to him.
Benjy was also a finalist postgrad preparing for his thesis defence and at least infrequently the object of Sirius’s sexual affection. You could argue it added a certain appeal. A certain je-ne-sais-quoi by any other name.
Beyond the sex and the reawakened feelings, however, Dumbledore had weeks ago suggested to Remus that ‘he might do well’ to ask after Gloria Ahmed’s research, and Dumbledore’s suggestions were often anything but. Benjy was in the same focus area as her and another twin intake student, though which of them was the shooting star Remus had no idea. He’d spent three years in a revision group with Ahmed. He was killing two birds with one stone, if you considered his innocuous questions as a kind of light reconnaissance. Which, in theory, meant you could see fooling around with Benjy as a harmless bit of fun that also got Remus closer to his goal. It wasn’t the only theory. Less charitable interpretations would suggest that Remus was using Benjy, sometimes literally, to further a different end.
It was yet another mean-spirited thing to think and worse to do, but Remus was enjoying his recent bad behaviour. Like a traumatised Kneazle, he was cautiously dipping his toes into the waters of mean spirits, and as of yet had found them agreeable and warm. Not to mention, they weren’t doing anything wrong—Benjy had made it clear that he wasn’t walking out with anyone, nor did he have an interest in doing so. He was also very very good at giving head and equally as understanding that Remus still had much to learn. They practiced together often.
The sneaking around of it and the spontaneity quieted any nagging scruples in Remus’s brain. It was effective. He’d be on a break smoking atop the North Tower or drawing maps in his dorm, before, oh hullo, fancy a puff, then Benjy was fumbling with their belt buckles and Remus was watching the door, unable to decide whether he was afraid or excited at the idea of someone, no names, walking in. It was almost narcotic, this idea that a boy lusted after him so carnally he was willing to risk being caught. The wealth of excuses it provided Remus to never fully disrobe was something of an added bonus.
After a week, Benjy probably thought Remus had a kink for clothed sex, which suited Remus just fine. Seeing Remus’s naked body was both a mood-killer and a liability, and it made him miss the Pyrenees all that much more because for one short period in his life, his body had counted as normal. Everyone there had known scars. Here, though—the thought of someone seeing him naked was like the thought of funnelling straight vodka down his own throat. It made his stomach turn.
It also kept things from going too far too fast. A well-needed tap or slam on the breaks, as Sirius would put it, because the moon was coming in a few days and Remus no longer trusted himself. The hunger and hot flashes and quickening of the heart that often plagued Remus before the moon enjoyed a new context in which to torture him, and torture they did. He was a ball of explosive anxiety wrapped in resurfacing angst and peppered just so with a dash of nuclear horniness. Worse, the feelings started earlier than they ought. Instead of beginning each nightfall in the three days before the full moon, Remus felt the urges—a euphemistic word for an embarrassing problem to have in a shared dormitory, as Remus hadn’t opted to put up curtains over his bed like Sirius, and he couldn’t well now put them up, could he, he might as well put up a flashing sign that read, HAVING WANK, DO NOT DISTURB—urges from the very first morning or sometimes the night before, and with him they remained. It clouded his judgement, made his spellwork unpredictable, and drew him dangerously close to blowing his cover in every sense of the meaning. So he took a brief break from Benjy. No hard feelings.
The irony of the situation was not lost on Remus. He’d worked so hard on the denmothers’ ritual to silence the angry wolf in his mind and now found himself lonely. Left alone to his own devices, he lashed out at others, and in their absence at himself.
A vicious cycle befitting a werewolf.
***
Tuesday was the full moon, but Remus had until nightfall and much to do. Tuesday was also the slowest day in the library, as much of the student body blew off their studies for later in the week, so Remus had little to do beyond reshelving and moderating squabbles between swots who wanted to study the same old tome on that week’s material for a particular Transfiguration lesson. Between that, the early sunsets of oncoming winter streaming through the stained-glass arch windows of the library, and the light rain falling over the stony castle battlements, Hogwarts had seen Tuesday and then gone to bed early.
Irma Pince—Remus still addressed her by full name to others as a form of compromise between his fear and respect for the witch—let him off early with a few more recommendations on how to approach his Comprehensive Locator. She’d been so helpful over the past two months that Remus often wondered why she wasn’t one of his faculty advisors. Which gave him a perfect excuse to talk to Gloria Ahmed, of course.
Rain streaked in dramatic grey rivulets down the brass-framed bay windows of the postgraduate lounge. The hearth with its marble hydra mantlepiece never went out in the winter, burning with warm orange hues at all hours of the day, but that and a hideous glass candelabra on Ahmed’s bureau (live candles were verboten in the lounge itself) were the only light in the room, giving it a claustrophobic, darkened feel, almost like an old monastery. She was working alone in the lounge when Remus arrived. Except ‘alone’ was an inappropriate word to describe her, Remus thought, because he had never met anyone so perfectly at home in their own skin, even if that skin came off as arrogant beyond all measure. Gloria Ahmed was not ‘alone’ in an aeroplane with God having abandoned the cockpit; she flew solo. Excepting the jet-black Kneazle in her lap, apparently.
For someone who was supposed to be researching the Kissed, her workstation lacked the grave and substantial flair Remus expected. There were no levitating books, no moving photographs to trap the emotionless expression of the Kissed, and not an esoteric diagram in sight. The classic pale beech shelves of her bureau had been replaced with a tall, thin filing cabinet in the practical blue-grey of most industrial metals. Her stationary was monochrome. She had a row of twenty-four biros, each with a sleek unpadded chassis that looked as though they’d be cool to the touch. What’s more, Ahmed appeared to be writing her thesis in some kind of code.
“Can I help you?” she asked, not looking up from her work. She didn’t even stop writing, and in an instant Remus realised he was biting off more than he could chew. Which was saying something, because, well, werewolf.
“Sorry,” said Remus, averting his eyes from her writing as one might from a king. Being caught looking over her shoulder wasn’t an amazing start. “I’d hoped you could help me with something.”
“Doesn’t everyone. If you need a miracle,” said Ahmed, “I’m fresh out. Check back tomorrow.”
“No miracles needed.”
“Good, I don’t actually offer those. I help those who help themselves.”
“Do you know,” started Remus, “How one might go about changing their faculty advisors? Is that something we can do? Or—”
“Yes, and ask them to be one or stop being one,” replied Ahmed, “answered in reverse order. Was there something else?”
It was a shockingly quick defeat.
“No, that was—well, come to think of it,” he said, and she sighed a sigh that sounded like she knew what was coming. “I know what some of the postgrads are doing for their theses—Sirius with his bike, Mary and her protection charm, and Lily is doing…” he paused and furrowed his brows. They weren’t in the same focus area, so it was easy to forget. “…something about heritable curses or the like. Blood and magical mediums of transition.”
That earned a small cackle from Ahmed. “Dark little minx, that one. Friendly as a quokka, but I’d run for the hills if she ever tried to take over the world.”
“You understand how disturbing that is coming from you, yes?”
Another cackle. “Yeah, I do.”
“What about you?” asked Remus. Then, with as much nonchalance as he could muster on the night before a transformation, he said, “I heard, well, that you were doing some kind of research on the Kissed, and I suppose I was curious as to what that entailed.”
Ahmed stopped writing.
“Now that,” she said, swinging her legs around in her seat to scrutinise him from behind her square-rimmed glasses, “is a really weird thing to say. Care to guess why, Lupin?”
Remus swallowed. “I take it you don’t talk about the details your research often with others.”
“Ding ding ding. Guess what you win?”
“what—”
“—another question. Who told you?” she asked.
In the pause that followed, a pause Remus could only stretch for so long before it stopped being dramatic and started being lethally awkward, Remus noticed a handful of things: the crack in her cool clay pot exterior; the way she glanced from his face to her own notes and back, only once, like a suspicious dragon protecting her hoard; and, he realised, that never once since meeting her had she ever seen her look someone in the eye. A connoisseur of lifelong paranoia himself, Remus recognised a kindred soul in Gloria Ahmed.
Rain dappled harder on the bay windows and a sudden gust rattled their brass frames. Both of them looked towards it on reflex, and when they looked back, Remus shrugged. He knew the card to play.
“I’ll tell you,” he said, “if you tell me.”
“Acceptable,” said Ahmed. She set down her simple quill and stroked the annoyed-looking Kneazle brushing up against her ankles. “You first.”
“Well, if it’s so important to you that you think I’ll fall for that—”
“Fine. Fuck me dead,” she said, grumbling, and Remus coughed. “Can’t believe I’m getting extorted by a firstie.”
“It’s been noted for the record. Now, explain.”
“What do you know about the Kissed?” she asked, adopting that instructive tone and losing most but not all of her superiority. She was, it seems, determined to make it a teaching moment.
“The basics, mostly,” said Remus, who did his best not to look at either door out of the room. His ears were keener than they ought to be, and he heard the sounds of students milling back and forth outside the library and in the main exit corridor. “The Ministry discovered how to make them sometime in the eighteenth century using Dementors, they’re incapable of original thought, and most spells directed against them either fail or bounce off. They’re also horrifying,” he added, because they were, “and usually made from the indefinite prisoners of Azkaban. Which is equally horrifying.”
“Colour commentary aside,” said Ahmed, as if they were talking about a Quidditch team Remus disliked and not a means of capital punishment, “what else do you know?”
Remus frowned. He’d been in the habit of failing these little tests, lately, and he was getting sick of it. He wracked his brain and when it came up empty wracked it harder.
“You can stop thinking so hard,” said Ahmed, “because there’s nothing else. They’ve been a cornerstone of Wizarding infrastructure in Europe since their advent, and, as far as I can tell, no one has written down a single curious thought about them in the almost three hundred years since. They exist in records, sure,” she continued, curious brown eyes noting Remus’s growing frown, “and people write about their literal function as cooks or cleaners or train porters, but that’s it. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
It did. It struck Remus as very odd at the same time lightning struck a far, far distance away, somewhere in the anonymous wet fields of the Scottish Highlands. As the flash died, a muffled crowd of voices cried out for someone to don’t do that—
Then the main door of the lounge flew open and off its hinges and Remus hit the floor out of reflex. Above him, Ahmed, who had remembered she was a witch and not just a mortal sack of squishy bits, was brandishing her wand.
Remus looked over. The door hovered mid-air, awkward and out of place, like it’d just burst into the room for a surprise party and crashed a solemn funeral instead. Behind the doorway stood Sirius, less awkward but nonetheless sheepish, probably because he still had his right hand outstretched and the semi-circle crowd around him was staring daggers. Lily, Mary, and Emmeline looked like they wanted to throttle him, while the rest of Theory—Jacob O’Neil and Benjy Fenwick—were bored by the whole affair and proceeded to ignore it.
“Hiya, Remus,” called Sirius. “Ahmed, nice to see you too. Remus—are you ready to go for that thing we talked about?”
The look on Ahmed’s face said don’t you dare, which made Remus want to dare very, very much, thank you. He could blame the moon, but in truth, he just liked pulling his one and likely only victory over on her with no immediate repercussions. She could hardly curse him with the others standing there to watch. And, well, if she did, Mary was an expert healer.
“Yes,” said Remus, making his quick exit from the room. Mary and Emmeline passed them by, also apparently deciding that the whole thing wasn’t worth their time. He ignored their shared looks of incredulity. “Yes, let’s go do that.”
“Oi,” said Lily, grabbing Remus’s arm to stop them. “It’s bloody lashing out. Where are you two pissheads off to?”
“Remus is gonna shag me silly in the autumn rain,” said Sirius, grinning. “Always wanted to do that before I died.”
When Lily stared at him, eyes demanding the truth, Remus only shrugged.
“It’s his birthday,” he said.
***
Inasmuch as a werewolf and a shaggy dog could flirt, he and Padfoot were flirting.
Remus ought to feel awful for it. He would, when he transformed back, and that would ache worse than his jawbone compressing to snap back into place, but that was a worry for a later Remus. For now, his new habit of borrowing happiness from the future suited him well.
All of Padfoot’s initial scepticism was left behind at the foot of the Shrieking Shack, whose crooked doors Remus burst through to leap and dive after the enormous black dog in the rain. Distant thunder rumbled like the breath of a dragon in his sharpened ears; the village of Hogsmeade, mired in grey mists and Scottish fog, were the opposite of enthralling. They attempted to ram one another into great lakes of mud that had sprouted on the flattened hilltops like open sores in the grass and kicked up huge clumps of earth behind them as they climbed rain-slicked hillsides. Animal haste and Padfoot’s shaggy fur kept them dry until they reached the forest’s edge. Thereafter, the high canopy of interwoven branches, wildvines, and spongiform hanging mosses took over that job, and they could just be animals chasing instincts.
Except there was one nagging thing that kept him from doing just that.
Remus was giving in. No longer could he bear to see Padfoot’s sad or confused and always doggy face when his canine science failed him—it crushed Remus’s heart to watch his rain-dripping snout dragged further down by dismay. So, when Padfoot barked to follow, Remus followed at full tilt; when they chased nightbirds and little ickle rats, he read Padfoot’s body language and coordinated their attacks; and, during their infrequent breaks by a wide-trunked tree, where Padfoot’s chest pumped with heavy breaths and Remus’s with exhilaration, he met the dog’s hesitant brush-bys with a nuzzle and solid, lazy lick to the snout.
Padfoot had recoiled from his teeth at first only to be thoroughly stunned by the lick. And they said werewolves couldn’t do magic.
The night stretched on. The more it stretched, the more they tired, and the more time Remus and Padfoot spent huddled by one another to warm themselves against the cold wind and rain as they rested. He found a stony outcropping where wind or another animal had carved out a hideaway beneath, where confused, disoriented roots broke through the ceiling in clumps and cracked bones littered the back wall, and brayed until Padfoot came running. Whereupon, of course, he bullied Padfoot into the shelter to curl around him—Padfoot was half the size of a fucking bear, but Remus was a werewolf and yet slightly bigger, and much warmer, and his fur never truly took on rain like Padfoot’s—so they could ride out the storm in peace. Yet the playful serenity of their forest-running games within games, that night, made it only all the more tragic when a distant howl cut through the late autumn storm like the heavy crack of thunder.
Remus froze the instant he heard it. It was long, very long—his werewolf brain wasn’t keyed for precise measurements of time—and while it should have been inaudible under the hammering of rain on fallen leaves, the howl sang to Remus. It drew him a map. The other wolf might as well have sent up a flare or lit a beacon, because the howl cleared the clouded sky for him like a flash of lightning. His hackles raised. He leapt to his feet at once. A startled yelp came from behind him—he’d trod on someone’s tail. He put his nose out of the shelter.
After the howl tapered off, Padfoot watched him with dogged calm. This was a test.
Remus bolted for the forest’s heart and paid no heed to the barking thing loping after him.
The land itself fought his pursuit. That was a first for Remus. As a werewolf he never paid much heed to the terrain, but never had he needed to: his senses expanded the world around him far beyond what his canine eyes could see into a sprawling, breathing network of motion and scents, of wind and prey and broken skin. The Forbidden Forest was old growth. Tree trunks spanned titanic widths but were few and far between, having culled their lessers more than a millennia ago. Yet soon he found himself turned around on an inexplicable ridge, too high and thick with underbrush to safely leap from. A wall of thorny shrubs dared him to pay their blood toll. When it wasn’t the low pine branches and creeping nets of ivy and occasional thick, silken web to warn him away from an Acromantula’s hunting grounds, it was the cold mist itself, thick enough to sink his teeth into, and needles of rain that began to sting like silver’s touch. Nature itself conspired to keep him away from the other wolf. Nevertheless Remus was determined even as the early morning fatigue seeped into his bones like the storm.
Though he was small and not possessed of preternatural endurance, Padfoot kept equal pace as Remus bounded through the unnatural underbrush with more brawn than finesse. Remus was faster and stronger and a much, much darker kind of creature than Padfoot, but Padfoot had a dog’s mind while Remus’s newfound consciousness was still learning how and when to switch between bipedal and quadrupedal movement. He also didn’t want to hurt Padfoot, even if the dog was trying to herd him away.
Why should the other wolf have to be an or, not an and?
The human in Remus recognised that was exactly the intent of the call, yes, but he was a werewolf, and he felt less and less the need to be obedient. Not to some stranger, in any case. A stranger who, Remus realised with an outranged snarl, had tricked him. Fair foul, foul fair.
Finally he breached the clearing whence the howl came and neither scented nor heard anything but storm. Near centre there was a large, flat boulder as wide as three people or two werewolves, and ringing the entire width of the glade were water-logged fallen trees that played host to the purple flowers of aconite. He’d seen this before, both as human and wolf. Not this place—this arrangement. There was a glade identical to this in the Pyrenees, presuming it hadn’t burned down with the rest of the Village. Or no, not identical: this one was wilder, older and almost overgrown. Vines of ivy and tangled hedges of prickly, sharp-thorned briars with blood-coloured berries stood guard here, but guard of what? Nothing and no one. There was no other wolf.
Remus reared back his head at the lightening clouds and paling grey sky. Howled an angry howl. Betrayal. From the clearing’s edge, Padfoot howled with him.
A moment later, the howl died on Remus’s lips and became a scream, because his spine had snapped and straightened in a matter of seconds. His skin was melting. The full moon was ending and they were deep, deep within the unplotted depths of the Forbidden Forest.
***
“Remus? Remus!” cried Sirius. He cursed a string of rapid-fire insults swallowed by the morning wind and the throbbing agony in Remus’s ears. “Fuck—I can’t see for shite.”
Remus shuddered on the muddy ground of the clearing. It was drinking away his body heat, but that was a nice reprieve—fiery was so often the best way to describe the pain of the transformation. Bones were not meant to be moulded like wet clay. The moon, however, cared little and fired Remus in its kiln once a month, even if it meant that he cracked like pottery every time. He relished his bed of wet grass. It was like a cool compress put on your forehead by your mum when you had a fever. Then Remus’s jaw relocated itself and he bit hard into his tongue by accident. Fresh fire and curse words bubbled up in his swelling mouth. He spat to the side, saliva, blood, and rain meeting the rain-soaked grass. His hair would be filthy. He probably looked like a mudflat Kelpie.
“Padfoot!” croaked Remus. His throat was raw from all the howling. Darkness rimmed his vision when he opened his eyes, but that would soon pass. Even in a storm, the early dawn light was enough for Remus.
“Remus?” called Sirius, and Remus let down his head again to rest. Two bare feet splashed through the glade’s waterlogged grasses, approaching, until Remus felt a cold hand on his neck. Light. Taking his pulse. “Heart’s beating,” said Sirius, “and you’re still warm. Moony? Still with us, are you?”
“Give it a minute longer,” whispered Remus, and he struggled to repeat himself again when Sirius leaned his ear closer to catch the words. Those long dark curls of his were soaked through with rain, whirled by the wind and sticking to Remus’s chest like glue, and Sirius’s teeth were chattering so violently Remus feared he too would lose his tongue. He wanted to tell Sirius to shift—he was naked at night in a late autumn storm, like—but his jaw was swelling at the joint and would remain so for a while longer. This was the part Remus hated the most. The helplessness. The vulnerability. His body always mended in a matter of minutes, but not even the denmothers’ ritual helped with this part.
The icy Highland rain did help, however. That was an interesting discovery. The sheer cold had numbed his joints enough that he could move them without crying out, so he pushed up onto his elbows and spat out another viscous glob of blood and spit. They needed to get out of this clearing—as lycanthropic traps went, this was more or less ideal. Only a blinking idiot would attack a werewolf on a full moon, at the height of their power, when they could wait until moonrise riddled their body with injury.
“Don’t look, Sirius,” he said after a minute. “It’ll be over soon.”
“It’s my fault,” Sirius said, and he cast a glance around the open glade even though it was too dark for human eyes. “We were playing and I let you off your lead—there was this howl, and—fucking hell, Remus, I’m so sorry.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” said Remus. His knees ached a dangerous ache. “Help me up, will you?” he said, and when Sirius did, he let out a long hissing sound like an overinflated balloon releasing painful air. “We respond to the call of our own kind. Doubt there was much you could’ve done.”
It was hard to tell which pain was worse: that of lying to Sirius, or that of his arm threading up and over Sirius’s shoulders as Sirius took most of his body weight onto himself. Perhaps as some small repentance, Remus pushed back against that.
“Give me more weight. My knees aren’t so weak,” said Remus, although they ached like a motherfucker, “and you’re tiny.”
“Everyone’s tiny to you,” replied Sirius, who relented. He paused and let Remus test his land-legs. “Not our fault you sprang up like a beanpole.”
“Fine. You’re perfectly average in size.”
“Cheers, Moony. Just what every lad wants to hear.”
Remus laughed a raw and wheezing laugh at that. Then Sirius budged up closer to him and, a moment later, they began their slow trudge back through the Forbidden Forest. At least the mud would be thinner under the canopy.
“You’ll have to be my eyes. Can’t see for shite,” said Sirius. “Tell me if we’re gonna walk into tree, yeah? Can’t go breaking my nose. My best asset.”
This was worse than a bloody car crash. This was an abattoir of a train derailment. Remus couldn’t even blame the wolf, not fully, and, for the first time in months, Remus realised that they were in a situation of actual mortal peril. There was no suspicious wildfire chasing them down—this death was laid by simple exposure, and Remus had run them directly into its clutches. Sirius was going to freeze to death, and Remus would freeze dragging his body back. The pair of them would either be eaten as carrion or end up preserved by mud not unlike those bodies they pulled out of peat bogs on the Outer Hebrides, a pair of archaeological skeletons that would enter the annals of history as brothers or very good friends.
He had no idea where they were. Nor did Sirius. They kept hobbling onwards, of course, but with how long they’d run into the woods and how little out, they had a long journey to make and no one to help them do it. On occasion they recognised landmarks from Remus’s trail of destruction, sort of, if you squinted and ducked your head to canine height, but equally those might’ve been a false trail. For all he knew they might’ve been wandering deeper into the woods. The only existing map Remus knew of a theoretically-Unplottable place like the Forbidden Forest was kept under glass in a locked room, and, even if someone happened to be watching it at that exact moment, it only extended so far into the forest.
They were on their own. No clothes, no wands, and no one to even notice them missing. Waldeinsamkeit did not come close to capturing the scope of their woodland solitude.
“Tree. Go left,” said Remus, “then straighten back out, like.”
Sirius adjusted their pace and direction accordingly, and Remus’s bones had set in place even if they still felt somewhat malleable. He kept his weight on Sirius, however. Too many overzealous mornings after the moon had taught him better, and, if he was honest, in an hour Sirius would need Remus’s excessive body heat more than Remus needed his support. Give and take. Remus had run him ragged, he realised. As they cleared another wide-trunked tree, one among millions, probably, Remus watched Sirius’s eyes slowly shut and then snap back open. The cold and fatigue were getting to him. When had he last slept? Or eaten? Had water?
“Tell me about the gift you wanted,” said Remus.
“What?”
“For your birthday?” replied Remus, and as the gears turned in Sirius’s head, he noticed the sleep grind out of it. Stay awake, stay alive. He didn’t know if he had the strength yet to carry an unconscious Sirius—maybe if he were a dog. “You said you wanted us to do something special.”
“Remus, you can’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“If we talk about something sentimental,” explained Sirius, “one of us is certain to die.”
“So it was a sentimental thing.”
“Remus.”
“If you don’t talk, you’ll fall asleep, so either get gobbing or shift so I can drag you.”
“Pardon me,” started Sirius, “but I’m the one who’s supposed to be heroically rescuing you, Remus, my fair maiden.” He was still somehow indignant despite being naked in the woods while the sky pissed rain through the high tree canopy. And, really, it shouldn’t have been on Remus’s mind, but that they were both naked and doing a large amount of albeit necessary touching was not lost on Remus. Even in a survival situation.
Sirius, he discovered, had bony hips that dug into Remus’s own stocky thigh as they hobbled onwards. His arms and legs were long and narrow while his torso was shorter and hunched by a purposeful, perpetual slouch, which gave the impression that he’d been stretched against his will as a child and only the core of him had managed to resist it into adulthood. His collarbones were sharp. Protuberant, you could say. His toes were as crooked at his knobbly fingers. And he had body hair! Dark, wispy curls glued down by rain on his forearms and centre-of-chest and lower down his belly still, which is when Remus looked away, cheeks flushed, and muttered, “Tree.”
“The map,” said Sirius, unprompted.
“Thought about that, Pads,” replied Remus. “It doesn’t go far enough.”
“No. The map was the thing I wanted us to do,” replied Sirius, whose teeth were chattering less, now. “Can you manage any wandless magic, y’think?”
Remus shook his head and then realised what a useless gesture it was. That was another problem of lycanthropy: his senses being so sharp, he often forgot that the dark was dark to other people, sounds quieter, &c. &c.
“No,” he said, and then, frowning, “well, yes, but around the moon, it’s unpredictable, like. Remember the door I blew through a wall?”
“Was wondering about that,” said Sirius, wry. “Worried you were catching up to me.”
“I am. I will, soon.”
“We’ll see. Ah, I could do a screen, I think,” he said. Sirius craned his head up at the cracks of early dawn light peeking the forest canopy above them. “Not much rain to stop, though, and the wind’s unpredictable as my mother’s moods. Nasty old gargoyle.”
“Reminiscing, are we? Thought that’s what—”
“—so, about the map,” said Sirius, “I was sitting there one evening, procrastinating—yes, Moony, get your ears checked you dirty old hound, procrastinating—and I thought, ‘Well, it’s it just unfair that Remus can’t reference his own thesis proposal ’cos it’s supposedly a violation of privacy and a security hazard et cetera.’ I have a mind for justice, you know.”
“I do know.”
“And I realised that if it went missing, you would be the prime suspect, ’cos you said only you and your faculty advisors could access it, and they don’t need to steal it, they can violate anyone’s privacy whenever they want. Awfully unfair system. Except they’re all stand-up kinds of witches and wizards, I realised, and there’s no way they’ve been paying attention to the actual details of the map.
“Could you imagine? McGonagall, Dumbledore, and Flitwick sitting around it drinking tea, laughing their tits off watching the names whizz by on the Quidditch pitch? Making plans to appear at inopportune moments when students use those long, winding corridors that never actually have lessons in them? Honestly, the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was likely, but then I realised they did all that before they knew the map existed. A moot analysis.”
“I don’t think any of them have tits, Padfoot. I think the tits go away when you become a professor. Cost of entry, like crossing the Acheron.”
“You think? I think some professors must have tits. I feel as though Charon would get very bored after several millennia if the only thing he had to entertain himself with was tits, and Jesus buggering Christ I can’t believe those words came out of my mouth. Moony, I think something might genuinely be wrong with me. Besides the fact we’re freezing to death in the Forbidden Forest. Well, I am. You’re hot. Warm. You’re very, very warm. What’s also very very warm is my idea, which is more of a question, Remus. How do you feel about committing a crime with me?”
Remus thought about it. “What kind of crime?”
“I haven’t done a crime—which, being honest here, is what a lot of our ‘pranks’ were when we were younger, but you can call them ‘pranks’ instead of, say, ‘theft in a funny hat’ when you’re young—in years, Remus. I wanted us to steal the map.”
“But—”
“—ah, hush,” said Sirius. “I’m getting there. So impatient, Moony, truly it’s unlike you.”
“You’ve seen me impatient once or twice before.”
“Wait. Really? When?”
“Wouldn’t you love to know.”
“I would, yes, Remus,” said Sirius, “which is why I asked. So evasive—”
“—about this crime?”
“So, if the titless trio never looks at the map enough to scrutinise it, and if it going missing is the only thing that would make them suspicious, I had a wonderful idea: what if,” said Sirius, pausing both for dramatic effect and because he needed to manoeuvre them up a short ridge, which took considerable effort and most of the breath from their lungs, sort of like a very long paragraph with only commas, “we made a fake?”
“A fake.”
“A fake,” said Sirius. “We should stop. I need a breather. My lungs are ruined, and it’s all your fault, y’know.”
“I’m gasping for anything to smoke right now, actually.”
“You’re awful,” said Sirius. “Old bones treating you any better?”
“Somewhat better. You’re covered in mud.”
“Thank you,” said Sirius, who lay back on the ridge and then shivered at the cold. “I’d ask you to levitate me so the earth stopped draining me like the harpy vampire she was, but I’d rather not find out what the canopy looks like up close, nor do I fancy entering low orbit.”
“You could—”
Remus fell silent and listened to the rain and wind and tried, vainly, to peer through the forest canopy and get some measure of time, or maybe find an escape route that prevented him from finishing that sentence. Which was stupid, very stupid. This was a survival situation.
“I could…?” asked Sirius.
“I am a warm surface,” said Remus, as mechanical as possible, “to use as a cushion between the heat sink of the ground.”
“Moony.”
“Shut up.”
“There are easier ways to get me to mount you, you know.”
“You’d be a dog.”
“As fascinating and kinky as that sounds, Moony, I have a better idea. You said your magic was explosively unpredictable, yes?”
“Around the full moons,” said Remus. “Three days before and after. Why?”
“Have you practiced conjuring fire without a wand yet?”
“Defence professor still has me moving feathers and lifting things. Getting the swing of it. Ish.”
“Well then, Moony,” said Sirius. He sat up—his entire pale back was caked with mud and his dark curls were thick with it—and his teeth were chattering again. “It’s time you tried. Up you pop—take my hand, now.”
Even naked and covered in mud, Sirius managed to command confidence. Bone-thin and shivering and almost blue in his paleness, yes, but confident and opposite Remus in every way. Remus felt a feverish heat, was burlier, and had tanned as much as a Welsh werewolf could from his time in the Pyrenees. He was far from dauntless, however. Thoroughly daunted. Which was why—after some wandless branch-snapping on Sirius’s part—he hadn’t expected the small pile of branches and twigs to alight in a great gout of flame, which then sputtered in the leaking rain and shrank to a manageable size. Remus stared at his outstretched hand with pleasant surprise.
“I knew it,” said Sirius. “Wormtail might’ve been our master of blowing up shite, but you always were the best at pranks when they involved fire.”
“When you say it like that,” said Remus, “then, yes, they sound less like pranks and more like arson.”
“Crimes in a funny hat, Moony. Crimes in a funny hat.”
They decided not to find out what would happen if Remus tried to snap branches. The last thing they needed was an entire tree coming down on them. Instead, the two of them huddled together by the fire under a nearby overhang, taking turns jabbing at their fire with sticks as though either of them had survival skills. Soon Sirius was levelling a pair of crooked fingers at nearby trees, squinting down the length of his forefinger to aim like a child with a slingshot. Branches from higher and further away snapped off with clean breaks to fall to the ground, and, with a few practice attempts, Sirius began catching them as they fell and reeling them in with a few tugs of precision telekinesis. It took time, yes, but slowly the fire grew. Warmth banished the blue from Sirius’s thin lips. As the mud on their skin dried and cracked, they peeled it off one another, and Sirius, ever droll, joked that they should try a different spa next time.
They were warm enough by the time the rain slowed. It was the Scottish Highlands, so it didn’t stop—it probably wouldn’t for another few hours—but the storm had blown over. By the fireside they formed a plan. When they reached the forest’s edge, Sirius would shift and run ahead, fetch their wands from the Shack, and then they’d be fine to conjure clothes and flee back to the warm sterility of the postgrad lounge and their dormitory.
As they argued over who would use the shower first, Sirius traced the many silver lines across Remus’s shoulders and chest with a light touch that made Remus shiver, although he pretended that was the cold, and Sirius let him pretend. Those were the biggest ones—fewer in number, but they’d made up for that in depth. They started with thin tails that grew wide like a teardrop and often ended abruptly, drawn out of the skin in an instant to inflict some new injury for a new frustration. On occasion they were intersected by another long scar, but most were independent. Each one marked a particular bad night.
On Remus’s arms, the scars were lighter but much more numerous and looked like the hatching of a very cruel sketch. The wolf had been frugal with his hands and forearms—they ended at the low forearm, he supposed, because it had never wanted to disarm itself. As for his face, Remus was lucky. It still kept his secret. He’d had countless cuts and bruises, and his nose broken a dozen times, but they’d often been the result of the wolf slamming his head into a wall or him falling before and after the transformation. That too was another peculiarity of the curse: his claws left behind furious red wounds that fought even magical healing and begrudgingly became scars. His bite was worse, of course: there were only a few ways to close a werewolf’s bite, and none of them pleasant. Tooth and claw.
The scars went lower, too, which was where Sirius’s touch was trailing. The scar on Remus’s right hip was unlike any other. There were deep divots into it that still ached around the moon, and you could pick out the shape and size of every tooth. Most of the mud was gone already. A moment before Sirius’s fingers reached the bite scar, Remus grabbed his hand. Held it, there, just above his hip for a moment. Exhaled.
“Help me up, then,” said Remus. “Still a long way to go.”
Sirius tugged him up to his feet, and it was another hour of walking before they found the forest’s edge. The cloud cover was too thick to tell time, but when Sirius returned from the Shrieking Shack with their wands in his jaws, he said he could see people milling about on the lightening outskirts of Hogsmeade and on the higher hillsides. Lights had blossomed in some of the castle’s higher towers, stained glass windows taking on a gold or white or sickly-blue hue. Six in the morning, or thereabouts.
“Saw two Aurors coming over this way,” he explained. “They’ll be here soon. No Dementors, though, so let’s move.”
It was seven o’clock on a Wednesday by the time they made it back to the postgrad lounge and found that the door would not open for them. It took a further hour and a half for Remus’s tired and oozing brain to churn out the solution: thinking an apology at the door.
Sirius, the poor sod, was dead on his feet. It was Remus’s turn to hold him up.
Remus encouraged several accusations flung by the early-bird postgrads that he and Sirius spent the whole night drinking out in Hogsmeade. It was a good cover story. Then, he dragged Sirius through the lounge and into his own bed—Sirius had done enough without also having to get his sheets muddy—where Remus allotted them a single hour’s rest before they kicked off the rest of their day. Library, flying, research, meals. Their work was rubbish and their sleep schedules were ruined for the rest of the week, but what else was new?
Christ, he needed a cigarette. Maybe something a little stronger.
***
Remus’s brush with mortality made him daring, stupid, and in both adverbial ways curious.
Sat before the dwindling hearth in the postgrad lounge late at night, with each of the seven marble hydra heads casting strange, ominous shadows, Remus set down one of Irma Pince’s recommended texts with the care of a weary librarian. A likely pseudo-Eratosthenic tome, which meant that it hadn’t been penned by Eratosthenes and instead the brilliant (if dull and dry and dangerously soporific) prose belonged to some anonymous author, on whose scholarship he now relied to keep him in the program, let alone on the sofa or chairs before the gently-kindled fireplace. The armchairs were as comfortable as they were beige. If he kept reading, he was certain to fall asleep. Sirius looked almost the same. He hadn’t turned a page of his automotive magazine in over a minute. His pale eyelids were slightly pink at the rim. They looked almost translucent.
“Padfoot?” he asked. Remus snapped the cover shut and charmed it to fly back to its shelf before rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He’d learned that one from Irma Pince earlier that week. “What else do you want to do before you die?”
“Bit personal, innit?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Remus, sliding down in his armchair, “we’re being formal now, are we?”
“Very good, Moony,” said Sirius. He was slumped across the sofa, not an armchair, and yawning perhaps because Remus had. “Try to keep up.”
“Trying. Failing. The world deserves to know.”
“Needs to know?”
“Needs to know. Doesn’t have to be the top of your list, like,” said Remus. “One thing you’d like to do before you die.”
“Fine,” replied Sirius. “I’ll tell you on one condition.”
“I show you—”
“—yes yes you show me yours, I show you mine.”
“That line work often, Pads?”
“Dunno,” he said. “Ask Mary.”
Remus manoeuvred with his elbows on the armchair until he could peek over and upside-down at Mary, who was copying some formulae from a sleek thin tome. Some Oxfordshire manuscript she’d mentioned was supposed to be a handwritten transcription of some unassuming but lost something something &c., he could scarcely recall. Necrologium whatever.
“Mary,” called Remus.
“Yes, darling?”
“Does that line ever work for Sirius?”
“No, darling,” replied Mary. “Not even once.”
Hearing Sirius snicker from the sofa, Remus groped around his surroundings for something to throw and to his misfortune came up empty.
“Pillock,” said Remus, opting to throw insults instead. “You can be so barmy sometimes, you know that?”
“That’s rich, clever clogs.” A return volley. There was a testing look in Sirius’s grey eyes.
“Prat.”
“Yob,” said Sirius. “Oik.”
“Daft daisy.”
“Snobbish prick.”
“Prickish snob.”
“Prickish snob?”
“Snob is the operative word,” explained Remus, “because you’re only sometimes a prick.”
“Ah, that follows. Seeing as you’re always a—”
“—Padfoot,” interrupted Remus, who even three years later rarely won this kind of battle, “would you like to hear my dying desire or not.”
Sirius leaned his head on the arm of the sofa and arched an ironic, dark eyebrow as if to say, All right, get on with it, then.
Remus let his tired eyes linger a moment longer on the dark curls, tired as they were, that spilled over the soft fabric of the sofa. Sirius had such lovely hair.
“Before I die, I would like to,” he began.
Embers crackled and split in the hearth. Mary turned a papery page.
A small distance away, Sirius’s ironic eyebrow arched a hair higher. Well? asked the eyebrow. Is there an ending to that sentence?
Which, if you thought about it, was an impressive display of restraint. It meant Sirius had held back his brow manoeuvring and left himself more room to work in, just in case. Always two steps ahead, Sirius Black.
Remus dug his elbows into the spongey upholstery of the chair and turned over to the other side, his neck and shoulders now dangling over the armrest. He jerked his head to Sirius. The universal signs of a secret. Sirius leaned forwards to meet him, dangling with precarious instability over the sofa. It surprised Remus that he hadn’t toppled over already.
“Before I die,” whispered Remus, “I would like to make a place for people like me. Where we can be safe.” Before he pulled back away, however, Remus tucked a loose lock of hair behind Sirius’s ear and gave himself a moment to breathe.
There was a pensive, almost solemn look in Sirius’s grey eyes. He gave the smallest nod. That was, indeed, a secret. Sirius would keep that one on pain of death.
“Well?” whispered Remus.
“Hm? Yeah, Moony?” whispered Sirius.
“A deal is a deal, Padfoot.”
“Pardon me?”
“Show us the goods.”
“Remus Lupin,” said Sirius, aghast, voice now returned to its normal confident volume. “I am not taking my cock out in the lounge. How dare you. How very dare you.”
Remus rolled his eyes and pulled back to lounge with terrible posture in the arm chair. “Knew it. Coward.”
“I never.”
“Dare you.”
“Remus,” replied Sirius. He was whining, which was usually effective against Remus. “Yours was sincere. You’re gonna laugh at mine.”
“Double dare you, like.”
“All right fine you’ve convinced me,” said Sirius. There was an embarrassed undertone to his voice, and he slid further down until only his lower back was on the sofa. An uncomfortable pose to hold, but Sirius held it. His spine was arched like a cat’s and sucked all the moisture from Remus’s mouth. “You aren’t allowed to laugh.”
“That wasn’t part of the deal,” replied Remus. He raised his voice. “Mary?”
“Yes, darling?”
“Was it part of the deal that I couldn’t laugh at Sirius?”
“Not as I recall.”
Remus held up a flat palm as though he were offering a platter of evidence to a famished audience. “This is a prison of your own making, Padfoot.”
“Before I die,” said Sirius, loud and with chagrin, “I long to have sex to Jazz.”
Remus considered it. “The whole album?”
“Are you offering?”
“Answer the question and I might,” said Remus, and Sirius gave a bark of a laugh at that. For some reason, it hurt to hear.
“Specifically track 12, side B,” replied Sirius. “Don’t Stop Me Now.”
“That song is, what, three minutes?”
“Rude. Very rude, actually.”
“It’s also only been out a week, Pads. I feel like that’s not ‘before I die’ worthy. In fact,” continued Remus, fuzzy brows furrowing, “I would argue that your dying wish is in fact easy to complete before dying.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Moony, but weren’t you the one who said it could be anything, no matter how important?”
“Hm. Was I?”
“Mary—”
“—that is quite,” called Mary, who was still drawing out magical formulae, “enough of that, thank you. Can you two do this somewhere else?”
Sirius and Remus exchanged looks.
“No,” said Sirius.
“No, ’fraid not,” said Remus, nodding his head.
From behind, Mary gave a melodramatic sigh, and Remus heard her set her quill down on the little lectern she’d been using to draw on. She crossed the room with a few long-legged strides and snorted down at the sight of them.
“Jesus, you two,” said Mary. “Don’t tell me you’re pissed again.”
Sirius winced. “Ah, don’t say that. I might still vomit.”
“It’s been weeks, Sirius.”
“No, I’m in agreement with him,” said Remus. They were stoned, but Mary didn’t need to know that. It had been a long, long few weeks. “We’ve succumbed to other vices,” he continued, groping overhead behind himself. His fingers scrabbled and found a crumb-ridden foil wrapper, still rich with the scent of milk chocolate, and waggled it at Mary with a crinkling noise. “Alcohol is a cruel mistress and I shan’t be calling her again.”
Mary took a cross-legged seat between the sofa and armchair, watching Remus with amused brown eyes. “In all the time I’ve known you, Remus,” she began, “I don’t think I’ve heard you call on anyone.”
“Other than Madame ’Hol, of course?”
“Of course.”
Remus touched the tips of two fingers to his lips and, through them, muttered, “’fraid I’m not one to kiss and tell.”
His eyes flicked to Sirius a moment, who was staring back with an intense expression. Like Remus was a book of ancient runes. When he looked back to Mary, however, she was rolling her eyes.
“We’ve told you about Sirius’s first sex—”
“—oh, do not start—”
“—which was also Sirius’s first threesome,” finished Sirius, speaking in the third person.
“And I told you,” replied Remus, “about my and Sirius’s first kiss.”
“that’s not the same.”
“And why not?”
“We told a sincere story about coming-of-age and intimacy,” said Mary. “You told us a story about four boys getting stoned and framed it in the most hilarious, unintimate way possible. You might as well’ve told us about the first time you went to the dentist.”
Remus opened his mouth and found no words, and yet when he looked to Sirius for some kind of defence, Sirius simply inclined his head as if to say, She’s right, Moony old pal, you did in fact downplay that as a way of deflecting from your reawakening feelings.
Or something to that effect.
“I told you lot,” said Remus, groping for a rebuttal, “the same level of detail you told us.”
“Ah, he wants more detail, does he?” said Sirius, who finally slid all the way down and joined Mary at the foot of the sofa. His poor core muscles. “Fire away, Remus. We’re an open book. And I know how much you love your open books,” he added with a wink.
Remus’s heart fluttered. Mary canted her head to taunt him.
“Who was it with?” asked Remus. He crumpled the chocolate wrapper in his hand, “Don’t tell me it was James,” he added, although if he remembered correctly what Lily had said, that seemed unlikely. And the idea of it put a peculiar, hollow sort of ache in his chest. “Or Peter.”
“Why?” asked Sirius. “Feeling left out?”
“Though if I’m honest,” he continued, ignoring Sirius and, yes, flinging the ball of foil at him in a gesture met with mock outrage, “maybe that’s for the best. You and James were always so competitive—I think that’d be exhausting for the third party.”
“It was neither James nor Peter,” replied Mary with a laugh. “Our turn.”
“Why do you get a—”
“—have you, Remus Lupin, had a threesome?” asked Sirius.
“Yes. My turn again.”
At the same moment, Sirius and Mary held out a hand, one pale, one dark, in protest. Remus thought hard about his next question.
“Is it bad,” began Remus, “that it sounds like I’m making a joke out of it when it comes up?”
Sirius gave a shrug to that.
“S’no bother to me,” he said, perhaps a little too quick, or perhaps just as quick as Remus’s own answers. “Keeps the banter going, and you never seem uncomfortable.” Then, with one of those wicked grins that Remus thought should be displayed on a gallery wall for study, he added, “Breaks my heart, though, every time you say you’re gonna shag me and don’t.”
“You don’t mean to say—”
“—oh, Remus, no, don’t do that,” said Mary. It was as though a student of hers had given the same wrong answer to a question for the dozenth time. Except Mary wasn’t a tutor—she was Madam Pomfrey’s assistant. She tutted once, soft, and shook her head. “You’re not interested in every girl, yeah? And Black here might have some questionable interests, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to jump every bird or bloke he sees on the street. If I had a Galleon every time some bird thought I was mad for her just ’cos my door swings both ways…”
“You’d have spent them all on birds who wanna swing your doors both ways,” replied Sirius, and Mary pushed his cheek away when he tried to kiss hers. “Now. Whose turn was it?”
“Ours,” said Mary, doing mental arithmetic on their conversational history. “Twice, actually. One for each of us.”
“Ah. Hm,” said Sirius, who had perfected an ominous tone by second year. “What great power this is. Mary, you go first.”
“Are you,” started Mary, eyeing Remus from head to toe in that predatory, probably somewhat seductive way if you did indeed swing for her doors. She tutted. She toned. She restarted her question. “Are you one of those people who never takes their clothes off?”
Remus frowned at that. “Pardon, like?”
“Do you never go starkers? Are you a fan of the American Amish?” she repeated, churning out various euphemisms with another teasing laugh. “Most I’ve ever seen is you roll up your sleeves when casting sometimes, and even that’s never past mid-wrist. If I ever saw your ankles, I might scream,” she added, wry, and then gestured to Remus’s long sleeves and ankle socks as if to prove her point. Behind her unseen, Sirius looked very pale and was still. Remus imagined his own expression was not dissimilar. At that, uncertainty creased Mary’s face, which was usually unerring in its confidence. “Said something wrong, have I?”
“Remus,” said Sirius. He was hiding the wounds in his voice well, but Remus held up a palm to quiet him anyway and cast a look around the lounge to assure it was still empty. You never knew with postgrads, no matter how late in the evening was. With methodical precision, Remus unbuttoned his sleeve, folded it down to the elbow, and displayed his lower forearm to Mary. While the years had let them fade, and while Remus had got used to them, he couldn’t help but wince watching her large brown eyes go wide as they traced the hatching lattice of pale, silvery scars that circumnavigated his skin. He hooked a finger in the rolled cuff of his sleeve to hike it further, to show how they curved and connected and continued up his elbow.
Because she was Mary, she reached out a tacit finger as if to trace one scar. Both of them withdrew at the same moment, and Remus busied himself with fixing his sleeve. Eyes downcast.
“It’s been a few years now,” said Remus. He fumbled endlessly with the fussy button at the end of his sleeve. “But suffice it to say, I used to be—I used to get hurt, and then I would get better, and then I would get hurt again. It doesn’t happen anymore,” he added, quick, because he saw the gears turning in Mary’s mind, “but these are—”
“—cursed wounds,” said Mary. She was a healer, and so she knew the ways they healed. Her willowy fingers found their way to her temples, where they rubbed small circles. “Jesus Christ, Remus, I’m so sorry I asked you that. And, maybe pass on the question next time it’s uncomfortable, yeah?”
Remus’s brow furrowed. She made it sound like he was the one in the wrong for answering her prying question.
“Cheers, Mary,” said Remus, annoyance plain, “next time I plan to share something intimate with you, I’ll think again.”
“Okay, I don’t know where that tone is coming from—”
“—weren’t you the ones lambasting me for keeping things to myself?” Remus fired back. This felt nice, the anger and giving into it. He would try this more often. “For being insincere? For always making a joke of things? S’pose that’s your speciality, o’course.”
“That supposed to mean something, Lupin?”
“You like pushing everyone’s buttons. Don’t deny it, like,” he added, and she gave a half-shrug as if to deny that she was going to deny it. “You have a reason for that, and I haven’t asked, because I imagine it’s a sore spot and I let people keep some things sacred without any applied external pressure.”
“You—” started Mary, whose expression had turned from an annoyed kind of anger to faded shock. That, in turn, cooled the hot blood in Remus’s veins, and he realised that he was saying words that would be very, very difficult to take back. Mary was always an expressive, excitable person when she enjoyed you, but she could flit, sometimes, to a waspish sangfroid at a moment’s notice. “You make it sound, Remus,” she began again, tone sharp, “like you think I enjoy belittling people.”
Wait, no, that wasn’t fair. She was the one being a berk, and Remus was supposed to be the one defending himself. How did that happen?
“Remus still owes me an answer to a question,” said Sirius, who hadn’t moved a muscle in all that time. Both Remus and Mary turned to watch him, which he took as silent acquiescence.
“Remus?” asked Sirius. “Can we talk in private?”
***
They sprawled across Sirius’s bed like they used to do at night when neither of them could sleep.
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done, Remus?”
Remus thought about it. He had to think hard on it, in fact, before he felt satisfied with an answer. “It changes from day to day,” he said with a shrug. “S’pose I tell a lot of lies to a lot of people I care a lot about.”
“I nearly killed someone,” replied Sirius, tone flat, “and betrayed one of my dearest friends in the doing. All ’cos I thought I was being clever.”
Remus wished that anything, even the scratching of the record player on unsounding vinyl, would fill the silence of their dormitory.
Something inside him gave out.
A moment later, he shrugged. “I change my answer. I nearly killed someone too.”
“You can’t—”
“—not here,” he added, quick, “and it was—it wasn’t like before, unquestionably. This was in France, in the Pyrenees. During the full moon, I found a group of muggles camped out on a ridge and attacked them and almost killed someone. They—well, it doesn’t matter, like. I didn’t do it, and instead I slashed up this stupid old pine. Point is, I almost killed someone, and I wanted to do it.”
A thousand questions bubbled on Sirius’s mouth, forming each one on his narrow, fuzzy lips like a fish gasping for air but never asking them, Remus presumed, because he felt he didn’t have the right. Remus spread his palms.
“Ask away.”
“Beauxbâtons didn’t lock you up for the fulls?”
“Never went to Beauxbâtons.”
“And, hold on—I thought you didn’t remember your transformations?”
“I didn’t,” replied Remus. “Now I do.”
“I—Moony, what the fuck?”
“I’ll tell you everything, Sirius,” said Remus. He knew he would because he had never in his life been able to keep a secret from Sirius Black. Not for long. “Everything. But I need you to promise you won’t speak of it to anyone else.”
He let those words rest in the dormitory a while longer before casting a Muffling Charm at the door. An extra note of paranoia. Then Remus lay back on Sirius’s bed to watch the ceiling, which Sirius had since their first weeks decorated with complex automotive diagrams—diagrams that made no sense to Remus despite being entirely nonmagical.
“I promise,” said Sirius.
“It’s a matter of life and death,” replied Remus, and the implication needn’t be said. Last time had been a matter of life and death, too.
Sirius lay down beside him and, sounding wounded, repeated his promise. “But you shouldn’t tell me if you don’t trust me, Remus. Not if you haven’t forgiven me. Not,” he added, “that you need to ever forgive me.”
“I have forgiven you, Padfoot.”
Sirius gave no reply.
“I think I forgave you a long while ago. S’pose I should’ve said it out loud sooner. That was cruel of me, and I’m sorry. But I was too afraid to write any of you lot back, and—well, I didn’t receive advance notice that you got into the postgrad program, so I left it alone even longer.”
“Remus…”
“I can forgive you. I have. I forgive you, Pads,” said Remus, emphasising it with a shoulder-nudge. Very blokey. Boys’ Club. “But I hope you’ll forgive me if I can’t forget it. Is that okay?”
“It is,” said Sirius, quiet, “’cos I can’t, either.”
Remus groped with exacting care for Sirius’s hand, which he squeezed, and when that didn’t get anything out of him, Remus bumped him harder with his shoulder.
“Ow, you git.”
“Say something, like.”
“Ow, you git?”
“Good enough,” said Remus.
Beside him, Sirius flicked a hand, and for at least the hundredth time that week, Queen’s Jazz, in all its vigorous enthusiasm, began to play through their dormitory.
“I’ll tell you everything you missed without us,” said Sirius, “if you tell me everything I missed without you. Fair do’s?”
“Fair do’s.”
They listened in quiet contentment a while longer. Then, in that short silence between individual tracks, a burning thought struck him. One in desperate need of freedom.
“I fancy blokes, not birds.”
“Remus, what—”
Notes:
Werewolves in this universe can walk upright, though I know most 'classic' werewolves fully transform into wolves. Please forgive my artistic license here, dear readers: I find it sexier when werewolves can pick me and up and hoist me several metres.
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here.
The next chapter, The Box will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 29 November, a Friday. If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendations this week are The Other Side of the Wall (or Laundry Day is Every Day) by BluBerd, a short R/S PWP voyeurism fic, and The Hot Flatmate Conundrum by TherestheSnitch, an even shorter R/J & (unrequited?) Wolfstarbucks pining/voyeurism fic. Don't draw any conclusions about my interests from these recommendations, thank you very much.
Chapter 6: The Box
Chapter Text
An avid reader from an early age due to the ‘infirmities’ of his childhood, as his late father called it, Remus often thought that idioms were dangerous as often as they were misleading. Opening Pandora’s box, for example, bothered Remus because while Pandora herself opened it and unleashed evil upon the world, it wasn’t as if she were responsible for its contents. The box was a wedding gift, a union between her and Epimetheus, but no one ever called it Epimetheus’s box. In some versions of the story, it wasn’t even gifted to them both—Epimetheus owned it and left it in her care, which Remus thought was a really irresponsible thing to do.
If you traced it back further, as Remus had because there was nothing else for a house-bound child in suburban Wales to do between full moons, you learned that Pandora herself was created as a punishment for Epimetheus, whose greater-known brother, Prometheus, had stolen fire from the Gods. Still, no one called it Prometheus’s box. Never Zeus’s box or Hermes’s box, even though they were two of several gods fabled to have made the thing itself. You could hardly blame Pandora. She was so far removed from the issue, and yet the phrase to open Pandora’s box was immortal and meant, as Hope Lupin had once explained to a very little Remus, to set in motion something with unforeseen consequences.
So, while you could say that Remus had opened Pandora’s box by telling Sirius everything, the truth remained that this was a mess of Remus’s own making.
Which was why he was standing in a darkened broom cupboard nose-to-nose with Sirius Black and not in the sexy way. It was far from sexy, really. There was no ventilation, not enough room to sit, and Remus’s back hurt because they’d been standing still for an hour on hard flagstones. He could feel, let alone smell, the sweets melting in his pocket. Yet his heart quickened still.
“This was much easier when we had James’s Cloak,” said Remus.
“Hush!” hissed Sirius, clapping a hand over Remus’s mouth. He thought about licking Sirius’s palm or pinching skin between his teeth—it was the blokey kind of thing to do, or if not blokey, the most Marauder-y—but if he did, well. Observe.
Remus licked Sirius’s cool, clammy palm with as much gross enthusiasm as his tongue could muster, and Sirius recoiled, his face twisted in horror and mild admiration. He wanged his elbow on the cupboard wall, thonk, cursed, and then stared at Remus with a neutral expression. His eyebrow arched at the speed of a villainous snail.
“Remus,” whispered Sirius. He grinned a crooked grin in the dark and it might as well have lit up the whole cupboard. “You don’t know where that hand has been.”
Remus flushed pink. He was getting better at not reacting, of course, but since coming out to Sirius, not reacting became—for lack of a better word—hard. The dark of the cupboard kept his cover like a well-prepared alibi, however, so he shrugged a small shrug.
At normal volume, he said, “No—”
Sirius’s hand shot back to Remus’s mouth. Remus bit it. Sirius recoiled. That was another idiom, biting the hand that feeds, but he’d found in Sirius’s case that bites rarely dissuaded him and, in fact, sometimes encouraged his bad behaviour.
“You’re so feral,” whispered Sirius, mock rudeness abound in his voice, “it’s a wonder they let you back in. Except it’ll be a short-lived return if you keep making noise, ’cos they will definitely expel us for attempted theft.”
“No one can hear us,” whispered Remus, “because there’s no one around.”
“…You’re sure?”
Remus tapped his ears. “Club benefits.”
“You never fail to surprise, Moony,” said Sirius. A moment later, a frown creased his face, which as of late was no longer smooth and pale but instead scruffy-bearded and pale. In the quiet dark of the cupboard, his worried pulse was hard to ignore. “What else have you heard?”
“Only your dulcet tones in the shower and every rude thing the student body says behind my back,” said Remus. It was true. More or less. He tried as often as possible to not violate people’s privacy with his keen senses, although he didn’t always succeed. The heart was one among a number of loud organs. “Could we get out of this cupboard, like?”
“Let’s. Phase three complete.”
“You know, Padfoot,” he said, “It would very much help if I knew what the phases were before we finished them, or what the first two had been.”
“Bup-bup-bup, Moony. Plausible deniability.”
They vacated the broom cupboard while doing their best impression of people who were neither sneaking nor skulking around, although Remus added extra depth to the performance by also trying to convey that they hadn’t been snogging. Not that he wouldn’t snog Sirius, of course. And not that anyone else was watching. Long, high-ceilinged corridors with darkened, ominous ends loomed equally to his left and right. Dim orange flames flickered in metal sconces high up on the smooth stone walls while diffuse blue evening light drifted in through the foggy stained-glass windows. Remus couldn’t so much as hear a rat scurrying about—such was the loneliness of this place. The sixth floor of Hogwarts Castle was host to few important rooms and this corner of it host to none of them, and that abandonment was precisely what made it so excellent of a location for Sirius’s plan. With the exception of a few forgetful portraits and the occasional forlorn ghost, no one frequented these corridors.
Or, at least, never with honest intentions.
Below their exact position was the fifth-floor prefects’ bathroom, which, unlike the corner corridor, saw frequent use for obvious and non-obvious reasons alike. Remus wouldn’t admit it, of course—Sirius received far too much positive reinforcement already for his bad behaviour, and he’d taken recently to flirting with Remus whenever the latter complimented him—but the distraction was a well-thought out one because it was thorough, difficult to navigate, and harmed zero people.
Well. The latter was debatable. Psychological scars were still scars.
“Does it have to be frightening?” asked Remus. Sirius side-eyed him while unstoppering a bottle from which fog rolled in a sinister fashion, like dry ice sublimating on a soundstage, so Remus fanned out his hands in self-defence. “What I mean to say is,” continued Remus, “is there any way we could tone it done, or perhaps change the atmosphere—”
“—if it’s not frightening, then the prefects will think it’s cool and not tell anyone, least of all a professor.”
“I feel awful,” said Remus. “Those baths were the one thing that kept me from snapping when I was a prefect. They’re sacrosanct.”
“Not anymore they’re not,” said Sirius, and he poured the bottle’s contents onto the old flagstones inside the cupboard. “Memento mori, et cetera et cetera.”
An itch ran up Remus’s spine like a fleeing spider and the rolling fog stopped at his boots before it, too, seeped through the cracks in the stone. Each flagstone touched desaturated like they were in thrust into a noir film, but that was the point of the Elemental Genre Mixture. Like much magic Remus admired, it was as whimsical as it was useless, intended to be drunk at a celebration or dinner party and make the imbiber act in a variety of silly ways in accordance with some genre of fiction. Used here, however, the effects would soon carry downwards into the bathroom below, where the lights would flicker or the walls would ooze slime or, if those within were particularly unlucky, the taps might run with blood instead of water.
The hour bell rang again in the evening, deep and ominous.
Remus wondered if perhaps they should have used more adequate protection.
“Phase four complete,” said Sirius, “and just on time. Go on,” he continued, shooing off Remus with a wave of his pale hands, and when that didn’t work, he placed both of his hands bodily on Remus’s shoulders and propelled the werewolf forwards himself. “Meet with whomever it is from the titless trio. I expect they’ll be interrupted soon. I myself have a date with phases six through eight.”
“Good luck and Godspeed, then,” said Remus.
“Honestly, the mouth on you, Moony,” replied Sirius with a grin. “Ta and kisses and all that.”
With a blown kiss and a jog around the corner, Sirius was gone and Remus would soon be late for his scheduled supervised visit to the Marauder’s map. He hurried himself along and tried to calm his coward heart.
After start of term, Dumbledore had moved the map into a storage room not too far from the Headmaster’s Tower out of what Remus presumed was convenience: the Headmaster of Hogwarts was undoubtedly a busy man, and his hours more valuable than Remus’s by at least one order of magnitude. The storage room was a building apart from the now-cursed Prefect’s bathroom and a literal bridge away, but that was part of the plan: to buy Remus time. Some of it burned up in his needing to bound down and then up several flights of shifting staircases, which left him out-of-breath and pink-faced from the exertion, but he arrived more-or-less on time to see Professor Albus Dumbledore stood outside the locked room, as still as a statue and with twice as pensive an expression.
His wrinkled, many-ringed hands were folded at his front in a manner you could mistake for pleasant if you did not have a keen eye for reflex: years upon years of habit that the body remembered even while the mind was troubled and unruly, like a soldier’s postural conditioning. When he was eight, Remus’s mum showed him an album of photos, all grizzled young men lucky enough to come home from the Western Front in one piece or thereabouts—it didn’t matter if they were laughing or crying or caught in a candid moment smoking a fag on the docks, one out of every few had a hard, vacant look to their eyes, the sort of stare that confessed a part of them hadn’t left the trenches. Or at least so his mum had said. He wasn’t the best at expressions, nor analysing them, but there were shades of it here: perhaps they weren’t the same men, but Dumbledore had been painted by the same artist.
Remus had always known him to be ancient, even when they’d met nearly a decade ago, but this was the first time he saw Dumbledore as truly old. He looked tired. Like he hadn’t slept well in years. Caught in a private thought as he was, all whimsy had abandoned Albus Dumbledore and he was worse for it.
“It is impolite, Remus, to eavesdrop.” said Dumbledore, and Remus jumped out of his skin. He was somehow both quiet of tone and loud enough for his voice to carry past the tapestry and around the corner whence Remus was watching. “Even if,” he continued, his whimsy returned, “the conversation is occurring in another’s mind.”
“My apologies, sir,” called Remus. He approached and gave a sheepish look.
“As you are so curious, I will share with you the thought,” said Dumbledore. He didn’t continue, however, and in the pause that followed, the door opened behind him of its own accord. Remus closed it behind them as they entered. No sense it making it do all the work.
The torches inside flickered alive with some begrudging, as though the magic were fickle. It felt darker and more claustrophobic, crowded as it was with old heavy boxes pushed to the walls and stacked taller than Remus, whose own imposing height was already daunting to most. A great number of vast white sheets had been drawn over what Remus could only imagine were priceless antiquities: unpolished suits of armour and unrestored portraits, white marble busts still flecked with paint, brassy ormolu birdcages, odd baroque instruments that hadn’t been strung and tuned in a century, all hidden away and effectively lost in the futile quest to protect them from dust. Yet there’d been a modern addition to this collection. At the end of the room was a lectern with a thick pane of glass and the Marauder’s map beneath it. A bubble of empty space surrounded it, giving the map a strange, almost reverent feel, as though Remus were visiting an ancient holy text instead of a map he and his mates drew up when they were fourteen.
“I often wonder where our legacies begin,” said Dumbledore. He sat in a plain wooden chair soon swallowed by his gold-embroidered grey robes and watched, with a soft smile, as Remus laid out his things on a nearby oak table and began to examine the map. “More often, I wonder if I ought wonder of such things at all. In such dark times, I cannot help but think of the many survived only by a legacy that exists, in a word, unfinished.”
“I’m not sure I understand, sir,” said Remus.
“I suspect because your attentions lie elsewhere.”
Remus was examining the map, yes, but he also gave surreptitious examinations to the lectern and the glass and anything else in the room that might bear an anti-theft or anti-tampering enchantment. The plan entailed not only breaking them—Remus needed to know them well enough to put them back in place exactly as they had been. At those words, however, his head shot up.
“No need to look so nervous, Remus,” said Dumbledore. He was as indecipherable as ever behind those half-moon glasses, because, Remus supposed, being a very expressive person also gifted you with the ability to conceal your emotions when you needed it. “You may not have heard it, but I was once in a program not unlike your own. We called it something else, then, but the principles are much the same. So, too, I imagine, are the stress, confusion, and exhilaration.”
“I think I might focus on looking forwards at my near future, for now,” said Remus, “instead of worrying about my or anyone else’s legacy. I don’t think I have the room for that luxury.”
“I myself often thought the same,” said Dumbledore, “and yet I feel I may have overlooked something in my haste to sever the two.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“I fear our futures are inherited by others as legacies,” said Dumbledore, and Remus realised that they were talking in some roundabout way about his father. Much like his mother once had. It was those little synchronicities that always made the Headmaster seem all-knowing.
“Pandora’s box,” said Remus.
“Indeed,” said Dumbledore.
A moment later, there came a rapid knocking on the door, which, again, swung open of its own accord. It was a blessing. Family wasn’t a keen topic for most anyone, these days.
“Headmaster—oh, hi, Remus,” said Nathaniel North, blinking as though seeing the pair in the same room was a desert mirage. The boy—he was seventeen, but that made him a boy to Remus, who was wiser and much more mature at nearly nineteen—always had the look of someone surprised to be noticed. “Sir, Professor McGonagall instructed me to find you. There’s been a series of strange reports from the students.”
“Such as?”
“Blood from bathroom taps,” said Nathaniel North, who counted off on his fingers as he spoke. “Suits of armour following you when you aren’t looking, and a woman screaming in the distance but you can never reach her. All centred on the fifth floor Prefect’s bathroom. It’s like a horror film, if m’honest.”
Dumbledore chuckled, and North frowned a petulant frown. Like he was often left out of the joke and never once appreciated it.
“A clever use of the Elemental Genre Mixture, I suspect,” he explained, and recognition dawned on Nathaniel’s freckled face. “Where is Professor McGonagall now?”
“On her way to the bathroom, I think?”
“Then I shall meet her there. As for you, Mr. North,” said Dumbledore, rising, “you will remain here with Mr. Lupin until such time we’re certain there is no darker intent behind these events. I am certain you’ll remain safe in his care.”
With that, Dumbledore and his ancient grey robes swept out of the room and only silence remained. Silence and, of course, the very large, very rigid wrench thrown into Sirius’s plan.
“Hullo, Mr. North,” said Remus, pretending he wasn’t in the middle of a crime. “How are your studies treating you?”
“Rotten,” replied Nathaniel. His small, freckled face twisted in on itself like a shrivelling balloon. “NEWTs are a nightmare and I’m going to fail all of them. I barely made O’s on my OWLs, Remus.”
“There are revision groups for that sort of thing, I’ve heard.” Remus opted not to mention that ‘barely’ O’s were, in fact, both still O’s and an accomplishment of their own, though in all technicality he hadn’t ever taken an OWL himself.
“Not for the bloke whose entire year dropped out,” he said. “Everyone thinks I’m cursed.”
“What about—well,” Remus said, trying to split his brain down the middle and across two tasks. He wished he had Sirius’s perfect recall. “I would have thought you had more friends outside your year. James and Sirius—”
“—the same year I got to be friends with those two was the same year they stopped doing anything fun. I might actually be cursed, y’know. Runs in the family. Mum says it skips a generation, but my granddad on her side was eaten by a Grindylow.”
“That’s unfortunate, but not too uncommon.”
“In the desert.”
Remus kept his helpful advice to himself after that. Instead, he thought a moment and said, “You recognised the potion the Headmaster described, did you?”
“Well, yeah. Elemental Genre Mixture. Sometimes the seventh-years slip it to each other on the sly. They call it getting Genroofied.”
“Disturbing.”
Nathaniel North shrugged as if to say, We’re seventeen or eighteen and there’s been a War since before we were at school, so what did you expect? Cheerful humour? so Remus again opted not to pursue it.
“What counteracts the effects of the E.G.M.?”
“Um,” said Nathaniel, who seemed to suddenly realise that Remus was a quasi-staff member and possessed some authority. “Savvy Solution?”
“And how does one prepare it?”
“You just put the page from whatever genre book in last when you make the potion, instead of first—oh, I get it,” said Nathaniel.
“Your classmates might better appreciate your knowledge if they know you have it,” said Remus, attempting to be as gentle as a professor ought. “People have to notice you before they can like you.” Remus tried not to think too hard on the hypocrisy of his words. It would distract him from the work. So, instead, he continued, “I believe that just across the corridor there should be a room with some spare ingredients. Can I trust you to find them on your own?”
“Yes, sir,” said Nathaniel, and Remus realised that might’ve been the first time a student called him sir instead of the Book Boggart or 3L.
“Go on, then, and don’t wander off, all right?” He absently flicked his wand to make a cauldron from a cluster of old pewter goblets in the room, and Nathaniel departed with some haste.
Remus listened to his eager footfalls cross the corridor and the clamour of his search for only a moment before seizing the opportunity to make the switch.
Half an hour later when Dumbledore returned, Nathaniel was quietly brewing a Savvy Solution. Professors McGonagall and Flitwick had both opted to join the Headmaster for his return—Remus imagined that was not Sirius’s intent—and so he sweated figurative bullets and literal sweat while he took elaborate and imaginary notes on the fake map now sitting beneath the glass of the lectern. All three of the professors cast a look about the room as they entered, looking at things that Remus couldn’t see. Their eyes fell only briefly on the lectern before their attention was drawn away.
“Ah, Mr. North,” said Professor McGonagall. Both she and Dumbledore always wore grey, but hers was a dark one, not like a thundercloud about to burst, but instead the shade of a cat in the night. Her gaze settled on Nathaniel with a softness she reserved for tragic students. Remus knew that look all too well. “I am glad to see you hard at work, even in your spare time.”
“It was Remus’s—um, Mr. Lupin’s idea.” said Nathaniel. “It might help some of the other students who got splashed by the effect. Prefects from every House uses that bathroom, so.”
“An excellent plan, Nathaniel,” said Albus Dumbledore. “Particularly so, as multiple Mixtures were deployed around the castle. It seems the library almost became a musical, although a postgraduate’s swift thinking put a premature end to that.” He inclined his head just so to Professor McGonagall, who lifted her wand and tapped it just once.
“Five points to Gryffindor.”
“As for Mr. Lupin, I hope our time away was not unduly harsh towards his studies.”
“Not at all,” said Remus. “Being honest, I think I’ve got as much out of it as I can for my thesis, sir.”
“I hope it was most illuminating,” said Dumbledore, “but, alas, we must venture out on our own eventually. Mr. Lupin, if you would do the honours?”
Remus leaned his head down to the lectern and, touching his wand to the paper, whispered, “Mischief managed.”
***
In exchange for his help in retrieving the map, Remus agreed to assist Sirius with Quidditch practices even though he knew nothing of flying. Emmeline was out field-testing her latest approaches to Unsupported Flight—none of which thus far actually worked, and accordingly meant she was becoming a nightmare of stress to exist around—so it seemed the polite thing to do. That, and Remus was eager to spend time with Sirius, but he couldn’t well say that part out loud, could he? Or couldn’t he? They were playing cat and mouse, or werewolf and dog, and the rules were confusing.
They were familiar again, yes, and yet their dynamic was different than it was three years ago. When it came to Sirius and Remus, concepts of ‘personal space’ or ‘friendship boundaries’ were elastic and more suggestion than law, but there were new connotations to every little action and it was driving them both insane.
Sirius started walking in on Remus in the shower to brush his teeth or take a morning piss. It crossed a few wires Remus wouldn’t have preferred to have crossed, but that was also the nature of Sirius’s existence. He was a little entropic. Possessed of a chaotic aura. It rubbed off on Remus as well, who injected more chaos into their destabilising dynamic by also walking in on Sirius.
With the newfound freedom to study the Marauder’s map at his leisure, the efficiency of Remus’s research accelerated so much that he found himself, curiously, with rare moments of spare time. He’d dreamed of time away from research for months now. Hadn’t he? Yet, not wanting for their arrangement to end so soon, Remus threw himself into assisting with Sirius’s thesis research on the magical side of things. Automotive engineering was an arcane art that mystified Remus, although he loved to hear Sirius speak about it at length. His grey eyes came alive with amazement, and the corners of his mouth—a narrow one framed by scruffy hair and which usually bore a natural frown—turned upwards with mischievous delight. He could listen to him for hours.
And indeed, for hours Remus listened, whether about motorbikes, their theses, or to Sirius recounting the exploits and dramatics of sixth and seventh year as well as the chaos between on holiday. Yet there were points, often when discussing Mary or other women, that Sirius grew shy and then withdrew from Remus’s touch.
That drove Remus mad. Not because he was denied Sirius’s touch, but because he couldn’t determine why or what prompted it, and he’d languish in withdrawals for hours until some unspecified threshold was cleared and Sirius put a cold hand to Remus’s warm skin.
It was safe to say that that Remus was thoroughly smitten.
When they took smoke breaks together, they absconded from the library or their dormitory or on occasion the Quidditch pitch—the later least of all, because Sirius hated the idea of his students seeing him smoke. Thick woollen scarves tucked into the necklines of their winter coats; threadbare gloves with the fingers sawn off, fishing through their coat pockets for a cigarette case; Sirius impatiently rifling Remus’s pockets while his hackles stood on end. Remus always lit his cigarette first and kept it in his lips, and a moment later Sirius would cup a gentle hand in the back of Remus’s hair to draw him forwards and light his own off it. Followed, of course, by a quip at each other’s rolling prowess. By Sirius’s long, crooked fingers and duellist’s dexterity, his spliffs were thin, distributed, immaculate, while Remus had years of dutiful practice over any other Marauder when it came to skinning up fags. An incorrigible team they made.
Remus let Sirius cut his hair in the first week of December. They kept it shaggy, but Sirius trimmed it short enough that Remus’s ears and eyebrows could peek through the edges that flew every which way and so it wouldn’t fall in his eyes anymore.
“Everyone deserves to see those eyes,” said Sirius. “Makes you look like a wise hippy. A thinker, and our Moony’s nothing if not a thinker, in’t he?”
Our Moony. The way his chest fluttered hearing that.
Dressing still happened in separate rooms, usually, but they did away with the ritual strictness of it. Clothing more in general. At first he caught looks at Sirius’s pale back as he changed vests after some flying demonstrations, and a week later by unspoken agreement it was deemed acceptable to lounge about in their pants in the late evening or during an morning lie-in.
When Sirius quipped that Remus had, quote, ‘intimidatingly strong thighs,’ he tried not to think too hard about where that meant his eyes were roaming. He failed every night, of course.
All the sneaking about for an embarrassing clandestine wank grew quickly inconvenient, though he at the very least slept well afterwards. Even if Sirius made the occasional wry remark that, again, quote, ‘Your morning face looks like you’ve just had the best shag of your fucking life, sometimes,’ which being fair to Sirius, was sometimes true of his dreams.
He said as much minus the pertinent details and basked in the mild, mixed outrage and intrigue that twisted Sirius’s jaw into a lopsided grin at that.
How dare Remus keep such gossip to himself?
Then a few days before the December full moon, Remus had a first in the form of declining Benjy Fenwick’s offer for a midnight tryst. It didn’t disquiet Remus that it was the first time, he realised, that he’d ever refused sex since he’d first had it, but he noted it for the record if nothing else because declining said offer before a full moon was, he thought, a sign of strong willpower. A more pessimistic wizard would’ve argued that there were other reasons for Remus’s refusal. He’d spent one overnight and a few mornings in Benjy’s room—his dormmate had been out field testing, and the idea of Sirius’s scandalised look, not knowing where Remus had been all night, made his toes curl with triumph—and while the postgrad finalist was in the shower Remus had tossed the place looking for anything that mentioned Gloria Ahmed’s thesis.
All of those attempts and all the one’s he’d made to get Benjy talking about Ahmed’s thesis came up empty. To make matters worse, by then the guilt was draining any of the fun out of the situation. Benjy was starting to doubt his head game. So he broke things off, or, well, mostly, even though they’d never been walking out together in the first place. Remus doubted Benjy noticed or cared—he’d be defending his thesis in a few months, anyway, and then that would be that.
“Was just a bit of fun, like,” said Benjy with a shrug, after about the third for old time’s sake, which usually coincided with a particularly stressful day of Remus trying to get his maps to behave. Both of them were still slick with sweat, pulses up, skin bared. Benjy only ever smoked after sex—the least boy-next-door thing about him—but he’d grown less cuddly, less cwtch-y, even, and smiled soft at the sight of Remus hastily tugging his trousers back on, Y-fronts lost somewhere to the void of Benjy’s chaotic dormitory. “But if you ever catch the itch again, like, you know I’m always gagging,” he added sweetly.
“Mm,” replied Remus. “Yeah, maybe.” What a master of eloquence he was.
Remus’s body, on the other hand, eventually noticed and cared because it was no longer getting the frequent, frequent attention it so desperately craved. Which led Remus, inevitably, to the events on that inconvenient Thursday morning, the day of the full moon.
It was the penultimate week before Christmas hols, and woke early, far too early for Remus’s tastes, for a Quidditch drill. The student body was barking for the final winter matches the following week and were booking Sirius at ungodly hours as a result. They washed, watered themselves, ate, and dressed as warm as they could manage, only for them to see the heavy snowfall of a blizzard blowing just outside the lounge bay windows as they left.
Sirius sent a courier to inform the students that all drills with instructors would be cancelled due to inclement weather. There was no Emmeline to overrule him—she could be just as mad for Quidditch as the general student body, and often more—so he and Remus had returned to their dormitory at six in the morning, put on a quiet Bolan record, thrown off their trousers and three layers of socks, and laid down on Sirius’s bed, unable to fall back to sleep.
They were a tangle of limbs and yet careful with their knots. They crossed each other at the ankle, and Sirius had trapped one of Remus’s arms under his neck, but all the bits that were important—or, well, the bits that he’d been told were important—were off limits. Ish. Implicitly, and neither of them, he knew, dared to push that boundary.
“Why did you fall out of punk?” asked Sirius. A non-sequitur. He was dozing and tracing little circles on a scar where Remus’s neck met his shoulder. It was distracting, but a good exercise in restraint for Remus. He could blame any inconvenient wood on the early morning. “You used to keep your hair so short, and I never see you in braces anymore.”
“I met an American werewolf at the Village who called them ‘suspenders’, like.”
“Is that why you don’t wear them?”
“No,” said Remus. “I had to choose between the bovver boots or the braces, so I chose the boots. S’pose they’re more expensive to replace.”
“I don’t follow.”
“You remember those pictures I showed you from the muggle newspaper of the Sex Pistols? The ones with the—”
“—where he’s wearing the swastika, yeah,” said Sirius, “I remember. You didn’t love that, as I recall. But they weren’t Nazis, yeah? Just trying to be offensive? Like that other one—London SS.”
“Would you wear clothes with the Dark Mark on them? Or call your band The Death Eaters?”
“S’not the same, Moony,” replied Sirius. “That’s happening to us now. It’s been thirty years for the muggles.”
“Has it?”
“Well when you say it like that, it sounds like you’re burying the lede.”
“Pads, I liked punk because it—well, at first, it had this sort of anarchiste feel to it, but with a commonality in the way people, everyday folk, were upset with the world and their government, who they felt hadn’t only let them down, but had led them down the garden path on purpose. I liked the anti-authoritarianism, and s’pose I understood the idea behind the offensiveness, but…”
“Y’said they wanted to piss off people who used the war as basis for their politics.”
“Right,” said Remus, “but it’s a reactionary position to be in. If that’s all you have, then you haven’t any beliefs, just counter-beliefs. So, you couldn’t draw a line anymore from the unity folks had earlier, like when I first brought you, James, and Peter to muggle London—”
“—Moony,” said Sirius, wincing in disgust, “there was no power nearly half of the time. That’s basically a muggle’s magic. It’s not unity, it’s a return to the dark ages.”
“No, but it was unity, because the mineworkers held up a united front and stood for something together, like.”
“That they deserved more money?”
“That labour mattered, and so did labourers,” replied Remus, “and yes, that that mattering meant they should earn more in a time when their normal wage was becoming worth less and less. Hence, ‘No future.’”
“This is all fascinating, Moony, but what does it have to do with your hair and braces?” asked Sirius. Remus snorted at that, and, at about the exact same moment, Sirius’s other hand jumped up and under Remus’s vest. He yelped—it didn’t hurt, it was just unexpected—and the two noises merged together into an unholy sound like a startled horse that set them both into peals of laughter. And when they settled back down, neither of them commented on the boundary Sirius had pushed. Remus’s legs twitched on occasion, however, while Sirius traced the scars on his belly. This was very past familiar. Not a blokey thing to do at all and against Boys’ Club rules, and not that Remus cared.
“The look that the—do you remember what a skinhead is?”
“Baldish blokes and birds who you used to dress like, yeah?”
“They adopted a working-class aesthetic,” explained Remus, “what with the collared shirts with braces holding up their drainpipes, and it showed others that they were prepared for a fight. Which was sort of the idea, I suppose. ‘Proletariat! We’re prepared to fight!’”
“I’m sensing an ‘except’ or a ‘but’ or perhaps even a ‘however’ coming up here.”
“Except, but, and however,” said Remus, “when you put those two things together, an aesthetic and reactionary offensiveness, suddenly everything was permissible as long as you were doing it to ‘spite the man’. So, instead of labour strikes and, I don’t know, other collective things they could’ve done, some of them started doing things like attacking immigrants.”
“Ah.” Sirius’s hand stilled on Remus, which was probably appropriate.
“A lot of punks call themselves apolitical, but—well, I can hardly think it’s appropriate to call oneself apolitical if you aren’t bothered milling about with fascists and neo-Nazis.”
“That,” replied Sirius, “sounds about correct. But, again,” he continued. “Hair? ‘Suspenders’?”
“Punk is split down the middle, and you can’t tell at a glance if the folks wearing the swastika shirt or whatever other manner of offensive apparel is doing it to be offensive or out of genuine belief. Which means we’re not thirty years removed.”
“Ah—hm. I think I follow, now.”
“Give it a go, then, Pads.”
“If you looked like a skinhead, then no one knows if you’re a skinhead skinhead, or if you’re just a punk with that aesthetic.”
Remus ruffled Sirius’s curls and, in response, Sirius started tracing his scars again. He twitched again—Jesus, Remus realised, he was basically as much a dog as Padfoot—and cleared his throat.
“I still consider myself punkish, like,” said Remus. “Can’t really afford to not wear the button-downs, what with the coverage, but if I ditch the braces and keep my hair long enough, hopefully I won’t resemble a walking threat.”
“Said the werewolf,” replied Sirius, grinning, “whose height may only be appropriately described as imposing.”
“Well, we don’t all have your legs for dresses, now do we, Padfoot?”
Sirius snorted at that. So did Remus, who realised, perhaps for the first time since he’d met Sirius, what was happening. There was a science to his boundary-stretching.
As they snickered at one another in the high-like state you could only get from an overtired early-morning lie-in you hadn’t expected to have, Sirius traced a light hand along a scar that went diagonally from Remus’s navel, across his soft but firm belly, and to his right hip. His eyes flew closed and he shivered violently in their tangle as Sirius touched the first silvery divot in his skin where a wolf’s teeth had broken him long ago. His index finger felt the contour of the scar, while the rest of Sirius’s hand rested on the thin fabric covering Remus’s sturdy thigh.
When Remus settled down again and stopped twitching, Padfoot folded down the waistband of Remus’s Y-fronts on one side to expose more of the bite scar. That was when Remus took hold of Sirius’s wrist, firm but light, although Remus didn’t move him away. Both of their pulses were racing. He heard them. Felt them. Almost he could scent it in the stale air of the dormitory. Excitement. Agitation. Sweet and earthy, almost pungent, the smell of a stormcloud before it breaks.
“Padfoot—”
“—sorry, Remus, I shouldn’t—”
“—Padfoot.”
Sirius fell silent. Remus took a series of measured breaths, in and out, and ruffled Sirius’s hair again before he let go of his wrist, which, wisely, Sirius kept still. Maybe because of Sirius’s patience, or maybe because of his own lack thereof, Remus hooked a thumb in the side of his pants and tugged them down on the right side. He was careful not to reveal anything indelicate—not that there was much to hide, he was painfully hard already and no amount of fabric could hide it—and then tapped his forehead to the side of Sirius’s head as if to say, There. That’s the bite that began it all.
It was Sirius’s turn to ruffle his hair, which stilled some of the shaking in Remus’s limbs. Only after that did Sirius feel the shape of the mark. “You’ll tell me,” whispered Sirius, “when I push your boundaries too far?”
“I like when you push my boundaries, Padfoot.”
“S’just. I don’t wanna end up on the outs with you like Mary, is all.”
Well, piss. When he put it like that. “I should talk with her, shouldn’t I?”
Sirius nodded and, even with his eyes closed, Remus felt it. A short while following, he felt Sirius’s palm press flat against the bite mark where hip met thigh met crotch and Remus thought he might have a seizure. Jesus Christ. Talk about crossing wires.
“Pads,” he said, “I’d like to, but—”
“—the moon. I know. I wasn’t.” Sirius moved his hand back up to Remus’s belly and then chest. Remus kept the mark exposed in case Sirius’s curiosity returned.
“You’re staying here for the hols, like?” asked Remus. Non-sequitur. They shifted seamlessly back and forth like that often, although, Remus realised, this was probably a Rubicon you couldn’t uncross. A bell you couldn’t unring.
An idiom that Remus really didn’t like.
“I am,” said Sirius. “Why?”
“How would you feel about spending the holidays together?”
Sirius snorted. “S’pose we were gonna do that anyway, yeah? ’Less you mean as a date.”
“I do.”
“Ah.”
“‘Ah’?”
“Ah.”
“Padfoot.”
“Hold on,” said Sirius, and he groped for Remus’s wrist. “Let me borrow your hand, would you, Moony?”
“You already have one of my arms.”
“Need your hand. Give it,” said Sirius, and Remus relented. “Good boy.”
Using two of Remus’s fingers, Sirius. pinched the loose skin from his arm between two of Remus’s fingers.
“Ow.”
“Did you—”
“—had to, thought I might been dreaming.”
“Bloody weird dream, that,” said Remus. “Fascism, trade unions, and Christmas holidays. Hold on, do me now.”
“Remus.”
“A pinch, you twat.”
Sirius pinched him.
“Well, bugger.”
“Ah, cheers, Moony, great to hear that.”
“What am I supposed to say to Mary?”
“Dunno,” said Sirius. “Figure it out after the lie-in. Your sweat gets all sticky when you’re anxious and it’ll ruin my sheets.”
***
Whenever fresh snow fell over the castle grounds and dusted the sky-sprawling trees of the Forbidden Forest, Remus liked to close his eyes and breathe in the silence. Snow had a way of making the world quiet, even to a werewolf. It reminded him of the Pyrenees. Peaceful isolation. Except he wasn’t alone, not then and certainly not now.
The full moon rose and fell uneventfully by previous standards. Neither of them wanted a repeat of their last expedition, and playing just the tip with the Forbidden Forest had an amusing appeal in itself. They took special care to remain only deep enough in the forest to conceal themselves from the Auror duo that seldom patrolled the treeline. Too shallow, and they risked discovery. Venturing further, however, invited the attention of more sinister creatures: though the Dementors patrolling the castle’s furthest boundaries ignored them when they were wolf and dog, only Sirius could transform at will, and neither of them had the facility to manage a Patronus Charm without a wand. It was a bit of a balancing act, a bit of a game. The more he played it with Padfoot the less he could focus on the stakes involved. That sort of thinking made no sense to a werewolf of hot blood.
With no distant howl to lure them like a siren in yet another storm, he and Padfoot lost themselves in the fresh snowfall, tumbling together and wrestling until the horizon was lost to the forest floor and they couldn’t tell in that billowing fog whether they were falling down or up into the night’s sky, where, in private, Remus thought Padfoot belonged, like an unafraid dark star that had come down to visit him for a white night.
After the moonset, while he lay waiting in the Shrieking Shack for his skin and bones to mend, he realised he needn’t keep such thoughts private anymore. In his raw rasp of a voice, he said as much to Sirius.
“We were playing in the sky,” said Remus. “You’re beautiful. We were beautiful.”
“We were,” said Sirius, and his smile was the sun.
What Remus kept to himself, however, was his knowledge of Sirius’s science. He was still doing it—assessing Remus’s limits as a wolf and all the ways he was different from their schoolboy days.
That was a dangerous thought. An accusation, really, and fighting with Sirius so soon was a surefire way to lose him again. Three years of momentum took time to rebuild, and as much as they bantered and sniped and lay together listening to records for hours on end, Remus knew that pushing past something necessarily meant you could never return to the ways that things were—you moved forwards or backwards and never both. You had to choose. And if you both chose different paths, then there was only one way for things to end.
Remus put away those thoughts for the holidays much like a toddler tidying their room for a formal visit. He could enjoy playing this uncomplicated game with Sirius for a few more days. With fewer students to bother them—although, as Remus had gathered, many more students than he expected chose to remain on the castle grounds for the holidays, which was a grim portent for the tides of the War—they scampered about the castle in the week before Christmas like mischievous churchmice.
On Christmas Eve itself, they used their executive privilege and purported authority to imply but not outright state that the general student body was forbidden from occupying the grand clocktower. It helped, of course, that the fifth- and sixth-year crowd used it as a clandestine smoking spot. Ghosts refused to enter it for reasons unknown to Remus, and even Hogwarts’ resident poltergeist, Peeves, something of a chaotic snitch and therefore a historical thorn in the Marauders’ collective sides, was cowed by its imposing presence, giving the clocktower an air of grave power and mystique. According to known lore (or at least that lore which was known to Remus), nothing could banish or truly harm a poltergeist as they’d never been alive to begin with. They were more ‘concept’ that ‘Being’. Anything that worried the amortal, Remus reasoned, ought worry more the mortal. In particular if they were impressionable young students.
It helped that Remus used his librarian and definitely-not-werewolf powers to appear atop the steps in his mysterious and imperious ways. Sirius cackled as the students fled.
“The Book Boggart strikes again.”
“Should be thanking me,” said Remus dryly. “They’re going to ruin their lungs, like.”
“They are, they are,” said Sirius, absent. He lit two spliffs with as many snaps right at their ends—the Defence professor had moved him onto wandless fire for a few weeks, now, and this was his new method of showing off—while Remus stared out the glass clock face of the tower, which had iced over only at its bottom edge. The frozen expanse of the Forbidden Forest swallowed the end of the bridge that led out from the castle and melted into the horizon. It gave the impression that they weren’t just postgraduates—they were lonely scientists in an Antarctic research laboratory, cut off in all ways from the outside world.
In times like these, the isolation made Remus felt safer than anything else.
On all sides of them were a mess of arcane brass clockwork that Remus had never known to slow or decay, spinning with a certain and unyielding force that, in a way, embodied Hogwarts. It was untouchable. A fixture of the land. The massive bell suspended above their heads and the golden pendulum swinging down beneath their platform looked to be the work of Giants, Giants who were unconcerned by the trivial matters of mortal people or, perhaps, had died long ago and thus never could have cared.
Remus wondered often about how Rowena Ravenclaw went into seclusion for a year and a day before agreeing to work with the other Founders and open the school. No written record of that time existed, so Remus’s imagination ran wild. What thoughts had plagued her? What worries? Had she, like Dumbledore, grown preoccupied with the reach of her legacy?
“Moony? Oi, Moony,” said Sirius, nudging him with an elbow. “You’re wasting a perfectly good spliff there, you plonker. Skinned it up myself.”
“Sorry,” said Remus. He took a drag off it and hoped that it might untwist the tangle of piano wire currently wintering in his gut.
“Knut for your thoughts?”
“‘What’s past is prologue.’”
“And this lovely quotation of The Tempest means, here…?”
“S’pose I’m feeling lonely,” said Remus. “Trying to figure out if it’s a good or bad thing. You sent those gifts off for Lils and Mary, yeah?”
“Posted them a few days ago, and the ones for Prongs. Told Lily to send ’em up James and Peter’s way.”
“Left the rest of ours under the tree in the lounge,” said Remus. “Think we covered everyone, even if most it was sweets and socks.”
“You’re so domestic.”
“Easily domesticated, yes,” said Remus, “by cheap sweets and nice socks. My weakness, actually.”
“Duly noted for next year. Merry Christmas, Moony.”
Sirius passed him a simple ribbon-wrapped box with no fanfare. It was a worn, thin, workbook-looking thing, and inside the front cover were the simple words, TO MOONY, LOVE PRONGS, PADFOOT, AND WORMTAIL. Remus recognised it immediately as the book in which they’d kept all their collective notes on the first iteration of the map.
“You said—”
“—James found it in an old trunk, posted me a week ago,” said Sirius. “Was right chuffed about that.”
With the halfway mark of their first year having, it felt, arrived so abruptly, their gifts had taken a turn for the academic. It was funny—Remus was finally having a go with Sirius, and although both of them were trying in earnest, it was still like playing chicken. He, James, and Peter had added condoms to the pile of gifts for Sirius’s sixteenth, and now here they were. Their breaths iced up mid-exhale, intermingled, and Remus wanted to be those breaths as much as he wanted to be the scarf about Sirius’s neck or the chill pink creeping up his neck, into his cheeks, warming his ears.
“Merry Christmas, Padfoot,” said Remus.
From Remus, Sirius received a special-order tome that Remus only knew existed because he found a discarded index card for it in the library, after Irma Pince had assessed his performance and deemed it adequate enough for further training. Principles of Energetic Transmutation was a hefty tome of nearly a thousand pages, two hundred of those in the appendix alone, but he thought it might help Sirius with some of the concepts he was proposing for his increasingly wild and sprawling thesis.
“Moony,” said Sirius, “you cad. This is disproportionate. This is cheating.”
“S’a selfish gift, really. I’ll be reading it as much as you.”
Sirius beamed, and, outside the rounded clocktower window, Remus swore that the snow began to melt in the sunrise.
“It’s perfect,” said Sirius. “You know I’ve been obsessed with trying to make this thing air-tight.”
“Is ‘air-tight’ the right word for a motorbike?”
“Magically speaking, Moony!” cried Sirius. “The goal isn’t just to make a bike that flies, you know that. I want a work of art. My pièce de résistance. Something that moves seamlessly between worlds and doesn’t even register as magic until it lifts off the ground and you can’t believe you’re flying. My motorbike,” he continued, throwing an arm around Remus’s waist, “will be a ballet.”
“A tragedy, then.”
“Cruelty,” said Sirius, lamenting. He didn’t remove his arm, and Remus didn’t worry, because Sirius, whose thin eyebrows came only to Remus’s shoulders, did that sort of thing often. Everyone knew they were close. Not acting close, in fact, would blow their cover, so he put his arm over Sirius’s shoulders in return. “Cruelty,” Sirius repeated, “and on Christmas Eve, no less.”
Remus took another drag off his spliff and tried not to look Sirius in his pleading grey eyes. They caught the refracted white-blue light from the glass of the clock face and gave them a reflective, irresistible sheen. Sirius whined out loud and Remus knew he was seconds away from becoming a dog, so he laughed and relented.
“All right,” said Remus. “I yield. Expound away, oh master of the ballet.”
“So I was reading about this Soviet scientist,” began Sirius, excitement brimming in his voice, “and the things that muggles were doing with their planes regarding radar, and I thought, what if I incorporated this into my thesis? Half the problem with brooms in times like ours is that they’re only hard to spot if you’re looking with your eyes and not your brain, ’cos any half-decent detection spell will make them light up like a firecracker on Old Year’s Day. And the same goes for all the disillusionments and everything else, really.
“We can’t do much about that with a broom, but while I was reading about the combustion engines and heat sinks and complex cooling systems of muggle vehicles—terrifying stuff, Moony, if I do say myself, I dare say muggles should be the ones hiding themselves from us, sometimes—I realised that, well, you could bring the two together. Like how we have torches and lamps and record players that work without electricity. They never get hot ’cos, well, that’s not how magic works, but then the thought struck me.
“What if,” said Sirius. Then he paused for dramatic effect and squeezed Remus’s side as they waited, earning a snickering yelp from the werewolf.
He continued to wait.
“Anytime now, Pads.”
“Actually, I sort of wanna hear you ask for it.”
“Pardon?” said Remus. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to make a confused or intrigued face and landed somewhere in the middle, which made Sirius snort.
“Beg—wait, no, hold that,” said Sirius. His neck flushed but his face stayed pale, because he was Sirius and always had a good poker face when he wanted it. “That sounds kinky and I don’t wanna mix academics with sex. It’ll ruin me. I take it back.”
“Oh, Padfoot,” said Remus, bumping his cheek down and against the mess of Sirius’s curls. “I beg of you, you genius, you ravishing fiend, der du von dem Himmel bist—”
“—stop—”
“—won’t you titillate me with the details of your most marvellous thesis?”
“More cruelty.”
Remus cast a look around the clocktower—he’d have heard anyone come up, but paranoia compelled him nevertheless—and then lay a gentle kiss where Sirius’s curls met his forehead. He was coming around to that, slowly. Kisses were weird. Sure, he’d had sex, but neither the boys he’d Biblically known in the Pyrenees nor Benjy Fenwick had been very interested in that, and nor, for that matter, had Remus. His had been a more carnal kind of urge.
“‘Titillate,’ Moony? Titillate?”
“It was the first thing that came to mind. Continue.”
“I wanna use the automotive bits and bobs of the bike as part of the charm,” explained Sirius. His tone had grown solemn, and, as happened often lately, Remus remembered that Sirius was not just a rebel, but also possessed of a keen and creative mind. “Take all that stray magical energy that could be picked up by magical detection and turn it into, say, heat, which goes out the exhaust like normal instead of cooking you in your bubble on your broom. It has all the infrastructure already, and you’d have to know what you were looking for to spot it.”
Remus blinked. “Sirius, wait, that’s actually—”
“—not unlike opening Pandora’s box, yeah,” finished Sirius. “You ever wonder what happens to all the theses after a postgrad’s done with them? As in, what they’re for?”
Yet, before Remus could answer, he heard a distant rumbling, like an avalanche, and the corner of the sky darkened just within the eyeline of the clock tower from its pale morning grey into a dark and ominous black marred by an unmistakeable glitter of emerald green.
A moment later, Sirius heard the noise, too, and they clutched each other a little tighter.
Another moment later and they were flying down the stairs of the clocktower, minding with some care the great swinging pendulum of gold, and then they were out on the bridge to the Forbidden Forest, staring over the castle spires and parapets to the skies above Hogsmeade. The dark clouds reshaped themselves, slowly, into a decaying emerald skull from whose mouth came a slithering and indifferent serpent, because terror and death had little need to rush. He’d seen countless photos of the Dark Mark in the Prophet. None had done it justice. Remus stared, slack-jawed, up at the sky, and tried not to entertain the feeling that his entire world was abruptly splitting apart at the seams. This sort of thing didn’t happen here, he thought, in the presumably timeless manner of people who’d lived through ‘this sort of thing’ for millennia before.
“Shite,” whispered Sirius. He gripped the cold wooden railing of the bridge until his knuckles turned white with exertion. Remus blinked twice and finally looked away from the Dark Mark. “Shite—Remus, we should—Jesus Christ, what do we do?”
“Too late for students to be out of bounds,” whispered Remus. “Let’s—we should check no one’s on the other end of the bridge and then bring students to the Great Hall. Protocol.”
“Protocol, right,” said Sirius.
“For a—”
“—an attack. Jesus.”
While there were no students on the bridge itself—you could see down the whole length of the rickety thing despite its years of wood warping—there was, as Remus knew well, a clearing at the end with a small coppice of trees where students liked to lounge and/or bunk off lessons and/or smoke, more so the latter two in the winter. It was a private spot, as most of the younger students feared the Forbidden Forest with good reason. Which is why it came as no surprise that Remus and Sirius would find a small crowd of students looking upon the faded green robes of Severus Snape.
Principle among that crowd, a half-step ahead of all the others to designate him as their leader, was a seventh-year student with squarer features than Sirius and wavy dark hair instead of curls. Otherwise, they were frightening alike. A glimpse into what Sirius might’ve become if no one had fostered the warmth in him: all neatly-hemmed black robes with pressed white French cuffs peeking out from beneath their sleeves with odd monogrammed cufflinks in triplicate, R.B.A., and everything and everyone around him trying and failing to hold his darling attention or to meet his lofty standards. The essence of old and ancient wealth. Distilled. Ice Prince as he was, Regulus Black had the look of a very bored king holding court among boring subjects, although his eyes lit up with a wicked interest when he spotted Remus and Sirius watching them. Le roi s’amuse.
“It appears,” said Severus, his flat, droning tone dripping with venomous derision, “that our conversation is no longer private.”
With that, the crowd—Regulus, three other seventh-year students from Slytherin and Ravenclaw that Remus vaguely recognised, and a single sixth-year from the former—all turned to watch them. There was a girl with dark V-shaped eyebrows and a bored-looking boy with messy brown hair, both of whom, as the stories were told, narrowly avoided punishment in some situation involving Mary Macdonald after he’d left school in fifth year. Something Avery and Something Rosier, new lieutenants to Regulus Black. It was as though he’d trod wrong and depressed a landmine, but hadn’t yet lifted his foot to trigger the explosion. Remus’s ears picked out the hammering heart and rushing blood from Sirius beside him, and Remus realised he had only a few moments to defuse a very, very volatile situation.
“Severus, would you care to escort these students—”
“What the bloody fuck,” said Sirius, “are you lot doing out here.”
It wasn’t a question. Remus wobbled, briefly, between the position of prefect and friend, before it struck him that he didn’t particularly care about getting in trouble if it meant having Sirius’s back. Some things never changed.
“Protocol dictates—” began Remus.
“—that we, as staff,” said Severus, rolling his eyes much to the amusement of his onlookers, “remain in place until all those in the area have been gathered. Yes, Lupin, I have read the protocol, even if your illiterate mind cannot.”
“Really?” spat Sirius. “What part of the protocol includes indoctrinating students into your greasy little fan club? Do they each get a chemistry set, or do you all share your late father’s?”
Something was different. Rather than fly into sudden and incontrollable rage as Remus had known Severus to do, a cold look hardened, instead, like ice in his dark eyes, and Severus’s melting-wax droop of a face became illegible.
Behind the crowd there came a rustle from the bushes. Remus and Sirius drew their wands and levelled them at the woods, while Severus, again, only rolled his eyes. After a moment, Rucha Nagar’s petite figure emerged from the bushes carrying a full wicker herb basket in one hand. It was loaded with mosses, toadstools, and other less-identifiable local flora. She raised her free palm slowly.
“Greetings,” she called to Remus and Sirius. “I come in peace.”
Remus frowned and tried with only moderate success to conceal his surprise as they lowered their wands. Rucha? He’d chatted with her many times despite having different focus areas, and she hadn’t struck Remus as the dark witch type. His thought was cut short: a practiced imperial laugh came from the front of the crowd, where Regulus stared past Remus and at Sirius with mocking delight.
“Mad Black,” said Regulus, “and Loopy Lupin. I suppose Dumbledore lets any dreg in to their once-esteemed programs.”
Remus fumbled for a credible threat. “No more lip,” he said, “or—”
“—what? You’ll take points? Forgive me, I’m trembling.”
“Reg, shut up,” snarled Sirius. His blood was pumping so fast Remus thought he’d have a heart attack. The words landed with mixed impact, cowing Regulus perhaps out of instinct, although the younger Black hardened. Neither one enjoyed backing down in front of a crowd. “This isn’t family dinner. Snape’s not gonna pat you on the head and give you a pony to torture ’cos you jumped through all his hoops.”
“What do you know about family?” asked Regulus, his poise cracking. “Remind me, did any of those blood traitors you love so much invite you into their homes when you ran away? No?” Regulus tutted. “What awful cousins.”
“Oh, Reggie, just ’cos they refused to shag you—”
“I don’t know,” said Rucha, very loud, preventing any reply from a now red-faced Regulus, “what is going on.”
“There’s been an attack in the village,” said Remus, “we think, and protocol—”
“—oh, you think,” interrupted Severus. Although his tone and face never wavered, the choice of his words and his frozen demeanour conveyed both his amusement and disdain for Remus. “Truly, the mark of Gryffindor, whose barbarism is rivalled only by the stupidity with which they rush headlong into danger. Except—Black,” he said, abrupt.
“Yes?” said Regulus. Sirius fumed.
“Which direction is Hogsmeade from here?”
“Why,” said Regulus, “it’s back the way they came.”
“Hm,” said Severus. “How odd that these exemplars of their former House chose to run across the grounds and opposite the direction of danger. In any case,” he continued, “five points to Slytherin.”
“Okay!” called Rucha. She was small enough and wore such unremarkable plain robes that you often forgot she was there, but her voice could carry across a room—or, here, a clearing—when she needed it. “I’m going to ignore whatever this is and take these students back to the Great Hall.”
“And I,” said Severus, “shall accompany you.”
“Watch yourself, Nagar,” Sirius called after Rucha. She led the crowd past them and didn’t look back. “And cover your drinks!”
On the bridge, Severus stopped, remained still a second, and then continued walking. Rucha herself didn’t break pace. They grew smaller and smaller as they followed the crooked wooden bridge, and, a few minutes later, the castle keep’s distant doors swung shut. They were alone at the edge of the forest. A bird took flight from a nearby branch with a rustle. Sirius was yet heaving breaths as heavy as they were angry, while Remus ran his hands through his hair, trying to focus. He did small arithmetic in his head to little effect.
“I’m so sorry, Padfoot.”
“Not your fault,” said Sirius. He crouched low to the ground like he usually did when he was drunk and feeling ill, and then, with a mutter, said, “Skunk made me slow, too.”
“You know I’m not great with the rapid-fire clever insults.”
“Except when it’s me, evidently.”
“I like you.”
“Y’know, Lupin,” replied Sirius, “you’ve got a fucked up way of showing that.”
“Don’t I know it.”
It was meant to be hurtful—it always was, really, when Sirius dropped his surname instead of ‘Remus’ or ‘Moony’—but Remus let it slide, partially because it was true and partially because it was Christmas Eve and, partially, but the biggest partially, because Sirius’s family drove him mad to a degree unrivalled by anything else and in a way that Remus would never understand. Remus was an only child—or, well, he’d learned later in life that he’d had an infant brother born the year after he was bitten and who died of SIDS, which gave some context to his parent’s inner lives and little comfort to Remus—and while his father had been a distant man and his mother often too close, his family had at least at some point tried to love him. Remus never had to run away at sixteen, even if at times he’d wanted to. So instead of snapping back with an insult, he crouched down beside Sirius until their knees were touching.
“I know you’re afraid for your brother, Sirius.”
Sirius snorted at that and then coughed and Remus realised, of course, that Sirius was keeping his head to the ground because he was crying in that silent way tormented children learn to do. No cure existed for that kind of ail. Remus settled for putting a gentle hand on his back.
“I won’t say it was nothing. Being mentored by Severus is a bad sign,” said Remus, speaking quietly. “But, while he’s still here, he’ll be kept out of trouble. We’ll figure something out. Some way to help him or stop him from getting himself hurt. We always figure out something, don’t we?”
“Clever clogs,” said Sirius, sniffling. “Bugger, I’m crying like a bloody bird.”
“As beautiful as a dove,” said Remus.
Another snort and cough. They waited a few minutes longer, stood, and Remus took a moment to fix Sirius’s hair, which had grown damp by the touch of snow. Brushed a gentle thumb under the darker circles beneath his eyes.
“We should head for the Great Hall,” said Remus. “They’ll be waiting after us.”
And they were—the Defence professor, whose name, somehow, Remus still did not know—spared them a long lecture only because she was being drawn every which way by her bald scarecrow limbs. The Great Hall was a riot of clamour: Heads of Houses pacing down every table attempting to herd students back to their tables, craning necks, a sea of whispers, the translucent silver silhouettes of ghosts floating, solemn and serene, high along the walls. Everything demanded her attention, from distraught prefects to wailing students to the occasional concerned member of staff whispering something up her absurdly tall neck and under her floppy Hessian hat.
“Protocol saves lives, Mr. Lupin,” she said, dismissing another prefect who reported back with some younger students. “I hope this does not become a pattern on your and Mr. Black’s part.”
“I promise it won’t—and, well—”
“Out with it, then.”
“What about the others?” asked Remus. “I know some are on holiday, but were any of the postgrads in the village? Fenwick, Stone, the O’Neils? Or Gloria—”
“No, no, no,” said the bald witch, “and who?”
“Gloria Ahmed. The one studying—”
“—the Kissed, oh goodness, right,” she said. “No, I should hope she’s alive and well. I personally escorted her here from my office.”
Remus made a mental note of that.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
“Of course.”
The late night of fear cast a long shadow like the Dark Mark over Christmas itself. Their gift on the morning of was reports that several establishments in the village, all vendors of muggle goods or services, had been attacked. Fires and explosions mostly, but a post office frequented by students for letters home to non-magical relatives had also been raided. Death Eaters had stolen everything under the cover of the violence. Not just the physical post—the lists and records and address books as well.
Exhausted owls flew back and forth from the castle in that long shadow until Old Year’s Day, a sombre occasion with no real celebration, because it was the same day they learned that three people had died in the attack and nearly two dozen more were injured. Added to the toll by the postgraduates were the several more students withdrawn from Hogwarts.
There was nothing to do about it. What could they do? What could he and Sirius do, specifically, concretely, in that moment? Lily and James both wrote to them—or, no, James wrote to Sirius, but Lily wrote to them both—begging them to stay within the Castle grounds for their own safety even if it was Old Year’s Day. Ruefully they acquiesced. Not ones to be stopped from celebrating, however, he and Sirius got drunk in the evening, having filched an abandoned three-litre box of red wine from the shared cupboards of the postgrad lounge. They sat in the dark just off the pier by the boathouse, watching the distant lights of Hogsmeade and counting down the minutes to midnight, and when midnight arrived, they imagined the fireworks that ought to have flown up from the town’s edge and over the Black Lake.
The fireworks had been cancelled, of course, out of respect for the dead and injured.
With all that on his mind, Remus woke from their long lie-in on the first day of 1979, and, to his dismay, found himself still a touch tired. Perhaps, he thought, the box wine had gone off.
Notes:
Inspiration for Elemental Genre Mixture owes to a distant, possibly-erroneous memory (a hallucination?) I have of The Shoebox Project. Inspiration for the Three-Day Week (as Sirius describes a powerless muggle London), discussions of the Sex Pistols, and London skinheads owes to real historical events that were actually going on in the UK during this time period. Don't be fooled, dear readers: this is all my convoluted attempt to sneak thoughts of politics into your heads.
(Vote for Kennedy. Vote for Kennedy.)
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, Winter of Discontent will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 13 December, a Friday. If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is Beneath a Big Blue Sky by eyra, a novella-length R/S PWP pastoral romance fic that centres on lambing season on a Yorkshire farm. It's wonderfully-grounded and vivid and a whole host of other lovely things, which is why I think you should give it a try.
Chapter 7: Winter of Discontent
Chapter Text
In the years after he was bitten, Remus Lupin, already a child of gloomy disposition, grew accustomed to being left to his own devices. It was the end of primary school and the beginning of textbooks he was meant to study alone, the beginning of drab armchairs by dreary windows and the humdrum Welsh countryside. Each rented cottage shabbier than the last, though full of the same forbidden curiosities. To stop him dismantling every complex object in the house—a habit developed out of curiosity and sustained, perhaps, by the attention it afforded him—Hope, a welder and trade unionist, took temporary leave from her career and politics to soothe Remus’s quiet rage. That she should have to do so while his father’s distance further fuelled that rage was not Hope’s fault. She was endless in her kindness to both him and his father, a privilege Remus had abused. He knew that now. Which is why, Remus thought, it ought’ve been her that received Lyall’s wand by post and not him.
Except Hope was five months missing. January’s end brought Lily’s nineteenth birthday and a letter from the Ministry to inform Remus that they were ceasing all search efforts and that they were sorry for his loss. A few days later, Lyall’s wand arrived in neat, simple packaging, like assorted sweets, although in place of chocolate or a family heirloom, Remus found they had sent him the heart of his discontent. Which was the last thing Remus needed at the moment, given his downhill snail of an academic decline.
What began as simple fatigue had rolled in over weeks like fog into his brain. Remus slept longer and yet felt less rested, twisting in his sticky sheets whenever late morning came; his beleaguered memory failed him with enough frequency it was starting to affect his research; and he once fell dead asleep while Sirius was rubbing his back during a midday break, gentle circles in the nest of sore muscle between his broad shoulderblades, earning him no small amount of teasing from that sharp, beautiful mouth. Every part of his postgrad duties was suffering, and Remus hadn’t the slightest idea why.
Or, well, that wasn’t true. Not exactly. There were certain warning signs to precede it: his pre- and post-moon urges lasted longer, as did his accidental magical flare-ups. Candlewicks burst into flame with brief woofs of combustion before simmering down at the snap of his fingers. He’d killed a thousand doors and mended two-thousand hinges. In his wandless practice with the Defence professor he’d gone through several dozen albatrosses worth of pristine white feathers. All the while the moderate endurance and sensory benefits afforded to him by lycanthropy were growing less moderate. Immodest. In the quiet of the lounge, one late wintry evening, he watched Sirius stroll by Benjy Fenwick’s bureau and—wholly, incontrovertibly against his will, mind you—as he ducked to give a brief whisper in Benjy’s ear, Remus caught every dirty word from across the room. The denmothers had warned him in their cryptic ways that ‘changes’ might happen after quelling the wolf in his mind, and yet they’d neglected to mention this part.
Which might have meant, Remus realised, that he’d buggered up the ritual.
The thought terrified him. With Chima and the other scattered by the wildfire, he had no one to turn to who might understand more about what kind of werewolf he was becoming. There was no one but him to correct his mistake.
It was a lot of pressure for a lower postgraduate.
To make matters worse, the student body was going mad for Valentine’s Day, and so was Sirius, who had fallen into one of his infamous dark moods since spotting Regulus, Severus, and the other students conspiring, maybe, perchance, on some possibly wicked scheme. It cast a jet-black cloud over Sirius’s psyche. He needed, no, demanded constant affection, which Remus would’ve been more than happy to give and in excess if only he weren’t so bloody tired.
Even the library hadn’t escaped the Valentine event horizon. Students had sneaked in overnight to string up heart-themed decorations. They leapt in daisy-chains between high wooden shelves and bordered the vast, many-panelled doors, where they infrequently whispered (inaudible to all but each given passer-by) that someone fancied them. It was advanced spellcraft: Remus suspected postgraduate involvement. The professoriate, even. Those responsible had gone so far as to make those in the healing section anatomically correct and bewitching them such that they beat in time with one another. All-in-all it was a very Marauder-y, the sort of overinvolved, overeducated thing for which Mssrs. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs would’ve gone mad. It made him at times almost achingly nostalgic. If nothing else he could write to James—Christ, how long had it been?—explaining that even without them, whimsy persisted at Hogwarts.
Perhaps because she no longer needed to interact so often with students, Irma Pince was in uncommon good spirits and let the decorations remain as they were, making only one small adjustment to silence them. It was, after all, still a library.
After the twentieth student that week came to Remus asking after any material on ‘love potions’—something of a dire fucking misnomer, and a concept which grew only more disturbing to Remus with age. Although he knew that nearly every single potion out there just enhanced one’s pre-existing feelings and thus acted as the wizarding equivalent of low-grade MDMA, there were a few nasty elixirs out there with yet nastier effects, so he nevertheless begged Irma Pince to let him move all such materials to the Restricted Section. If nothing else he argued it could prevent a host of inevitable poisonings due to user error.
“My,” she said. “Remus, maybe you ought to try one yourself.”
“Pardon me?” asked Remus. Dismay wore openly on him like a heavy weight.
“Drink up, and then take a long, long look at the library,” she explained. “Maybe you’ll fall back in love with your job again.”
Request denied. At least her twisted humour had remained intact. An anchor, really, in Remus’s storm.
As she departed, no doubt bound for some exciting librarian affair that didn’t involve students, book recommendations, or the dreaded reshelving, Remus heard the gentle tap of knuckles on the counter behind him. It was a tall, thickset counter that climbed to his navel and stretched a two-foot gulf between him and the remainder of the student body, complete with a sleek varnished countertop and smooth, seamless wood grain. While he expected Sirius to be standing opposite it (clad in, of course, his conspicuously allegedly-dragonhide jacket), he hadn’t expected that Lily, Mary, and Rucha Nagar would be accompanying him. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder or thereabouts, like a poorly-organised Roman phalanx. Each watched him with evil plotting intent. Remus immediately wanted nothing to do with it.
“Sorry loves,” said Remus, frowning a very obvious no, I refuse whatever this is kind of frown. “I’m on the job, like. Unless you need a book—”
Lily slid a folded piece of stationary across the counter towards him. Her short, tapered fingers were tipped in neat, functional nails, lightly-glossed.
“You haven’t even looked at my library card,” she complained, “Mr. Book Boggart.”
She kept on sliding it forwards in a manner Remus imagined was supposed to be secretive, like a drug deal or two spies exchanging dossiers in a Parisian café, but in reality it looked very conspicuous. Several tinier students—somehow Remus had lost the ability to differentiate first years from fourth years, they all looked so bloody young—were staring at them. The gossip was alive in their eyes. The counter was too wide and the gesture too indiscreet.
Remus accepted her library card. A Trojan horse.
It was a Valentine’s card.
“TO: REMUS LUPIN,” it read. “YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO STOP BEING SUCH A SWOT AND ATTEND THE ANNUAL VALENTINE'S BALL WE HAD TO CHANGE THE NAME BECAUSE SIRIUS AND MARY WERE BEING IMMATURE. FROM: LILY EVANS.” And, in those same neat, legible letters, it continued, “P.S. DO YOU LIKE ME CHECK YES OR NO,JAMES IS GETTING ANXIOUS AND YOU DID NOT REPLY TO MY LAST ENQUIRY.”
“You’re all deranged,” said Remus.
“You missed my birthday,” said Lily, indignant and yet still pleasant, “because you said you were falling behind in your research.”
“You blew off both of Slughorn’s do’s, the mentorship dinner—” started Sirius.
“—not to mention the revision group meetings you’ve been missing,” added Mary.
“—and the collective general meetings, and breakfast,” continued Sirius, who mentioned them, “and if m’honest it’s an embarrassing look, even for us postgrads. You’re making us look bad.”
Lily nodded. “We work very hard to make the student body think this comes natural to all of us and that we’re effortlessly brilliant. You’re blowing our cover.”
“Even the great and terrible Ahmed is taking time off her great and terrible research,” added Mary.
Each of them had a varied approach. Lily, ever the cunning manipulator, plied Remus with guilt and pleading auburn brows; Mary wore the same cool indifference she’d adopted since he’d gone off at her, that classic Mary sangfroid with which she inspected her varnished nails, casual-like, which was all a different kind of guilt; and Sirius, known for his subtlety, ran his tongue over his teeth in a flick and then smiled at Remus with knowing grey eyes. Tease.
Remus felt the flush creep up his neck. They hadn’t had a conversation on public affection yet because of, well, everything, and because although Remus had shagged a two-digit number of wizards and/or werewolves, he and Sirius hadn’t done so much as snog yet. You could argue they’d been far more intimate what with the scars and skin and not-infrequent nudity, but by technical definition they were still chaste. Not technically illegal. Not that the House of Lords had eyes and ears inside a magical school for magical youth in a magic Highlands castle, but it was not lost on Remus that nearly everything about what he wanted to with Sirius was still a crime in Scotland. England and Wales too, actually, given they both weren’t yet twenty-one. Not that he wasn’t historically partial to the occasional crime or three, funny hat or no.
To make his red cheeks less obvious and buy himself more time, Remus looked down at Rucha in her simple dark robes and quirked a fuzzy eyebrow at her, as if to say, What’s your role in all this, then?
She shrugged with noncommitment that said, I told you, Lupin, I just like to be included.
“Well,” said Remus, groping for a defence. Er. “Where would we hold it, then? Not the village, like? Not after the attacks.”
You could hardly say backing over the mood like a lorry driver over the family dog was a weak defence. A bad one, probably, and the pained look on their faces reflected that—excepting Sirius.
“We found it,” he whispered, ominous.
“Technically I found it,” said Rucha, “but I didn’t even know what ‘it’ was until Evans explained it.”
“You didn’t,” said Remus.
“Me, James, and Peter looked for seven years,” began Sirius. Remus had helped, but only for five, he supposed. “Ever since I read Hogwarts: A History, we dreamed so often of the possibilities and she only bloody went and found it by accident!”
Remus yawned—it was involuntary, and came over him without warning—and Sirius shot him a look of wounded accusation.
“That, I gather,” said Rucha, “is how one is supposed to find it, but I made a mark outside of it when the door disappeared. Bending the rules is much more fun.”
“You don’t need to bring a date,” said Mary. Remus’s paranoia wanted to bite back that he was perfectly well and capable of getting a date, thank you, but he had been awful to her, so he let that slide. “The theme is platonic love,” she explained, while rolling her brown eyes, actually. A faint aroma of roses followed her. “Lil’s idea, so people without someone to shag can come.”
“Of course I’ll bring a date,” said Remus, who maybe couldn’t let it slide after all. He gestured broadly to Sirius. “Padfoot’s my date.”
“A platonic love for the ages,” said Lily, sage.
“Hey! Sirius is very—” started Remus, who then coughed and subsequently thereafter lowered his voice because he realised what he was about to shout in a student library. “Sirius, I’ll have you know,” he continued in a defensive whisper, “is very shaggable.”
“Sirius isn’t the problem one here,” said Mary. No, she muttered it under her breath, but Remus was a werewolf and God, he’d been meaning to apologise to her for a while. Sort of. “Can we go now?” she asked, louder. “Lupin agreed and we’ve at least three more versions of this identical conversation to do.”
“Let’s,” said Lily.
As she, Mary, and Rucha departed, Sirius waited a beat longer and jerked his head towards Mary. Deal with that, yeah, Moony? was the implication. Instead of following with an ominous or else gesture, however, he did the thing where he ran his teeth over his tongue again in a flick. It was a different kind of threat, one that worked far more effectively on Remus.
It also crossed a few more wires that Remus hadn’t thought went well together. Sirius Black, he thought, would make for an awful electrician.
A moment later Remus remembered he was supposed to be figuring out how to fix things with Mary and not lusting over his—well, wait, shit, what word was he supposed to use there? Sirius? Padfoot? His Padfoot? Yes, his Padfoot, that’s what he would go with, and oh bugger there he was doing it again.
He’d talk to Mary.
After a kip, of course. Remus was knackered and it was starting to show.
***
Lonely and hollow in its sound like a single chamber of the heart, Remus’s memory of the other werewolf’s howl echoed in his dream and woke him from his fitful sleep with a sudden, rushing thought. Perhaps, Remus realised, he wasn’t so utterly boned after all.
It wasn’t just an excuse to not to talk to Mary. Remus was very adept by that point at making excuses for not talking to people and over much longer stretches of time. A connoisseur of it, really, which is why he knew that this was his best excuse yet, because for once, the excuse in his mind actually outweighed the alternative in importance.
That was how Remus justified his late-night departure across the long crooked wooden bridge that led to the Forbidden Forest.
If a) he had indeed buggered up the denmothers’ ritual and b) it was the source of his fatigue, there was exactly one other forest glade he knew of that resembled the one in the Pyrenees, and one werewolf clever enough to trick him while they should have otherwise been a mindless beast. Not only were those clues decent enough to warrant some pursuit, they were also the only clues Remus had.
As he reached the end of the bridge and the beginning of the Forbidden Forest where the snow grew hard and crunchy beneath his boots, he preferred not think about the possibility of his theory coming up empty. Original research often went nowhere. Instead, he thought on what might happen if his condition worsened and he flunked out of the postgraduate program while the others remained here—what that would mean for him, for Sirius, and for the promise he’d made about Regulus. Could he handle another broken promise? A well-landmarked if treacherous path began to slowly take shape in his mind, the margins of the map filling in, slow, steady, with a draftsman-like quality. The denmothers’ ritual. The other werewolf. Regulus and Sirius. The Kissed. Gloria Ahmed’s research thereon. If only he could connect them in the right sequence, he felt like he might stop going somewhere and finally be somewhere. Or perhaps that was ignis fatuus. A hinkypunk, a light in the distance that lured weary travellers to their doom, like a siren.
Between his preoccupations and the exhaustion, Remus noticed the pair of figures in deep scarlet robes approaching him too late. Aurors, it seemed, walked with much lighter feet than the average witch or wizard. He heard and saw them only a moment before they saw him. Remus swore.
“Mr. Lupin?” called the Defence professor. Her smooth and scarecrow-like features were terrifying in the dark, like someone had peeled old, sun-cracked skin off a mummy and stretched it back over a very thin marble mannequin. She sounded incredulous. “Oh, goodness. Whatever are you doing out so late?”
Auror, singular. He’d thought the other witch beside her was an Auror, but the deep red bob of red hair under her scarlet hood was unmistakeable. Knowing that Emmeline Vance’s thesis was on approaches towards Unsupported Flight, it made a certain sense, Remus realised, that she would be so light on her feet. Living bodies tended to attract gravity. Perhaps she wasn’t as behind on her thesis as Remus had thought.
“Hullo, Professor,” said Remus, far too late after she’d asked. “Vance,” he added, inclining his head just so.
“’lo, Lupin,” said Emmeline. She was a half-step behind the Defence professor and staring with blank confusion, like he’d just interrupted an ongoing scene before his appropriate cue. Lupin? she mouthed. Why are you here?
“Are you—sorry,” said Remus, whose train of thought derailed as often as a non-union operation, these days. “Emmeline, are you an Auror, now? Have I missed something?”
Emmeline and the bald witch exchanged looks that, again, suggested they were flummoxed more than anything else.
“Nah,” said Emmeline, “we were out for a walk, is all.”
“Why—”
“—why,” interrupted Emmeline, “are we answering your questions, again?”
“Ms. Vance is quite right,” said the bald witch. “And I remain curious to hear why you yourself are departing the castle so late. You do recall that there are many dangerous beings in the Forbidden Forest—Dementors,” she added, “being the most likely to encounter once you step beyond the boundaries. Unless your intent was to practice your Patronus Charm, although I should think there are better ways.”
As she spoke, Remus gave a pleading look past the bald witch at Emmeline, who in turn furrowed her sharp dark brows as if to say, Merlin’s tits, Remus. What are you up to?
“Serious business indeed,” said Remus, sharpening his look at Emmeline. “As for why I’m out here in the evening, headed into the Forbidden Forest, alone, well,” Remus continued, choking back an odd, hysterical kind of noise because he was about to lie to an actual Auror, “I’m about to test my Comprehensive Locator Charm, of course, to see if it can improvise and intuit a map of a natural locale as well as it can a manufactured setting.”
“And to do that,” said Emmeline, who was both a former Slytherin and as quick with her words as she was a broom, “Remus has to get lost, otherwise the charm might draw on his ken, unconscious or not. It’d poison his data.”
Remus nodded, and although he would’ve agreed with her regardless of what left her mouth, he mentally made a note to make a physical note of that. An idea was brewing.
“At night?” asked the bald witch. “Goodness, that seems dangerous. Needlessly so.”
“I’m rum at Astronomy,” replied Remus. While he never could keep a secret from Sirius, thirteen years as a werewolf made him much better at lying to strangers. Aurors included, apparently. Remus gave a silent prayer to any available God that she wasn’t a Legilimens—someone adept at invading and reading minds. “Can tell you the full moon is in two days without looking up. If I get lost, I’ll navigate by the stars—but as long as I don’t look now…”
“Your research remains pure,” finished the bald witch. “A clever solution, although still dangerous. Would you like us to accompany you?”
“Actually, Professor, I think I’ll be fine.”
“As you were, then.” She tipped her Hessian hat.
“If you’re not back by morning,” called Emmeline as he passed them and breached the forest’s edge, “I’m sending a search party.”
The snow-covered quiet of the Forbidden Forest gave the rest of Remus’s journey and ruminations an eerie undertone, as if instead of a wintry forest, he were walking across a very large and empty room that gave no echoes. By contrast, to the tone, however, Remus felt like laughing. He thought of the bald witch and Emmeline again and wondered as he hiked whether it was possible they were romantically involved. Stranger things had happened at Hogwarts.
Something stranger, in fact, was likely to occur when Remus reached his destination.
From all his previous full moons, Remus knew the depths at which the Dementors patrolled and pre-emptively cast his Patronus in an attempt to ward them away. It was easier to do it before they arrived, and Remus didn’t trust himself not to fumble it and meet an untimely death otherwise. A fate worse than death, if Sirius was to be believed. Remus shuddered. No available evidence existed to suggest that the Kissed felt, well, er, anything, but he couldn’t shake the horrid nightmare of being conscious yet out-of-control of his body for the remainder of his lifespan. On that he’d more direct experience than he cared to admit.
His translucent silver wolf loped around and about the forest while Remus skirted its edge until he was where he remembered playing with Padfoot—Sirius—and could see the evening-lit silhouette of the Shrieking Shack in the far distance. From there, he delved deeper into the forest and passed the threshold guarded by Dementors. Where once had been carpets of moss between vast-trunked, fungus-ringed trees as old as Hogwarts Castle was now a sea of frozen snow. It clung to every fractal branch and fell in terrifying infrequent thumps that set Remus’s coward heart racing. Yet neither beast nor Dementor revealed itself in the light of Patronus.
Although it wouldn’t work against any other manner of dark creature, he hoped that in some small way the light was protecting him from the sundry rumoured creatures of the Forbidden Forest. After all, what simple wizard would go walking around in the dark? Perhaps he could give the impression that he were a beast not unlike an angler fish. Or at the very least, a formidable enough wizard to warrant not troubling.
Not that he and Sirius ever encountered any dark creatures during the moons. Now that was Waldeinsamkeit. There were rumours that Acromantulas—giant, spider-like creatures the size of horses, if not bigger— had established a colony therewithin, and beyond that were tales of Trolls, a Centaur village, and of course other werewolves, but of all those rumours, Remus had only ever had one fleeting encounter, a missed letter of sorts that was only deadly over the span of hours, not seconds, and exposure had been the forest’s weapon of choice. Then again, they’d been a large shaggy dog and a transformed wolf. Not easy pickings for any predator.
He had two hours ahead of him to fret over such things, and yet, aside from owls that screeched at him, nightbirds, rats and the occasional fox hurrying away with its young, Remus encountered no other creature for the entire duration of his cold hike.
It gave him no comfort. He couldn’t shake the feeling he had arrived so early for a party he found its associated house darkened and empty and devoid of hosts. Boarded-over windows, no car lingering outside the garageport. Overstuffed mailbox. A sinister chill to the air, the sort of itching breath on your neck’s nape to let you know you were being watched. The unnatural quiet of the wood only made his bootfalls in the snow sound ever more clumsy and loud, each crunch of stale, frozen snowpack echoing like a gunshot up into the high canopy above. Two hours on edge in the night. Two hours traipsing around in the dark for a place he hadn’t seen in a season.
The two hours were so uneventful that it came as a genuine shock to Remus when he found the clearing, that same empty glade edged with fallen logs that still bore the purple flowers of aconite. Winter and snow couldn’t touch them. At his feet overripe blood-red berries perforated the snow in a pair of odd scattered branches, which, from precisely his position, might’ve resembled antlers or horns. Hundreds more still clung to the thorned ivies above him, which dangled in curtains with their odd heart-shaped leaves from thickset pine branches. An imperfect circle of uniform pine trees stood guard over the clearing. By the size of them they’d done so at least four centuries.
In the centre of the clearing stood the same large, flat boulder he’d found in the storm, although now a figure with long curled tangles of dark hair and shredded linen rags for clothes sat on its snowless edge. Only once he saw them could Remus’s irritatingly-infallible senses pick them out: they smelled subtle and old, much like the dark forest itself. Never before had Remus met a werewolf who could conceal their scent as such. Consider his interest piqued. As Remus drew nearer, struggling, graceless, through the undisturbed snow by the pale silver light of his Patronus—how had they got to that boulder? There were no footprints to or fro—he saw that the werewolf’s sun-baked skin was unscarred, giving them an unexpectedly youthful, almost epicene appearance. Their bare feet dangled off the edge as though they were a desultory child kicking waves on the pier, although in truth, Remus realised, it was he who was dipping his toes in dangerous waters.
“Young little magic boy,” called the figure in a voice best described as hollow. They had a rounded, almost childish face and serious eyes as brown as they were wild. In the light of his Patronus, their pupils glowed with an eerie eyeshine. There was a word for that. Tapetum lucidum. “Come to see me?”
“You’re the one who howled to us,” said Remus. He kept a loose but ready grip on his wand.
“No,” said the other werewolf. “Only to you, magic boy.”
“I really prefer ‘Remus’.”
“Re-mus,” they said. Like they were a child sounding out the word. “No, that’s not right. Remus is a wolf. You’re just a little magic boy, and you’re holding a little magic stick.”
“Forgive me,” said Remus, “for not putting down my only means of self-defence when encountering a stranger in a dark forest.”
The other werewolf rolled back their head and laughed, baring their overlarge eyeteeth to the sky. Their laughter was soon swallowed by the thick-trunked pines around them and the heavy cover of snow. It was disquieting to hear such a loud noise in the night. It sent a tiny little spider up the ridges of Remus’s spine.
“I’m missing a joke, here,” said Remus, on edge. He gripped his wand tighter.
“You think this is a trick.”
“Do you blame me?” asked Remus. “You’ve tricked me once already.”
“You came to me, magic boy. I was so sleepy, too, but I stayed up and waited for you.”
Remus blinked. “You know about my problem?”
“Maybe,” they said. “Maybe not. You’re so like them, it’s no wonder those old sneaks took you in. I was wondering why you smell so much like them.”
“You know the denmothers too?”
“Maybe,” they said. Maybe—”
“—okay that,” said Remus, “is going to get very irritating very quickly, and I think we both know how little patience I’m going to have this close to a full moon.”
The other werewolf frowned as though Remus had broken an unspoken rule to a game he hadn’t known he was playing. They tapped their hand in rhythm flat against the cold stone of the boulder, their cracked nails encrusted with dirt, and hummed, hollow, to themself.
“Hullo?” said Remus.
“No.”
“No?”
“No,” said the other werewolf. They waved him off with a hand like shooing a pest. “I don’t like this magic boy at all. It’s rude. Come back to me when you’re Remus.”
“Wait, no—I’m sorry,” said Remus. He stowed his wand and fanned out his hands. “I’m just tired of people playing cryptic games with me and never knowing what I’m supposed to do.”
The other werewolf lilted their head to one side, and Remus saw that there were in fact leaves lodged in the tangled knots of their hair. A snapped-off bendy twig. Their eyes caught the light again.
“Poor little magic boy,” they said, tutting. “But he’s honest. Says his feelings. We can make a wolf of him yet.”
“Thank you?”
“I am very lonely,” said the other werewolf. The conversation was—well, it was barely a conversation, and realisation dawned on Remus that maybe it had been a long time since they had last had anything approaching a normal social interaction. He scaled back his expectations.
“Why are you lonely?” asked Remus, gentle.
“I don’t care why,” said the other werewolf, annoyed. They kicked a dirty bare foot. “I want to trade.”
“Trade?”
“Come back to me soon and talk to me, magic boy. Listen to what I say.”
“It’s a two-hour hike to get here and another two hours to get back,” said Remus. “What would I get out of this trade?”
“You want more?” they asked, surprised. It took a moment for him to understand that, in this offer, meeting the other werewolf was apparently a benefit, not a cost. From the high boulder behind their mess of long hair—it must have reached their hips, although Remus couldn’t tell because they were sitting—they peered down at Remus to appraise him. “Okay,” they continued. “What more do you want?”
Remus opened his mouth. Remus closed his mouth. The other werewolf giggled in delight.
“No one asks you that question, do they, magic boy?”
“I would like,” began Remus, “answers to my questions.”
“Okay,” they said. Their voice sometimes took on a sing-song quality, still hollow, like a log rotting from the inside out. “Tonight, I’ll give you one.”
“Did I successfully finish the ritual I learned from the denmothers in the Pyrenees?”
“No,” they said, and Remus paled.
An owl hooted in the distance. The other werewolf did not elaborate, because of course they would be a literalist. It was Remus’s luck. Part of Remus wondered if they weren’t even a werewolf—maybe some kind of shapeshifter, or fey, maybe. It was the Scottish Highlands, after all. They couldn’t possibly be as youthful as they looked, and he’d never yet known a werewolf obsessed with vanity. Either way, he’d have to choose his questions more carefully.
“I’m bored,” said the other werewolf, unprompted. “Will you run with me?”
Remus looked up at the stars and, although he wasn’t actually rum at Astronomy as he’d told the Defence professor, he could tell, more or less, that it was still before midnight. He didn’t need the sky at all to tell it would be a long night either way.
“Only if we run towards the castle,” replied Remus. “I have, well, magic boy things to do in the morning.”
“He has a sense of humour, now,” said the other werewolf.
They hopped off the edge of the boulder and landed like a normal human ought, sinking into the snow, although the sheer winter cold appeared not to bother them. The researcher in Remus wanted nothing more than to do a dozen different detection charms—‘strange’ scarcely began to describe the unease and curious familiarity he felt being near them—and yet he didn’t, because he’d got the sense that they approved very little of witches and wizards.
They bolted past Remus like a dart in the dark and vanished through the tree’s edge.
Remus whirled to chase after them and soon wished he had kept up with any of the physical exercise he’d done in the Pyrenees. His chest began to burn in under a minute; icy fingers of air forced themselves into the normally unplumbed depths of his lungs, cauterising them with cold; he kicked up sprays of clumping snow and tried in vain to ignore the melt accumulating in his boots. Although he soon caught up with other werewolf as quick as Padfoot might when Remus was freshly transformed, for them, Remus realised, the pace was one of leisure, not strain. Probably they could do this all night. Whether or not it registered to them that Remus could struggle and was in fact struggling to keep up, after five minutes of a full-tilt run through the unpacked stale snow of the woods, Remus’s lungs finally gave out.
He tripped and doubled over in the snow, his heavy green woollen cloak splayed out beneath him and chest heaving with the strain you only experienced after years of replacing physical exercise with smoking. His ribs were on fire and he was caught between sputtering for breath and coughing it back out like an aging unoiled lawnmower engine running on empty. The other wolf entered the frame of his vision upside-down and stopped with one dirty hand against a tree trunk by the base of the ridge.
“Come back again soon, magic boy,” they called, voice carrying too far in the dark. Then they ran further on, over the ridge and out of sight, and the forest fell quiet once more.
Remus lay there a while longer to catch his breath. It was the first time in weeks, he thought, he’d had the time and space to do so in private.
A few minutes later he stood and drew his wand. Hit himself with a Hot Air Charm, first, and then began working through casting the first developed part of his Comprehensive Locator Charm, which he directed at the forest floor. Why not? He was already there, anyway, and had no idea if they’d actually run back in the direction of the castle. And it would only further solidify his alibi.
When he was done, dozens of knobbly mounds of snow to represent trees sprang up in a circle around him. The larger of them were carved from condensed snowpack while their brushy branches instead attracted loose powder like a magnet collecting iron filings. Far off to the southeast—an accompanying compass to his map had assembled itself out of loose twigs and a frozen red berry—in sprawling cursive was text that read HOGWARTS, and above that, a tiny and pale snow castle with pebble parapets. Behold the months of his laborious research. He hadn’t quite figured out how to get his Comprehensive Locator to learn people’s names or track their locations or the other dozen useful features of the Marauder’s map, however, which undercut the success of it all. You could do it with additional spells and enchantments and location-fixed magical foci and too much time and a variety of inelegant reagent-burning shortcuts, but that wasn’t the point. The point was a ballet. Sirius had been right on that matter.
Still, it was a little victory, and Remus had so few of those as of late. Two in one night, by all technical accounts, and he resolved to get a third victory in after the coming moon.
Even if he was already tired, and even if an apology sometimes felt like losing.
***
As a tall and willowy witch, Remus thought you couldn’t get a true picture of Mary Macdonald while she was hunched over a workstation and peering down her nose at a book. Moving pictures did a better job—Mary was a person of constant movement.
She smelled of ash and acid and a significant amount of dust, which was about par for someone working on a Protection Charm-type thesis. From what he gathered, her goal was to create a protective enchantment that not only adapted to unspecific harms, but one that also adapted to them with repeat exposure and grew stronger as a result, not entirely unlike an immune system, or a crack team of masons. Contrary to Ahmed’s words earlier last term, Mary’s Polyadaptive Protection Charm seemed like it would be useful more than once or twice in a lifetime. Presuming she got it to work, of course.
“Mary?” asked Remus, and Mary stopped reading to watch him with a neutral expression.
“Oi oi, Lupin,” she replied. She sat back in the tall-backed chair of her bureau and folded her manicured hands over her lap. Their dynamic had cooled noticeably enough to the others, and Sirius had for nearly two months done his best to keep them out of direct, but they hadn’t had any other explosions since their fight.
Well, Remus’s fight. Mary hadn’t exactly been an active combatant.
“Could we go for a walk, maybe?” he asked, inclining his head to the other postgraduates at their own workstations.
“Yeah,” said Mary, “sure.”
They strolled out past the library and the North Tower—this kind of apology and talk deserved privacy and Mary, Remus thought, oughtn’t be subjected to the gawking that usually followed Remus. Still, as they passed through the snow-laden courtyard to a lonely alcove found behind a worn medieval battle tapestry, a few students in their heavy winter cloaks flashed hand signs at one another and fell silent to watch them. They of course didn’t know Remus could hear them whispering. When he turned his glower back on them they all looked conspicuously away at the snow or sky or their shoes.
With their eyes off of him Remus lifted the edge of the tapestry, disturbing the gallant knight woven into its fabric, to reveal a hidden passage in the not-so-blind arcade through which both he and Mary needed to duck, ever-so-slightly too tall for a tenth-century castle. The space within the wall was an interstitial one, narrow but warm, with flat stone benches wedged between carved columns and tall arches and a few antiquated but comfortable cushions left behind by whichever other students had stumbled over this passage only to lose track of where exactly it was. Someone had punched a hole through the unpolished stone wall and replaced it with an arrangement of cloudy stained-glass that looked like opaque Gothic design from the outside. From within, however, they gave a clear one-way view over the courtyard and walkways—the colonnades, the peristyle, the cloister, there were a thousand words for the open-sided arcades that surrounded a courtyard—to calm any risk of claustrophobia. Peter had found this hideaway in second year.
“Why do they make that gesture?” asked Mary. She stuck up her right palm, three fingers up, little finger bent, and thumb straight out to the side. You could only really do it well with the digital muscle tone of someone who used a wand, which Remus thought might be part of the appeal. “It’s not any rude gesture I know,” said Mary, “and God knows I know a lot of rude gestures.”
“3L,” said Remus, and when Mary gave a quizzical look, he shrugged. “You don’t recall the nickname I had at school?”
“Mate, I spent most of my time trying not to hear the rude names people throw around. Though Sirius might’ve mentioned something, as I recall.”
“Fair do’s,” said Remus. He flopped down on the stone bench of the alcove, and, never one to be outdone, Mary mirrored him. “They used to call me Loony Loopy Lupin, on account of—well, let’s say I could be badly behaved at times,” explained Remus. “I didn’t think the name would survive my absence. Although as I recall, Peeves was very fond of it.”
Mary nodded with slow recognition and glanced down to Remus’s sleeve, which he adjusted out of reflex. No skin was showing, of course—it was winter and snowing and they were outside—but Remus heard Mary’s heart quicken. He doubted she’d forgotten his mess of silver scars whether or not they were hidden by his gloves.
Then she looked away. Far away. Through the one-way window their gazes drifted to watch the main courtyard, currently occupied by squealing young students and a few brooding older ones trying to forget about revisions and the War at home. Which was often the problem of Hogwarts, actually: the comfort it brought often reminded you how cold the world could be without it, and of how quick your time in the castle melted away. Little compared—not the cigarettes, the spliffs, not the booze and not the magic. Not even crisp nutty chocolate, which Remus fished out from his pocket and began snapping into crisp little squares.
Eventually, Mary said, “I think I should probably stop asking you questions I think are innocent.”
“No, no,” said Remus, holding in a laugh. He passed her a square. “I’m the one who owes you an apology, Mary. I was a right prick and snapped at you over something you couldn’t have known. Worse, even though I knew you weren’t trying to hurt me, I tried to hurt you.”
She considered this for a long time. She crunched thoughts and hazelnuts with her strong jaw.
“Do you know why my brother got nicked?” asked Mary. Remus shook his head, so she said, “A brunch of drunk skinheads near our flat in Brixton attacked him on his way home,” she continued, her brown eyes now further away still. “Defended himself, ’course. Told me everything in a blind panic when he came in the door. Few landed in the hospital, one died.”
“Jesus. How old was your brother?”
“Fifteen,” replied Mary. She spat at the ground. “Ministry heads decided he was ‘old enough’ to know the consequences of using magic on muggles, even if it was accidental. Dementor’s Kiss.”
Remus spat with her. “Fucking fascists.”
“Fucking racist fascists.”
“Fucking racist fascists,” said Remus, correcting himself. “Mary, I’m so sorry.”
“Those blood purists—it’s never an alternative with them,” she explained. “It’s always an and. We’ve got actual vampires and werewolves and God knows what else in our world, Remus, and I can’t help seeing the actual danger of a werewolf hasn’t diminished the perceived danger of a young Black British boy.”
“Werewolves aren’t—”
“—Bloody hell, I’m not saying werewolves are inherently dangerous,” said Mary, grimacing. “Who d’you think I am? I’m saying,” she continued, “that it should put things into sharp relief. If you took the werewolf out of a young Black British boy, these fascists would still be muttering shite under their breaths. It’s never been about the ‘danger’, because the danger’s no more than a pretence.”
Remus pouted his lips and rested his chin atop his fist.
“Well, when you put it like that,” he said, nodding, “it sounds bloody convincing, doesn’t it?”
“There’s this group in America called the Combahee River Collective, and last year or, two years ago now, I suppose, they did this statement. And, I don’t know, but for the first time since I’d started reading—which, mind you, was bloody early—I felt like I’d read something by someone who understood me. Where I was and who I was. I’ll find you a copy of their statement later. The Collective has this way with words—anyway,” continued Mary, “the point is, I don’t know if I can make you understand how much it hurts to hear that shite, Remus. ‘Button-pusher?’ If I had a Galleon…”
Remus felt very warm and wanted nothing more than to flee the alcove. He didn’t, however. Instead, he cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry, Mary. I hurt you, on purpose, and I—well,” he sputtered, “I was—I am sorry that—okay. I said offensive things with bigoted undertones.”
“You did.”
“I am sorry,” he continued, “that I said you were a button-pusher, and I am far, far sorrier that I attacked your character in awful ways because I was upset with myself.”
They watched in quiet as a seventh-year Slytherin witch flourished her wand in the courtyard. The spell was an involved one that Remus couldn’t quite parse until he could, and as he did, he let the corner of his lips turn upwards. Moments later, the spell took hold and slow snowflakes were falling upwards, not down. Flake by untrodden flake, snow lifted off the packed mounds on the ground and flew back into the air like departing birds awoken from hibernation. Most of it remained earthbound. While the Slytherin witch went back to practicing whatever it was she was practicing for her NEWTs, the younger students regarded her and the rising snowflakes with awe and childish wonder, and Remus, for a moment, felt the future could be bright again.
“I’m also sorry,” said Remus, “that I called you a cunt.”
“Remus, you didn’t—”
“—in my head. I called you a Berkeley hunt, so—”
Mary snorted and bumped him with her hip, pushing him to the precarious precipice that was the edge of the bench. She nicked another square of chocolate from the wrapper he’d set on his thigh and popped it in her mouth with a laugh. “You’re stupid, Remus Lupin.”
“S’pose I can be daft sometimes.”
“Sometimes?”
“Oh, ow, ouch. I’ll prove you wrong—ask me a question. Anything.”
There was a long pause.
“Why is it, really,” began Mary, “that Sirius calls you ‘Moony?’ He told me it was rhyming slang—Moony Loony Lupin, shortened as one does, and that tracks with the nickname,” she explained, “but I wanted to ask you.”
“It’s actually after that Marc Bolan song. Lunacy’s Back.”
“Really?”
“No. It’s because,” said Remus, “in second year, he, James, and Peter discovered I was a werewolf.”
There was another long pause. Mary was doing mental arithmetic. She was a healer, after all.
“Nice try, Lupin,” she said, nudging him again. “Scars are too old, though, and I’ve never seen you with a fresh scratch after the full moon, let alone some of the wounds I’ve seen in medical texts on werewolves.”
“Bugger, you caught me,” said Remus. Sometimes clever people were the easiest to fool. “’fraid Sirius had it right the first time around. Insult into nickname. Classic, really.”
“A shame,” said Mary. She sighed. “Was hoping for an interesting story.”
“Think the world’s had enough of my storytelling skills for a while, actually.”
“And James Potter? You and Sirius call him—”
“—there’s this phenomenon that gazelles and other antelope do, where they leap around to show off their fitness, a theatrical performance of sorts that, er, I think is for either attracting mates or warding off predators,” explained Remus wryly. “Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘stotting’, but you could equally say ‘pronking’ or ‘pronging’. And if you recall back in school,” he continued—Mary gave him a knowing look, then, and made a show of rolling her eyes—saying, “James made something of a habit of that. James often prongs, ergo…”
“How on Earth wasn’t your first reflex—”
“He patently refused the moniker James Stotter, I’m sorry to say.”
Mary snorted at that and flicked his forehead, a few minutes later he was laid across the cold bench listening to her talk about a nameless girl she was seeing on the sly, trying to catch the sweets she threw, underhand no less, in his mouth like a dolphin breaching the sea or a baby fucking bird.
***
Part of what made witches and wizards like Gloria Ahmed so annoying, Remus thought, was that they weren’t satisfied being the swottiest of swots. Not only was she the darling of the faculty and liaison to the postgraduate board and probably loved by her family as well, Ahmed turned out to be an excellent bartender and convincing saleswitch of recreational substances. It wasn’t fair. It was, in fact, probably unfair. There she stood behind a classic English bar, the wainscoted sort with rich, creamy brown wood panelling and ye olde-y iron-ringed barrels for support pillars and an unpolished limestone bartop that would’ve been unimaginably impractical if not for the existence of magic, which had kept it free of stains for centuries. Remus kept running his fingertips over its coarse stone surface almost sensually, mesmerised by the cool abrasive touch, while waiting for her to finish up her latest confection. She wore a lab apron instead of a barkeep’s. Dark, durable leather with shining silver chains for straps and polished silver eyelets. Something about the metal’s oily sheen caught Remus’s eye. He wondered if it was Goblin-made.
“Don’t pretend we’re even, Lupin,” said Ahmed. She stared at him with narrow eyes from behind her narrow frames, and, a moment later, slid a small metal platter towards him. “I’m merely biding my time.”
“Duly noted,” said Remus. He scooted forwards on his barstool to stare down at the platter—tin, not silver, thankfully—and the dozen little brass bells atop it that appeared to be sized for mice or maybe Bowtruckles.
“Sweet Nothings,” she explained, spotting his frown. “Grab a friend and a bell, knock your heads together, ring the bell between your ears. Same blissful effects of a love potion without the comedown afterwards or the creepiness, and instead of oral consumption, it’s—”
“Aural consumption. That’s awful.”
“That’s branding. If you’re not interested, I’ve got everything from mead to gin to Firewhiskey for you and your pisshead pals.”
“Also noted,” said Remus. He wasn’t sure how that was possible, but of all the things he knew Ahmed to be, a liar was not one of them. Maybe she was a closet alcoholic. Maybe she was the ‘supplier of questionable morals’ from Sirius’s sixth and seventh years, and this was her way of funding her studies. Aside from the vagaries of her research, that she was Australian, that she had an improbable knowledge of cocktails and stouts and lagers and such that surpassed even Remus’s amateur appreciation, and that she owned a black Kneazle, Remus knew approximately zero other things about her and had thoroughly burned that bridge by extorting her months ago.
He was becoming something of a friendship arsonist, really, and it was costing him in a very literal fashion because the prices for booze Ahmed quoted him were also, somewhat fittingly, extortionate. Supply and demand, and she had a large supply of vengeance.
“I’m running a business, not a charity.”
The first round of Sweet Nothings were free, however, and so Remus decided they would have to make do. Neither a borrower nor a lender be, there’s small choice in rotten apples, et cetera. It was better form anyway to not mix too many substances so early in the evening—Sirius had, somehow, an infinite supply of spliff, and Remus sometimes wondered if he’d found a place to grow weed on the castle grounds, which would be entirely like him to do so and not bloody tell Remus—and that restraint might keep him from spending the rest of the evening hunched over a toilet or holding back Sirius’s hair. The Come and Go Room would appreciate that.
Perhaps because she herself was so often overlooked, Rucha had something of an affinity with the Room and thus was charged with their accommodations. For the occasion, she’d coaxed the room into assembling a pub-like open lounge with posh wooden tables and high-legged chairs and enough tasteless heart decorations to make a cardiologist weep. Though the ceiling was high and populated by only a few old iron chandeliers, the Room had seen fit to drape cherubic banners along every exposed wall to muffle any echoes, while a few choice romance tapestries—knights and maidens, a mermaid and a harpy, three classical dragons all wreathed in flame and faded to the point that you couldn’t quite tell if the tapestry was a brutal battle scene or draconic pornography—loomed high above Ahmed’s bar. According to Lily the Room couldn’t produce food or drink, though of all people Gloria Ahmed had the latter covered. The Room had, however, produced a record player, although every album dustcover was empty and so instead they’d summoned their own. That had been Remus and Sirius’s contribution.
A separate chamber wound round the corner. It was a smaller, cosier affair, the sort of room where Remus could stand with his arms outstretched and do comfortable circles but two Remus’s probably could not. A flickering hearth was its only light source. It housed a hard sofa, an old fluffy armchair, and a tigerskin rug that Sirius found hilarious. Lily thought it was horrid and Emmeline sort of sexy, which tracked because Emmeline would be the kind of witch to find taxidermy sexy, while Remus preferred not to think about the rug at all. It had eyes that watched you as you moved.
Maybe it was the drugs—probably it was the drugs—but Remus couldn’t help but interpret them as pleading.
There was a loo, of course, but it was a loo and thus needed no further description beyond having as many stalls as there were guests and yet only two working sinks. He hoped it wasn’t an omen.
At the moment his immediate circle consisted of Sirius, Lily, Emmeline, and Benjy Fenwick, the latter of which made Remus’s hackles stand because he hadn’t much seen Sirius and Benjy interact together, and in fact only knew they Biblically knew each other because of his inquisitive and sometimes creepy nose. And his ears. And his brain. Mary, the only one he knew to actually pierce Ahmed’s sarcastic armour, was sat at the bar in a striking ruby dress that made Remus feel underdressed for the occasion. She had her heel hooked on the foot of her barstool and a slinky elbow braced on the limestone bartop, her chin in hand, while she and Ahmed exchanged inaudible rapid-fire banter.
The rest of the postgraduates sat at another table. Severus was among them. Apparently he could make friends, and by the sound of it was not unpopular among them. That thought was disquieting and brought up memories of him, Regulus, and the other elder students meeting at the edge of the Forbidden Forest. Remus’s stomach twisted. He tried and failed to imagine how Sirius was coping behind those intense grey eyes of his.
Once he explained how the Sweet Nothings worked, however, Sirius was the first to try one and insisted that Remus be his partner, which of course prompted an endless amount of ribbing from those present, excepting Benjy. Not only was he too nice of a person to tease, he was also one of two people at Hogwarts, Remus realised, that knew Remus wasn’t straight. He felt another pang of guilt watching Benjy’s boy-next-door eyebrows knit together in apparent concern only to realise that, no, probably he wasn’t jealous of Sirius, nor brokenhearted over losing his casual arrangement with Remus. Probably Benjy was jealous that he wasn’t ringing Sirius’s bells in the loo right this very moment.
All that worry and more oozed out of Remus when he locked elbows with Sirius and they knocked their heads together. Sirius did the honours and rang the tiny mouse-sized bell between their ears, although instead of a tinny ringing sound, his ear filled with a sharp, yapping bark that sent heat creeping up his neck and a flush into his cheeks. He licked his lips. The back of his throat grew wet with saliva and the forefront ever-so-slightly dry. As the seconds rolled by, that heat rolled out from his neck and across his body, a pleasant, comforting warmth that spread like sinking into a hot bath with very, very sore muscles.
The sensation could only be described by Remus as groovy.
“Ooh, that’s tidy, like,” said Benjy. He was a popular target, being openly gay, as both Lily and Emmeline had locked elbows with him. “Fess up: who heard what?”
“Do I have to say?” asked Lily.
“Potter, aye?” asked Emmeline, and when Lily nodded, Emmeline, never one for subtlety, rolled her head back with her eyes. “You’re so bleeding boring.”
“Oi! Who was yours?”
“Heard myself,” she replied with a shrug. “Who else?”
“Complex,” said Remus. He waggled his fingers, absent, because there was something mesmerising in how he could feel the warmth sloshing around in them. It was like a liquid.
“All right, Lupin?” asked Emmeline. She wore an ambitious smirk. “Plan on sharing, or just judging us mortals like you normally do?”
“I thought drugs were supposed to make people nice,” said Lily.
“This is her being nice, butt,” replied Benjy, “and Em’s got a point. I know next to nothing about Lupin here, but I reckon he knows a lot about all of us.”
Sirius planted both hands on the scratched-up tabletop with far more haste than he probably intended, resulting in a loud slap that drew looks from their opposing table. Instead of any kind of apology, however, he giggled.
“He grew up in Wales,” began Sirius. “Lonely bookish child, explains why he’s such a swot. Loves cockles, hates flying, and when he grows up, I think he wants to be a library. Anything else you need, Benjy? His shoe size?”
Lily and Emmeline drummed their fists on the table—the former developed a curious bloodlust, Remus realised, whenever she was inebriated—and before that battle of wits could get any further, Remus coughed.
“I heard a dog bark,” he blurted.
“Oh, that’s twisted, like,” said Benjy, and the rest of the table stared at him, enthralled. It was almost comedic. Without coordinating aloud they leaned in, four pairs of elbows hitting the table at once as their leering intensified. Sirius’s more so than the rest, for reasons Remus thought were obvious. His brow arched so high Remus thought it might leave his face altogether. He was mentally revisiting those thoughts of dragging Sirius into a lavatory stall and ringing a few of his bells.
“Utterly twisted,” said Remus, who really wished he could take a nonchalant sip of anything. “Still want to hear more about me?”
“More than ever,” said Emmeline.
At that point Sirius interjected to say that he, of course, heard a motorbike revving and that brought them back on topic. He nudged Sirius’s foot under the table as a quiet thank you, or intended to, at least, but instead bumped Lily’s shoes and inadvertently started a very mature five-way game of footsie befitting several adults. Emmeline won, of course, because she had on stilettos.
Sirius insisted that they put on Ziggy Stardust and take full advantage of the dance floor. Black-and-white tiles—what unfortunate soul had tried and failed to bring muggle disco to Hogwarts, Remus knew not and wanted to know not, for theirs must’ve been a cursèd soul. Brimming pitchers were fetched and quaffed and negotiations already underway for a swift second round, or perhaps a third, while David Bowie promised alien salvation. It was hard to resist. Sirius sank to his knees, hands clasped, and begged, begged Remus to show off all those brilliant French dance moves that he must’ve acquired from his time in Parisian nightclubs, the cheeky fucker. Emmeline and even Mary from the bar goaded him on. Touché, Padfoot. Touché. Still Remus obliged for only a few dances, cognisant that the constant fatigue plaguing him could overwhelm him at any moment, and so he twirled Sirius in his Stuart tartan trousers and silky white shirt, did the hustle with Lily, and let Mary twirl him because she was the only person with enough height to not dislocate their shoulder while doing so.
Benjy also offered him a dance—part of Remus wanted to accept, if only to do some science of his own and see if Sirius lacked the immunity to jealousy Remus himself possessed—but he knew he should pace himself and instead said he was going to rest both of his left feet.
While watching Rucha do circles around Jon O’Neil’s odd wooden wheelchair, Remus dozed. His head nearly hit the table when Gloria Ahmed sat down beside him, sliding a pint glass his way.
“I was wrong to underestimate you, firstie,” she said, and Remus blinked the sleep from his eyes. Her fired-clay features were pensive and not so barbed as they usually were. Was this an apology? What fell sorcery had Mary worked over her?
“Sorry?” asked Remus.
“You heard me the first time, don’t push it,” she said. Her square-rimmed spectacles were a degree or two off kilter. “You really have to tell me who talked, though.”
“If it’s any consolation, I haven’t told anyone. S’pose I haven’t learned much at all.”
“No, Lupin, you don’t understand,” said Ahmed. She gripped his wrist with surprising ferocity and pain needled up his arm from where her nails dug into his sleeve. Under the table, something soft and likely Kneazle-shaped brushed between his ankles. “You have to tell me. This postgrad shit might look like whimsical fun, but I promise it’s not.”
Remus thought about the rumours about Dorcas Meadowes’ thesis defence. He frowned.
“I don’t know if I can,” he said, uncertain, “but I think maybe I was told not because of the subject matter of your research, but because it was a way to get us to interact.”
“What?”
Remus shrugged a helpless shrug. “I’m speculating. Maybe we’re supposed to work together? Or maybe—”
“—no offence,” she interrupted, about to say something probably as offensive as it was true, “but I really doubt you’d be able to help me with anything, and I’m not exactly the mentoring type.”
“You’re not wrong, seeing as either I’m the shooting star or the worst scholar here.”
Ahmed sat still for a long moment and then finally released Remus’s aching wrist. The breath that came out of her was long and begrudging, like she’d been holding it for ransom and only now realised it didn’t come from money.
“Who else, Lupin,” she began, “is a third-year Theory postgraduate?”
Remus opened his mouth several times and blinked. “Wait. Benjy—”
“—and me, the great Gloria Ahmed, et cetera, were the double pair. Seeing as we’re both still here…”
“So that spiel in first term was, what, exactly?”
It was her turn to shrug. “Intimidation? A bit of fun? You can’t deny that it probably lit a fire under your and Black’s arses. And it’s still true. The Ministry doesn’t like how inconsistent the results are for theses—threaten to pull the board’s funding every other year, I gather.”
“And you’re telling me this—”
“—you’re bright, Lupin,” said Ahmed, “but you’re not that bright. Not enough to crack my codes, not enough to guess my research. You’re a perfectly decent postgraduate, sure, but you deserve to know that if you’ve been put into this weird game, it’s not because you’re a player. You’re a pawn,” she continued, with no mirth or sadness in her voice, “and we both know what happens to pawns in a game of chess.”
She stood and waited patiently for Remus’s reply, although he hadn’t one.
“Oh, and don’t go asking the Defence professor about my research,” she added offhandedly. “Or the rest of Theory, or even Fieldwork. I told them all P.A. was trying some academic espionage and we’ve all battened down the hatches against you lazy sods. Scorched earth. Hope you understand.”
She left behind the pint glass but took the Kneazle.
Remus sniffed the drink and surreptitiously cast a detection spell. As far as he could tell, it was only lager—a peace offering, perhaps, or a consolation prize for being so thoroughly trounced—and he sipped at it even though Remus hated the taste of beer. Not only did fermented grains taste awful, they barely did what they were supposed to do, while the ‘girly’ drinks—basically straight alcohol and sugar syrup—got you where you needed with a party to boot. The foulness of it kept him awake enough, however, for Sirius and Lily’s return. Both of them were flushed red from dancing and Remus smelled sweat on both of them. While Lily’s flush bridged her nose and turned the tip of it pink, Sirius’s never quite touched the hollow of his cheeks.
“Don’t get me wrong,” whispered Sirius, ducking to meet his ear, while Lily went to fetch drinks at a hopefully-affordable price.
“Was it only dancing?” replied Remus. Sirius grinned.
From there, they retired to the quieter room with the hard sofa and hearth. Rucha had done a rum job accounting for a variety of mood-altering substances, though he doubted she was aware of how convenient a darker, milder room was to Remus’s current predicament. He, Sirius, and Lily arranged themselves before the fire, with which none of them seemed to have any non-magical facility: Remus could identify a fire poker beside the mantle and that a fire poker was intended for poking fires. Sirius and Lily concurred. From there they chatted shit for a half hour about nothing—vocations, struggles with research, the War, and how the food in the Great Hall was worse than they remembered—before the conversation turned to a topic in which Remus had exactly zero interest. He’d have preferred a red-hot fire poker.
“I dunno. Parenting is kinda like Ziggy Stardust.”
Lily laughed, abrupt, like soap bubbles escaping a bottle, while Remus only snorted. “How’s that, like?”
“Do enlighten us,” said Lily.
“Well, not if you’re gonna be rude.”
“Oh Padfoot,” began Remus, “great and terrible Padfoot, please—”
“Moony, I thought we agreed to keep that kind of talk in the bedroom.”
“Oh, right, my apologies.”
“you two,” said Lily, wheezing, “are incorrigible. God, I thought you and James were bad enough.”
“Lils,” said Remus. He feigned shock and outrage. “Do you mean to say he talks this way with other boys?”
“Constantly.”
“Evans!” cried Sirius. “You’re blowing my cover. He’s gonna leave me, now.”
“Or walk out with a girl,” said Lily, elbowing him.
Remus shrugged and ignored the pointed look Sirius gave him. “Between my thesis,” he said, “and Sirius, I honestly don’t think I could juggle another person.”
“Moony.”
“Yes, darling.”
“Are you suggesting that once we’ve defended our theses,” began Sirius, eyes alight with predatory excitement, “we can have a third? Like those muggle hippies do?”
“No.”
“Remus is right, you know.”
“Thanks, Lils.”
“You’d have room for a third and a fourth,” she finished. “Because you’d be down two theses.”
“Ah, that’s room for you and James, then.”
“Not a chance, Black. I’m not letting you steal my boyfriend.”
“Tried, love.” Sirius shrugged and sprawled partly over the sofa, and mostly over Remus. “He’s painfully heterosexual.”
“What do you mean ‘tried’—”
“Wait,” asked Remus, “why is parenting like Ziggy Stardust?”
“Catching up, Moony?” said Sirius. He nestled into his new spot with his bony elbows and hips, and Remus ruined his hair in revenge. “I dunno, I think that parenting—bringing a child into the world especially—is, y’know, a monumental act of hubris. Which is Ziggy Stardust’s defining characteristic.”
Remus opened his mouth with a readied retort, and then once he realised it wasn’t the worst allegory, actually, and maybe a decent one, he closed it.
Beside him, he heard Lily’s lips do the same.
“What?” asked Sirius. “There’s this initial rush about not having enough time and an impending biological apocalypse—Five Years—and a rise to fame while you’re adored by the tots in the middle, and then by the end of it, they’re tearing you apart, Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide, and it’s your own fault ’cos you were the one to bugger up their whole lives and preach to them about a world and saviour that isn’t really there.”
“Jesus Christ, Padfoot.”
“And it’s—y’know, it’s not a sympathetic position. Ziggy is awful. He took this precious thing, this trust everyone had in him, and he abused it for his own gain.” Sirius deflated against Remus’s side. “You ever think about your parents? What they must’ve thought before having you?”
“No,” said Lily. “I do think about the decisions my parents are making now, though. You remember they’re sick?”
Sirius nodded and Remus frowned. He hadn’t actually known that.
“They’re in hospital now. Pneumonia a bunch of times, it’s mad. I wanted to bring them to St. Mungo’s, but they’re not having it. Petunia accused me of making them sick with magic and—okay, they say they don’t believe her, but they don’t want to make her upset either. Even after she told the doctors and nurses I was mad, they won’t contradict her.”
“Fuck, Lils,” said Remus.
“I snuck in once, but it only made them upset. Never understood magic, them, and I gather the more it became part of my life, the less they wanted to know about it. They only met James twice,” she added, “and he and Pet had such an awful row—she kept saying we were making them sick—so they think he’s a bad influence. He can’t stand to be in a room with Petunia, you know how he is, and she’s always there. Neither of them will swallow their pride. Of course they hold it against James and praise Pet for it. They adore her fiancé, did I mention that?”
“What an utter cow.”
“That’s her,” said Lily. Her tight red plait had come a little loose with the dancing and whatnot, and it made her look as tired as Remus often felt. “I wonder if she’s not right.”
“You can’t be—”
“—they don’t know what it is,” she explained, “the doctors, and I gather there’s some magic diseases that muggles can get. Maybe I passed something to them on accident.”
“Is that your fault, though?” asked Sirius.
“I don’t know if it’s about fault. I wonder, I guess, if they knew what would happen, that if maybe I’m the reason they’re ill, would they have had me?”
“’Course they would, Lils,” said Sirius. “Your parents love you.”
“You never talk about yours,” she said. She flushed redder than her freckled face already was, then, as though she only then became aware of what she was saying.
“’Cos my family’s a mess. How’s that poem go, Moony?”
“Which one?”
“The—c’mon, you know the one, you read it—”
“—oh, Larkin. This Be the Verse.”
“I’ll settle in, shall I,” murmured Lily.
“‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’”
A beat.
“Is that it?” asked Lily.
“No, but I’ll sooner drink piss from a boot than remember the rest of it this hammered.”
“Ah, hm. Speaking of drinking piss, Lils, would you—”
“Shove off. You brought it up, Black.”
“And I’m full of regrets.”
“I can do it, Pads,” said Remus.
Sirius leaned his head straight back up against Remus’s shoulder to look at him upside-down. After a moment, he gave a frail nod.
“The first time I really met Walburga Black,” began Remus, “I thought she was the nicest mother in the world.”
Remus was getting weird and sentimental and uncommonly forthright, and he briefly wondered if his high was turning on him. Maybe the opposite—maybe the warmth he felt was letting him trust.
“Summer before fourth year. Sirius sent us each a fancy invitation on the poshest stationary I’ve ever seen. We were all chuffed—never got to see Sirius’s before. Knew he didn’t get on with his family, but not why.”
“Greeted you lot at the door,” growled Sirius. “Deranged bat. Didn’t want you to see the Kissed servants.”
“James, Peter, and I stayed three days. She baked just like Mrs. Potter except without all of the love and sugar and delicious Indian sweets, left us to our own devices, even for meals, except when she and Orion would chide Sirius about sulking or not including Regulus in our games. He was sulking, but we just thought that was because they put him in formal robes for the visit. The ones with the monogrammed cufflinks, like.”
“Moony, the posters. You brought the posters.”
“I did.”
“Posters?”
“Muggle women on motorbikes from a shop in Cardiff,” Remus explained. “Sirius stuck them up on the wall as soon as I handed them off and—Jesus, the cold fury of that woman. Her lips went so thin they might’ve been a razor.”
“Less editorialising, Moony.”
“She dragged Sirius by the ear into their library—that was our first cue—and he came out a full hour later with these red puffy eyes. We knew he’d been crying.” Remus had also smelled the blood, but he couldn’t well share that part with Lily, so he said, “I lost it on her, like.”
“Lost it?” asked Lily.
Sirius looked up at Remus with a wild grin. There he was. “He started cussing her out,” explained Sirius. “Flew down the stairs, almost. Couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“Remus,” said Lily, scandalised and aghast. “You didn’t.”
“I did. Screamed every foul word I could remember, even if they didn’t go together. Spat on her, actually, and if James and Peter hadn’t come down after me and held me back, I think I might’ve jumped on her. Not my proudest moment, if m’honest.”
“Picture him at fourteen,” said Sirius, reminiscing, “already a beanpole, shouting, ‘Foul loathsome evil demoness cunting arsehole of a whore,’ and flailing like a wild dog. Gave Peter a black eye by accident. And the look on her face! Ha!”
Lily frowned. “I thought Sirius didn’t start living with the Potters until that Christmas before you left?”
“I didn’t,” said Sirius. He shrugged and sniffed, putting on bored airs. Always the aristocrat.
“She called me a filthy half-blood,” explained Remus, “and a load of other vile stuff, and we were all made to leave a short while after that.”
“Your nickname makes a touch more sense, now,” said Lily. “Never seen that side of you.”
“I had some emotional problems as a kid. In any case,” he continued, “Sirius was furious with me for months. Left me gutted, though I never blamed him for that.”
“Look back on it fondly now, though, don’t we?”
“It makes sense now why you two are so inseparable.”
Remus and Sirius, whose limbs were already a tangle, both exchanged looks, with the former tilting his head down and the latter up.
“James was the one to get him out. With his family’s help, o’course,” said Remus, shrugging. “I made the situation worse.”
“I wasn’t implying you make things better for each other,” replied Lily. She took on a wistful look. “You have each other covered, even when it’ll make a mess. Like me and James, that. Except you lot don’t shag,” she added.
“Right,” said Remus dryly. It was maybe true.
“What about you, Remus?”
“Do I shag?”
“No,” said Lily, laughing again in that bubbly way. “What about your family?”
Remus blinked, and, below him, he heard Sirius’s mouth open. With a gentle hand, however, he tilted Sirius’s jaw shut.
“I got my father’s wand in the post the other day,” said Remus. “First instinct was to snap it.” Lily paled and her eyes sobered, so he said, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to jump on you.”
“Didn’t know that,” said Sirius, quiet. “S’pose it follows, what with your recent moods.”
“I don’t have moods. You have moods,” he muttered. It was a childish thing to say, but they were talking about family. It fit. “My mum’s—well, there’s no easy way to say it. They think she’s dead, like.”
“Do you?” asked Lily.
“Don’t know, if m’honest,” said Remus. “I wasn’t nice to her when I was little. She wanted to keep me safe, but—”
“—safe?”
Remus blinked. He was getting sloppy. Christ, why did he do drugs, again?
“Remus had a rough childhood,” said Sirius. Always quicker than Remus, always on his toes. “Met your mum once or twice, as I recall. Kind old bird.”
“Do not,” said Remus, “call my mother a ‘bird.’”
“If the feather fits—”
Remus clamped a hand over Sirius’s mouth and tried not to squirm when Sirius licked it with the verve and vigour of a canine Animagus. He could be clever and say, You don’t know where that hand’s been, Pads, but that was an unlikely deterrent.
“She never let me out of her sight too long,” said Remus. “And I never gave her anything but trouble for it. She just—oh, actually, this might sum it up. I ever tell you how she met him?”
“Your father?” asked Lily and Sirius in unison. “No.”
“Boggart went after her,” said Remus. “Looked like a man. He swooped in and banished it, and didn’t tell her for months what had happened. That she was never in any danger at all. Bloody fucker had to trick her into staying with him.”
Maybe his high had turned against him, or at least rallied with his simmering resentment and strengthened it. Blood was pounding in his ears and, he realised, Sirius could probably feel his heartbeat.
“Non-sequitur,” said Remus, now aware of the silence. “On a scale of, say, one to ten, how likely do you think it is that Emmeline and the new Defence professor are shacking up?”
Lily sputtered into a sudden wheezing laugh like she’d been clocked in the gut, while Sirius threw his limbs out in surprise.
“I need so much more to drink before I’m ready to hear what brought that up,” said Lily. “Be back in a blink, loves.”
As it turned out, she wasn’t—from the sound of it, she was immediately distracted in the other room by a new conversation—and it left Sirius and him alone on the sofa before the hearth, still tangled up like a knot.
“Speaking of fourth year,” began Sirius. He squirmed away and to a crouching position on the sofa. Remus tried to hold him still, but Sirius was like a bony squid or a summer breeze: impossible to hold onto. “There’s been this thing on my mind—something I’ve been meaning to re-enact. If you would, Moony?” he continued, and there came a round of inebriated cheers from the other room. A smashed glass. Sirius swung his leg to straddle Remus’s lap.
You wouldn’t, Remus mouthed, unable to wipe the grin off his face.
Except of course he was Sirius Black, and so he would crane his dead down to lick from the top corner of Remus’s mouth to the bottom opposite and back around. It was funny and strange and Remus wasn’t sure whether to push Sirius off or not because, well, even if you didn’t think it was an alien way to snog someone—and even if, like Remus, you were beginning to get a taste for it, crossed wires be damned—it was distinctly weird.
What wasn’t weird was the kiss that followed. Sirius pressed his narrow, fuzzy lips forwards and met Remus like solving a soft puzzle he’d set in the scruffy home of Remus’s jaw. His dark curls fell beside them on either side, a tickling curtain to section off an intimate moment, and, in their tiny private galaxy, Remus realised he didn’t just enjoy the orbit of Sirius Black. Sirius and him were a binary star.
Remus pushed, hard, into the kiss and gripped both hands on Sirius’s bony hips because he didn’t trust himself and because kissing Sirius was a ride for which you kept both hands inside the cart at all times. He was a rollercoaster and moved his hips like one, and even though they were at a party with some nine of their closest colleagues plus Severus in the other room, Remus was grinding his dick as sensually as he could against the, well, flatter-than-expected curve of Sirius’s somewhat bony arse like they were rutting in a convertible on a lonely hill. They were overwarm, slightly sweaty, chest to chest. Their heartbeats raced like overworked pistons.
It was embarrassing and too public and sort of pathetic in the desperation of his horniness, and yet when Sirius fixed one hand in the mess of Remus’s hair where it belonged, Remus realised that in that moment, he would’ve done anything and everything Sirius asked of him.
Sirius never asked, however. In one smooth motion he released his grip in Remus’s hair, pulled away, and swung his leg back over until he was sprawled lazily and luxuriantly over the sofa like a bear that had had its fill of some heavily-fermented fruits. It left Remus flushed and hard and whining, he realised, like a literal actual dog. Before Remus put together that he, too, could initiate things with Sirius, however, he heard footsteps approaching. Chunky heels on long strides.
“And what,” asked Mary, peeking around the corner at their cosy sofa and fireplace, “is going on here, I wonder?”
“Just re-enacting the infamous Sirius Black’s First Kiss from fourth year,” said Sirius. He poked her tongue out at her and she laughed.
“Oh, is that so? Remus?” she asked. “What’s the verdict?”
Remus grinned. “He’s really, really good at this.”
“So good, I was about to have his trousers off, I’ll have you know. Kinky little minx, our Moony.”
“Oh, excellent,” said Mary. Then, over her shoulder, she called, “Em! Lils! We’re having a threesome in here!”
There was a small stampede of feet as six more postgraduates poured into the room and piled onto the small two-person sofa in an attempt to see if the thing had a weight limit. Eventually, Remus, Sirius, Mary, Lily, Emmeline, Benjy, Rucha, and Gloria Ahmed and her Kneazle were stacked like mismatched tower blocks on top of the legless ruins of a broken sofa, in that order.
Even while pissed, stoned, and high on Sweet Nothings, Ahmed still managed to rule from a throne.
Notes:
The full text of the Combahee River Collective Statement that Mary references in this chapter is available to read for free here, though you can find better-formatted versions online with a quick Google search. I chose an existing web archive link mostly in the hopes of avoiding a dead link, or one that is eventually rerouted to a malicious location.
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, By Association will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 27 December, a Friday. If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is (WIP WARNING!) Calling off the dogs by fiddleleafedfig, a melancholy non-magical coming-of-age fic with a focus on religious themes. I'm an enormous fan of texture in fiction, and this fic oozes texture.
Chapter 8: By Association
Chapter Text
The Daily Prophet, 10 March 1979
AURORS? WHAT AURORS?
WHITEHALL—Murders, fires, missing persons—and Minchum blames the press.
As the country faces the threat of all-out mayhem and amid renewed calls for action, Minister for Magic Harold Minchum scoffed at accusations that Aurors were being diverted to protect Ministry personnel, a sign of doubt in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement (DMLE)’s approach to defending the people of Britain.
He said: “There is no doubt—but plans are always ready.”
Minchum went on to say that institutions like the Prophet were contributing to a ‘culture of fear’ and that any public reporting on the movements or tactics of Aurors was ‘subversive’ and ‘threatened the safety of hard-working Aurors and citizens alike.’ He gave no comment on mounting public sentiment to ban congregations of half-breeds or whether or not he would support Wizengamot member Gwyn Selwyn’s proposed legislation to fortify the Werewolf Register.
FEAR.
Three years after DMLE Head Bartemius Crouch authorised the use of Unforgiveable Curses by Aurors pursuing suspected deviants, there remains no end in sight for these measures panned as ‘drastic, aggressive, and without mercy’ by Magical Law critics such as Malodora Snyde.
“As the criteria for being deemed a suspected political dissident remains withheld from the public and, according to Ministry sources, grows wider with each passing day, I cannot endorse this flagrant erosion of our rights and free thought. We may never know the full Wizarding toll of this frankly chilling policy.”
BRINK.
With falling support for Minchum and his Dementor-oriented strategies, it is speculated that Minchum may be another in the line of ousted officials, following the legacy of ex-Minister for Magic Eugenia Jenkins.
However, with the increased powers of the DMLE and the sentencing of suspected deviants to Azkaban without trial, many are left asking: which ‘Dark Lord’ should we truly fear?
Remus folded the newsprint and flung it to the edge of Sirius’s bed, where it landed atop another similar article albeit with no moving pictures. His worlds, both muggle and magical, was barrelling headlong towards disaster, and if only Remus had the energy to care. Strikes and marches; bans and prohibitions; laws, laws, laws. There’d been an opinion piece on the weekly printing of the Werewolf Register. Malodora Snyde, a repeat commentator whom Remus loathed, was arguing (probably for the express purpose of personally complicating Remus’s life) that one Friday-night posting of the Register in the back pages of the Evening Prophet was now insufficient for tracking ‘the spreading contagion’ and new measures were sorely needed. As though this was the greatest trial facing magical Britain in their current era. Gwyn Selwyn’s hale, righteous stare intimidated him whenever he dared open the Prophet’s back pages, which covered the legislative ongoings of the Wizengamot, and thus were tucked away between personal listings and international Quidditch coverage. Suffice it to say it was all shite. Indeed, the only thing peeling him from the bed so early in the morning was the looming presence of the full moon, which, at least, hadn’t landed on his birthday that year—not that there were any planned celebrations.
“Have y’read this?” asked Remus, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
Sirius paused—he was rustling around in his bureau for something, dark curls still tousled by sleep—and then said, “Moony.”
“Yes, darling?”
“I am currently walking around without trousers on,” he said, “and you’re asking me about the Prophet?”
“Yes, darling.”
“When did we become these people?” he said, cupping his face with both hands. Sirius was indeed wearing no trousers, although it being the end cusp of winter, he still wore a thin white cotton vest and, unlike Remus, favoured boxer shorts, also Stuart tartan. His eyes kept catching on the soft, downy hair that darkened the gap between his shirt hem and waistband, and even where it peeked over the collar of his vest. When he twisted his torso Remus could make out the shape of his hipbones. And, there—at first Remus thought he was idly scratching, but, no, Sirius bunched his vest in his crooked fist, lifting its hem slowly, knowingly, a wicked glint in his eyes. So much pale skin. Remus struggled to maintain eye contact. Not that that was new.
“Got your attention now, haven’t I?”
That Sirius was taking a Pavlovian approach to their relationship, however you chose to define it, was not lost on Remus, and though he never dared say it out loud, he was enjoying that approach. He was wanted. He felt wanted. For Sirius, a boyish sort whose demands were shallow and whose deeper desires were so seldom spoken aloud, Remus was malleable clay.
Yet, there were hitches. The growing fatigue aside—which, mind you, had resulted in a half dozen embarrassing situations with Sirius kissing his neck and Remus falling asleep—it was also not lost on Remus that creative substances were the key to easing Remus’s inhibitions, and he had little room for those, now. Remus’s memory was growing so dodgy that he hadn’t touched anything fun since the Valentine’s party, much to his and Sirius’s chagrin. Booze and spliff knocked him out almost instantly. Worse if it followed a meal—he smoked most mornings to stave off his appetite and took tea for breakfast, which had an appreciable effect on preventing him from falling asleep while reshelving, but by dinner left him either comatose or (and Christ he would kill Sirius if ever it got out) an inability to summon up physical desire while Sirius tangled them in the sheets rutted against his thigh. Hunger and cigarettes were anathema to the dick.
It was weird. He’d got his end away on and/or in a number of blokes already. He mightn’t have finished school, but southern France had supplied an alternate form of education and a near-infinite supply of Franco-Iberian boys and men who’d been only too willing and, actually, now that he thought about it, possibly too willing to get an amateur blowjob from a bookish sixteen-stroke-seventeen-year-old-werewolf in the latter case. He’d topped. A handful of times, in fact. He’d learned that there was a word for that among his sort, and that it was called ‘topping’. Suffice it to say he was no doe-eyed ingénue. Lycanthrope à genoux. Around the moons, he had the constant urge to interrupt Sirius’s showers, or to wake Sirius up with his mouth, or—well, the point was clear.
Sirius arched an eyebrow and probably noticed Remus wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying, so he grinned and trailed his eyes down Remus’s navel. “That’s more what I expected,” he said, and flung himself towards the bed.
Except the moons, too, felt like a kind of drug.
Even if he trusted himself, Remus was relying on them more and more to accomplish everything that fell apart in the three weeks between. Only the full moon repelled his fatigue. His research was a shambles; Gloria Ahmed was set to leave Hogwarts in a few months and had become even more secretive in her research, which, by the way, he still had no idea what he was looking for or why Dumbledore needed him to find it; the werewolf in the woods hadn’t been in the glade when he tried a week prior; and, well, with Sirius—
Sirius’s mouth was on his neck and then on his lips, and moved frequently between the two. Their rules, which weren’t spoken but more implicit, kept Sirius’s hands within bounds—bare chest, flushed neck, face, arms, even high upon Remus’s stocky thighs was okay, the bloody tease—and yet the frustrated way Sirius ground his lap against the spot where Remus’s thigh met hip told him that Sirius desperately wanted more. He could smell his arousal, sweat and excitement staining their sheets. Even Stuart tartan couldn’t camouflage the dark stains on Sirius’s boxer shorts.
It was hardly chaste. Remus always pressed back as if not more needy than Sirius, and the two layers of thin, damp fabric weren’t going to save their souls from burning in Hell. Which, really, was what this was, because Sirius would trail kisses down from the corner of Remus’s mouth to the scruffy stubble of his chin until his lips were below Remus’s navel and Sirius was tugging down his waistband. Remus balled his fists in the red sheets behind him. He kicked his foot like a fucking dog. Sirius grinned and laughed and let a bead of saliva drip from the tip of his tongue onto Remus’s fuzzy crotch, and yet—
“Wait,” said Remus, and although Sirius stopped in an instant, he groaned and blew a hot breath between his lips that made Remus shudder. “Pads, I just—”
“—it’s your birthday,” said Sirius. His tone was petulant. His tongue was about half an inch from the tip of Remus’s dick, so hard Sirius could probably count his heartbeats for him, which made this quite quite possibly the hardest, or, er, the most difficult thing Remus had ever done. “You were the one who told me you hadn’t copped off with anyone in months.”
Remus fought a losing battle with a yawn. “Padfoot, I am so very desperately horny right now, as you can see,” he said, “but—well, the moon.”
Sirius stared back at him with incredulous grey eyes. “Your time of the month, Moony? Really?” he said, and while there was humour to his tone, Remus also picked out a wounded undertone to it. Sirius probably thought he was doing something wrong. He released Remus’s waistband and then gestured to his own tented crotch. “Is this doing anything for you?”
“Did you want me to—”
“—oh, bloody never mind,” said Sirius. He sat back on his knees and ran both hands through his dark curls. When Sirius deflated, it was never a grand ordeal because the boy couldn’t put on weight even at nineteen, but it stung Remus all the same. “Should I take care of this? Is this—are you gonna change your mind later? Shall I wait in the wings for your arrival?”
“Oh, piss off.”
The look that ran over Sirius’s sharp, angular features was an acrobatic one, jumping to a high-browed surprise, tumbling tight across hurt, and then sticking its ten-point landing on the unearned imperiousness that so defined Sirius Black’s moods.
“Fine,” he said, remaining cordial probably only because it was Remus’s birthday. “I am going to go have one off in the shower, a long shower, and then the next time that you want this,”—he gestured to his body and then settled a hand on the front of his boxers—“you can take some bloody initiative, because I am tired of trying to intuit my way through whatever this months-long mood is. Oh, and your gift is on your bureau. Happy birthday.”
Sirius slammed the bathroom door, which was the only childish thing he did in that whole encounter.
The worst part of being apart from Sirius for three years was that it’d become far less easy to feel good about their arguments. If Remus had any clue as to what was happening with his body, the fatigue, and his lycanthropy, he’d have shared it with Sirius already.
The clue, that was. Probably not his body.
His last hope was to ride the moon’s manic energy until he had some kind of solution. Sixteen waking hours each day, sometimes more, had barely been enough for his postgrad life before. Now, outside of the three days before and after the moon, he found himself rising as late as noon and falling asleep by nine. Thus far, he was lucky in that the other postgraduates just thought he was so far ahead he’d got lazy. Sometimes Remus worried whether the fatigue might stop advancing at all. His secret would be exposed, then, and not even Albus Dumbledore would be able to save him from the impending coma.
Which was why that morning of his nineteenth birthday while Sirius was still in the shower, probably wanking with some fury, Remus decided he would try again to visit the werewolf in the woods. This time, however, he would bring a gift.
***
The snow had melted away in wells around the wide base of each tree in the Forbidden Forest, and the branches long since cleared of loose powder by the movings and disturbances of all its denizens. He saw a few deer, no foxes, dozens of little birds and many a rabbit with coat ongoing the spring change, and tried to forget how many he had devoured raw over the course of his many moons.
His stomach rumbled. The rabbits fled from him as soon as they scented him. That was him—Remus the Yob, the Book Boggart, heralded by fleeing bunnies. No magical creatures—or, well, at least none with any recorded intellect—bothered him on his travels through, and so he dismissed his Patronus once he was past the threshold guarded by drifting Dementors. A suspicion was growing in Remus.
The glade itself looked as though an early localised spring had arrived. Colourful wildflowers sprung from every fallen log and were thick around the base of the flat boulder in the middle, which acted as a sort of pedestal or throne. To Remus’s relief, atop it sat the long-haired werewolf, whose clothes looked less stained and yet more torn since the last time he’d seen them. Even from across the clearing, their eyes immediately settled on the wide flat box in Remus’s off hand. They cocked their head to the side and listened as Remus shook it.
“You’ve no idea how glad I am to see you,” called Remus. When the other werewolf inclined their head, he approached the boulder and was quietly thankful that he didn’t have to keep yelling across a wide and empty clearing.
“He’s nicer this time,” said the other werewolf. “He needs something.”
“Yes,” said Remus, quick, “I do, but I’ve also brought you a gift in exchange.” He’d done some research on the various spirits and other hard-to-classify denizens of the Scottish Highlands, and while they matched none of the descriptions, every text had at some point said the same thing: it was very difficult to ask something of a fey spirit, and much, much easier to offer them something instead.
“A gift?” they asked.
“A gift,” said Remus. He gently shook the box again, and inside, several small objects rattled in place against crinkly aluminium paper. “I hope I’ll get more than one answer this time.”
“Give me the gift and we will see.”
Because they made no motion to hop off from their seated position atop the boulder, Remus struggled, although not as much as he’d imagined, to climb up the rough stone face and sit beside them. On its far side was a thick snarl of tangled ivies, giving ample handholds.
He passed off the box, which the other werewolf tore open, and said, “It’s—”
“I know what chocolate is, magic boy,” said the other werewolf, annoyed. They worked with surprising dexterity and precision to unwrap each assorted chocolate and devoured each one with similar efficiency. “These are good,” they said, mouth full, “Bring more of these, next time.”
“Noted.”
“You are tired and tired of being tired.”
“I am,” said Remus. Rather than watch the werewolf eat, which in all honesty Remus found both tragic and a touch disturbing, he looked out across the glade from their raised perch. It was a nice view—from this higher angle, you could see further into woods going out than you would coming in, which felt like being in the eye of a very slow-moving, forest-looking storm. “You knew this last time.”
“If he knew, he would not have come back.”
“You don’t know that. Can’t have known that, like.”
The other werewolf stopped about halfway through the box and squinted down at the box. They craned their neck down and hunched their back, long tangles of matted hair spilling over the box, and then reached two fingers behind the plastic fitting to tug on a tucked-away photograph. It was a still one—neither his camera nor could he use magic, at the time—but the woman in it with tight spirals of hair, functional hiking clothes, and a dark complexion was unmistakeable.
“You brought two gifts,” they said. “Is this her?”
“I thought you would recognise Chima,” said Remus. He was being very careful not to burn any potential questions. This werewolf was very literal about things.
“She is much older, here,” they said, tapping Chima’s nonplussed expression with a cracked and now chocolate-stained nail. “I knew her when she was but a little girl in Algiers.”
Remus blinked and kept his head from swivelling. That was unexpected.
“She’s—well, she looks older than you,” he said, and it wasn’t a lie. Though they were sun-worn and dirty, they looked young, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, and the roundness of childhood hadn’t left their face.
“She is still prettier,” they said. “Ask me your first question.”
“If the unfinished ritual from the denmothers is the reason I’m growing increasingly tired,” began Remus, “how do I rectify that and fix the mistake as well as the fatigue?”
“No.”
“What.”
“No,” said the other werewolf. They closed the box of chocolates and set a heavy stone atop the empty half, crushing the cardboard and pinning it against the boulder. “The unfinished ritual is not the reason you are tired or tired of being tired.”
“You said—”
“No. You assumed.” They hopped off the boulder and walked with unnatural speed towards the nearest tree. “We’re going to climb that.”
“Without magic,” said Remus, flat. He hopped off after them and thankfully didn’t roll his ankle. His landings were improving, at least. “I didn’t think wolves were known for climbing trees.”
“‘Without magic,’” said the other werewolf. They laughed—a hollow sound with an echo swallowed by the forest. “What does that mean, magic boy?”
“Do I get another—”
“—we will not use sticks to climb the tree,” they said. “How does a werewolf not use magic?”
He stared at the rough, grooved bark at the base of the tree and noted that the next available branch was some three metres from the ground.
“S’pose we are magical creatures,” said Remus, “but we’re not spiders. I can’t just stick to a tree.”
“You can use your head.” They grabbed hold of the tree and affixed a bare foot on the slightest bulge of a knot in the bark and Remus winced as their toenails dug into the grooves. The other werewolf didn’t seem to mind pain or cold, however, and began ascending. “Are all werewolves magic?” they asked, with no hint of exertion on their breath.
Remus suppressed a cry of disgust as he grabbed hold of the tree and found it sticky. It was made all the worse as his boots found no grip at all, so he had to pull them off, covering both his shoes and socks with oozing sap.
“All werewolves have to be magic,” Remus said with a grunt. “That’s sort of the premise, I’ve gathered.”
“Are they magic before as well as magic after?”
He tried again. The other werewolf was waiting for him, presumably to show him the path.
“I’m going to call you Socrates,” said Remus.
“Why?”
“That.” His feet stung and felt awful with sap, but he did have better grip. As he climbed, he considered the question. “I don’t know if there are muggle werewolves.”
Once they passed the first ten feet and got to the branches, Remus realised that the difficulty of climbing a tree was inversely proportionate with the danger. He was glad Socrates let him still carry his wand. Regular spellcasting habituated you against a great deal of self-preserving behaviours given the relative ease of minor mendings and telling gravity to bugger itself, but the higher they climbed, the less Remus could focus on reason and the more he focused on calculating the speed at which he would impact the forest floor if his next foothold failed to hold.
“You did not finish the ritual you learned,” they said. They wove through the branches like a snake through grass. Remus, meanwhile, pushed through like a dog under a chain-link fence. “There is a complete ritual and I know of it. I can show you.”
“Thank you,” said Remus, breathing now heavy from exertion. “but I would like to know what I’m getting into,” he continued, cursing his beanstalk height and the added force required to heft it, “before I engage in transformative rituals.”
“Come back to me when you are wilder and I will tell you.”
Out of whatever pitiful mercy Socrates had for Remus, they didn’t make him climb the entirety of the tree, which Remus realised must have easily climbed a hundred feet or more to the sky. There were things in the tree—loose webs, a dozen burgeoning insects, skittering arachnids, and a few nests that Remus was careful to leave untouched because some magical birds could be very, very vicious with you about trespassing. The forest was less empty than he realised. A little less Einsamkeit to his Wald.
They were about thirty feet up, which was twenty-three feet and some inches higher than Remus preferred to be at any given moment, but his broom time with Sirius and his students fought off the vertigo.
“Why am I so tired?” asked Remus. After a moment, he added, “and please don’t say because I just climbed a tree or because I smoke too many cigarettes.”
“I don’t know,” said Socrates. “That is a magic boy problem.”
Well, piss. Back to the drawing board for that.
“When do I count as ‘wilder?’”
“When you are off your leash,” they said. More detritus had accumulated in their long hair due to the climb—it was unwashable, really, the whole thing would probably just come right off if it touched soap—and Remus realised he hadn’t ever seen them show pain or discomfort. “This is your last answer,” they continued, meeting Remus’s look with their wild eyes. “Ask.”
Remus stared down at the distant forest floor, where pine needles and earth were framed by the last dregs of hard, unmelted snow. His tired brain hadn’t expected to get this far.
“Are you—were you a human, ever?” he asked after a long pause.
Socrates rolled back their head and laughed, and then Remus was falling from the branch.
Only by the grace of nearly five years of Professor Flitwick’s relentless drilling was he able to arrest his own momentum before hitting the ground. Magic saved his life a dozen times every day, and yet it had cost him several that he’d never be able to live.
When he turned over and caught his breath, the other werewolf was gone, and Remus decided to add ‘malicious’ back to the list of identifying traits. Not that malice was a particularly unique feature among magical creatures, of course.
***
As it turned out, Remus’s bad reputation had spread from the postgraduates to the general student body and then, as of recent events, back to the postgraduates. Existing on the constant brink of falling asleep had been cute for a few weeks and now everyone was thoroughly sick of his shite. Conversation dithered whenever he entered the longue. Mary canted her expressive head to the side whenever he asked if she’d like to go for a smoke off the side of a viaduct and said, “No, darling, I’ve research to do,” verbatim, every single windy evening for the past nine days. Later he’d catch her varnishing Sirius’s toenails with Lily on his other side, shameless, and by silent, mutual agreement Remus would pretend that he had something better to do only to fall asleep and be left asleep at his bureau until sandy-eyed morning.
Perhaps because of the floating candles and the entrancing (false image of a) night’s sky on the enchanted ceiling, Remus often fell asleep in the Great Hall, usually before or after a meal. Whenever Sirius was absent for one reason or another (flying lessons with Emmeline, revisions with his cohort who now met regularly without him, still shagging Benjy Fenwick, &c. &c.), Remus found himself awoken by an insistent empty tin plate trying to abscond from beneath Remus’s forehead like a trapped bird, or the changing of the ceiling’s weather, or, just once thus far, the silvery ghost of a masked Venetian noblewoman trying to determine if he’d died and thus needed ghostly guidance. Missing meals only worsened the fatigue.
In the shower. While reading. He even fell asleep on the Quidditch pitch, thankfully in the stands and not the air. After a pathetic moon where Padfoot outpaced him in both speed and stamina, Sirius started refusing him a broom and made him watch for fair play and technique from the ground. Thus far Sirius hadn’t deigned to leave him there until nightfall, not improbably because he was afraid that, were fresh snow to fall, Remus might actually freeze to death rather than stir awake in the late Highland chill. Even Irma Pince slipped a flyer under his mountains of reshelving: it was a local group that met bimonthly, which was to say twice a month, for witches and wizards (OTHER NON-HUMANS WELCOME!, noted the flyer cheerily) who couldn’t quite handle the day without a handle of a firewhiskey. 3L: that was how many litres the rumourmongers of the student body rumoured he drank.
Needless to say the Book Boggart was slain, and his fearsome reputation dwindling.
As March closed, Remus caught wind that while there were no formal exams for postgraduates, the faculty advisors would assess his thesis progress at the end of term and act, in essence, as the ultimate arbiter for whether Remus would continue in the program. An informal test, if you would. And, of course, if you would, have all your citations and end notes and a formal presentation prepared, and of course prepare all of this in triplicate—that being in addition to your own—so as to distribute a copy to each of your faculty advisors. Seeing as he had a half-dozen puzzle pieces kludged together from smaller puzzle-pieces belonging to no specific box, however, he wasn’t keen on that idea. Moreover, his Comprehensive Locator Charm once again took a back seat to his new research project.
Bothering the postgraduates was something he could live with; bothering Irma Pince, however, would soon get him murdered. He’d fallen asleep at the help desk and in the stacks often enough that she now felt it necessary to supervise him instead of doing whatever interesting librarian thing she’d rather be doing that moment, and the students, perhaps tired of Remus forgetting what they’d asked, had started turning to her for help.
No one was in a good mood.
“Mr. Lupin,” said Irma Pince, sharp. She wore, with seriousness, a very funny hat that was too wide at the sides and bore many raven feathers, and yet her amused features—high arching eyebrows, long nose, wide but short mouth—took on their previous bird-of-prey-like qualities. “If you enjoy those books so much,” she continued, snappish, “I could send them to your home with the rest of your things”
That was a new threat. How fitting it would be to leave Hogwarts by choice only to be expelled-stroke-fired after returning. Remus slid the books on sleep curses, sleeping draughts, and the mythos of sleep to the side and gave a sheepish look. Les Rêves de Glaikit hadn’t been particularly interesting anyway.
“Honestly,” she said, tutting.
As he packed a large stack of returned books back onto his reshelving cart, however, Remus heard the most curious laugh: while he was used to the giggles and snickers and silent pointing, this one was quiet and yet still imperious. Aristocratic.
Regulus Black stood at the other end of the counter, flanked by a short, cunning-eyed and wicked-browed Avery on one side and Severus Snape on the other, the walking stain. His hair was parted back and up loosely into an aristocratic bun, exposing his broad forehead and giving him an air of casual sophistication: you could scarcely count on someone like him to honour any unspoken social contract, because his world of origin was an alien one, parallel and odd, where children had governesses and Kissed servants and accompanied their eccentric uncles on dragon-hunting expeditions that cost exorbitant sums of gold. The rules simply weren’t the same. With icy brown eyes—not grey, thankfully, and his face was much squarer than Sirius’s own—that weren’t cold, just uncaring and amused, Regulus examined Remus as a bored cat might a mouse. His monogrammed cufflinks were bright and polished.
“Tired?” he asked. “What interesting reading material you have there.”
“I wasn’t aware Lupin could read,” said Severus dryly.
Remus wasn’t aware he could shut the fuck up. He didn’t say so aloud, of course, not even as the upper lip on his stupid sallow face curled upwards and Remus resisted the urge to punch him in his giant bloody nose. Blood was bad for the books. He kept rearranging them on his cart long past the point of it being sensible.
“Perhaps not. I’m told he beat the postgraduate board into accepting his application,” said Regulus. He tucked a loose hair back over his ear with practiced nonchalance—where he’d picked that from was obvious—and spoke with the casual, practiced tone of someone discussing literary canon. “Not to mention poor little Emily Leach.”
Oh, great, that was another rumour he needed the student body to pick up. He shot a glare at some eavesdropping students, but an involuntary yawn ripped out of him soon afterward, which undercut the whole effect.
“Do you have a book I can help you with?” asked Remus. He dug his fingernails into his palms. Hard. “How Not to be a Knob, maybe? Ten Ways to Fuck Off and Impress Your Mummy?” He was cursing in front of students. That’s what he needed, more reasons for disciplinary action.
“With that clever wit, it’s no wonder you made the program,” drawled Regulus.
“What else could you expect from—what do they call him? Loopy Loony Lupin?” said Severus. His face was neutral. It was childish and a boring insult, like calling him ‘Snivellus’ or a grease-stain, but as it turned out juvenile behaviour rarely ended with adulthood. He lifted three fingers and jutted out his thumb, little finger bone-rendingly tucked against the small of his palm. “Fitting that someone like him would waste the gift of higher learning. How wonderful it must be to be favoured by the powerful of the world,” he continued, tone flat, “even when you deserve none of it.”
“Oi.” Sirius approached them from behind and, for a moment, Remus braced. Regulus, Severus, Avery, and even the other sycophants whipped around and Remus could see their wands poking out the ends of their sleeves.
Regulus tilted his head to the side. “I thought I smelled—”
“—no one cares, Reggie,” interrupted Sirius. He waved a dismissive gesture. Shoo. “Now run along or I’ll hire one of the seventh years to write a letter to your lamprey of a mother and tell her you’ve been snogging half-bloods.”
Regulus fell silent. Jesus, Remus could kiss him. He’d throw himself over the counter, really, if he could muster the energy.
“Intimidation?” said Severus, droll, but Regulus held up a pale hand to quiet him. He began walking—bumping Sirius’s shoulder as he passed, which pulled an unsubtle gasp from the small gathered crowd of gawkers and other socially-parasitic onlookers—and left without a further word. The others followed a step behind.
“Might as well get him a bloody palanquin,” said Remus eventually, too quiet and too late to be heard by anybody who might repeat it.
When Sirius finished working his way through what Remus identified as breath exercises, he leaned his leathery elbows on the tall thickset library counter and then looked between Remus’s tired eyes, his pile of unfinished work, the texts on sleep magic, and the spot where Severus was previously standing. Realisation dawned on him, and a moment later, it dawned on Remus.
They were two different dawnings.
Sirius leaned further on the counter. “Buggering Christ. You’ve been done in by Severus,” he whispered.
Sirius always thought it was Severus. That hadn’t changed. “Padfoot—”
“—regardless of what you think about my instincts, a) it is a distinct possibility, ’cos it makes more sense than someone new going after you,” whispered Sirius, “and b) I cannot believe you kept this from me.”
“I thought you’d be yelling more, if m’honest.”
“Ah, I will,” replied Sirius. “First, you’re gonna explain everything, and once you’re better, I’ll yell.”
About twenty minutes later, Remus was slumped over his own bed and tried to will the fatigue out of his muscles and bones. Even talking made him tired. One of Sirius’s books on flight had roosted on the ceiling lamp, though in Remus’s vision it now had a translucent, orbital twin.
“So, while trying to steal Ahmed’s research, you were also meeting—”
“—with a werewolf in the woods I named Socrates, yes, because I think I might be cursed,” finished Remus. He yawned. Sirius swore. “Well. Cursed in a way inconsistent with other werewolves.”
“When you say ‘they,’ I s’pose you mean like Ziggy Stardust.”
“Correct,” said Remus. Then, a moment later, he snorted and added, “I promise I didn’t dream them up. They’re real.”
“They pushed you from a tree.”
“Think it was supposed to be a metaphor,” said Remus, “but yes, that’s the gist of it.”
“Okay—stop,” said Sirius, grabbing Remus’s wrists. “Keep your trousers on.”
Remus frowned. “Padfoot, m’sorry about—”
“No! Jesus Christ, no,” said Sirius, quick, “I’m gonna go fetch Mary and Lily, and if Mary gets that hungry look in her eyes after seeing you in your pants, I don’t know what I’ll do. And I mean that,” he continued, “in the sexy way, not the violent way.”
“Noted. Do I have t’be awake?”
“For the—Remus,” said Sirius. “I’d ask permission.”
“For the tests.”
“Oh, no, probably not. Being conscious might actually be detrimental to the diagnostic process, but you should probably expect me to shake you awake.”
Remus was already fast asleep.
***
Remus had some misgivings in being left out of his own health discussion, but when they shook him awake, Sirius summarised it thus: Mary was certain it wasn’t a curse laid by simple spellcasting, even if it was some novel invention; in his compulsive catatonic state Remus wasn’t sleeping, in actuality, he was merely unconscious, which is why his fatigue never improved and indeed was compounding; there was a great deal of debate about potential remedies; two full hours had gone by; they’d missed dinner; this was apparently worth note because on offer for the professoriate (of which they were now, horrifyingly, part) had been a sinful prosciutto-and-burrata-and-red-wine-poached-pear salad, oiled and spiced and served with a sweet white Italian frizzante so light and bubbly Emmeline Vance had compared it to honeyed Champagne; and that Lily knew they were out of their depths and so she called in Rucha Nagar to help as well.
“You can’t do a test?” asked Sirius. “Something, at least? Find a trace?”
“A test?” asked Rucha. She scrunched up her small face as if he’d asked her to tapdance or fly to the moon. “Why would a magical poison leave a trace?”
“’Cos it’s magic? Whimsical, obsessed with cosmic fairness and bound by the laws of magic, or something perhaps approaching that ideal?”
“P.A. is lowering the bar, honestly.”
“Are you going to be helpful?” asked Sirius, irritated. “Remus is quite possibly dying of poison.”
“Have you considered—”
“—no,” said Remus. He sat up on his elbows. “Out of the question.”
“—why—”
“—he’d certainly be withdrawn,” said Sirius. “During a War, no less. And if we can’t figure this out,” he continued, gesturing between the lot of them with great emphasis, “as five postgraduates, how are a bunch of overworked Healers at St. Mungo’s supposed to identify this mystery poison that you say won’t even have a trace.”
“Point taken,” said Rucha. “It’d help at least if we knew anything about the poisoner.”
Remus heard Sirius’s lips part, and he tutted. Sirius turned to watch him with the question in his eyes, and yet, before Remus could reply, Lily beat him to it.
“Black, don’t you dare,” she began, sputtering. “Why would Severus poison Remus and not you?”
Sirius shot him another look. Not Lily: him. Of course he understood Sirius’s logic. 1) Severus knew the secret of his lycanthropy, yet was sworn, apparently by Albus Dumbledore himself, not to reveal it; 2) Severus was apparently not sworn to not harm him; and 3) if, in being examined for the cause of his mystery illness, the expert Healers of St. Mungo’s uncovered his status as an unregistered werewolf and his secret were to therefore become public and also be accompanied by a lengthy sentence in the Dementor-ridden prison of Azkaban, what better way was there to punish both him and Sirius, the latter of whom had roamed, publicly if unspeakably guilt-ridden, for the last time he’d put Remus in harm’s path? Or perhaps not. Perhaps Remus was reading too much in Sirius’s harsh grey stare. It wasn’t exactly his lingua franca.
“I didn’t say anything,” said Sirius, looking away from him finally.
“Severus?” said Rucha. “As in Snape, comma, Severus? He’s—what, did you kill his mother or something?”
“Or something,” said Sirius, icy. His face was taut.
“What’s the prognosis, hypothetically speaking,” began Remus, “if it was Severus?”
Rucha shrugged. “To use the technical term, the prognosis is ‘You’re boned.’”
The four of them—not Rucha, who was enjoying this more as an academic exercise than anything else—deflated, and she fanned out both hands. “Don’t—okay, stop whatever that is,” she continued. “I’m a herbologist. Severus is a potions wizard, and maybe the most adept I’ve ever seen. If it was him, then I think there are two options: either you’re being continually poisoned, or it was a one-off dose. If it’s the former, Lupin would get better with time away—the summer, maybe—and it’ll resolve itself. It’s how I would do it,” she finished, “if I wanted to get rid of someone without killing them.”
“He’s been getting worse.” Sirius threw up his hands. “That, and we share nearly everything. A dorm, a shower—”
“—he always steals something off my plate, even when we’re in the Great Hall and there’s plenty enough to take from elsewhere.”
Mary, who had theretofore been quiet, interjected and said, “Some poisons accumulate over time. Muggles have it often with heavy metals, where the continuous exposure gradually worsens the effect. Huge problems with lead, for example.”
“Cheers, Mary.”
“Just trying to help.”
Rucha cleared her throat. “There are some herbs that have different properties when plucked by left or right hand and whether by waxing or waning moon—we’re past NEWT-level bollocks. You can’t guess on this. If we give him a counter-draught and it’s not a one-off dose or if we’ve got it wrong, you’ll just poison him the other way—or, if we’re unlucky, it’ll kill him outright. And that’s presuming it’s still in his system and this isn’t the byproduct of some permanent change to his physiology, like Polyjuice that’s gone off, the Elixir of Animagi, or a Draught of Lethe—”
“—he looks the same as he always does,” snapped Sirius, “he’s not an Animagus, and he—wait, what was that last one?”
“Padfoot, really?”
“I loathe potions.”
“‘Fill for me a brimming bowl
And let me in it drown my soul:
But put therein some drug, designed
to banish Woman from my mind:
For I want not the stream inspiring
That heats the sense with lewd desiring,
But I want as deep a draught
As e’er from Lethe’s waves was quaffed;’
et cetera et cetera. Keats, Padfoot. Keats.”
“His memory seems fine,” said Mary dryly. “How is it you know Greek but not the name of Hades’s river of forgetfulness?”
“Ah, that’s simple, darling. You see, Hades isn’t real.”
“Useless aside aside,” said Rucha, loud and with mild annoyance evident in her voice, “no matter how simple or complex, we have to know for certain what this is before we act.”
No one argued with that assessment.
“We’ll never get him to confess,” muttered Sirius. “Fuck.”
“We won’t,” said Lily. “I might. I’ll—bloody hell, I can’t believe I’m considering this. I’ll spike any good will I have left with him straight into the sea if you’re wrong about this, Black.”
“If he’s right, Lils…” said Mary. She let the implication rest.
“It’s Snivellus,” said Sirius, falling back into old routines. “I’ll come as—”
“No,” said the room.
They watched Lily leave—‘they’ being the three of them and not Remus. Sirius let him sleep. Later, Sirius told him what happened while he was asleep and/or unconscious. By his account, Lily came back to their dormitory with her neat red plait still well-together, but she a new hard look to her eyes, a Mohs-8 green, and something was lost from her expression. Her pink-rimmed stare was a thousand leagues deep. And there’d been the whiff of fresh sorcery off of her, to Sirius’s nose. He thought she’d been crying, and although she wouldn’t talk about it, Sirius thought she must’ve discovered something awful about Severus that day. What, precisely, Remus couldn’t fathom: it couldn’t be his nastiness, his cruel candour, the way he attacked any exploitable vulnerability. She couldn’t give a name or method to his poisoning, only the promise that it would stop. Remus had to wonder if Severus refused to explain himself, or worse, if he’d tried to bewitch her mind—to compromise, as though that would somehow let her continue ignoring the virulent hatred that shuddered like a fault line between her oldest childhood friend and her new cohort of modern, deviant romantics.
While they’d all lost people over the years, Sirius would long maintain that that was her moment—the first time Lily Evans realised she was in, not around, the War.
Resolution came with no climax.
Three months of silent suffering mended with such swiftness that it terrified Remus, because it meant he’d missed every possible avenue of poisoning and in fact never suspected it at all. Lily warned him to be careful, but he wasn’t sure that was possible. Severus was lethal. Lethal in the manner of radioactivity—when next he passed Remus and Lily in a corridor together, his silent steps made unsubtle by the flapping of his followers’ robes and the scuffing of their boots on the smooth castle flagstones, he didn’t so much as glance in their direction. Lily fell silent midsentence. Right as they rounded on the corner—there were four of them, Severus and his three students—one tiny pale boy of no more than fourteen (which, admittedly, had been the same age that James, Sirius, and Peter had become Animagi) shot him and Lily one furtive, terrified glance. A moment thereafter his expression tightened into a hard sneer.
Mudblood, he mouthed. To Remus, he curled his hand, 3L, and vanished behind the wall.
After a week and a moon, Easter was rearing its ugly egg-shaped head and Remus’s sleep schedule had almost righted itself. His Tantalus-esque relationship with the night was almost over. Recovery was just over yonder ridge. He was still terribly behind in all his work, of course, his reputation was in the gutter, and his current academic trajectory still put him in the path of flunking out, so all-in-all it was quite a far far ridge and its summit at the end of a brutal mountainous pass, but at least he wasn’t still being poisoned on top of his postgrad work—the latter of which was its own kind of poison. When he shared that thought with Sirius, however, he didn’t receive the expected reaction.
“Y’know, Lupin,” said Sirius. They were atop a lonely wide stone viaduct overlooking a river that fed into the Black Lake, tucked between a constellation of high castle-y spires and stained-glass windows with black-iron Gothic frames, where the wind oscillated most days between an eerie doldrum stillness and sudden ripping gusts that stuck their cold fingers to the beneath your scarf to the warm nape of your neck. Sirius was sucking on his second cigarette in as many minutes as if it’d given him the very gift of breath. “That really fucking hurt.”
“Which part?” Remus quirked a brow despite himself. “Being anchored by my bad reputation?”
“Piss off.”
“Pardon me?”
“I think you know well which part, yeah?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, the part where I was poisoned and panicking about my élan vital for three months hurt you, did it?”
“Yeah, it did, you prick,” said Sirius, gruff “but it hurt a lot more that you didn’t spare me a word about it. Three months!” He took another drag, finishing off his cigarette, and flicked it off the bridge. His frustrated fingers fished another hand-rolled one from his pocket and lit it up with a snap. “What the fuck, Remus?”
“Look, I was—”
“—Jesus Christ, get over yourself.”
“Pardon?” Remus felt his heart speeding. This was the yelling part.
“What happened to, ‘I’ll tell you everything? I forgave you a long time ago?’ You’ve been sneaking around all year, keeping secrets—I don’t know who you are, Remus.”
“I don’t know who you are!” Remus fired back. There were students in the distance, crossing on a lower stone viaduct where the errant wind might carry their words, so he lowered his voice to a hiss. “You were doing science on me when I transformed. Studying me. The Sirius I knew—he didn’t do that shite. Plonker broke several magical laws just to help me and conspired with others to do it.”
“I was curious—”
“God, I knew it.”
“—oh, come off it, you bloody masochist. You were curious. You’re seeing some dick in the woods and letting them do science on you.”
“They’re—”
“—a werewolf? A mentor? Different?” said Sirius, quiet. “I just wanted to know how my friend had changed. I wasn’t gonna tell anyone, or do anything. Not unless you wanted me to.”
“Oh, just—”
Remus stopped. Tried to breathe.
“Say it.”
“No.”
“Say it. You thought it.”
“Now who’s the bloody masochist? The martyr?” Remus was aware he was shouting, now, but he didn’t care. This felt good. “Every time I’m cross with you, you make me feel as though I’m the one doing something wrong.”
“You ran away!” Sirius was crushing his cigarette between his fingers and red in the eyes. “Jesus Christ, Moony. You up and left and you pretend like that didn’t do anything to us. You broke the four of us, you broke me and James, you broke me. Gutted. Each of us, we were—did y’know that dad, ah, his dad, died last year? Mary’s brother? Or did you just assume that the world stopped ’cos you weren’t there to watch it spin?”
God, Remus wanted to throw a fucking punch.
“And then you came back,” said Sirius, and the fire was dying in his grey eyes. “I can’t breathe around you, Remus. If you ran away again—and I thought you were. For months I thought I was doing something to piss you off and you were ready to take flight. I didn’t notice.”
Remus took a deep breath in, another out, and then kicked the stone parapet of the bridge hard enough that his foot went numb in his boot. It was better than arithmetic.
“I yelled at you,” mumbled Sirius. “I didn’t notice, and I’m still the bloody reason it happened.”
Remus put all his weight on his other leg and then slumped against the parapet. He’d actually cracked the stone’s surface. He pulled a glove off with his teeth and ran his fingertips over the coarse, broken stone, tracing its rough fractal break.
“You were the one to put it together,” he said eventually.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why didn’t I—God, Sirius, I had no idea what was happening to my body except that I might’ve worsened my condition. I thought I could fix it. You’ve spent years doing nothing but derail your life trying to help me. I’ve been mad for you for years. Still can’t fathom why any of you put up with me, actually, and in case you haven’t noticed,” he continued, coughing to cover the rawness of his throat, “you’re the only family I have left.”
“That’s not true. You’ve got James, Peter, Lily, Mary—”
“No.” A hysterical kind of laugh bubbled up his throat. “No, Pads, I really don’t. I don’t know any of them. You were right—I ran away, and everyone is different. Even you.”
Sirius slid his back down the rough stone of the walkway to sit a distance from him. “You’re different too, Remus.”
“I can’t ever get that back. I threw away years,” said Remus, “and I’ve been trying to blow past it all with jokes and banter and bluster and none of it is damn well working, is it?” In the pause that followed, he winced—his foot was losing that numbness and instead throbbing like a motherfucker. “I think I just broke my foot.”
“Remus—”
“—let’s add it to the pile,” he said, “of the bad things we keep doing to ourselves. What a mess of martyrs, like.”
“‘tchu want me to get Mary?”
“Might be more of a Hospital Wing type deal,” said Remus. “Piss. I don’t want to look at Madam Pomfrey. I want a cigarette and go back in time and not break my foot like I’m fourteen again. Scratch that last, actually—I want to not break my foot and then I want to shag you silly.”
“Christ.”
“That’s some twisted shite, I know.”
Sirius passed him an unlit cigarette, his own still between his narrow, fuzzy lips, and then cupped his hand in the back of Remus’s hair to pull him forwards and light it. “How messed up are we, yeah?”
“Worse than my foot,” said Remus with a laugh. “Pomfrey’s going to cut my boot off.”
“C’mon, up you get, then,” and Sirius was helping him up. Arm-around-waist, arm-over-shoulder. There was more dignity in this than being levitated. “I don’t know if this was helpful, Moony.”
Remus shrugged. Privately, he considered it a mark of progress that he didn’t break his hand. “I do have one thing I need from you, Pads.”
“What’s that?”
“You remember everything I said about Ahmed?” asked Remus. “I need you to talk to someone for me.”
“I think she’s immune to even my charms, Moony, but I’ll take the vote of confidence.”
“Not her,” said Remus. “She was the double pair for her year, which I never thought about because I didn’t remember she was human, and not, for example, some wizarding God. But she is human. Thus she eats, thus she sleeps. And, being in Theory, that means one thing.”
Realisation dawned on Sirius. “Wait, Evans is her dormmate?”
“She reckons I’m not clever enough to crack her code on my own,” said Remus, “and I think she’s probably right. I also think, however, that the two of us working together could crack it.”
Sirius grinned with a wild, doglike self-satisfaction. “We’ve cracked harder.”
“All Lily has to do is get us a copy. You think you can swing her?”
***
Plotting drew them back into old patterns, and they spent the rest of the trek as well as the few hours wait in the Hospital Wing drawing battle plans as though they hadn’t been screaming at each other only a short while ago. Most of the castle was of the Middle Ages, medieval by nature and ‘modernised’ in a sixteenth-century Gothic manner, but the Hospital Wing had a strong Victorian influence, its smooth stone walls housing not suits of armour and hideous tapestries but rows of firm white beds topped by crisp white sheets, and a generous cloth partition, a noble verdigris in colour, ready to close weary patients off from the world. Sirius was convinced that his charms could sway Lily—who, as the stories were told, was not in fact immune to that old Black magic—but it would require the perfect approach and a reason for theft. She wasn’t the crime type. Too many scruples.
Sirius spun out ideas and Remus workshopped them, but without James’s practicality and Peter’s strategising, their two-man operation failed to deliver a full-fledged plan.
“We could fold Evans into our operation,” said Sirius. “Explain that it’s from the Headmaster.”
“Pads, he didn’t say to steal her research.”
“Then why are we?”
“Okay, well, how else did he expect me to do it?” asked Remus. He was still snappish, but stuck to his arithmetic and breathing, which worked for the most part. “I still don’t know why. He’s her faculty advisor, why couldn’t he—oh bugger.”
“You said Ahmed’s notes were in code, yeah?” asked Sirius, and when Remus nodded, he made the implicit explicit. “If she’s brilliant enough to do an entire thesis in code without anyone knowing, how likely do y’think it is she could do two in parallel?”
“One for the board. One for herself.”
“But if he can’t crack the code, how are we supposed to?”
“Maybe he hasn’t the time?” They were adrift in the wild seas of speculation, now. “Maybe he has, but he’s unable to tell anyone directly?”
“Like with Meadowes, Moony? S’a stretch.”
“Or maybe he’s not in a position to risk it—or any other perfectly valid reason, really. This isn’t helping.”
“I’ve got one—ah,” said Sirius, quieting his voice and putting on that charming Black grin. A touch crooked, and more crooked than that in the eyes. Dead charmer. “Hiya, Poppy.”
“Mr. Black,” said Poppy Pomfrey. She was a matronly witch, with greying blonde hair in loose curls tucked underneath a nurse’s veil. Remus sometimes wondered whether she’d had experience with non-magical medical treatment or how old she might’ve truly been, because what she wore always reminded Remus of nurses from old war photos, although her expression was infinitely more hopeful. In truth, he’d thought it was a uniform until he’d seen Mary at work without the same outfit.
Pomfrey continued to inspect Remus’s foot. In theory it was mended, but she made him wiggle his toes a few times longer and flex it every which way and gave him a steady look.
If Madam Pomfrey didn’t buy his and Sirius’s cover story about clipping his foot on a wall while flying, she had no interest in pestering him about it. Perhaps after so many years of patching up a shredded Remus every month, this, at least, was a mundane kind of injury and not so difficult to fix. It had dark origins but was not itself a dark wound. That, and more than half the injuries each term were Quidditch-related. After so many hours in the Hospital Wing with her, Remus knew she shared his cemented belief that Quidditch was a reckless game for witches and wizards with a death wish. It certainly explained Sirius’s love for the game, even if he was an average player when rules were obeyed.
“Mr. Black,” said Pomfrey, turning her attention away from Remus’s foot. “As a flight instructor, you should be able to gauge someone’s proficiency and prevent this kind of accident.”
“I’ll work harder, Poppy.”
“As for you, Mr. Lupin,” she continued, “your foot appears well-mended. You are free to go—but keep off it, and I would recommend a break from flying.”
“Thank you, Madam Pomfrey.”
As they absconded down the stairs where staff were treated—it was a smaller, cosier affair far from the prying eyes or ears of the student body—Sirius whined about Remus’s ability to escape these things unpunished. When Remus pointed out that Sirius hadn’t been punished either, it did not help matters.
“She can’t well give us detention, can she?” said Remus.
“Ah, detentions,” said Sirius, wistful. “Most of them were worth it. Snivellus needed so many baths, and—ah!” Whatever reminiscing Sirius was doing ended as his grey eyes snapped to a focus. “I know how to charm Evans.”
“How?”
“It’s simple, Moony. I stick to the truth: I’m going mad with the thought of my brother getting the Kiss.”
Remus froze mid-stride and grabbed Sirius’s elbow, but Sirius swung with like he was twirling on a post. A twinge of electricity shot up his toes. He’d been expecting that.
“Padfoot, I want your help,” said Remus, quiet, “but I don’t want you to bleed for it. That’s an awful thing to do to yourself.”
Sirius shook his arm free. “D’you mind if we don’t talk about this now? Can this be my say? For once?”
Remus remained quiet and followed after him. This wasn’t a mood, Sirius wasn’t stalking, and no stormclouds were forming around his head, but that loud, adult part of Remus was screaming like thunder that this kind of plan was not forwards progress. Unhealthy behaviour.
Some fifteen minutes later, they were back at the lounge—they still had to think apologies at the door for it to swing open—and Sirius fell back in step with him instead of leading.
“Look, we’ll talk,” he said. “After. If I do it now, I’ll start bawling, and I need all those tears for Evans.”
“Are you sure—”
“A thousand percent, Moony. Over a cliff and all that.” Despite every change, Sirius never lost the way he rocked between silly and sincere like a ship over waves. He grinned, wide and crooked, and broke away from Remus.
“Oi, Evans!” he called. “‘tchu doing? Planning for the hols already?”
***
After the Christmas Eve attack, holidays had changed at Hogwarts. The Prophet questioned whether students were indeed safe there, and, Remus gathered, so did many student families.
Whereas before, stays on the castle grounds were increasingly commonplace, the attack on Hogsmeade had flipped the perspectives of many. The sacrosanctity of Hogwarts was broken. It was touchable, even if the Death Eaters weren’t—depending on whom you asked, of course—present on the grounds themselves. That bubble of protection offered by Albus Dumbledore was shrinking fast. Most students went home for Easter, and, though Remus didn’t know at the time, a handful wouldn’t return. Yet that two-week break from students was Remus’s saving grace. So too was Sirius, and Mary to a lesser extent.
Not Emmeline—she was out field testing again, and Remus couldn’t blame her. In two months she’d be defending her thesis, and regardless of the outcome, these would be her final days as a postgraduate. The world did not revolve around Remus Lupin. Not even if you shared a revision group with him.
Mary, being Mary, was ahead and had already prepared her end-of-year review with her advisors, and, as an upper postgraduate she drilled both of them on what to expect. She made for a terrifying and effective guide. Later, at Sirius’s behest, the three of them concentrated on shoring up the weak points of Remus’s research records while Remus himself attempted to jam together a presentable draft spell that was more than a glorified Point Me.
The library was a cemetery haunted only by self-sufficient NEWT students and a few postgraduates, which allowed Remus to spend his long vocational hours on research while still completing his duties and worming, slowly, back into Irma Pince’s good graces. It was a long road. Meanwhile, Sirius had precious few bookers for Quidditch drills, and Pomfrey needed no assistance from Mary with healing due to their tiny caseload.
The War was saving Remus’s life. That thought wore on him heavily.
He told this to Sirius as they lay on his bed—Remus’s side of the dormitory had long since become their shared workshop, and his unused bed stuck against the high ceiling to give them added room.
It wasn’t that he expected a wise reply from Sirius or sage advice, or any comfort at all, really. He simply couldn’t keep the thought in his any longer. It rattled around too much, like loose change in a mystery pocket, although the only thing it bought Remus was more and more guilt.
That might’ve been the booze, though.
They’d been drinking with Mary earlier because students would return in two days and because, on the grace of the trio’s efforts, Remus’s thesis was now in a recoverable position. The next month or so would be a crunch—both Mary and Sirius compared it to NEWTs, which Remus had never actually taken nor studied for, as everyone apparently needed frequent reminding—but it turned out that you could, in fact, waste three months out of the year and still have something presentable in terms of a thesis. If nothing else, they were toasting to the knowledge that P.A. wouldn’t be host to that year’s flunkies.
Mary had since retired to her room. Or, well, she’d said, but the subtle hint of lavender perfume told Remus otherwise. He let it slide, of course—Remus owed her a thousand and one favours.
Which left him and Sirius on the bed, both tipsy-stroke-drunk and still fully clothed, as neither of them had had any time to reckon with what happened between the poisoning and now. Procrastination was their mutual bane.
Whatever rambling mess Remus always so enjoyed to hear from Sirius had to do with Quidditch teams, professionals at that, and James’s opinion on them. The precise contents didn’t matter, because every Quidditch discussion Remus vaguely remembered went something like this.
“Orright, Potter.”
“Orright, Black.”
“Quidditch team is awful compared to other Quidditch team.”
“My Quidditch team’s dad could beat up your Quidditch team’s dad.”
That much remained the same, although, from the letters Sirius was passing Remus to read, their vocabulary of insults had flourished and grew elaborate in their explicit purple prose. It made Remus proud, and Sirius’s neck flushed when he said so.
Remus was doing that more and more often. Saying the things he felt, even if it was sincere in a silly circumstance, and the rewards were not unpleasant. Sirius’s poker faces were less poker-y after a few drinks and a few months of study, and, at this distance, Remus could pick out every quickened beat of the heart.
“Ah, read this bit. James calls the Holyheads—”
“Wait.” Remus sat bolt-right, wobbled, and ignored the confused, doglike sound Sirius made as he went looking for his trunk.
“Moony?”
“Give me a—oh, here it is.” His trunk was pinched between a wardrobe and a stack of heavy tomes, and Remus pulled it out with a tug and propped it open. Inside was an ordinary shoebox with, Remus knew, extraordinary power. He planted it in front of Sirius. “This is yours, now. Open it when you like. Read everything.”
With long crooked fingers, Sirius lifted the shoebox lid to peek under it and then let it fall shut. His grey eyes grew intense and, for a moment, he looked sixteen again.
“Maybe not—”
“—not while we’re drunk, no. Done enough weeping for a while, like.”
At that moment there came a knock on the door, and Remus jumped as though they’d been caught mid-tryst. It wasn’t a wholly inaccurate comparison. Sirius tucked the shoebox under his bed like he was stowing contraband, then, while sipping from a loose bottle of something burn-y, he twisted his fingers at the door to unlock it.
Irrational envy stung Remus, then. It was a logical consequence of missing three months. Sirius was now kilometres ahead of him in wandless magic—so much so, Remus wondered if was possible to catch up.
“Come in!” called Sirius, and Remus blinked. Propelled by the reflexes of unparalleled paranoia, he whipped his hand wrist-first towards the ceiling and then yanked.
The door opened and Lily Evans’s pale features poked around the corner. “Oi, Black—bloody piss!”
Remus’s bed crashed to the carpeted ground with such immense force that all four wooden legs flew off in four different directions. One leg clipped the base record player—Sirius yelped like a dog—and the moody atmosphere of whichever Floyd album met its abrupt end as it skidded off its track. The sound was like a bomb going off, and Remus wanted to throw himself over said bomb. It was a better fate than plucking the shrapnel of lingering embarrassment from his poor, battered reputation.
“Are you two ever not piss drunk?” she said, green eyes accusing. “Do two you do anything else?”
Remus and Sirius exchanged looks. They were trying very, very hard not to spill into laughter and not succeeding very well at all.
“Sometimes,” said Sirius, “we also get stoned.”
“Might as well change your bloody thesis and study your livers. Honestly, the state of you two.”
“Join us,” said Remus. He waggled an enticing bottle and saw the weakness in her eyes. Like luring a small woodland rabbit with a bit of celery.
Lily shook her head and gave a wry smile. “Some of us have better things to do with our time,” she said, and from around the corner she hefted a trunk. It looked heavy and worn and distinctly muggle.
“No,” gasped Sirius. “In three weeks?”
“What can I say, I’m—Remus!”
He was at the door in a flash, lifting one arm around her waist to pick up and twirl her, and using the other to hold her trunk. There was a great show of it—she rolled her eyes on the first spin, cracked a smile by the second, and by the fifth she was laughing and Remus was so dizzy he nearly fell over, which sent him and Sirius into peals as well. As for the door, he knocked it shut with his heel and let Sirius handle the Muffling Charm.
“Brilliant!” called Remus. Sirius was right—this was much, much easier with help.
“I can see why Prongs fancies this one, Moony.”
“Mm,” replied Remus. “Halfway to checking that ‘yes’ box myself. But, Lils—Ahmed’s not going to catch you, is she?”
“She’s out till morning,” explained Lily. There was a living mischief in her eyes, faerie-like, and for a moment, Remus thought she might’ve been a Marauder in another world. “Going for field testing tomorrow, and I’ve only bloody watched her lock her things up a hundred times, now.”
Sirius was up, now, and in lieu of lifting her, they stepped through the paces of some awful off-beat two-step that Lily made look effortless, and Sirius, bloody sexy.
“How’d you swing it?” he asked. “I thought she must’ve charmed it all.”
Keeping the suspense alive, Lily gestured to the trunk in silence. Remus popped one latch while Sirius did the other. It felt apropos.
The trunk was organized like a filing cabinet drawer, and when Remus plucked a sheet of oddly glossy paper from the row, he realised he was staring at a blown-up polaroid photograph of normal parchment, each one decorated with strange geometry.
“You clever minx,” whispered Sirius. “I could kiss you.”
“James would have a fit.”
“I’ll kiss James on your behalf, then.”
Lily snorted and, not entirely recovered from their earlier giggling, took a moment to compose herself. “I gave up on the notes right quick. Couldn’t duplicate them, re-wet the ink, or bewitch a quill to copy them, and she put this incorporeal paperweight on them—”
“Paperweight?” asked Remus.
Lily took a piece of parchment off Sirius’s bureau and printed neat block letters that said THE WORLD on it, and then drew a circle she labelled NOTES. She then put one of Sirius’s paperweights atop it.
“The parchment is our world in three dimensions,” she said as if that explained everything. “No summoning or any other funny business. A muggle camera, however—”
“She didn’t think of that?” asked Remus, frowning. Lily shrugged.
“Not everyone keeps up with muggles.”
“Thank you, Lils,” said Sirius. “We owe you a thousand.”
“Anything for James’s other life partner,” she replied. Sirius grinned wide at that, and Remus remembered the circumstances she’d been told with a wince. “Here’s hoping it helps, Black.”
“Cheers, Evans,” said Sirius. From the downwards turn of his tone, he’d also remembered.
Lily didn’t keep them long after that. They chatted about James and Easter—she’d been away a few days to see him, though she declined to answer when Sirius asked if his current tutoring position involved country estates and horseback riding—before she left for her own life again.
“Are we bad people?” asked Remus, who flopped on the bed again.
“Maybe,” said Sirius, “and I’m ready to talk about it now.” He paused, flopped on the bed—flopped was not the right word, Sirius was too graceful for flopping, it was more like a very drunk whale meeting the ocean after a leap—and then scrunched up his crooked nose. “Maybe not ready. Am drunk enough, though.”
With a bump of his forehead against the top of Sirius’s head, he signalled for him to proceed.
“Whatever Dumbledore wants with it, we’re using it too. For Reg. If we can’t stop him, we’ll figure out a way to stop the Kiss, or reverse it—if, if it comes to that,” said Sirius. His voice was shaking, steadied only by the wonders of alcohol, so Remus groped for his hand and found wrist instead. Squeezed anyway. “That’s what I’m getting out of this Moony. You and Reg—you’re the two folks I owe the most. And you promised.”
“I did promise.”
“So, I wasn’t lying to her. To Evans, I mean. Not fully. I just left out the other reason, but that’s a lie by omission and the reason’s not mine to tell.”
“So,” said Remus,” maybe we’re not bad people?”
“Maybe not,” said Sirius.
“Christ. What are we doing, Pads.”
“Dunno,” said Sirius. “Postgrad seemed a better idea than trying to make it on my own during the War. And—get this, it’s absolutely mad—before they got into this home tutoring business, James and Peter had it in their heads that they were gonna fight.”
“You weren’t?”
“Ah, cheers for that.”
“—Not what I meant, sorry,” said Remus, quiet. “C’mon. I’ve had enough of fighting with you.”
“And we don’t want another broken foot, now, do we?”
“Y’know, Pads, I’ll tell you where you can put that foot.”
“Come and try me, Moony.” said Sirius, and he stuck out his tongue while Remus rolled onto his elbows. “Nah, I wasn’t gonna fight, now, was I?” he continued. “My head’s twisted enough as it is. M’not like James. I’d come out barking on the other end, y’know?”
“James can be…”
“A bloody idiot?”
“Out-of-touch.”
Sirius snorted. “That too. He didn’t do a NEWT in potions—how did he think he was gonna be an Auror? And I’ve never seen him hurt a fly.”
“Unless that fly wore Slytherin colours, of course. Or had committed any minor act of effrontery according to James’s inscrutable criteria. Or,” Remus added, “when he was bored, or thought we were bored, or whenever he was in near proximity to Lily, like.”
“’tchu mean, Moony? That’s just fair turnabout.”
“I get it,” said Remus. Their booze was empty and new bottles out of reach even though this was a booze-deserving conversation. Perhaps in a moment of wisdom, however, Remus decided not to summon more. “The—well, the fear, I s’pose.”
“How very dare. I’m a former Gryffindor, I know no fear.”
“Shut up.”
“Make me, Lupin,” said Sirius, and the snort that followed was from the rebel in him, not the aristocrat. He had that daring look. Remus almost did shut him up with his own mouth, but he waited. That wasn’t growth. That was patience.
“What’s twisted, Pads, is that I might be the only one in the world worried more about what happens after.”
“’Cos of—”
“—we both know it’s the only reason I’m here,” said Remus, and Sirius remained quiet following that. His dark curls spilled out like a glossy halo over his grey sheets—of course Sirius’s sheets would match his eyes—and he looked thoughtful.
“And?” said Sirius.
“Rallying cry of a generation.”
“Thought that was ‘No Future,’ ’less I read all that muggle graffiti wrong.”
“That too,” said Remus. He blew a breath through his teeth and Sirius made an annoyed face, presumably because he was in the direct path of it. “World’s gone straight down the shitter, hasn’t it?”
“Full brick, yeah. ’Cept then they took that brick and hurled clear it through the loo window.”
“Why does your loo have a clear window?”
“Why do the birds sing, Moony.”
Remus opened his mouth to answer and Sirius nearly punched him in the throat trying to clamp a hand over his mouth. There was a wicked gleam in Sirius’s eye. A laugh in both their throats.
The scant few times Remus had wrestled usually ended with the other party saying something to the effect of, Wow, Remus, you’re stronger than you look, except Sirius was now half-decent at wandless levitation. Whenever Remus pinned down both his wrists, all he did was twitch a finger and then Remus’s socks would lift off the ground and Sirius would squirm away. A bony bloody squid with magic, that Sirius Black. Some kisses might’ve slipped in, here and there, because Remus was a tactician and it ruined Sirius’s focus and also, just maybe, he liked the way Sirius’s neck tasted. A little salt. Sweat. Smoke and ash, of course. They were both burning up with exertion and drink and Remus threw off both his socks and his waistcoat as a threat, because if Sirius levitated his shirt or trousers next, Remus was going to toss those too. That was dangerous territory.
It was already over, though. Remus got both his thighs on either side of Sirius’s jagged hips and both slim pale wrists pinned against the sheets, and with their hot lips together, Sirius was done. Finished. Defeated.
Except he was Sirius, and so then he wasn’t. Remus tasted dog in his mouth and recoiled.
Padfoot barked at him. The shaggy dog rolled bodily off the bed and out of sight onto the carpet floor, still tangled in loose clothes. Thud. He heard tearing.
A moment later, Padfoot pounced with canine precision and Sirius was back on top of him, bare fuzzy chest moving heavy, loose curls tickling Remus’s neck and cheeks and forehead, and Remus realised, painfully, that Sirius was naked. Both of their hearts were beating beyond measure.
There wasn’t enough urgency in the world. Remus depleted it all. He burned it on a great sacrificial pyre and pulled off his own shirt with the ashy remains and let Sirius work through his belt and trousers. Crooked fingers snagging in hems, pockets, on zips, curse words flying frantic until he was kicking off his pants like a diver. Which is when, of course, he double-crossed Sirius and used the moment to flip him onto his back. From the sound of those little gasps Sirius gave when Remus planted little kisses down his flush neck and across the hollow of his chest—God, Sirius had chest hair, he wasn’t going to let the boy ever wear a shirt with his coats ever again—and then to where the curve of his sharp, bony hip met his curiously-round thigh, gasps that sounded like Remus’s name, breathily said, over and over, he gathered that Sirius didn’t mind.
His thumbs were made for the divots in Sirius’ hips the same way his lips were made for Sirius’s dick. He was grateful for that. It forced some patience. After he wet his mouth, which was less sexy to think about and yet weirdly sexier in practice, he ran his tongue down either side of Sirius’s dick to slick it before taking it into his mouth. Now the truth of it, Remus knew, was that your hands were the most important part of a blowjob if you actually wanted to get the person off with any consistency, but this was drunk sex. It was sloppier. It was supposed to be sloppy.
He was lazy and kept an awful pace, while Sirius kept whining at him and wrapping his hands in Remus’s hair because his hips were pinned and he wanted to thrust. So Remus left go of his hips, except now the angle was wrong because you couldn’t thrust upwards into someone’s mouth. Not really. Not if their dick curved upwards. All that gave you was palette and uvula and sometimes, if you were unlucky and three sheets to the wind, teeth.
Sirius growled at him to lie back, and meeting no resistance, manhandled Remus to his heart’s desire. His half-varnished nails dug half-moons into Remus’s forearms; his eyes were huge and dark with longing. After ten seconds of being unsure how exactly he was supposed to be arranged, Sirius tugged him by the shoulders until Remus’s head dangled off the bed upside-down at about crotch height, his eyeline more or less level with Sirius’s bollocks and the gap between his thighs and, come to think of it, he’d never tried this position with Benjy Fenwick.
That was the exception. You didn’t need to use your hands for this.
Remus balled his fists in the sheets and held on for dear life, though choking to death like this would’ve been, he thought, a fucking fantastic end. By the end of it his chin was slick with his own spit, his eyes were watering, and Sirius was pressing soothing kisses to his forehead between cheek-burning whispers of Good boy while eyeing every bit of Remus he hadn’t paid attention. Yet.
They went at it like drunk rabbits, and then tipsy ones as the night went on. Another bomb had gone off in their dorm. During one short break for water and a piss, Remus stepped off the bed and his foot landed in snow. Magic. Their ambient, furious desire was congealing in the air, exciting it into strange weather systems with eddies and whorls, ruffling the curtains on Sirius’s bed much the same way that Sirius ruffled Remus’s hair as he kneeled, supplicant, between Sirius’s legs. There was cum on his chest. There was cum in his hair. No one could ever again be allowed in their dorm. The smell alone would give them away immediately. It’d have set Remus’s face aflame if the booze and exertion hadn’t already done that, and if Remus didn’t find the idea so bloody hot.
The morning lie-in after their late night was all that again, although lazier and stickier, with more frequent breaks for water, and a longer one to skin up and smoke exactly one morning cigarette shared between the both of them out of the small window of their loo, which was the only window in the dorm that opened. Remus learned he liked every bit of giving head to Sirius while he smoked except for the say Sirius could get lost and forget to tap off the ash.
Well, that, and the dehydrated cum of a hungover smoker was effectively acid in your throat, like a gluey half-shot of toxic waste, actually, but Remus worshipped at the temple of Sirius Black, and all things toxic were thus sacred.
Notes:
The initial article is a pastiche of a very real article from The Sun that ran on 11 January 1979, entitled "Crisis? What Crisis?", which did not sink Labour PM James Callaghan's government, though nor did it do Labour any favours. Alas, I'm afraid that this AU will not take us in the wondrous direction of what life might've been like had Thatcher not come into power.
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, End of Year 1 will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 10 January, a Friday. If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is (WIP WARNING!) on another ocean by colgatebluemintygel, a R/S saga that has had me enthralled for the better part of two years and for more or less the entire duration I wrote this fic. It is so fantastically good that a part of me won't survive if it's never finished, so I have a vested interest in promulgating it to others. Consider it a pyramid scheme of sorts.
Chapter 9: End of Year 1
Chapter Text
From the moment James explained to him what an Auror was—they were the wizarding equivalent of a soldier, a spy, a cop, always an arm of the state, always dressed in distinct deep scarlet robes with stark black trim—Remus feared them on an instinctual level. His late father Lyall never spoke of them. Years he’d gone without crossing their paths. Peter Pettigrew, with no little awe in his prepubescent voice, explained that they were all the best duellists in Britain (with a few notable exceptions, such as their resident Charms Professor Filius Flitwick), and that their traditional dress came from a desire to camouflage themselves against walls and bursts of fire—a classic staple in your average militant sorcerer’s offensive repertoire. Later reading and the War taught him that just because a fear was instinctual did not mean it was wrong. Where before they’d been absent, soon they haunted his train platform, all nine-and-three-quarters of it; he saw one during his very first Hogsmeade visit, drunk and threatening a barmaid in the Three Broomsticks; by fifth year they were searching every student’s luggage. Aurors were a constant threat to his way of life and the reason Remus still caught himself longing for the seclusion of the Pyrenees. They were danger incarnate, especially for a closeted werewolf.
So, while months of drilling wandless magic together had softened Remus somewhat to the Defence professor, he nevertheless never dropped his guard. He couldn’t afford to. Even in moments like these, where he was breathless and struggling to cast even the flimsiest Shield Charm.
That an Auror was beating him up with both of his hands, wand and word, tied behind his back was not lost on Remus.
“Could we have a break?” Remus panted. “I’m spent—need a moment.”
“Goodness. I thought you know by now that magic is never lost, Mr. Lupin,” said the Defence professor. Something about her was uncanny an sich. He never could quite put his finger on what it was: her height, perhaps, never felt the same as when last he saw her, though neither could he recall what day or time or even her manner of dress, though she always resembled a cross between a scarecrow and a mannequin. After all this time, he still didn’t know her name. That was magic. “It can shape and be shaped, it can change and be changed, but we do not deplete it, nor do we store it. If magic is the sound, then we are the piano and the pianist.”
The lecture rang a few bells. Loud and familiar bells right beside his ear, actually, except Remus was feeling flippant because he’d meant physical energy and she clearly knew that.
“Then why,” he said, stretching out the breather, “am I still so rubbish at wandless magic?”
“Are new spells discovered, Mr. Lupin? Or are they invented?”
“Both?”
“Goodness, was that a guess?”
“Yes.” While the subject matter would fascinate a normal Remus, this one was anxious and distracted and drenched in sweat. The May heat had arrived even in the Scottish Highlands, and with it unbearable humidity. “I don’t know,” he continued. Jesus, he was tired of tests. “In P.A., all of our theses are cobbled together from other spells, sort of like fridge letters you arrange to make a sentence. But—”
She inclined her bald, Hessian-hatted head and arched her browless brows, signalling him to continue. It was a pain. Honestly, he was hoping she’d interrupt him as most others did.
“S’pose someone had to make the fridge letters, didn’t they?”
“This is one of our coremost conundrums of magic, Mr. Lupin, and you should see it as no slight that you cannot find an answer.” She smiled—a disconcerting thing to watch—and said, “Better witches and wizards than you or I have long searched for a satisfying explanation.”
“Did they find any?”
“Goodness, I wouldn’t know. The more they looked—”
“—the more they couldn’t recognise the questions they were asking,” finished Remus. Dumbledore had said something similar to him ages ago.
“And the more teeth they found on the answers to their old questions. If there are indeed answers,” said the bald witch, her scarecrow face uncommonly solemn, “they belong to dark and deadly creatures.”
“This doesn’t make me feel any better about being rubbish.”
“Oh, cheer up, Mr. Lupin. Should you ever lack a wand, you may yet lift a book, light a fire, or dispel a simple enchantment. How many wizards your age can say the same?”
“Well, I know of one.”
She crouched beside him. Her limbs always folded in like they were on axles, too long for her body and far too flexible, but when she was together like this, she felt less intimidating and more human. Which was rich, of course, because she was far, far more human than Remus.
“As my days at Hogwarts are drawing to an end,” she said, “I have no qualms telling you that Mr. Black has a strong connection between his desire and intent. This will serve him well with instinctual wandless magic,” she continued, a wry look in her pale, glassy eyes, “but it will frustrate him with all things unintuitive. And perhaps we might say that it is not always wise to so reflexively indulge our most immediate impulses. Not every dream remains a dream realised. While many witches and wizards your age may say that they fear failure, I think that it must be a far worse and far more lonely fate to fear one’s own success.”
“Are you sad to leave?”
“Everything ends, Mr. Lupin.”
“And what about me? What’ve I the knack for, like?”
“Goodness,” she said, voice mirthful. “If I told you, you’d only ever practice whatever came easily. What kind of professor would I be if I allowed that?”
Remus grunted. His skin stung and his bones were sore. She’d stuck to only the most basic of jinxes, and yet still Remus felt like he’d been worked over by the bloodchild of a mallet, itching powder, and a vengeful case of the common cold.
She took his silence as assent and nodded, sharp. “Shall we go again?”
Inside Remus was a strange melange of guilt and envy. Of course, he wanted little more than to fall over and end the session early, but this was a molehill to the mountain that lay ahead. Sirius had already progressed to what he named a hideous and vile kind of torture. This advancement owing, of course, to him not having been poisoned for the better part of three months, not that he shut up about how far ahead and difficult and oh-so-terribly-particular this latest technique was. Parallel Sequencing, as Remus understood it, was a fiendish procedure not unlike a pianist breaking the interdependence of their hands, or maintaining a conversation aloud while reading a novel. Except it was unlike both of those things because in truth you were playing a different music piece with each hand while reading in one language and speaking in another.
They still only used four wandless spells: levitation, making a fire, dispelling an enchantment, and conjuring a shield. You simply had to use all of them in response to the Defence professor’s meddling while threading a feather through its hoops.
Sirius’s complaining, of course, was always met by Remus with vicious mockery, and, later, with kisses to soothe his bruised ego.
“I’m rubbish!” Sirius was whining, but that whining was sweet balm to his burning embarrassment and the lingering rash of a Stinging Jinx. It was nice to sulk together in their inadequacy.
“We’re both rubbish, Pads,” said Remus. He planted another kiss on Sirius’s jawline, scruffy and muddled with dark hair as it was, and mirrored Sirius’s pouted lips until the other boy cracked a grin. “At least you’re hot rubbish,” said Remus. “I’m forgotten. I’m a scentless takeaway carton pinned flat behind the bin.”
“Wouldn’t hot rubbish be worse?” said Sirius. He crinkled his crooked nose. “It certainly smells worse.”
“At least rubbish that smells is paid some attention.”
“Ah. The ‘at least Hell is warm’ defence. A classic.”
With a squirming insistence that convinced Remus for the umpteenth time that Sirius had no solid bones in his body, Sirius turned himself around to get at Remus’s own neck, which required the unfastening of a few shirt buttons. As a matter of precaution, he forbade Sirius from leaving marks higher than his shirt collar—a rule, like many others, that Sirius seldom obeyed.
The postgrad lounge was an inappropriate place for this. Remus knew that. He also knew, however, that this close to end-of-term every postgrad finalist (Gloria Ahmed, Benjy Fenwick, Emmeline Vance, er, that other bloke from Fieldwork, what was his name?) was out field testing in anticipation of their thesis defence, while every tutor-tasked postgraduate was foundering in the turbulent sea of the student body, who requested more help for their OWL and NEWT revisions than in the past eight months combined, and who were violently furious when their tutors did not halt time itself to afford them more time to study. Time to himself was scarce. Time alone with Sirius was scarcer. So, with an audience of only empty workstations and emptier chairs, Remus acquiesced. Worse things had probably been done on these squat sofas than kissing.
Mary, of course, was a bit of a wildcard, being Madam Pomfrey’s healing assistant and thus having no consistent schedule, but Mary was always a wildcard. At least Remus had the ears to hear her long legs approaching over their paired racing heartbeats.
His shirt buttons were done up with frightening speed, and, before the door swung open, Sirius was sprawled over the sofa with his head in Remus’s lap like a lazy and aristocratic dog. If he were anyone other than Sirius—and, he supposed, if Remus were anyone other than himself—it would’ve been an unblokey arrangement, far too intimate and with not enough wrestling or roughhousing. With Sirius it was expected. That was part of the problem, maybe.
Perhaps understanding that it was a difficult subject for Remus, Sirius had kept a wide berth around going public or coming out, although the alternative explanation was that neither of them wanted another fight so soon.
Remus wasn’t ashamed. Not exactly. Well, maybe some of the things he liked to do to Sirius with his mouth and tongue were shameful, but that wouldn’t well stop him—and blushing at the thought of saying those ideas aloud was hardly the same thing as shame. As for Sirius, he was out already to half the postgraduates, having spilled the bisexual beans to them on impulse, but that was different. He was ACDC. Bisexuality was in as of late. Sirius was Ziggy Stardust or, by the rumours, Freddie Mercury—he was hip and glam rock and trendy. Not, of course, that Remus thought Sirius’s sexuality had to do with being hip or glam rock or trendy, but it was in the cultural zeitgeist, and so people regarded his bisexuality like a suspicious garnish on an otherwise delectable dessert. He was also Sirius Black, notorious rebel, and among his former peers, many of whom looked up to him with awe and, among the older student body, desire.
Benjy Fenwick, however, was like Remus: tragically gay. He was Bowie. Sort of. More 1972 Bowie, announced as gay and shrouded in sexual controversy that often overshadowed his musical brilliance—or, here, magical brilliance—not 1976 Bowie, clarified as bisexual during a retreat into more traditionally masculine personas.
That those dates were burned into Remus’s memory was beside the point.
You scarcely needed to be a werewolf to see the sneers or hear the rude whisperings that followed Benjy, which ran the full gamut of uninspired homophobia to hurtful rumours before closing off its insulting triathlon with an enraging kind of pity. Being a werewolf, however, Remus was audience to it all. It was relentless. It was ubiquitous—Gryffindors, his House of red and gold, joined in on the snickering and tutting whenever Benjy Fenwick’s name carried through the corridors. Remus had never noticed it before and now he couldn’t escape it, and, Christ, it was Benjy Fenwick. He wasn’t exactly camp or effeminate. Benjy Fenwick was all clean-shaven jawlines and crisp blue-collared button-down shirts and impromptu rugby games by the Gamekeeper’s hut, a classic Stehaufmännchen not unlike James Potter, if gay, and Black, and muggleborn, and on top of all that a trade unionist. His skin was as thick as a tectonic bloody plate. Yet the constant barbs stung Remus to observe, and Remus wasn’t even their intended target.
Not, again, that Remus thought there was something wrong with being camp or effeminate. Probably. He hadn’t explored that bit very much, as Benjy was a masculine kind of bloke with muscles and that Welsh-boy-next-door look which made Remus wonder, sometimes, if he himself counted as camp and/or effeminate, which—really? A camp, effeminate werewolf? He could be bookish, yes, but—
“Remus?” asked Mary. She rapped her knuckles in his shaggy, Sirius-cut hair. “Oi, is this thing on?”
Sirius stared up and over Remus’s shoulder with a grin. “Moony thinks a lot about everything and anything,” he said. “One of my favourite things about him.”
“Aside from the—”
“—from the shagging, yes,” replied Sirius. “How’d you know, Mary?”
Mary leaned down over the sofa and Remus’s shoulder—neither of them, actually, had any sense of ‘personal space’ or ‘common decorum’ or ‘shame,’ a collective lack Remus envied—and her made-up face was alive with conspiracy.
“Remus and I,” she whispered, “have been having an affair.”
“With Lils and Em, that makes three this week. Honestly, Moony, how d’you swing it?”
Both of them cracked grins like a pair of broken teapots and laughed, almost in unison, as Remus’s cheeks flushed a deep red. If only the sofa could swallow him alive.
“All right, Remus?” asked Mary. She lost her laugh, first, perhaps because she was still sometimes on edge around him. “Let us know if we’re taking it too far.”
“I don’t understand why I’m the town bicycle, like,” said Remus after clearing his throat. That was good. Leaning into the joke was very good, that was what he was known for, very unsuspicious-like. Even if his voice had dropped an octave and grown very suspiciously crackly as of late due; his poor punished throat. Everyone kept offering him Cough Potions and he was running out of places to store them.
“Who else, then?”
“I—well, s’pose if I ever find out,” said Remus, “I’ll have to shag them and pass on my curse. What were you asking?”
“If you needed any help putting something together for the end-of-year review, you daft dimwit.” Insults were Mary’s love language, as Sirius often said, and Mary loved everyone a lot. If she was waspish, he bewared her sting. “Seeing as you two were busy cuddling instead of revising, I assume the answer’s no?”
“I’ll have you know Moony and I are capable of doing both simultaneously.”
“I don’t think I want to know what you and ‘Moony’ can do simultaneously.”
“You sure, Macdonald?” asked Sirius. His thin eyebrows waggled with such ferocity they could’ve flown off his face. “You could watch.”
“Oh, I—”
“—could we,” said Remus, tone curt, “perhaps focus, and also not sexually objectify me for five minutes.”
“Do I have to get my head out of your lap?” asked Sirius.
“No.”
“Do I have to get my mind out of the gutter?” asked Mary.
“Also no.”
“It’s a deal, then.” She shook his hand. Very blokey. “End-of-year-review? Help required?”
“I think I have it covered, actually,” said Remus, although he took the opportunity to run through the whole thing one more time anyway. “It takes nearly thirty minutes of constant casting, but as long as I have a blank map to use as a focus, I can draw you a map that shows who is where in any city as far as south as Bristol, with all the unparalleled haste of a stereoscope.”
Mary frowned. “Bristol? Not Plymouth?”
“Mate, I could show you that with a normal map of Plymouth, no magic needed, like.”
“What the fuck,” said Sirius, loud, “is a ‘stereoscope.’”
“It—you hold it up to your eyes, Padfoot, like a camera, except it shows you an image instead of taking one. You can slide between different images.”
“—and how big is this map supposed to be, Remus?”
“Thought of that, too,” replied Remus. “I’ll bewitch a magnifying glass so they can examine the details. Not that there will be many,” he continued, deflating against the sofa, “because it takes five minutes for the map to show any changes. Still working out that bit of lag, like. Truly an amazing spell worthy of a full year’s research. Have you heard back from Ahmed yet?”
“Not yet,” said Mary. She shrugged, but Remus caught the worried look in her painted brown eyes. Evidently, Mary caught his. “It’s normal. Em is usually late from hers, remember? You run into complications and spend more time in the field than you thought.”
“She’s two days late.”
“Fenwick was a whole week late,” she replied. It was true. “Ahmed can handle her own, and last I heard, she doesn’t even like you.”
“Moony. Could you use it for pornography?”
“The—what? My thesis?”
“The stereoscope.”
Mary tutted softly. “Sirius Black, you have so much to learn. Yes, of course muggles use them for pornography.”
Jesus Christ. “Jesus Christ,” said Remus, turning red again. “Up. Let me off this sofa now. You two are impossibly—” he continued, and then stopped, because Jesus Christ, he was not about to say those words aloud.
“Impossibly what?” asked Mary.
Sirius waggled his eyebrows again. He licked his lips for show, too, while Mary wasn’t looking.
“I am going to go practice my spell,” said Remus. He lifted Sirius’s head from his lap, and his eyebrows stopped their suggestive dancing in favour of a confused and insulted arch like every cat or lapdog displaced. Remus ignored that, however, and channelled all of his calm and blood to his brain as he stood because he was wearing trousers, not robes, and he refused to be hoisted by his own petard that way. “You two—well, I don’t know,” he continued, “go shag or whatever have you. I need to focus.”
“You know what might help—”
“—leaving!” said Remus. Both of them cackled, and, even after he shut the door to his dormitory, he could hear them.
“I think,” said Sirius, “he was going to call us impossibly horny.”
“Chaste little angel, is he?”
Even muffled as he was, Remus could hear the grin on Sirius’s face. “You have no idea, Mary,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t know how he puts up with the orgies.”
***
In truth, Remus was the one that was impossibly horny.
If Sirius had a problem with that, he was very much being a team player about it, what with the shower visits—which, Remus discovered, were very wet and yet very unlubricated and thus required special tactics—the ambushing each other after Sirius’s vocational work, and the new commonplace nudity of their dormitory. It was urgent; it was casual; sometimes they were so dead tired that it was mechanical and they fell asleep wordlessly afterwards. Remus loved every moment of it all. Most of the time they weren’t even drunk or stoned. Remus apparently needed that leg up to get his leg over only once, after which the tightness in his gut disappeared and he became voracious, even through the Hogwarts Tobacco Shortage of 1979.
Who needed cigarettes when you could have Sirius Black between your lips?
Remus did have a problem with it. It was a similar sort of problem to the one had in the postgrad lounge before they’d been so rudely interrupted by Mary, in that he wanted to be touching Sirius all the time in any given moment, and in public do things that were technically appropriate but gauche and juvenile and far-too-teenage for his purported maturity. Except he couldn’t do that, because—
There came a sharp rapping on the door and Remus cursed like a buggered sailor.
In his attempt to do three things at once—cast a Freshening Charm, open the door, and do up his belt and trousers—he tripped and nearly toppled over a stack of pseudo-Eratosthenic books onto a still-hot engine Sirius couldn’t figure out how to cool.
“Remus?” called Lily. “Oi, Lupin, open up, you’re going to make us late.”
A fire was what he needed in his dorm, of course.
“I’m—well, give me a moment,” Remus called back, smoothing himself down. He wished he had Sirius’s poker face and cool blood. “Still dressing.”
“Black has been ready for an hour.”
“Sirius has it easy. He can wear anything and make it look swish, even a dress and heels. Especially a dress and heels, actually.”
When he cracked the door open, still flushed, Lily looked him up and down with a keen and appraising eye. Her nose, perhaps less keen, sniffed and spilled a frown across her freckled face like a spreading stain. “Are those roses I smell?” she asked.
“Freshening Charm,” said Remus, quick. “Dorm’s a mess. Perhaps I’ve overdone it.”
She snorted at that. “Perhaps?”
“As much as I’d like to wait here and let you lambaste me, I thought we were late.”
“Correction: you’re late, we’re guilty by association,” said Lily. She grabbed at his wrist, which he dodged—whether due to his reflexes being enhanced by lycanthropy or impending mortification, Remus could not say—and for that, she looked at him with incredulity. “Nervous, are we?”
“Extremely. Onwards.”
As she led with that Lily-like quiet determination, Remus did a Cleaning Charm on his hands without a word. It stung like all Hell—there was a reason that sorcery hadn’t eliminated the need for plumbing so much as smoothed out the pernickety bits. Scouring your flesh with magic tended to, at best, take off a layer or two of skin. Worse, still, if you were scared, or inexperienced, or nervous.
They were all nervous. In another cruel twist of the knife that was postgrad life, thesis defences happened two weeks before OWL and NEWT exams, and the end-of-year review for lower- and upper-form graduates the week after, with the firsties, as Ahmed would call them, going last. In theory it provided them with more time to prepare. Reality, however, disabused them of that notion. All it left them with as the impending sense of doom and Remus frustrated. The postgrad finalists received two full days each for their defence, and the upper-form one apiece for their review, while Remus, Sirius, Lily, and Severus Snape would all be reviewed together within a span of four to six hours and at the same time. Moreover, it was a verbal review: presentation and examination, what in their world was known as a viva voce. Dinner and a show.
Unlike Remus, Sirius was possessed of a normal response to anxiety. As Lily led him up to a little-used tower not far from the Library, they caught Sirius halfway up the stairs, his angled chin tucked over a tiny popped windowlatch and a half-smoked cigarette lilting out the corner of his narrow mouth. He startled and vanished the fag at the sound of their footsteps, then cursed when he realised it was only them.
Apparently it had been his very last fag. Traitor.
Anxiety tamed all four of them: despite the tower sharing two attempted murders, one broken friendship, one uncertain relationship, a werewolf, an unregistered Animagus, a mudblood and blood traitor and blood supremacist and more rivalries both academic and personal than there were people in the room factorial, no one spoke a word as they sat in a neat line on a short stone bench outside the examination chamber.
He needed a smoke. Some chocolate. Or a shag. Not a spliff, not now, but maybe afterwards, and a definitely a drink to go with it. Regardless of the outcome there would certainly be drinking. Kicking the shit out of Severus was hot on his mind, too. That was another thing that James taught him.
In third year it’d been less reasonable. He and Severus hadn’t directly interacted much up until that point, but they were a year out from James and the others knowing about Remus and they protected him still. More than that. They were risking everything for him and called him mad for even suggesting, just the once, that they needn’t do so much. Remus was loyal—you couldn’t let someone hex your dearest friends with their backs turned, even if intervening meant you got two months detention, a new nickname, and your fist split on Severus Snape’s front teeth. No one expected the quiet one.
They expected the quiet one’s right hook even less.
On the merit of being poisoned alone, however, Remus had the right to do whatever he saw fit. This wasn’t irrational or boyish. If you traced it far back enough, it might’ve started there with immature roots, but the fruits today were deadly nightshades and no one was throwing around hexes or planning tricks anymore. This was no mere child’s game. Everything before was the sort of thing that accumulated, like heavy metals running off from a mine stream, until the soil and waters were so toxic a Prank of calamitous proportions arose and bit the head off the snake. It was all fun and games until Severus was coughing up blood, and probably it would be fun and games still for a while after that. Christ—wasn’t this how it all happened before? Whoever said you could never go home again had never sat a thesis review viva voce.
For those few minutes in the corridor, they all looked like children again. Lily and her braided schoolgirl plait; Sirius and his fidgeting; Remus wanting to break something; and Severus, with his arrogant distain, looking like an insistent ink stain on an otherwise nice portrait. A mop of lank black hair. Blank, listless features. He even breathed like an arsehole.
God, Remus ought to kick his teeth in.
Yet, the subtlety with which Remus had been poisoned gave him pause. He couldn’t just kick the shit out of Severus, not if Remus wanted to survive afterwards, and although Sirius would undoubtedly help him bury the body, murder wasn’t in his bones. Not yet.
Close, maybe, or maybe that was the nerves. Or nostalgia.
The door to the examination chamber opened with a change of air pressure.
“They’re ready for you,” said Professor McGonagall. She stood in the doorway with her wind-frozen hat almost scraping the arch and small horn-rimmed glasses sitting low on her stern nose. “Come with me, now.”
Lily leapt from the bench and was first through the doorway, which, Remus realised, glowed with the dim violet light of several inscribed runes. Severus went in after her at a languid pace, while Remus lingered and waited for Sirius, who yet sat a moment longer. When he rose, they walked together, although in lieu of letting Sirius squeeze his hand—they were being watched by McGonagall, who knew far too much of Remus’s personal life already, despite Remus, he realised, knowing next to nothing of her personal beliefs or politics vis-à-vis Scottish law and homosexuality—Remus threw an arm over his shoulder and pulled him close. It was a bigger gesture, yes, but blokey-er and less intimate, and Remus would think of how that felt for Sirius after his end-of-year review.
Once through the door, Remus stumbled. Sirius vanished from his grip, and he could see neither Lily nor Severus, nor McGonagall behind him. Even the door itself was gone, replaced by a bricked stone wall with aging mortar. It was an old, coarse kind of stone, the sort whose stubble would rough your fingertips if you brushed it. Faceless. Rough. Around him the chamber was wide and tall and bore a scent so sterile Remus wondered if a normal wizard could pick it out. There were no burning braziers, no torch sconces alight with an eternal flame, and little decoration at all, in fact, beside a grand, flat wooden table bearing a precise square metre of parchment. The table was a horizontal slice of a gnarled English oak tree with countless rings and a rustic wobbly edge. Further behind was a claw-foot desk with two comfortable chairs, and the one on the far side was occupied by Albus Dumbledore, Order of Merlin &c. &c.
There were no windows in the room. It ought to be pitch black, and Remus blinked as if to wake himself from a dream.
“Although I imagine you have had many a nightmare of this kind,” said Dumbledore, whimsy alive on his old and wrinkled features, “I assure you, Remus, that you are not asleep. Ingenious, is it not?”
Remus did another slow turn about the room and felt himself calm. A curious and foreign feeling, those days, so Remus said, “I think I love magic.”
Whenever Dumbledore chuckled, it rang with a soft, genuine sound. “Precious few witches and wizards may yet say the same. You should be proud,” said Dumbledore.
Remus felt a warm stirring in his chest. One of many things he’d learned about the Headmaster in his nine square years was that Dumbledore was not in the habit of lying to you. With the slight lift of one ringed hand, Dumbledore gestured to the walls and ceiling.
“Rooms such as these are not necessary for ordinary studies. However, at the postgraduate level, some caution, I believe, is preferrable to unwarranted risk,” he explained. “Given the nature of your research, I suspect we will be just fine.”
Remus nodded, remaining quiet, and Dumbledore rose. He still wore his normal attire, pale grey robes adorned with fine embroidered patterns, but they wore heavier on him than Remus remembered. White trim threaded with constellations. His hemline swept the smooth stone flagstones as he crossed to the main table, which Remus saw also had a large magnifying glass.
“In your own time, Remus, you may proceed.”
Remus blinked. “Oh, are—”
“—ah,” said Dumbledore, and Remus’s jaw snapped shut with an audible click. “I see you were not informed by Ms. Ahmed. For this first-year review, a single member of one’s advisory team is sufficient, as lower-form postgraduates rarely have enough demonstrable progress to warrant a three-person panel.”
“I haven’t seen her around as of late,” said Remus. He was fishing in the dark, here, but there was a glimmer in Dumbledore’s eye. An inscrutable grain of something. “Ahmed, I mean to say.”
“You haven’t? How curious.”
There were no clocks or gears or chimes to fill the silence here. No darkness to fade away in, no one to be the foreground to his back—this was a naked room.
“Sir,” began Remus, “is Gloria Ahmed missing?”
“What, I wonder,” replied Dumbledore, “would you do if I answered ‘Yes,’ Remus? I cannot imagine that it would give you any comfort. Should I instead answer, ‘No,’ or say, ‘I cannot share that information,’ I equally cannot imagine that you would believe me or not assume from my lack of response the truth of the matter.” He was circling the table with slow, meticulous steps, now, as he continued, “You already know the answer, do you not?”
“Did you know?” asked Remus.
“Did I know what, precisely?”
Remus swallowed and, much like with Socrates in the woods, he realised he was a nineteen-year-old-werewolf meddling in the affairs of a century-old wizard. “Did you know she was going to go missing?”
“That, too, I have already answered.”
“You suspected it, then.”
“I suspected that a bright young woman with unparalleled intellect and a mysterious research proposal might attract unwanted attention. I suspected that a witch who kept secrets as a dragon keeps its hoard might be seen as just as dangerous. I suspected,” he continued, volume never rising and yet his voice seeming louder in Remus’s ears, “that Gloria Ahmed might be endangered should she leave the castle grounds, and I warned her as such, but Hogwarts is not a prison, and I am no gaoler.
“She departed weeks ago for a location I cannot share with you. To my knowledge, she never arrived at her destination. A report was placed with the Auror Office to declare her missing on the date of her thesis defence, and, in accordance with new Ministry guidelines, she will be declared dead if they can find no trail of her in the six weeks following.
“Is there anything else you would like to know, Remus?”
Remus’s head was spinning. He felt dizzy. There was no reasonable explanation in his mind for why, actually, Dumbledore was telling him all this, and yet another question did indeed bubble to Remus’s lips.
“Are you—”
“If you are about to ask, Remus,” said Dumbledore, a sad amusement to his tone, “whether I, or indeed anyone else, am magically bound to not speak of some subject or another, then I must insist you reflect on your words.”
Remus’s skull buzzed. “Right.”
“No, Remus, I am not so bound. Neither, however, am I as clever or powerful as my reputation may claim. Few witches and wizards are, I’m afraid.”
“And if someone had, say, a copy?”
“Then that someone,” interrupted Dumbledore, “would do well to keep such information private. We must be precious with our secrets, even if they feel small. Even with those we trust, Remus.” He drew to a full stop, slow, like a heavy stone wheel returning to its place at the bottom of a hill. When he looked to Remus from beneath his half-moon glasses, there was both mirth and fatigue in his eyes, and both in great amounts.
Remus was lost. Why would Dumbledore ask him—or, well, not ask him, but imply with such importance that he go through all this trouble only to tell Remus he oughtn’t share the information he’d been pursuing for the better part of a year? The question must’ve been obvious in Remus’s eyes, because Dumbledore smiled one of those sad and knowing half-smiles that had become so prominent in Remus’s life.
“If you are confused, Remus, then I encourage you to look at this as though it were a game.”
“Chess?”
“Heavens no,” said Dumbledore, and he chuckled again. “Draughts.”
“You play—”
“—there are only pieces, and while one crowned piece may well win a game, relying on one alone will just as often lose it. It is a favourite of mine because, I think, it is a wonderful teaching tool for children and adults alike.”
It was a wonderful and whimsical way to say a very grim thing indeed.
“Forgive me, sir.”
“Whatever for, Remus?”
Remus cleared his throat. “I never answered your question. You asked me what I would do if you said yes. My answer, I think,” said Remus, doing his best impression of James, “is that I would do almost anything to stop it from happening again.”
Whether the sadness left or grew stronger in Dumbledore’s features, Remus could not say. He inclined his head, which Remus interpreted, charitably, to mean You already are, Remus, and then gestured to the seat before the claw-footed desk. They both sat, and Remus saw a sheet of parchment that hadn’t been visible before. Remus seized it for a scan. Apollo Oneko, Kelly McCallaghan, Siobhan Doyle, Terramina Flint—
“These are names,” he said, and then promptly felt stupid because Dumbledore knew that.
“They are indeed,” explained Dumbledore, “but the people on the list are far more interesting. Can you guess, Remus, what they all have in common?”
Remus swallowed again. His blood was uncommonly cool in this room, or maybe that was Dumbledore’s presence, but his heart quickened. “They’re all—well, I reckon they’re all like me, are they?”
“Correct indeed. These are all names that, despite passing over the bureau of the Werewolf Register, were left off its list for one reason or another. I do not know why,” he continued, watching the inquisitive spark alight in Remus’s eyes, “but I believe they represent an open door. Each of them remains in Britain.”
“You want me to find them, then.”
“Find them. Talk with them. Assess where their hearts lie and, if possible, learn how exactly they came to avoid the Ministry’s notice. I suspect they will remain within Britain for the summer, which means that you have time.”
“Time,” said Remus, uncertain, “for what, sir?”
“To save them, Remus,” he said, and he let the words rest on their own in the echoless room. “You may reach them in ways I cannot.”
“Is that why you invited me back this year?” asked Remus. His tone was sharp, and the words came spilling out of him, fuelled, like too much of Remus’s life was, by anxiety and doubt. “To collect on a debt? I know I owe you for your help, but—”
“—if indeed, Remus, we owe debts to one another,” interrupted Dumbledore, “the debt I owe to this world is far greater than I can ever hope to repay. No, I did not invite you back to Hogwarts because I thought you may be useful. There are no pawns, because people are not playthings. If I misinterpreted—if you did not indeed volunteer—then you may forget this list and return to your studies, and I promise you will not suffer for it. The choice is yours alone to make. I have no use for conscripts. I will not, I cannot force you to squander your future years on a cause you do not believe in, for it matters not that I believe we may soon have no future at all. If we cannot rely on good, kind, and brave people to intervene where intervention is needed most sorely, all is already lost.”
No future.
The words—a simple song lyric that struck a chord with thousands, if not tens of thousands—came clear to the forefront of Remus’s mind, although it felt needlessly childish. Yet he knew why they were on his mind. His time in the Pyrenees had given him, for once, a picture of a possible way forwards, a life in which he would still struggle, but struggle less for a thing that was out of his control. The Village was gone in flames, yes, but the idea was still there. If he were Mary, then the answer would be obvious. The only ones who could care about this work were people like Remus.
Trying with all his might to still the slight tremble of his hands, Remus tapped the list with his wand to shrink it and conceal its contents, rolled up the parchment, and slipped it in his pocket. Mischief managed.
“I apologise, sir,” said Remus.
“Apologies are wasted on those who have already forgiven, Remus. Now,” continued Dumbledore, “as animating as this conversation is, I believe we are here for much lighter matters. I will, however, give you as much time as you need to compose yourself.”
They stood at the same time, and, for the first time in nine years, Remus realised he was taller than Albus Dumbledore.
Four hours thereafter, Remus returned to the postgrad lounge in deep thought, and, after interrupting said thoughts to think an apology at the door, he crossed through to find six postgraduates hunched over the squat beige sofas that lay before the hearth. All of them watched him with intense scrutiny.
Mary’s eyes were hopeful; Emmeline’s vicious eyebrows, expectant; Benjy smiled with boyish charm; and Sirius and Lily wore shell-shocked faces, like they’d been in the trenches and nearly drowned in the mud. As for Rucha, Rucha was—well, she was there, nonplussed and small and overlookable.
“Who did you have?” asked Mary. She was a restless housecat perched on the spine of the sofa, ready to pounce. “Was it bad? How do you feel?”
“Dumbledore,” replied Remus. Both she and Emmeline paled, although it was the unexpectedly latter who ushered him forwards with a fire-warmed blanket and a hot mug that smelled of cocoa and booze.
“Bloody poor sod,” she said. “Think you passed?”
Remus’s jaw worked open and shut, but he could force no further sound out. Mary tutted, indulgent. Emmeline placed him half on top of Sirius and beside Lily with no apparent shame or care. Not that he could muster any embarrassment. It was a fair remedy, even if Lily was clammy with anticipation and Sirius reeked of motor oil. Both of them were haggard—Lily’s plait had come apart, and Sirius’s curls were more knotted than tousled, although Mary was working through that, as gentle as a mother cat, with a hairbrush. Both of their eyes were far, far away, no doubt analysing every uttered word over the past four-to-six hours for errors or missteps.
Remus reckoned he looked much the same. His skin was still damp with all the nervous sweat, and his brain felt smoothed of all its wrinkles. Some idiot part of him had thought to bring chocolates in his pocket to ease his nerves, only the thought of halting his viva voce to silently, agonisingly swallow a lump of sweets half-melted in its wrapper while Albus Dumbledore made unflinching eye contact was unbearable. He could not remember to the nearest week when last he’d slept a normal amount. Or slept sober. Or had a cup of water that wasn’t at least slightly caffeinated. Other subjects rested heavy on his mind, too, but he let Sirius bear some of that burden as he reclined back into the sofa. Only some, of course, because Remus was taller than Sirius and much heavier, square-cube and all that, and he didn’t want to crush the boy to death.
“That should be illegal,” muttered Lily. “It’s ghastly. It’s—it’s perverted is what it is. My research notes need therapy.”
Mary’s whisper was in his ear to provide colour commentary. “She had the Defence professor as her reviewer, poor thing.” Jesus Christ. Poor thing indeed.
“I vomited,” said Rucha. The small witch was full of surprises. “My first year. Twice. Once during, once after. She didn’t bat an eye. Reviews are awful.”
Emmeline furrowed a brow. She was handing off drinks to Sirius and Lily, now. “Who was yours, again? Sprout?” she asked, and when Rucha nodded, she shrugged. “Had Flitwick, me.”
“That must’ve been nice.”
“Thought so too, my first year,” explained Emmeline. She shuddered, and the idea of something frightening Emmeline frightened Remus. “But he’s a library of Charms, that man. He kept asking me about authors I’d never read and why I didn’t incorporate them. Was bricking it the entire time. Did you know he was a master duellist?”
“Sirius,” whispered Mary, now in Remus’s other ear, “also had Flitwick. It turns out he’s an automotive enthusiast. Loves motorbikes, in fact. Total petrolhead.”
Remus groped for Sirius’s knee and squeezed. He did the same for Lily a moment later, and connected by their pain, they sipped their spiked cocoa at the same time.
With a flick of his knobbly wand, Benjy conjured a large, empty platter with gold filigree, and another complicated sequence filled the plate with the most vile-, sugary-, and delicious-looking biscuits Remus had ever seen. He might as well have summoned a lake in the desert. They lunged—Sirius’s shoulder knocked Remus with enough force to overturn half his mug, although someone with a wand at the ready fixed that error, reversing the flow of entropy, as you did—and stuffed their faces like greedy children. As was apparent, Fenwick’s thesis in Theory had to do with, well, something very fiddly and complex around Summoning Charms and using multiple dimensions as a means of travel, but in all honesty Remus couldn’t follow it and he wasn’t about to start trying now.
“Biscuits and spiked tea,” said Benjy, “just like my nan makes.”
Remus hoped his nan didn’t know anyone with diabetes. These things were as lethal as they were delectable, and he said as much through his dry crumbly mouth.
All the finalist postgrads had passed review or successfully defended their thesis. Finalists and the upper-form were notified the day after their examination period, and so they knew Emmeline, Benjy, and, oh, Jon O’Neil, that was his name, would soon be awarded their degrees and leave, while Mary, Rucha, Jacob O’Neil, and Sophia Stone would move on to their third and final year.
Remus wanted to be happy for them. Except, of course, Remus, Sirius, and Lily would have this dread cloud hanging over them for at least twelve hours longer, not knowing their fates.
The envy struck him when he thought of the second-years. They were safe, self-assured. As for the third years, however, he pitied them and relished in private the idea of having more time at Hogwarts ahead of him. He hadn’t got to know Jon O’Neil, but Emmeline and Benjy were colleagues, and they were about to be cut loose in the middle of the War.
Except saying any of that aloud would be mad. Loony. Instead he drank again, as did Sirius and Lily, and when their mugs ran dry, their elders rushed to refill them like Olympic cupbearers. It was a sacred tradition among postgraduates.
***
There was a celebratory dinner. Hosted and catered by none other than Horace Slughorn, of course.
Only the postgraduates and faculty were in attendance: no lower-form students, no ghosts, no Ministry heads, no DMLE, no Quidditch managers, no one from the Werewolf Register to raise Remus’s hackles. Remus appreciated the privacy even if Emmeline would’ve appreciated another last attempt at schmoozing. Almost as much as he appreciated the catering, actually.
All of his complaints about the food quality in the Great Hall flew to the wayside once the doors opened to that smaller ballroom that played host to the social gatherings of Hogwarts.
The smell of it was the first thing that struck him. Golden rosemary potatoes baked to perfection lay in long, shallow trays so the bottom layer didn’t continue to cook from the ambient heat or soak in excess oil; rich, buttery dal cooked down in cumin and turmeric sent up curling wisps of steam from its bright yellow herb-garnished surface and set Remus’s mouth watering; assorted greens were crisped or wilted or lightly steamed in every shade of green imaginable, spiced with ginger, garlic, and chiles or dressed with bright Dijon mustard or tossed in rich, aromatic, cold-pressed olive oil; there was even an entire roasted bloody boar complete with a fuck-off red apple in its toothless jaws and more sweet, tender fruits stuffed for its guts inside, although Lily and a few others paled at the sight of it.
The boar sat nestled on a bed of verdant, leafy, sometimes anthrocyanotic green-and-purple kale, eyeless and bronze-skinned like an overslept sunbather, with its arse tucked into a wicker cornucopia that overflowed with ripe field tomatoes, whole bulbs of roast black garlic still tied up with strings, enormous red grapes and tiny, glistening green ones so pale they might’ve been white, and from there yet more exotic offerings, crystallised pineapple and skewers of apple and mango and grilled coconut radiating outward like an event horizon of indelicate excess. The platters were old, polished porcelain and the sort of crystal that gave a pleasant tinkle when you flicked it with your nail and otherwise chased in gold and electrum and ormolu bronze; the candelabras were of some hideous age of antiquity; wineglasses were arranged in an eyebending architectural structure that flowed like a dark red fountain and which contorted itself into smaller and smaller yet no-less-impressive shapes as postgraduates set upon it like wolves. All this and more set upon an absurdly-long pristine white tablecloth so stark and clean it dared them to feast, and feast they did.
The terroir as Sirius called it was unfamiliar and delicious. The intoxicating reek of it was thick in the air, like (he claimed, having been brought up with the requisite oenological sophistication) a vineyard breathing out clear moist morning air after a brief downpour following a prolonged drought. A French vineyard and a French downpour and a French drought, Mary hazarded, giving Remus an arch, questioning look. Her scathing eyebrows demanded answers he couldn’t give. He was entranced by this, their Horn of Amalthea, and trying not to dribble on his unshined boots.
Having hunted and eaten rabbit while transformed, Remus had settled his qualms with brutal carnivorousness long ago. A peculiarity of lycanthropy. Left alone with it, Remus had the infrequent if albeit completely loony urge to sink his eyeteeth into a raw cut of meat red and oozing myoglobin, though such barbarous temptations weren’t present here in the ballroom.
Instead there were spiralling pearl-inlay platters of delicate cucumber sandwiches with their pinch of salt and whisper of fragrant dill, and opposite those were the same pale-breaded, crustless forms filled with fine, creamy layers of dark liver pâté. Six strategic kinds of rice decorated the banquet table and ranged from jasmine to basmati to Italian arborio cooked into a salty melt-in-your-mouth seafood risotto. To Remus’s utmost delight, there was also a platter of fresh Atlantic cockles drowned in tangy vinegar.
He made an arse of himself shoving three down his own throat at once after Sirius, Lily, and Mary each made a face over trying but one.
Not that anyone cared because there was wine in generous amounts. Not enough to get sloppy, no, and you’d never hear otherwise from him, but Remus would never look at Professor McGonagall, or Minerva, the same again. Her accent thickened with drink like the fancy flaming spirits that followed they served until she was incomprehensible to anyone south of Edinburgh and her face flared an angry red from alcohol. Meanwhile Professor Flitwick, a tiny and well-dressed man, put away possibly his entire bodyweight in port and appeared stone cold stoic. Remus suspected him a werewolf. He had the metabolism for it. It wouldn’t have been the first time—or, no, actually, the more that his fizzing brain thought about it, it would have been the first time, and Remus would’ve been the second, depending on when the tiny man had contracted lycanthropy. Speak of the devil.
Albus Dumbledore was not in attendance, but the word was, according to Mary, he was known to get piss drunk at these affairs and became, by all reports, an insatiable gossip. It was inappropriate and hilarious and, Remus thought, a piercing insight into the man he’d once been before the War.
By the time it was all over, Remus was so well-stuffed he reckoned he’d gained ten pounds, and Sirius, whose thin figure was sometimes painful to behold, had to loosen his belt. Remus privately enjoyed the idea of having some cushion between those bones and his own soft-padded places. He and the others stumbled back towards the lounge, elbows interlocked in a manner that due to their mismatched heights probably impeded Lily (his left) and Sirius (his right) more than it steadied them all, chatting shite and slugging directly from an unsanitised bottle of wonderfully-fizzy champagne while Emmeline tried and failed to get everyone to sing some variation of a Sorting Hat song that Remus hadn’t been around for in his time at Hogwarts, nor by the cacophonous sound of it had anyone else. They parted at the lounge. There was a gratuitous amount of close hugs and cheek-kissing.
There was a postgrad afterparty, of course, but tradition limited it to the upper-form and finalists. Mary and Emmeline winked conspiratorially at them as they trailed the other postgrads out of the room. There would be mystical exchanges of guidance and words of wisdom and probably an awful lot of drugs, which made Remus wonder if there was truly a rule against firsties attending or if no one wanted to put up with another night of his and Sirius’s antics.
That last part was probably the paranoia talking.
All of this came to a close by the first week of June, when OWLs and NEWTs began. Both Emmeline and Mary encouraged him to continue his research for the following two weeks—and, by that logic, to keep working on his thesis in the nine summer weeks that would follow—but Remus was so drunk on the knowledge that none of them had failed, he couldn’t focus. Even the student body, tired in their end-of-year revisions, couldn’t bring him down.
Remus smiled at students in the library when they requested books or needed help with research areas and he hummed a jaunty tune while reshelving, all of which for some odd reason terrified the student body more than any of his previous behaviour. Tiny eleven-year-old children squealed and ran, robes flapping around their ankles. They giggled with their friends and tucking themselves around conspicuous corners to watch him with no apparent compunction. The Book Boggart was returned. Everything was almost normal again. So effervescent and jovial was the atmosphere of the Castle, you could almost forget there was a War unfolding in the background. Almost.
No one talked about Gloria Ahmed’s disappearance. It was beyond taboo. The very idea of speaking her name was like casting an Unforgivable Curse, and the sentiment infectious, as though mentioning her fate might spread it to the other leaving postgraduates. Even her place setting in the Great Hall vanished, and the table was shrunk to remove any obvious gap. It left the table lopsided, like an amputated toe.
Despite Hogwarts’s endless spring of gossip Remus never caught any rumours about her. It was gauche at best these days to speculate on the missing, as so few students at Hogwarts, whether student or postgraduate, remained untouched by the War.
Perhaps it was easier for the others. No one knew Ahmed or anything about her research, and while many of them respected and/or hated and/or wanted to be her, Remus wasn’t sure she’d had what most would call ‘friends.’ Excepting Mary, of course—the only one he’d known to insist that she was a complex human being instead of a human being with a complex—and Mary was no stranger to loss.
For Remus and Sirius, however, the shabby old trunk of blown-up polaroid pictures weighed as heavy on them as a casket. Ahmed’s body might as well have been in it. As she’d disappeared with all of her original research material in tow, the encoded notes were possibly the only record of her scholarship at all, and, Remus realised, if they failed to decode them, every (alleged) brilliant thought she’d had would be lost to the void.
They were pallbearers to its unknown contents and unwilling to set down their charge.
Many a night, he and Sirius sat around the record player and eliminated popular ciphers, and, later, as the full moon approached, they realised they might have to start eliminating uncommon and obscure ciphers as well.
Both of them acknowledge this as a formality. Unless the great and possibly late Gloria Ahmed was lazy and used pre-existing ciphers as a framework for her own original one, this was certain to be a dead end, but you had to cover all your bases. That, and neither of them wanted to dive into the deep end of cryptography so late in the term. There was an entire branch of Arithmancy dedicated solely to encryption and hundreds of illusions designed to subvert prying eyes, not to mention the possibility that her original text might be in a non-English language as well as encoded. Sirius had Latin, Greek, and Russian while Remus had Ancient Runes, and both of them were French-fluent, but that was an impoverished armoury. Remus’s own scattershot German was hardly a main gauche.
“Wish Prongs were here,” grumbled Sirius one late evening. He kicked absently at a crumpled ball of parchment like a dreaming dog. He lolled his head to side to squint at Remus through his dark curls. “‘tchu remember the first time you overheard him and his parents discussing something?”
Remus smiled wryly. “Not very well.”
“Four fucking languages in as many sentences. In one sentence. Unbelievable, our Prongs, not that he’d ever let us forget it.”
“Mm. How many languages does James have again?”
“Numerically?”
“’course. Include dialects.”
Sirius paused a moment, eyes rocking up to the ceiling, counting under his breath. He stopped and frowned.
“A fuckload,” said Sirius eventually.
The more they looked at the problem, the bigger it became, which was the defining feature, Remus realised, of his entire life. This wasn’t a wolf at the door. This was a wolf of the big bad variety. It resisted all of his straw-y attempts at penetration and probably would resist the stick-y ones too. All of this Remus recounted to Socrates, minus the pertinent details and everything about Ahmed’s research. He wanted to entertain the strange werewolf, not risk his life, and they appeared more interested in the descriptions of the feasts than anything else.
“You did not mention dessert,” said Socrates. In place of chocolates, they accepted tales and stories as gifts. Remus thought that might work, given their early complaint of feeling lonely.
“I didn’t,” replied Remus.
Socrates only accepted his visits in the three days before and after the full moon. If Remus arrived outside that timeframe, he found the aconite glade empty and the Forbidden Forest much more alive with its magical fauna and the occasional dark apparition. With them there, however, his journey was again uneventful. It was mid-morning, and they were walking a slow spiral out from the glade. In his hindbrain he could almost superimpose their regular walks over the forest from a bird’s-eye view, and he thought it might have been a classic labyrinth, or perhaps a triskelion. Still Remus was glad they weren’t running. Although even the summers of the Scottish Highlands were brisk, he’d rather not come back sweating, and he fancied the idea of undressing in a dark forest even less.
“I looked into whether muggles could be werewolves,” said Remus. It was a non-sequitur, but Socrates often followed their own conversational rhythm and so seldom acknowledged what Remus said if it didn’t interest them. “I found next to nothing, of course,” he continued, “because all the literature on werewolves generally pertains to finding and-stroke-or fighting them.”
“He knows nothing but books, this magic boy,” said Socrates. “What do your thoughts tell you?”
“That I know nothing?”
“What? That’s stupid,” said the other werewolf. Their tangled hair shook as they turned to look at Remus and dislodged a leaf. “Who told you that?”
Perhaps, Remus thought, that was better left unexplained. “It was a private joke.”
“You are not laughing.”
“You’re very literal,” replied Remus. Thus far they’d shown no signs of intending any harm to Remus, so he could hardly be blamed for growing flippant. Or, well, he could, but Remus wasn’t going to accept that blame. “I don’t see why a muggle couldn’t be a werewolf.”
“Have you met one?”
“As it turns out,” said Remus, “I never asked any of the ones I met. They all knew magic existed, and, although I didn’t witness each of them personally doing magic—many of them lacked wands, you see—I suppose I assumed they were all witches and wizards. Perhaps there was a Squib or two?”
“Squib,” said Socrates. They stopped at the base of a tree and, with such force it made Remus cringe, dug their fingers and toes into its bark to climb. “What is a Squib?”
Remus furrowed his brow while peeling off his trainers—it was too hot for boots, and it hadn’t rained in a few days. His toes sank slightly into the cold, damp earth. “A Squib is,” Remus said, and then stopped. “I don’t know how to explain it. S’pose they’re people who can interact with magic but not perform it.”
“Hmph,” said Socrates, and Remus followed them up the tree.
Only a few months had passed, yet, together, the two of them climbed higher than before. Remus was still awful at getting up the first ten or so feet, and, again, his terror of falling increased proportionately with the height climbed, but he liked the physicality of it. The insects, like the shiny black fist-sized beetle he saw burrowing into the bark of the tall pine, he liked less. There was a fresh splinter somewhere in his foot that he had to ignore.
“I won’t,” began Remus, panting with exertion, “be here for the summer.”
Socrates wedged themselves on a Y-arching branch. “What happens to the magic boy when he’s not at the magic school?”
“Not certain,” he replied. Jesus, they were high up. “We’ve got a holiday planned with some old friends, I think, and I ought to keep working on my thesis. Other than that,” he continued, perching himself near the trunk of the tree and far from Socrates’s grasp, “I imagine there’ll be much drinking and, if I’m lucky, some opportunities to scream, ‘Fuck Thatcher.’”
“Who is—”
“—actually, forget I said that name,” said Remus. He stared out at the woodland around him, and, privately, wondered how it might look from the very top. The distant forest floor unfurled beneath him like a hard labyrinth of roots and briars and other inopportune cushions. He blinked and looked away, vertiginous. “Am I ‘wilder’ yet? Off my leash?”
“No.”
“How do I—”
“—no,” repeated Socrates. They waved an absent hand. “You will know when you are off your leash, magic boy. Everything ends.”
“Sounds appropriately vague. I hope it’s not a hero’s journey situation—I’ll be very upset if it turns out I can’t learn the ritual because, for example, the only way to ‘become wilder’ is to unknowingly complete it.”
“If you tell me about the desserts,” said Socrates, ignoring him, “I will not push you from the tree this time.”
That, Remus thought, was a fair trade.
***
Watching the Scottish countryside with its verdant rolling green hills and ever-present light rain shrink away and grow distant, Remus’s mood soured. The sky was a pale, blotchy grey, with looming, dark nimbuses bleeding out into their paler companion clouds like a blooming inkstain. If he squinted he could see the occasional ancient menhir peeking out of the drizzle, its tall, stony eyeless face watching him from a bright mossy hilltop like a cow watching a Range Rover cross an otherwise unstimulating vista before vanishing over the next hill. There was a cromlech somewhere along this way, though it was probably too far to see in the rain: when he’d been a child the Hogwarts Express had rolled over a titanic stone viaduct and James, Sirius, and Peter had crowded to the window, pointing and whispering about a ring of sacred standing stones, myths and legends—a tale of opening and closing portals and coming and going strangers. He couldn’t see it now. He’d see it a handful of times more, then no more. A picturesque Scottish loch stared up at him from the beautiful, beautiful horizon. The warm rumble of the train crept up through the soles of his boots and pleasantly into his inner ear. What an awful deal they’d struck with Hogwarts.
It was a childish and petulant thought. The world was not fair, not even approaching it, a fact that Remus knew should be self-evident to anyone having spent half their life in a time of War.
Barely nineteen and he was already nostalgic for his schoolboy days, and, in truth, not the days themselves but the idea of them, the age they represented, as Remus’s memories were only fond in retrospect. So much of his time was spent wrestling with his body and burgeoning feelings and what he imagined it meant to come of age, yet he felt immature. Unprepared. Robbed, sometimes, because he’d run away at fifteen and lost three years learning enough about himself that he wouldn’t be a threat to normal people. Three years of train rides that he’d never had and would never have back.
“It’s cruel,” said Remus, “that they make us love it so much.”
Sirius had his elbows bowed on the railing of the break van, two fingers clutching half a spliff. They’d shotgunned the first half together. Intoxicating kisses. The tailwind off the back of the train parted Sirius’s dark curls into loose black curtain, but it wasn’t strong enough to snuff out a burning fag—something about aerodynamics that Sirius could explain and Remus probably couldn’t, and in any case they’d cast a few charms to ensure a smidgen of privacy, which had the not-unwelcome effect of soothing the slipstream winds. They’d kept the light rain though. There were tiny droplets on his the edge of his vision on his eyelashes. Sirius looked radiant and ravishing and at Remus coolly, cocking his head just so to one side. Curiosity piqued. Anyone else would’ve look at him funny and replied, Remus, however could love be cruel? or perhaps the same sentiment in a far less nancy way, but he was not anyone else. A lifelong companion to cruelty, Sirius was acutely aware of how love, in its sundry forms, could wound.
“’tchu mean?” asked Sirius. His expressive features—that crooked nose, thin eyebrows, and off-kilter jaw that made Remus’s chest ache—were neutral, even when spotted by the summer rain, like the surface of a still pond. He watched Remus with appraising grey eyes.
Remus shrugged. He felt strong about his words, yes, but there’d been so much emotion already, so he kept a casual tone when he explained, “I was in a blind panic being there for, what, nearly ten months, and now I want nothing more than to be back already. Isn’t that horrid?”
“I think I follow,” said Sirius. He sucked on the end of his spliff. “Thought I was mad, like. The only one who felt that way.”
“Sharesies?”
“Well I’m not about to travel,” he replied, inclining his head to the open spot beside him.
Remus sidled up beside him.
“Good boy.”
Sirius hooked a loose elbow through Remus’s own and brushed up against him like, well, a literal dog. He brushed back. The area was well private, as Remus had the foresight to lock the luggage compartment behind them when they went through the rear of the train, which, of course, he’d remarked on loudly to an audience of luggage racks and drowsy caged owls. Sirius had made a sly comment about how the risk of being caught was half the fun and Remus hadn’t dignified that with a response. Sirius’s dark jacket—no, it couldn’t actually be dragonhide, could it?—was cool and slightly dampened by the rain, but his hand was pleasantly warm. Sirius flipped the spliff backwards in his mouth and offered the end to Remus for a shotgun. It was the closest, Remus realised, he could get to breathing Sirius’s literal air.
His lungs burned, that part never really stopped, but he resisted the urge to cough. Sirius tugged him down by the collar to kiss him after. A fizzy kind of hypoxia fired off effervescent, bubbly signals in his brain, each suffocating neuron bursting like pyrotechnics.
A moment later, smoke was trailing away behind the train.
“Christmas of first year,” said Sirius, staring off after the vanishing railbed, “Reg must’ve been ten, still, and he was so preoccupied with the worry he wouldn’t be sorted into Slytherin that he was inconsolable. Obviously, Orion Black, Son of Arcturus, was not pleased with his darling son crying like a nancy, but he and my mother were patient. Until, of course, they weren’t. We were in the foyer as I recall. Hideous paintings on the wall. Prometheus Bound, I think. Rubens. It’s funny what stays with you. Reg’d been nervous all holiday, bearing witness to my entire family’s disgrace at my filthy Gryffindor hands, and I’d done my best to console him, but I’m afraid it wasn’t enough. I don’t remember exactly what Regulus said—if m’honest, a lot of that time’s a blur to me—but whatever it was,” Sirius continued, taking another hit, “Orion slapped him.
“Christ, you should take this thing away from me. Otherwise, I’m gonna be completely sozzled before we get halfway to King’s Cross. Sharesies means you have to take, Moony, ’tchu know that?”
Without looking, they exchanged the spliff. Both their stares remained fixed on the vanishing tracks behind them and the distant horizon. They were matching pace with the rain: it was getting worse at roughly the same pace as moved the Hogwarts Express. A summer storm was blowing in from the north. Probably it wouldn’t make it to London.
“My mother, that horrid Gorgon of a woman, never touched anyone with her hands. That was too base, too muggle for her rich taste, but Orion was a hands-on man. He shouted my name when he did it—sharp and imperial, ‘Sirius!’. It knocked him over,” he said, indeed both sharp and imperial. A shudder followed his imitation, however, and Remus knew it probably wasn’t the rain. Sirius tucked his head against Remus’s shoulder. He forgot about the spliff and almost set a loose strand of Sirius’s damp hair aflame. “I think that was the first time I saw Orion was capable of regret. His face changed so quickly for such a stoic man, and for Reg, I gather his entire world fell apart. And you know who Reg looked to first? Not our mother. Don’t think I’ll forget the look on his face.
“I wonder if he blames me for it, sometimes. Both of them probably do. I remember thinking, ‘If I wasn’t such a terrible child, he wouldn’t have that reflex. I made him do it. He thought I was Reg, and that’s why Reg was hurt,’ over on a permanent loop. They made a big show of apologising, not using words, obviously, but they brought him gifts and gave him every allowance, whether large or slight. Our mother healed the mark on the spot, and, y’know, I hadn’t realised she was such a capable healer up until that very moment. S’pose people surprise you. And I think Regulus might’ve actually got a literal pony out of it. They kept it out on the country estate with Alphard’s horses, but, ah, all this to say that they showered him with love and affection and it made it all worth it. Until the next time, of course.
“I stopped chasing those moments ’cos of James—and you and Peter too, of course—’cos I was always waiting for the slap, and while Prongs could be a right knob sometimes, usually about Quidditch, he never—hitting me,” said Sirius, “was not a condition of our love.”
There was something to do, here. Not grab his hand and squeeze, not put an arm over his shoulder—those were wires that Remus thought should remain forever uncrossed, and in any case Sirius never liked that kind of affection when talking about his family—but all possible actions escaped Remus. James would’ve known what to do. He had that Fingerspitzengefühl—that intuitive and empathetic je-ne-sais-quoi that Remus had truly never sais-quoi’d. In the absence of a better idea Remus nodded against the crown of Sirius’s head and continued to stare off the train. A flyaway hair tickled his upper lip, trapped in scruff. He didn’t move closer; he didn’t pull away; he was there to listen, and so that’s what he did.
“I feel like that, sometimes, when I’m doing my research or working on the bike or flying the kids—Jesus Christ, I’m calling them kids, some of them are nearly my age—that same ache in my chest, that tightness. Feels like I have to always be braced for the next hit, ’cos we know it’s coming.”
Remus took a drag off the spliff, which, he realised, was dying in his fingers. “I know the feeling,” he said.
The heavy wrought metal of the tracks rolled away from them in smooth intervals, and by the grace of magic, the train wheels gave only a quiet, comforting noise. It hummed. Rain tampered its thick roof behind them like a light white noise, offering the two of them even a sonic kind of privacy. At times Remus felt the Hogwarts Express was alive, that you could sense its beating mechanical heart and, while aboard it, it could sense you. High above in their eyeline and through the trail of engine smoke, there were dark stains in the sky just below the clouds. Holes in an otherwise idyllic landscape. He wasn’t certain when Dementors had began escorting the train as a matter of policy. He tried and failed to ignore them. Looking at a Dementor was like looking at a familiar gravestone: it dug a cold, dull knife against his chest and yet left him feeling slightly numb.
“D’you think they want it this way?” asked Sirius. He cleared his throat and Remus, ever gracious, pretended not to hear its breaking. “Whoever ‘they’ is, whether the Ministry or the staff. D’you s’pose it’s intended to terrify us?”
“Those last few weeks,” began Remus, “I would’ve done anything to prolong it. I still might, actually, for just another few hours of that atmosphere. It was like they put opium in the air. They were all so proud of us, and we were proud of each other, and—well, it felt like,” he continued, and then halted himself with a cough. To stall his thoughts further, he took another drag.
“All right, Moony?”
“I don’t want to say it.”
“Would it help if I said it for you?”
Remus grinned and bumped his head against Sirius’s. It required much more hunching on Remus’s part, of course, but while they were leaned over the railing like this, the difference in their heights was not so large. “It would,” said Remus, “but nevertheless I should probably say it. Progress and all that.”
Sirius gestured with a regal hand, as if to say, Go ahead, your Majesty.
“It felt like we were a family.”
“That it did, Moony,” said Sirius, “that it did.”
Remus inhaled, deep, and coughed to clear the damage from his poor abused lungs. If ever there was a moment to share, and yet he couldn’t work up the courage. Not yet.
“Wanna see my bike again?” asked Sirius. Remus’s fuzzy brows furrowed and earned a crooked grin from Sirius, who, as he recalled, had once been in the habit of referring to them as Welsh caterpillars. With a nudge of his shoulder, Sirius inclined his head towards the luggage compartment and said, “Come on, then.”
Sirius flicked the stub of his spliff off the train and, with a bat of the same hand, he vanished it mid-air.
The motorbike was an unassuming vehicle on its surface, and yet, Remus thought, that was what made it so magically interesting. It didn’t yet fly, although as he gathered that was Sirius’s intent, but the bike functioned thus far without ever needing refuelling and offered greater protection to the rider in the unfortunate (but in Remus’s opinion, extremely likely) event of a crash. Someone was going to die riding this thing. Probably it would be Remus. It looked and felt statistically inevitable, though under the bonnet, the spellwork upon it was elegant—Remus hadn’t said as much to Sirius, he was saving it for a rainy day, but it wove together kinetic elements with broomstick comforts and probabilistic manipulations—and, more impressively imperceptible to any detection spell the pair of them knew. The enchantments were air-tight. Indeed, the only way you could tell the bike was abnormal by touching it, as all the transmuted thaumaturgical energies became heat and thus kept the thing perpetually lukewarm to the touch and the heat sink at a skin-searing blaze, which, therein lay the problem. Extreme heat had a deleterious effect on most enchantments, though Sirius swore up and down that as long as nothing reached a melting point, the spellwork would hold and everything would be perfectly safe.
Which, therein lay the problem.
Sirius could talk for hours about his plans for the bike and often did. That particular morning on the train, Remus let him rattle on for exactly one before the conversation drifted to other fears and anxieties. As it turned out Sirius was excited and frightened at the idea of camping with James and Peter over the summer; Remus confessed he found himself often wondering how his research might afford him a living; and whenever both of them ran dry of topics, they tangled a leg or an arm together and soaked in the pleasant rainy silence. Whether that silence lasted a minute or fifteen or half an hour, one of them would say something and it would all start anew again.
Sometimes they kissed, although with less feverish passion and more smoke-addled languor. Shagging was right out, of course. They were too keenly aware of what happened last time Sirius tried to get his leg over on a public train. And Remus was not about to give him the satisfaction. Joking about it, however, was right in. Remus let slip that he too had messed about with Benjy Fenwick and Sirius was inconsolable with delight, needling him with questions of how Remus rated his slops, and, later, with mourning over the potential threesomes that could have been. As far as either of them were aware, he would be luxuriating in his post-postgrad experience somewhere in London, though Benjy was oddly vague on the specifics of what exactly his post-postgraduate life would entail. Not one to be outdone, Remus suggested, slyly, three-quarters jokingly, that he could always ask Mary for Benjy’s new address.
By early afternoon they were sobering, maybe, in the luggage department. They debated on whether or not they ought return to Mary and Lily, who were no doubt besides themselves wondering what fresh Hell he and Sirius had set loose during their hours-long absence, but never quite could work up the nerve to get up and leave. Sirius waxed on about sexual logistics; Remus tried with all his might to clear his mind and enjoy this last moment of peace. Except once again, Remus had secrets, and keeping them never worked with Sirius.
“Ah, and the positions, Moony—”
“—when I said ‘I would’ve done anything,’” interrupted Remus, “I did, actually, do something.”
Sirius had his knees up at his chest and was staring up at racks of luggage against wall. He might’ve been having a staring contest with one of the few waking owls in the section, come to think of it, although Remus had no idea which one was winning. They’d had already had to magically silence another, a tiny brown thing that had started shrieking the moment they entered and could not be bribed by any means to stop. Its huge eyes bore a hole in Remus’s skull.
“Moony,” said Sirius, “I love you, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
They said things like that. Sirius Black did not like or dislike things, he loved or despised them. ‘Darling’ or ‘Love’ or ‘Yes, my dear?’ were commonplace utterances shared between everyone Sirius adored. Perhaps appropriately, it was one of the things Remus loved about Sirius—like Austen, he had no notion of loving people by halves. It wasn’t his nature.
“The earlier conversation?” replied Remus. “About leaving Hogwarts? End of the year?”
“Moony.”
“Yes, darling.”
“That was three hours ago. Maybe four, come to think of it.”
“Are you following, or—”
“—yes, yes, proceed,” replied Sirius, “I just wanted it to be on record that you are an alien creature with an alien mind.”
“So noted,” said Remus, and he let it linger a while longer because his words were not unlikely to kill all smiles in the room. “I did something. Or, well, s’pose in all technicality I implied and-stroke-promised I would do something, but I intend to carry it out, and—well, I trust you, Padfoot.”
“Suddenly, I’m worried.”
“It’s warranted,” said Remus. In one last moment of paranoia, he lifted his wand and cast a Muffling Charm, which, being honest, was becoming somewhat of a reflex for Remus. “Dumbledore gave me another task.”
“Ah,” said Sirius. Neutral tone. His face was inscrutable. “I see.”
“It’s a new one,” Remus added, quick. “Told me during our end-of-year reviews. I promise I wasn’t withholding, I—well, I needed time to think about whether I was going to pursue it or not, and after that, I started thinking about trust,” he continued, wishing with much regret that he had a less wobbly brain to parse his speech. “I trust you, Padfoot, and the only way to show that is to put my trust in you. I know how you feel about the War—”
“—Remus, that’s not—”
“—and I don’t think it’s right to keep something so important from you, even if I’m worried you’ll disapprove.”
“Remus.”
Remus winced. He couldn’t look at Sirius, it was like staring into the sun. In the silence of his nonresponse, however, he felt a finger brush his cheek, just above where Remus’s neat-shaven facial hair began. Remus inhaled. Exhaled. Did arithmetic to quiet his rapid heart.
“Yeah, Pads?”
“Dumbledore asked me to do something this summer too,” said Sirius. That snapped Remus’s eyes to Sirius’s pale and angular face, and he saw the conflict battling it out behind his grey eyes. “He said—I never could do a good Dumbledore impression, so I’ll summarise it—that he suspected my brother would be inducted into ‘darker circles’ upon leaving Hogwarts, and that I ‘might do well’ to speak with him. Wants me to sway him, s’pose, although anything I say’s gonna do a fat lot of good.”
They hadn’t come up with a plan for Regulus yet beyond decoding Ahmed’s notes, but even that was a pipedream of sorts. If the Kiss was indeed preventable—which, being clear, was wild speculation and wilder hopes on their part—or could somehow be reversed, there was no guarantee that Ahmed had written on that at all. Perhaps it would be easier to shackle Regulus in a cottage somewhere until the War was over, though by Sirius’s dark mood perhaps it wouldn’t be. What if he’d already done something unforgivable? They’d have to move him out of the country or yet further, and even then he’d be hunted for bounty. There was exactly one punishment for being unmasked as a Death Eater. The Kissed were both justice and commodity to the larger magical world.
Sirius blew a sharp breath between his teeth and it make a curious whistling sound. “I know I said I wouldn’t fight,” said Sirius, “but letting Reg throw his life away might be the only thing to twist my head up worse than being a bloody soldier.”
“You’re not a soldier, Padfoot.”
“Know I’m not,” he replied, clearing his throat again. “It’s for Reg, not for Dumbledore or the bloody Ministry. ’sides, not like any Auror’s gonna up and let the old Black heir fight on their side, right, Moony?”
Remus snorted at that. “Just as likely they let a werewolf into their fold.”
“A pair, aren’t we?”
“Mm,” said Remus. “Lils and Mary are having kittens, I reckon.”
Upon returning to their original compartment, however, Remus and Sirius found it empty of people. In their place was a small post-it in bold and chaotic cursive that read, “CHEERS, FELLAS, SEE YOU IN FRANCE. XOXO M&L.”
Remus was the one to choose the destination, of course, because the idea of being alone and isolated in the British countryside during a War was not a relaxing idea. It was the sort of thing that historical children did in historical novels set during the London Blitz, not the sort of thing that British yobs did between summers at uni. The Gascony Moors on the Bassin d’Arcachon were not as warm or enticing as the Mediterranean Côte d’Azur, but they were bigger and less populated and close to a wine capital of the world, Bordeaux, which was warm and enticing in its own way. There would be sandy beaches and fewer shrieking infants. Enormous waves. Plentiful oysters. A picturesque distant lighthouse. The difference between high tide and low tide, which Remus had seen but once, was astonishing. And perhaps Remus had unspoken aspirations of perhaps kissing Sirius under the moonlight on an Aquitaine beach, and perhaps, if he was lucky, sucking his dick, which he absolutely would not be able to do either of those things on the tourist-ridden hyper-commercial beaches of the French Riviera.
While on some level it bothered him that they wouldn’t say a proper goodbye to Mary and Lily, Remus also knew they’d done so at least three times before boarding the train. If they hurried they might still be able to catch them disembarking. Being at the back of the train, Remus and Sirius opted to grab their luggage from the compartment once they pulled into the platform and make a hasty exit. It wasn’t strictly legal, but it was hardly theft in a funny hat, because how, really, could you steal your own property? It also helped them avoid the Kissed porters, which had become something of a sore subject and sorer sight.
Once they stepped onto Platform 9 ¾, however, they proceeded two further steps before freezing at the same time, earning them several dirty looks from families awaiting their students. A crowd of impatient students began to push past them like a clogged pipe bursting.
Jesus Christ. How could he have forgotten.
Sirius dragged him to the nearest pillar, where they set down Remus’s two trunks. As for Sirius’s six in a variety of sizes, colours, and textures, as well as the conspicuous motorbike, they let those remain floating. He rested his forehead against the pillar. The concrete was cool against his forehead, like a damp compress to ease a fever. He was definitely still stoned.
“Moony. I just had a thought,” said Sirius.
“Really?” said Remus. A mad giggle bubbled up over his lips. “Do you need to sit down?”
“Did you know,” began Sirius, who was dangling over the precipice of deranged laughter, “that I am currently homeless? What with Euphemia having moved house and Lily and James having their own place.”
“Y’know, Pads, both of my previous addresses have caught fire, and I’ve only now realised that I, too, am without home.”
“Well then, Moony. How do you feel,” began Sirius, “about us getting a flat together?”
Notes:
A 'viva voce' exam is not an invention of my mind. I don't think I could be so nefarious. Nor did I read Redwall growing up, but I've been told it is famous for its pages-long feast scenes and wonderfully worldly food. (Apologies to the vegetarians and further out there—you take risks by stepping into the shoes of a werewolf.)
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, Summer 1979, Part I will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 24 January, a Friday. Being a 'part-of' chapter, this means I'll be posting every week until there's no more parts to post! If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is Lethe and Mnemosyne by montparnasse, a work that I struggle to explain but really enjoyed—a Gothic romance set on the Cornish moors, sort of like Wuthering Heights except with enjoyable gay sex. Go read it!
Chapter 10: Summer 1979, Part I
Chapter Text
Between his second and third years at Hogwarts, summer of ’73, the anxiety that so defined Remus’s life reached a boiling point.
It’d been four months since Sirius got his record of The Dark Side of the Moon, which he played without end in their third-year Gryffindor dormitory, and two months since he, James, and Peter discovered the secret of Remus’s lycanthropy, in that order. Emboldened by their implausible acceptance, Remus awoke one early summer morning and walked into the kitchen of their latest quaint-but-shabby cottage rental, his mother sweeping the checkered linoleum while his father read the Prophet. It was there that he broke eight years of his parents’ quiet calm by asking how exactly he’d become a werewolf.
While Remus hadn’t then known Lyall Lupin to be an emotional man—the distance between them only grew more obvious with age—that morning Remus saw, perhaps, what Hope Lupin must never have in more than thirteen years of marriage. Lyall’s face in that moment remained as burned into Remus’s mind as the pale bite mark was into his hip. Painful rage; bitter regret; disdain, if not for himself, then for the people around him. He folded the Prophet onto the table and didn’t finish his morning tea. He didn’t speak. Remus remembered, vividly and tumultuously, the way you remembered a feverish nightmare, that in the total silence of the kitchen he couldn’t tell which of their three hearts was beating fastest. It felt like they stood frozen for ten minutes. In all practicality it was probably less than a minute before Lyall stood and grabbed his khaki trenchcoat off a bronze hook by the door. Sirius had been right—it was funny what stayed with you.
Lyall Lupin left the house that morning and did not return for two days.
His mother, the only patient one, then, of the three, made Remus a light breakfast and quietly recalled the story as she’d heard it told. It was brief. There was a man, she said, by the name of Fenrir Greyback, who’d been very upset with Remus’s father, and Remus had paid the price of his father’s sins. Years later, Remus pieced together the rest from archived clippings of The Daily Prophet.
A recent rise in werewolf attacks across Britain and Ireland, often with young children from magical families as targets, stoked fears that there was a Pack attempting to swell its ranks. The Prophet coverage sometimes adorned the word with a capital P, perhaps to indicate its presumed significance. Remus had the sense that the lycanthropy was less of a primary issue and more of a tool to lance the Minister for Magic at the time. Nobby Leach had not been a popular choice among social conservatives. Nevertheless the coverage was always gruesome. There was no unjustified level of outrage. Remus’s own father gave colour commentary as something of an authority figure in the Department of Creatures. Lyall decorated these stories in the same that that a butcher might decorate an abattoir. 1965. Two children of muggles were allegedly killed during the next moon in yet another lycanthropic attack, and Greyback, disguised as a non-magical vagrant, was brought in by the Ministry for questioning. They thought little of him and released him. Before his memory could be modified, however, a gang of suspected werewolf accomplices aided him in escaping.
And after that, well.
Those Prophet clippings amounted to about six weeks within a news cycle more concerned with congregations of Squibs and other magical minorities, a fact which often made Remus’s stomach turn. The entire moment his life changed forever could be reduced to six articles in a shoebox.
Yet, perhaps that was exactly why Remus stood across the street from a derelict warehouse in the London Docklands, wearing a grin and not the queasy wet-mouthed expression of someone about to vomit. The distant buzz of flies and other less-identifiable waterborne insects mixed in with the electric hum of streetlamps, whose unwashed ochre lights felt like heat lamps in a strange, exotic terrarium. His blood was hot and alive with a half-mad excitement. Tracking other werewolves was dangerous, yes, but it was a danger that existed at the intersection of possibility. Even if he was only supposed to pump them for information, it was something. It was more. Being a werewolf might actually mean something.
The old warehouse swarmed with magic. Swarmed with people—a hive of the proletariat. Conflicting mods and rockers, many now well into their thirties, decorated its corrugated metal doors in divided battle lines like regiments of old, grizzled veterans, thin solid ties versus white silk scarves, fitted suits versus tough jeans, and hot, dirty, hateful cashmere-on-leather action, while scores of spikey-haired punks with equally-spikey clothing congregated in small pods around them, picking fights or blustering against the encroaching waves of braces-and-bovver skinheads who, in turn, tried to pick fights with the rockers and the mods and old Ted dandies and the occasional stray turtleneck beatnik and anyone, actually, with a darker skin tone than lily white. There were a few unnameable ink blots that resembled Siouxsie Sioux impersonators, though with their own personal twists. He had no idea what to call them. Sioux-chic. Dire. Gothic. It was all not unlike lifting a fallen log in the garden and discovering a teeming ecosystem underneath, and Remus, well—when Remus first arrived, he’d taken one look at them and then one look at his own reflection in a closed shop window and went back to the flat to change.
He’d looked like a proper toff. Now, with some of Sirius’s resized clothes, he might blend in, less the invasive species than before. And as for his reconnoitring, there was no security for the warehouse, no bouncers, and a shocking lack of violence despite the strange mélange of a milieu, although the night was still young. Or, if not young, on a lot, lot of drugs that made it nevertheless feel young.
Beyond the physical realm, however, technicolour trails seeped out the high broken windows of the Docklands warehouse like clouds of smoke, and that same vibrant haze clung to the tight clothes of one of maybe every four-dozen people milling in and out of the building.
Sirius had taught him that trick. The persistent detection spell involved a convoluted enchantment cast on one eye and had the side effect of turning his iris white, and, as it only lasted a few hours before needing to be renewed, he’d been forced to bring a wand. Not his own, of course. Remus thought there was a nice poetry to Lyall’s short, inflexible wand being used by a werewolf for meeting other werewolves.
Remus re-upped the enchantment on his left eye and then found a gap in the unmortared brick of the alley to stash it before setting off for the warehouse. Crushed amber glass clung to the bottom of his boots and gave his steps an ominous crackle. He left behind the stench of stale piss, feline and human muddled together, and braced for a novel olfactory assault. Far across the lot someone yelled incoherently and hurled a beer bottle not in his direction. It sailed over a fence. His heart was pounding.
The mixing of magic and muggles was strictly verboten, of course, and yet watching the traces of magical activity drift in and out of the warehouse—areas like the Docklands were popular for these unlicensed do’s, as everything had shut down on the Isle of Dogs since the deepwater docks took over London’s freight shipping and the land thenceforth lived in bureaucratic limbo—Remus felt like he was watching a living thing thrive, not the rotting underbelly of a criminal world. Did the Ministry know? They had to know, surely. So much pomp and circumstance followed the Statute of Secrecy that no one could not know. He picked out a girl and a boy, which was to say a woman and a man, both Black, who looked to the unassuming eye like ordinary muggles, but Remus’s eye was enchanted. Each of them bore a simple matching necklace, but the spellwork on them was so dense and intricate that Remus couldn’t fathom within a thousand kilometres what they were meant to do—and did they know? How much lost enchanted miscellany was circulating out there in the mundane world?
He could smell his quarry as he drew near. Them. Werewolves. Only a handful, but if he could scent them, then they’d soon pick him out just the same. It was on a different spectrum to human smells, like tuning into a different frequency on the wireless. The closeness of the full moon only strengthened it—strengthened him. Two days out. He was hoping it might make them more reckless, as it often did for Remus.
Remus struggled over a chain-link fence and almost flubbed the landing. He could feel the spectre of Socrates mocking him over his shoulder. As if to take their place, however, two smoking youth around the back entrance laughed, loud into the night, and gave him mock applause, to which Remus replied with a very rude and out-of-breath gesture.
So, of course, a moment later they were friends. That trick he’d picked up from James and Sirius their first time on the train.
One was tall and one was short, a Vaudeville classic, and both wore the kind of togs that suggested queerness with all the subtlety of Ziggy Stardust giving a Canal Street handjob. Both were thin, too. Unemployment was rising for muggles. They grinned at Remus’s attire—all zips and safety pins and sleek black fabrics mottled with the Stuart tartan Sirius adored so much—and he grinned back. Apparently they’d been watching him leer out of the alley and kept a running bet as to whether or not he’d work up the nerve to come in. Perhaps he wasn’t as stealthy as he thought.
Small talk was small talk. They offered him a smoke, but he declined and lit up a light, thin spliff, the kind that only Sirius could skin up with his long and crooked fingers. The tobacco shortage at year’s end had broken them both from cigarettes. Still Remus missed the taste and it showed with his general irritation, not to mention the lack of idle, nervous rolling to occupy his fingers, but he reckoned it was at least a neutral change—Sirius had the money and lack of care to provision them with a near-infinite supply of weed, and though their brains were probably stupider for it, their lungs no doubt appreciated the reprieve.
The pair of youths called themselves Trouble and Strife and both flipped Remus off for laughing.
Trouble, the short one who could not possibly be eighteen, asked what Remus ‘did’, and it was their turn to laugh when Remus paled. That was his ironclad cover, immediately blown.
“Nah, mate,” said Strife, the tall one with a face of gold makeup and two prominent front teeth. “He don’t mean your job, he means what you’re into.”
Remus tapped his ash. “D’you mean—” he began, and then realised he’d affected an accent of his own. Jesus, Mary would have a field day. He coughed, and said, “I reckon I fancy boys.”
Trouble laughed, then. He put out a lot of noise for such a little person. “What music are you into?”
Fifteen minutes later of similar conversation later, Remus stamped out the stub of his spliff and broke off from them when one of their other presumed friends came by. They were none too heartbroken. There was a burst of music as a derelict fire exit swung open to disgorge a clump of overheating dancers—curls of vapour trailed off their sweat-soaked clothes like steam vanishing into the oversaturated night air. Remus caught the heavy steel door before it closed and slipped inside.
The music was a mess. In the few early hours he’d spent reconnoitring the location, he’d heard the roar of punk, the rhythm of reggae, the thrumming of rock, and, as was classic to these kind of all-nighters, the fast tempo of Northern soul. That mess of sound, however, translated well to the assault on the senses that was the rest of the inside: the sights varied as wildly as the subcultures of the patrons, the lights were either blindingly bright or non-existent, and the intense heat and humidity produced entirely by humans. Outside, it was a summer night in London, brisk. Stepping in through that warehouse door, however, was like using a portal. It was sweltering like a sauna, except in place of fired wood it reeked of booze and sweat and piss and sex and blood and vomit and the other sharp spices of party life. Navigating the dark and narrow back-corridors was like pushing through a throbbing labyrinth, or the intestines of a gargantuan creature: people lined every wall like bulbous polyps, and he had to shoulder his way through crowds of sharp-eyed, overstimulated revellers, who too often scarcely notice that he was squeezing directly through their conversations, and sometimes back again when he hit a dead end, impassable blockage, a corridor that only ended in hollowed-out office rooms that reeked of sex. He’d never touched so many people before. Someone groped his arse as he made a final push through a wide service corridor where the music grew louder and louder with every single step.
Once through to the main room, the wall of sound hit Remus and vibrated his entire body, attempting to change the beat of his heart and match it with the tempo. It felt like a physical impossibility to exist on another wavelength. He ought’ve stuffed cotton in his ears. It was indescribable. It felt impossible that he wouldn’t be deaf once or if he left. He hadn’t known that this much noise could be concentrated in one place without compromising the structural integrity of physics itself. The proximity of the full moon only made it that much stronger on his senses. And a second wall hit him, too, one of people, all moving and thrumming to a fast tempo. Not the slow peristaltic digestion of the labyrinthine corridors: this was acidic, corrosive, explosive. You danced or you were trampled. This place was a fire hazard—he had no idea how there was any electrical power in the warehouse, although he soon found himself not caring—and there must’ve been a thousand people crammed in a space meant to hold maybe two-hundred. How exactly did a warehouse on the London Docklands endure this much vibration?
It was mesmerising to experience, like the first time Remus had stepped into the Great Hall. If he hadn’t had an eye bewitched to spot magic, he would’ve thought that some of the dancers were charmed—their frenetic dancing defied gravity.
Underneath all that glamour, however, there was witchery.
At least a few punks had active enchantments on their clothes, either for protection or, if Remus was less paranoid, for cooling and comfort. Unfamiliar spells lingered in the air like dust; a woman with moonlight skin and white-gold hair that blew in an impossible breeze—a Veela, if Remus recalled—danced amidst a crowd of six or seven men and one or two women, all with sweat thick on their brows trying to impress her; a small cauldron bubbled atop one table; a small, possibly-Goblin woman with claw-like nails on the end of her exceptionally long fingers rode atop a dancing muggle’s shoulders, dripping in ornate metallic jewellery that caught the flashing lights with a dazzling display of colours that appeared to dip into impossible spectrums; and as Remus pushed through the crowd along the walls, his beanstalk stature affording him some ease of movement, he even caught what he thought must be a well-dressed vampire entertaining a small harem of pale, hollow-cheeked youth in a dark corner behind a support pillar.
Now that, that bothered Remus and heated his already hot blood, but there was little he could do without a wand. Even with one, however, what was he supposed to do? Attack her in front of all the muggles? She could be three hundred years old and had them hanging on her every word. So instead, he pushed onwards through the vibrating throng, trying to let his senses guide him past the guilt.
He’d been all over the Isles tracking down the names. Most of them were dead ends—werewolves, it turned out, were not always social creatures, who’d have thought—but Terramina Flint came from a pureblood family, a big Sacred Twenty-Eight one, and so he’d followed the rumours there and tracked her movements: first Manchester, then Birmingham, and now London. The underlying pattern hadn’t come to him at first. It hadn’t come to him at all, actually. He’d been loitering outside a train depot in Birmingham, smoking and trying to decide on whether to try Bristol or London next when a muggle man asked, unprompted, for a hit. They got to chatting, though the man turned out to be straight, or, er, no, he had a wife, and those two things were not necessarily syllogistic, but he spotted Remus’s map and told him with a laugh that he hadn’t taken him for much of a dancer. To his credit, Remus played it off well.
Evidently, Terramina Flint was a fan of the all-nighters.
Every locator Remus had cast after someone on Dumbledore’s list had failed or gave off a false trail, the latter annoyance being his second clue that at least one of them had a wand and enough magical training to cloak themself and the others. It also meant that they knew and were in contact with one another. Or strongly implied it. The alternative was unlikely: werewolves as a general rule did not tend to finish their schooling in witchcraft, and the ones who contracted lycanthropy in adulthood tended to be one-off loners, the sort of itinerant witches and wizards who kept no fixed address and eventually ended up bleeding out in an overfortified Welsh barn after a rough full moon while their fingers went numb. Remus was something of an outlier in that regard. They were good enough that he couldn’t crack their protections, not magically, but there were other, slower, more manual means. A few hours spent reconnoitring abandoned event-sized Birmingham warehouses under cover of nightfall turned up what a year of studying cartographical magic could not: irrefutable evidence of sorcerous residuum and an uncanny lupine scent that he couldn’t forget, like scenting the sharp sea air for the very first time. He knew that smell then, and he knew it now.
Which is why, of course, danger pricked up his spine like a scuttling spider when Remus broke through the crowd’s edge and caught a glimpse of one directly. A shirtless, well-muscled man with a bald head and a lattice of intricate spellwork tattooed over his dark skin gave a furtive look at the thrumming crowd around him and then ducked through a doorway into what might’ve been a loo. Remus’s eyes didn’t recognise the man, but his nose recognised him as werewolf.
He licked his lips and followed in after him.
***
A moment after he was clear of the door, it slammed shut behind him, locked, and silvered chains sprang forth from the handle like a spindle rewinding itself. Remus cried out more in surprise than anything else and looked back on reflex. A hundred flyers had been posted on and torn off it, leaving it with a paper stubble. The bald man was on him before he could turn. He twisted one painful arm behind Remus’s back and shoved him forwards until he slammed, chin-first, into the cold concrete wall. A spark went off behind his eyes. His vision was spotty. Breath had left him, and wouldn’t return, and a growing panic alighted in Remus that he’d just broke his spine and he would never breathe again. He thrashed. A slow wisp of air crept into his throat. Jesus Christ, the man’s grip was like a steel vice. He’d managed to turn the entirety of Remus’s weight against him. Nor were those enchantments just for show: they were inkspells, which they fell loosely under the taboo of Human Transfiguration. Christ knew what you had to do to get them to stick on a werewolf.
When his breath returned in full and his darkened vision cleared, Remus blinked and realised he was staring at two other werewolves. The one with the wand was an older witch, late forties or early fifties by the grey and white streaks in her dark flyaway hair, although her features were less creased by age than Remus expected. She was dressed neat and sort of boyish, not unlike a son ‘borrowing’ his father’s suit, with an amused steel in her eyes. She’d perched her light frame on the edge of a grimy old sink. Her boots didn’t quite touch the cracked floor. Beside her stood a short, honestly somewhat camp-looking wolf with a mop of Scottish red curls. Short described all of his wear: the tiny short denim trousers, the curious white-striped midriff, even his ankle socks. He bounced from foot to foot on ragged colourful trainers with a rabbity kind of energy, part nerves, part excitement, and his eyes flitted back and forth from the witch on the sink to the man pinning Remus against the wall, watching them for what to do next.
The sink witch tapped her wand once and the music of the warehouse faded until it was only distantly audible. She didn’t utter a word. He revised his assessment of her magical competency sharply upwards, which might’ve been useful if he’d thought to do so before walking into an ambush.
“Frisk him,” she said, and as the muscular werewolf did so, she canted her head to the side to stare at Remus’s face. “What an interesting eye you’ve got there.”
“All the better to see you with,” replied Remus, voice mushed by his cheek against the rough concrete wall. He was lucky he hadn’t bitten his tongue in half. The harsh, thick tang of iron tickled his throat and blood tricked out his nose, dripping onto the grimy linoleum below.
“Oh, and he’s funny,” she said.
“Aye,” said the rabbity one. Rabbit? That worked. “He’s funny. Funny for a thicko.”
The well-muscled werewolf, whose sleeve of tattoos gave the wall a faint, ghostly glow, like ambient neon to Remus’s enchanted eye—who Remus named Sleeve in the absence of anything more creative—stopped groping him and gave a grunt of assent to the witch on the brushed steel sink.
“He hasna got anything on him,” said Sleeve. It was a touch too lyrical to be properly menacing, if Remus was being honest, but that might’ve been the accent. Also Scottish. Also might’ve been the probable concussion.
The sink witch—she must’ve been Terramina Flint, Remus reasoned—tilted her wand, slow, towards him, but she cast no spell. She shrugged. That she was the ringleader here was so obvious it didn’t need comment, but what impressed Remus more was her apparent age. Ageing was a luxury not afforded to most by lycanthropy—and, Remus noticed, what little skin she showed bore no scars. This was a werewolf who’d never locked themselves up in a cage.
“Maybe he is a thicko,” said Terramina. “Where’s your wand, darling? Don’t tell me that,” she continued, waggling her free hand at her own left eye, “is just some defect. I’m not stupid.”
“Didn’t think you were,” replied Remus. “S’why I wanted to talk to you.”
“Talk?” said Rabbit. “He wants to talk.” Still bouncing, that one, with nervous energy, and Remus thought he might be on the outs with them, or a recent addition. The boy was looking for their constant approval.
“Talk?” said Terramina. She pouted. “With little old me?”
“You’re Flint, aren’t you?”
A whipcrack in the air. The haste with which she moved wasn’t physical speed. She Apparated and arrived right next to him, a cold fury in her dark eyes, nose an inch away from Remus’s own. The sound was unbearable in their current concrete enclosure. He might’ve flinched if Sleeve’s grip let up even an inch. Her wand tickled his throat.
“That has not been my name,” she whispered, a razor on her lips, “for a long, long time.” She paused, as if to let the words sink into Remus’s brain, but then the fury on her dark eyebrows shifted and became confusion. Being sniffed at was not exactly new to Remus, not after having spent so much time with Padfoot, but whereas that was curious and friendly, this was diagnostic. A frown split on her lips, and she said, “Release him.” When Sleeve did not, she snapped at him and repeated, “Let him go. He’s one of Greyback’s.”
The name was a cold bucket of water over Remus’s head. Startled him. Five years old was too young to remember much of anything, but hearing his name aloud still made Remus’s eyelids itch.
“Greyback?” said Rabbit. “Him? Really?”
Remus furrowed at that. There were the obvious indignities, yes. He wasn’t an object to be owned, certainly not Greyback’s, nor Dumbledore’s, nor anyone else’s—or, well, sometimes, yes, he was Padfoot’s, but that was less ownership and more, actually, an entirely different subject that was unrelated to this current line of thinking. To his knowledge, Greyback had left Britain sometime in the late sixties and hadn’t been seen since. Again the cold legs of a spider skittered down his spine. Perhaps, he reasoned, perhaps Terramina was older than she looked. Perhaps she spent a great deal of time abroad. Perhaps that was why she knew Fenrir Greyback’s scent.
“I won’t ask again,” she said, her voice even.
At that, Sleeve let him go and the release of strain on his poor abused shoulder was so soothing Remus wanted to cry. Deep bubbles of tenson popped and fizzled out deep in his joints. The soreness would creep in, of course, but for now he relished in the ability to stretch it.
“Thank you,” said Remus, stretching out his shoulder and wiping the blood from his lip. He ignored Sleeve’s snort and non-reply and watched him move to the door. Evidently, he wasn’t quite free yet.
“We didn’t know,” said Terramina. She wasn’t afraid, just defensive. “We don’t want a war.”
“Well, you’re in luck,” said Remus. “I don’t belong to anyone.”
“You smell like him. He turned you.”
Remus grimaced at the idea of smelling like anyone other than himself.
“Right, well,” he began, looking around the shabby state of the loo, its piss-stained concrete walls and dirt-packed cracks in the linoleum flooring where life was beginning anew, “where’s the one that turned you, then?”
“Dead,” said Terramina. She watched with an analytic if wary eye.
“Hope to say the same, one day,” replied Remus.
“Dead, he says,” said Rabbit. The speed at which Rabbit looked between them was almost comical. Every time he snapped his head, his short mop of curls lagged a hair behind. “Do we believe him?”
“Don’t believe anything, these days,” she replied. “If I were willing to listen, what would you want to talk about?”
This was further than Remus thought he’d get, being a nineteen-year-old werewolf with no training in the art of espionage or what have you, yet he was still terribly out of his own depths. What did Dumbledore expect him to do? Draw them a map? These were strangers, stranger werewolves, yes, but they didn’t know Remus, and they had no reason to trust him. Sleeve was all contempt and detachment; Terra wore an old schoolboy’s suit but the creature inside was nothing but years of honed survival instinct; simply having Rabbit in his eyeline made Remus nervous, which, didn’t he seem awfully young to be doing this sort of thing?; and all three of them were horribly, incurably paranoid. Which, Remus realised, was also one of his own defining traits.
“Y’know the Werewolf Register?” asked Remus.
Sleeve snorted again. The corner of Terramina’s mouth twitched with amusement.
“Heard of it,” she said.
“Well, I heard an odd rumour,” began Remus. She was not the sort of puzzle that Remus could pick apart—she was not unlike Sirius, and that made her impossible for Remus to predict. It required years of divination, a team of Seers reading grim portents. She was hardly the only one in the room, however. “Seems there might be some names that keep falling off the Register’s desk at the Ministry.”
Rabbit’s young features curled in a moment of hurt confusion—it was the sort of look he’d seen, oddly, on Peter’s face years ago whenever he heard about some fun thing to which he’d never been invited—while Sleeve looked to their leader. He wasn’t sure how to parse that last one. Faces weren’t his focus area. Had he already known, or was he just oh-so-bloody stoic?
“Heartbreaking, but I think we’ll survive,” she said eventually.
Remus took a deep breath with as much subtlety as he could manage and tried to quell his rapid heart. Maybe he could blame the moon for his dumb confidence.
“Apollo Oneko,” he said, looking to the muscular werewolf at the door. Surprise marred his smooth and dark face. From there, Remus looked to the rabbity Scottish boy. “Kelly McCallaghan.” He stopped there—the boy paled and stumbled like he’d been shot—and Terramina knew he knew.
“If this is a shakedown,” she said, “it’s a very bad one.”
“Not a shakedown. Gather you weren’t in on it, then?”
She eyed Remus up and down one last time, as if finally seeing him, then returned to her perch on the sink. For that she hadn’t Disapparated—her steps were unusually long and she moved with an odd, queer weightlessness. After she flattened out her suit jacket she took a moment to readjust her faded blue necktie. She looked like she been in Neverland too long, and the magic couldn’t keep her body young anymore.
“If we had connections that powerful in the Ministry, do you think we’d be hiding in places like this?” She punctuated her words with a swift kick to the unpolished steel of another sink, her heeled boot leaving a dark black scuff mark.
“Aye…” said Kelly, some colour returning to his pale face. “Shit digs, y’ken?”
“I rather like what you’ve done with the place, actually,” replied Remus.
Apollo stepped away from the door and back to Terramina’s side.
“Why’d you come here, then?” he asked. He had a very lyrical voice for such a burly man, what with the shirtlessness and vivid orange runner’s shorts. “Y’ken our names, you’re asking questions—why?”
“He doesn’t look like a Ministry type,” said Terramina. “He’s not got a wand.”
“I was hoping to learn how you’d accomplished it,” said Remus. He licked his lips. He was very good at lying to people about being a werewolf, but he wasn’t sure how that translated into lying to other werewolves. “Might be useful for people like us.”
“You’re recruiting, then?”
“Said he weren’t with Greyback, him,” said Kelly, bouncing from one foot to the next. “Ain’t after no war.”
“Still not recruiting,” repeated Remus. He looked towards the unblocked doorway, although the silver chains still shielded the handle. “Look, if you truly know nothing, then I—well, I think it’s best I get out of your hair, like.”
A long pause followed. Terramina raised her wand, slow, and then incanted under her breath, allowing the chains to recede and vanish. Before Remus could move, however, Apollo stepped forwards.
“Wait,” he said.
“Apollo,” said Terramina, sharp, but he ignored her.
“Give us a reason to trust you, aye?” he said. There was a genuine undertone to it. “Tell us how you came by your ken.”
“Give me something,” replied Remus. He fanned out both hands and gestured to the concrete wall to which he’d recently been acquainted. His bloodied nose left a browning stain. “How’d you meet each other? Why are all of you on the list? Are all of you wizards?”
Kelly laughed at that last one. Short and yappy, much like the boy himself.
“Wizards? Aye,” he said, “we’re all bloody Merlin.”
“You don’t know?” asked Terramina. Her expression was one of genuine surprise.
“Know—”
“—you called me Flint.” She spat on the cracked linoleum underfoot after saying it, which probably made it the cleanest spot in the room. “I’m not one. They disowned me,” she continued, “because I was the first Squib in three generations. Stain on the family line.”
Remus blinked, rapid, and Kelly yapped another laugh. He gestured to the unmarked door handle. Terramina shrugged. “Their assessment, not mine,” she explained. “Maybe I was a late bloomer.”
“But the rest of you—”
“Never touched a wand,” said Apollo.
“Aye, I have,” said Kelly, copper eyebrows waggling. “But I do a different kind o’ magic with me hands.”
Remus’s head spun. It was surprising, yes, and out-of-place, but above all else it was weird, a very intense flavour of strange, and one, he realised, he wasn’t going to parse on his own. It was the beginning of a joke: three Squibs walk into a loo, and the werewolf says, er, something. Moreover, and more importantly, these werewolves were classic outsiders, the same way that most of the other denizens of the warehouse were on the outside. Magic was access. Access was class. He wasn’t going to get very much further with them if he said he was a magic boy from a magic school who’d been told by a great and powerful wizard to come looking for them—yes, that would go over well. Why was he doing this? Because his professor told him to, said the dog.
“S’pose our kind ought to stick together,” said Remus, and Terramina narrowed her eyes.
“Your eye—”
“Not a Squib,” replied Remus. Summoning every ounce of his concentration to not burn down the bathroom, he flashed his hand forwards with an upturned palm, incanted in his head, and a tiny flame sprang into existence above his hand. He snuffed it out a moment thereafter. “No wand either, but I’m dead clever.”
“Dead clever got a name?” asked Apollo. “Y’ken ours.”
Shit. Jesus, he was the worst spy in existence. “Call me ‘Remus.’”
“You’re joking,” said Terramina.
“It’s not my given name, obviously,” he said, which was perhaps the only way he could save it. Hope Lupin’s penchant for mythology gave him good fortune for once. “And you prefer—”
“—Terra.”
“Oh, and mine is so awful, like.”
Whether they were affable because they saw him as little threat, because they thought he was Greyback’s, or, Remus thought, because they were like him in that there were so few people they could trust, Remus took the opportunity and ran with it. It was a crack in the thick ice that settled around any werewolf’s social ability. Perhaps it was the curiosity of it all: he’d not kept a Herculean distance between him and the other werewolves in the Pyrenees, and with some he’d got too close, but the Village had had what Sirius might describe as its own terroir, a benign hippy-cult affair where werewolves coexisted only with other werewolves. Terra and Apollo and Kelly—and now, at least briefly, Remus—were wilder, more devil-may-care, the sort of werewolves, Remus supposed, his father ought’ve warned him about if he’d been any good at being a father. They prowled the quasi-magical Squib borderlands that apparently existed between the muggle and magical worlds. They did not behave. They were no one’s dog but their own.
It was still somewhat early in the night and, together, they were four werewolves two days out from a full moon at a warehouse all-nighter on the London fucking Docklands. They made him do the trick with wandless fire in his hand again. The excitement was palpable in the air, all that solid tension having sublimated, dry ice into curious vapour. They peppered him with questions like dogs nipping at each other’s heels, and he mustered as much honesty as possible for each of them. Yes, he grew up in Wales; yes, he knew wizards, although he wasn’t close with too too many; no, he wasn’t on the Register; and yes, as Kelly sussed out in the way that many camp gays could, he was as bent as a nine-bob note. That last one of which the rabbity Scot met with a cheeky grin.
“S’fine with me,” he said, “’long as ye don’t try to shag me or nothin’.”
As became apparent to Remus, they had nestled themselves quite quite nicely into the niche area where the magical world met the nonmagical. It was the Squib thing to do. Misery acquainted a werewolf with strange bedfellows, et cetera. While some bred Kneazles or Crups with cats and dogs to sell in what Remus learned was a rich and complex underground pet trafficking network, others ferried potions to muggles for both weal and woe. Terra—who Remus knew could not be a Squib in earnest, because she could do magic—had established herself as a purveyor of exotic drugs. A magicopharmaceutical entrepreneur, she was.
This, of course, Remus discovered when she was beset upon by a few muggles looking for something fun to smoke, eat, and/or snort. Being unofficial events, there was rarely a bar at a warehouse do. People relied on other things to keep them going. There was a lot of money changing hands. She tucked a flyaway lock of greying hair behind one of her ears and two hundred pounds into her wallet.
“We need it,” she explained. “Getting in and out of the city every month isn’t cheap, the bribes are murder on our bottom line, and milk’s up to fifteen pence a pint. You want some?”
“I take it you don’t mean milk.”
She didn’t. Back in her office loo, she laid out along the brushed steel sink a thin line of white powder that, to Remus’s left eye, had a strange aura to it.
“I haven’t any money,” said Remus.
“First one’s free,” replied Terra. “It’s how we get you.”
He touched a finger to the powder and daubed it on his gums, not, of course, that he’d ever seen cocaine in person before. He recalled from novels and possibly one time at the muggle cinema with James and Sirius that it was something you were supposed to do. Terra watched him with possible, not improbable approval in her eyes, and Remus frowned. There was a taste to it—familiar, almost. He might’ve been pants at making Potions, but in first year he’d been the best in his year for identifying ingredients. Sirius, of course, had taken that as evidence of something sinister.
“Doxy eggs?” he asked. He hadn’t eaten them (ill-advised), but he had smelled them, and the two senses were more or less interlinked. “And there’s something else, too, I can’t quite pick it out—or, er, no, it’s sort of like fermenting moss.”
“Dead clever’s right,” said Kelly. “How’s he ken that shit?”
“Forest Troll marrow. Prolongs the effects. Makes it better than speed, and coke’s more hip to the club crowd these days,” she explained. She winked at him for reasons unknown. “Comedown’s worse, but nothing’s free in this world, is it?”
Deciding it was better not to ask how they got the Troll marrow, Remus looked at the three werewolves around him with their expectant eyes and realised that perhaps, actually, this was not an offer and instead another test, and so a moment later, Remus was ducking his head and snorting his first line of adulterated cocaine off a lavatory sink.
A few thoughts ran through his mind, then.
- Remus was a postgraduate, so this was more of an inevitability than anything else;
- nevertheless, being peer pressured—Pack pressured, maybe?—was probably not how he wanted to do this;
- there was no possible way he could ever tell Sirius what unfolded this night; and
- how, oh how had Dumbledore expected him to handle this task alone.
A short moment after that, Remus’s nose went numb and he became distinctly aware that he was a God among mortals and that the world was a lovely place, actually. His mind was often an unquiet library, yes, but that was no longer a problem: rather than anxiety pulling his thoughts taut against each other like a screeching, discordant, untuned violin, he could process them, finally, independently and without issue. They didn’t have to conflict. Once James had described to him the sensation of putting on glasses for the first time, of seeing the world, and for once Remus could see. He had the space and the speed with which to work through his thoughts and, when he needed to put them down, they remained in place exactly as they were until he returned to pick them up. No errant wriggling.
He needed to put down his thoughts often, of course. Terra never touched the stuff—which, Remus thought, was a shame because she was missing out on her own genius alchemy, all kept in a slim cigarette case that unfolded like a Matryoshka doll into progressively larger compartments and drawers and cases of display—but both Kelly and Apollo did a bump with him, having started far earlier than he, and the smaller Scot dragged him out by the arm towards the dance floor. It was like beginning of a really funny joke: a wizard, two Scots, three werewolves, two gays, one bisexual, and two Squibs walk onto a dance floor, and they’ve only got six legs between them.
Ha! It was funnier if you were on cocaine.
Two DJs later and Remus had lost his shirt. Sweat poured off his neck and glued his hair to his forehead. He felt like an accelerated particle bent on collision. A skinhead-y looking bloke slammed into him and bolted off into the crowd with no apology; a girl in a tartan skirt caught Remus’s elbow, harsh, only to shout something inaudible when he turned out to not be the person he was looking for. You couldn’t not be touching someone on the dance floor, there was no room, there was no space—there was no measure of time in the warehouse, that was why they called it an all-nighter, the only tick-tock the rhythmic pump the beat, his heart, and the trickle of blood out his left nostril. Cocaine and bloody noses: not an ideal combination. The blood had earned him strange looks; the shirtlessness was now earning him a further stranger looks from the dancers around him. A small fallout radius cleared around him. Part of that was probably because he was dancing with two men in ways that were hardly Christian, although, Remus realised, part of that might be the scars he was showing off.
It should’ve brought wild panic to his mind. ‘Should’ being the operative word. He felt the panic coming, and then his brain seized it and dissected it like with a laser. Why should he panic? They were muggles. Few people liked to see scars, yes, but no muggle in their right mind—which, granted, there were a number of drugs being passed around like exorbitantly-priced Hallowe’en sweets, though he made a mental note to ask how much, exactly, Sirius was paying for their weed—no muggle in their right or drunken mind would take a look at Remus and assume anything worse than he’d been mauled by a variety of animals in a variety of different sizes. Fewer muggles still liked to pick fights with tall bloke-ish fellows covered in scars and who were gagging to throw a fucking punch if someone so much as mouthed the word shirtlifter.
As for those in the magical know, well. Everything here was terribly illegal, and how, exactly, were they going to learn his name?
There. Panic settled. Remus went back to dancing.
Then, a little bit later, half a DJ later, maybe, they went back to the office for another bump, and in the confessional of their doorless sticky-floored bathroom stall Kelly tugged him down by the nape of his neck to whisper that the second one was never going to be as good as the first so if he had any inclination of chasing that initial high he should stop right now. It would eat him alive. Remus noted this and also, he realised, that he had never felt so earnestly, undeservedly loved and/or cared for by another person in so long, so he brushed aside those coppery Scottish curls and kissed the man. His lips were dry but soft. He dug his clever fingers into the ridge of Remus’s collarbone and Remus asked his age. Kelly had laughed so hard in reply he threw up into the sink.
Then they were back to dancing again. It was the natural order of things. His body no longer needed water to function, such was the miracle of cocaine. His vision felt sharper. Even as the enchantment on his left eye died he swore he could still see a faint luminescence from Apollo’s intricate network of tattoos. His own skin was pulsing. It was hot—it could’ve been his heart, which itself was beating so fast Remus felt like he was music. He knew he wasn’t much of a dancer. Two left feet, &c. &c. Still, somehow, Remus could not, he realised, give less of a shit. His body was meant to move to this Goddamn beat, and move it would. It couldn’t do anything else.
This was new music. Rare music, for Remus. That was the appeal of these things, as Apollo explained—you got out on the dance floor and every hour, you heard that rare groove, which, for Remus, turned out to be the sultry and fast soul of Gloria Jones.
“Sometimes I feel I’ve got to—
run away.”
Tainted Love was right. Kelly grabbed him by the belt loops and played with one of his eyeteeth, the tip of his tongue grazing hungrily, almost sensually over the sharp end of his canine. His teeth were slightly crooked. Remus wanted to put his hand down Kelly’s trousers. Instead he threw himself even more into his moves, but there was more contact in it, desperate and hornier and drifting dangerously from the beat, and people were giving them dirtier looks, so they broke off before Remus started throwing punches and Apollo found them a room with a roll-arm sofa complete with, it seemed, two other Squibs and another undergrounder witch, one with that shimmer to her clothing that said it was enchanted.
Kelly talked their ears off about all the fun ways you could adulterate muggle drugs and, when they asked him to kindly shut the fuck up, offered them each a tiny bump to buy his silence. It turned out the little man was actually something of an expert salesman—using his annoying-ness to his advantage with no shame. Apollo was the stoic muscle and held the goods, as well as the cash. Along with his mercantile expertise Remus had a suspicion that Kelly was something of a habitual kleptomaniac. His slim wrists were a riot of beaded bands and mismatched bracelets and simple tied cords. He lost count of how much money was changing hands, exactly, but it was mesmerising to watch, like discovering pornography.
Soon Remus became part of the act. The Squibs and the witch were obsessed with his ability to do wandless magic—he must’ve done that trick with the fire in his palm for them a dozen times—and it didn’t matter that it made him sweat because he was already sweating. He was the hit of the party. After Kelly passed them the directions to Terra’s office (the lavatory), Remus’s thoughts all rushed to a standstill.
He could do this. They could do this, together—he could, in fact, run away with them and become part of their act. This didn’t need to remain a ploy or part of some greater game. This was an out.
Then he stowed that thought because it was crazy. Loony. That was the cocaine talking.
So he distracted himself listening to Kelly and tracing the lines of enchantments on Apollo’s biceps and sculpted that were subtler but no less impressive to see up close without magic, which were sort of like scars, actually, if you squinted, and when that thought surfaced, he kissed Kelly again because, Jesus, sometimes that was the only way to shut him up. Not that it did shut him up. There were all these little noises.
Rabbity ones, in fact.
He clambered over him and pinned him down against the ratty blue sofa cushions, arms above his head, and paused only to glance up at Apollo. He’d expected cool indifference—jealousy, maybe, though his ability to discern sexual persuasion with any accuracy dropped precipitously the hotter he found someone to be. He hadn’t thought they were together, but he hadn’t been otherwise certain if this was some kind of niche cultural werewolf taboo, but it wasn’t. Apollo lit up a fag. Remus grinned down at Kelly, who grinned up at him. From there, well, there was a logical progression. They went from that room with the ratty blue sofa to another darker, private one where there was no comfortable furniture, but in place of a lock they could jam something heavy up against the door. A former office. The carpet was musty and doing Christ knew what to his knees. Still he and Kelly were an excellent team on Apollo’s belt, and, as they were taking turns blowing the God of Music himself, Remus wondered whether there was some unspoken link between queerness and lycanthropy.
Maybe it was circumstance itself: queer werewolves just sank to the bottom below the straight ones. Opportunity and class and all that jazz.
They were odd thoughts to be having while Remus worked those little gay shorts off of Kelly. Apollo had gone off to do something else—the God of Music was, apparently, not the God of Being a Generous and Reciprocal Lover—and that joke made Kelly laugh so hard it sent Remus into peals, which is how they got into this situation. Except, Jesus—lube. They had no lube.
Remus wasn’t an expert at this. More of an apprentice. Still, he was dead clever, innovative, even, so he improvised with his mouth and Kelly seemed to be appreciating it. Remus learned that he liked eating arse at the same moment he learned the other werewolf spoke Gaelic. He’d have to try this on Sirius sometime—oh, Jesus, that was another thought.
When Remus hoisted up Kelly and braced the smaller Scot back against the cool plastered wall, he realised it was possible to have no thoughts, exactly zero, when you were thrusting up into another boy like that and soft, urgent gravity was thrusting back.
***
At some point just before sunrise Remus made his goodbyes. Terra gave him another bump for the road. Apparently, they’d done good business and made more than enough to get them out of the city for the next full. Remus did it—he didn’t want to be rude—but Kelly was right in that the first one was the best. Some heretofore unknown chemical process was unfolding inside Remus. He wasn’t tired. Sleep was kilometres away from him and not in hot pursuit, no, but all the cool, sly self-assuredness Remus had found himself revelling proved soluble to sunlight. It skunked; it evaporated with exposure to morning. The once-packed corridors were thinning out; even the music was growing anaemic.
Remus hopped the fence back, found the mortarless brick wall that hosted his father’s wand, and tucked it into his pocket. He couldn’t Apparate just yet. Not safely. Laughter and sobering all-nighters were around every corner. The nearest Tube station was an hour away, and moreover he didn’t have his shirt, so he walked south from the Docklands. Most folk would be headed north instead. He went opposite them: with any luck, he’d be alone before he hit the water.
Fifteen minutes later and after a piss against a dented white waterspout that probably left it thereafter cleaner, once Remus thought no one in the know would hear the telltale crack, he vanished from one nondescript run-down alleyway and appeared in another. Sirius’s flat was in Soho, home to sex shops, sex cinemas, strip and peep shows, sex clubs, and about a dozen massage parlours.
Soho, not Sirius’s flat. God, he was funny.
It was Sirius’s flat. Sirius, of course, called it their flat, collective, shared, but that was incorrect because Sirius had paid for it, while what little remained of the Lupin estate could cover their bills for a year or so if they were reasonably miserly about things like electricity and takeaway. Not that Sirius let him pay for anything at all. His late uncle Alphard’s money was not infinite and nowhere near the fuck-off mass of the Black fortune, but it bought Sirius a flat and could carry him through the remainder of his postgrad life, more or less independent of how he spent it. He couldn’t put a precise number on it, because Sirius refused to tell him, actually, which was something of a sore spot, but then again he couldn’t complain much, could he? Sirius was, after all, letting him stay in his flat.
Money was its own kind of magic. If both of those were class, then, once again, Sirius was either above him or equal in every possible one. Christ, he needed to see Sirius.
The jog up to their flat was only a touch scandalous. He had no shirt, but this was Soho at the crack of dawn and Remus was a librarian on his feet. No one caught him. He closed the door and lay his sweat-drenched, morning-dew hair back against its hard, sturdy comfort. The varnished wood was cool and smooth against his back. His skin was less on fire and more like lingering embers, which meant he was hotter, actually, than he was before if you followed the science of the metaphor, and Remus was.
He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and even then, it’d been oatmeal. Neither of them cooked. His body was a sea of sweat, only some of it his. Water, Remus reckoned, was a clever idea, and rather than slam it, he poured himself a short mug and sipped at it as if he were drunk.
Summer had kept him and Sirius busy, so they hadn’t yet replaced the off-yellow patterned wallpaper that still bore the smoke-stains around light, rectangular patches where department store picture frames once lay. The drapery was floral and a different disturbing shade of fruity green, in an attempt, Remus thought, to confuse and dazzle predators. Even the ceiling had a texture to it. The weird ruffled ceiling squares were like paper doilies, while the floor, some kind of wood, was styled in alternating dark and light chevrons. At this time of morning the soft predawn light gave it a silkier, dreamier look, and the wide windowsill had never looked so inviting to sit upon.
The furniture was furnished.
One kitchen-stroke-dining room, one bathroom, one bedroom, one miscellaneous closet space, all in descending order of size. It had been cheap and available, qualities that inspired feelings of kinship in Remus.
He crept into the bedroom, sipping water still, and found it empty. He and Sirius were all over the place with their schedules. Between tracking the werewolves, Sirius working on his bike, catching up with old friends, planning for the holiday, and rectifying their recent homelessness, they often passed each other like ships shagging in the night.
On the end table by the bed, however—a four-post affair with drapery, as they felt naked without it—was a foil of still-chilled chocolate and a post-it beneath. “DEAR MOONY STOP,” it began. “GOT BACK IN TONIGHT BUT YOU WERE NOT HERE STOP,” and the next bit was, “I HAVE LEFT YOU FOR MARY STOP WE ARE GETTING PISS DRUNK IN A MUGGLE PUB IN BRIXTON AS I HAVE ALWAYS DREAMED STOP JEALOUSY IS UNBECOMING STOP I CANNOT KISS YOUR FACE IN THE MORNING IF YOU ARE JEALOU SSTOP LOVE PADFOOT STOP.”
From what Remus remembered, Mary’s family rented a flat in Brixton. The rest was a little unclear. Pubs closed at eleven these days, and, although they might’ve hit a club thereafter, it was past six in the morning. The note, however, bore promise that Sirius would indeed return, and so Remus looked from the note to the bathroom. He’d been meaning to do this for a while.
Remus was not the experienced sort, but he did research. If you squinted and looked sideways at that last night-stroke-morning, that could be abstracted as a kind of research too. There was some preparation involved in this. And, well, he hadn’t eaten anything in nearly a day, unless you counted the teeth dust from his grinding jaw or a rabbity Scot’s arsehole, and when was the last time that had happened? Depending on who you asked and what you read, recommendations varied like the principles of a contested science, although Remus favoured the route that would compromise his digestive tract the least. Jesus wept knowing he did enough damage to his own body already.
Shower. Remus needed a very long shower to wash the night off of him and soothe the rapid speed at which most of his thoughts were moving. His nose was beginning to ache, and the dryer it got, the more he smelled iron. He was still high, of course, but he could feel it fading, and even the remarkable extension of the euphoria wouldn’t last forever. At least the water was always warm. Perks of household magic.
With a little determination and a lot of lubrication and a willingness to experiment that, in truth, was spurred on by the events of the night-stroke-morning-stroke-Scottish boy he was inside earlier, Remus learned that there was indeed a reason the boy’s he’d shagged let him do such awful things to them. Who’d have thought? For some inexplicable reason he couldn’t have imagined within a thousand kilometres that it could feel good, that he had an access panel to his nerves and endorphins in an accessible (if inconvenient) spot, but soon he found himself panting, forearm braced against the sweating tile of the wall. His toes curled against the porcelain floor; he couldn’t keep his eyes open. At any other time the thought would’ve hit him—camp, shirtlifer, &c. &c.—but he still had that dulling focus and thought, instead, of Sirius. His sharp mouth, his long crooked fingers, and then he had to stop, because getting his end away with three fingers in his hole and a shower wall was not how he wanted this long morning to end.
After that, he threw on a pair of drawstring trousers, found a proper spliff in Sirius’s things, and nursed it along with water through the open window. There’d only be so many more hours of cool morning air on his skin. Fewer, too, of clean air. The street was already waking up outside. Or, equally, as it was Soho, the street was going to sleep, but Remus had no patience for pedantry then. His fingers were twitchy and he wanted to talk Sirius’s ear off if only so he wouldn’t keep catching his teeth grinding in place.
He wouldn’t do this again. It was fun and risky and, he knew, extremely dangerous, and the comedown would probably require everyone around him to shelter against the fallout, especially so close to the full moon, but he’d survived. He felt more alive for it. And, yes, his answer would probably sway more towards the ‘fuck the world and fuck cocaine’ side in a few hours, which, Jesus. Terra’s stuff had a half-life like uranium whereas normal cocaine probably had a half-life of about fifteen minutes. He’d known fruit flies with a shorter lifespan than this.
Twenty minutes later, he heard movement in the hall and Sirius fumbling with his key and, on reflex, opened it from across the room before Sirius knocked it off its hinges. You never knew with Sirius. He was on his feet a moment later.
Sirius blew into the room like a tipsy breeze and, when the door was shut, he closed both arms around the small of Remus’s back. With middling success, Sirius tried to pick him up and spin him. His lips tasted like spirits and syrup.
“Moony, Moony,” said Sirius, grinning his crooked grin from ear to ear, “you’re back, you’re back.”
“I am, I am,” replied Remus.
“Did you—”
“—tell you later,” whispered Remus, nipping at his ear. They lingered there a moment, cheek flush to neck as though the sound of Sirius’s excited heartbeat was the most melodious piece of music he’d ever heard. Which, in a way, it was. “Hair of the dog?”
“Ah, he’s learned to fetch, has he?”
“I’m going to let that one slide.”
“Good boy.”
Remus could’ve pounced on him, then, but even if Sirius was somehow not knackered the morning after a piss-out, he’d thoroughly passed the threshold of ‘masculine musk’ and into ‘alcoholic sweat.’ So, a few minutes later, Remus was lying on the chill tile of the bathroom floor, listening to the gentle hiss of the shower and Sirius’s elaborate, erotic moans of relief. He was a glorified coaster, levitating a mug of water and the Bloody Mary he’d fixed for Sirius, who alternated between them both. What a pair they were. Sirius was in the nonverbal stages of inebriated primordial fatigue and Remus, for the life of him, could not shut the fuck up. He wanted to jump in the shower and press him to the wall, but a) the cold of the tile was very, very nice on his back and scars, and b) he probably needed to tell Padfoot at some point.
Which is how they ended up on the sofa in the kitchen-stroke-dining room instead of the bed, snogging with the laziness of a morning lie-in, with Sirius in his Stuart tartan boxers and sprawled overtop him and their hips rutting together. Remus threaded his fingers through one of Sirius’s hands and used it to unthread his drawstring. At that Sirius gave one of those confused, doglike noises and broke off his kissing. Being in the business of training one another, this was off-routine—moons could be sensual, but they never went further. He hadn’t meant it to be a rule per se but he’d never had the willpower to tell Sirius otherwise. That no longer worked for Remus.
“Padfoot,” he gasped, drawing Sirius in by the nape of the neck, “I have two very important things to tell you. First, I very, very much want you to shag me through this sofa. Second,” he continued, “I may or may not be still somewhat high right now off something other than skunk.”
Sirius froze and drew back, slow, to appraise Remus. God, those grey eyes were a beauty—hollow and haunting and capable of catching any light, even the scant few blue morning rays creeping through the horrid drapes, and scattering them on the iris like stars. The acrobatic range of expressions crossing the rest of his face, were less beautiful and more hilarious. Who knew Sirius could convey all five stages of horny grief in under fifteen seconds?
“I don’t wanna take advantage of you, Moony.”
“I’m not wearing any pants, Padfoot,” said Remus. He snorted at that, his own words, and trailed a gentle nail over Sirius’s prominent clavicle. “I’ve been wanting to spring this on you for at least two hours, now.”
“At least?”
“I committed to the—is that,” replied Remus, fuzzy brows furrowing, “really the question you’re wanting to ask right now?”
Sirius snorted, too, because they were a mess, and he reached for a distant mug of water. “I have two very important questions for you, then.”
“Oh, go on, then.”
“One,” began Sirius, “is it alright if I go for a piss first? I’ve been needing to for about—”
“Yes. Next question.”
“Two: does it have to be the sofa?”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Actually, there’s three questions. Why the sofa, Moony? Do you have—”
Remus shut him up with his mouth and then they broke apart again. Bodies were difficult things to manage. While Sirius was in the loo, Remus set up the record player and put on Jazz. He used their liquor cabinet’s door as a glassy mirror in which to fix his hair and then scrambled to appear sexy and effortless by the window, where the stubbed-out half of Sirius’s stolen spliff lay in a glass ashtray. His heart felt steady and strong. When they met again, yes, on the sofa, thank you, Sirius brought the lube and Remus had lost his drawstring trousers. They were at Jealousy. There wasn’t a rhythm to it, not in particular, because Remus wanted every part of Sirius. No rush required—not then, anyway. The album was almost an hour long.
Enough evenings of drunken boyfumbling taught you how to shag while not sober. Generosity was mandatory: Remus sidled down until half his body was off the sofa so Sirius could straddle his head and rock back and forth across Remus’s tongue. Such a position wasn’t right for getting off, but that wasn’t the goal. The goal was teasing him up—a necessary component if your active partner was under the influence of alcohol. Sirius twisted his hands in Remus’s hair and breathed breathy, quiet gasps of relief as he fucked Remus’s mouth. After Sirius was well hard and hunched over and they’d reached Let Me Entertain You, both his elbows braced on the sofa and Remus suffocating between his thighs and only getting breath between thrusts, they pulled apart again. His poor jaw. Probably it could’ve done with being slammed against concrete or being used like a toy, but not both. Sirius tugged him back onto the sofa, full body, and set to kissing his neck again while his fingers worked the lube and warmed it.
It wasn’t entirely necessary—Remus had done that work earlier, and your muscles stayed pliant for a long while afterwards—but the light circles Sirius trailed around his hole were like a mouth on his hip scar. It was his favourite.
His new favourite thing, thereafter, was having Sirius’s fingers inside him while they kissed. That was soon dethroned by having Sirius suck him off and finger him, and Remus knew soon that brutal, wonderful reign would also come to a swift and climactic end. Sirius worked a lube-y hand between his legs and Remus hooked his own gangly ones over his shoulders. His neck was flush, his pale, dark-haired chest heaving with unbridled canine excitement. The look in his eyes was all desire and devouring and disbelief.
For a long while, many months, actually, he wondered how Sirius fucked.
People were varied, of course, and they’d sucked each other off in a dozen different moods, but the question had kept Remus up at night in more than one way. Both of them were far less experienced with this. It was harder to put on airs.
So, when they lined up and Remus split himself open on Sirius dick, he was surprised to learn that Sirius, at least for the duration of Dreamer’s Ball, was a gentle lover. For Remus, it had always been so urgent, so frenetic, like he might be yanked back underwater at any moment and those were his last breaths. He wasn’t a jackhammer, but he had sturdy thighs and a feral impulse. He was chasing something. Not, of course, that it ever stopped Remus from putting his hands to work, because feeling someone twitch over that edge and spill around you as fucked them was, in a word, powerful. Remus was generous, but no one ever said generosity couldn’t also be selfish.
Sirius, however—Sirius fucked with his whole body. His mouth was as important as his dick. Remus was losing himself in the kisses and the slow rocking of Sirius’s hips against him, and that slow, gasping whisper of Moony, Moony, Moony, over and over, like he was in a dream and Sirius afraid to wake him. He was all longer strokes and his confidence brooked no urgency. No part of him worried it could be over too soon. He didn’t move to the music.
It wasn’t what he pictured from Sirius.
“You can—” mumbled Remus, who, despite having someone inside him, found himself flushing at the prospect of talking about it. “Padfoot,” he continued, low, “you can be rougher, like—with my throat, you remember. If you like. You don’t have to be scared about breaking me.”
He held his eyes steady with Sirius’s a moment longer. His angular features were twisted up with pleasure and his brows with worry; his dark glossy curls, still damp from the shower, were flatter and less pompous, stripping away some of that smooth aristocratic armour. Sirius nodded, ever so slight, and his face lit up with a grin as the track changed.
“Tonight,” whispered Sirius.
For maybe the first time in eight or so years, Remus finally met Sirius Black in his entirety. Sirius wasn’t the problem—he met bits and pieces over the years and pieced them together like a disfigured puzzle, but, again, that wasn’t the problem. Remus was the problem. Remus was the one with the papery armour that pulled away to reveal more papery armour, because he’d been a book with a thousand pages of word salad, and as the shitty springs creaked beneath them on the sofa and Remus muffled his gasps in Sirius’s mouth, he finally let himself be known. He’d wondered what it felt like on the other end when he’d had Kelly pressed up against the wall, mewling his little Gaelic noises as he spilled, hot and messy, over Remus’s hand, and here he was.
Remus was coming apart. It was pathetic, almost, if it wasn’t so beautiful and if it didn’t feel so hot, slick skin on slick skin and the lewd, urgent slapping of Sirius’s hips. He worked his dick with his own hand, as both of Sirius’s were busy, one buried in the mess of Remus’s hair, the other bracing ahead so he could get the angle right. Even though he could hear Sirius whispering the lyrics to himself and felt the laugh in him, he was so close, and then his legs were spasming on Sirius’s shoulders.
Sirius broke all rhythm. His breath hitched and then he was hyperventilating, almost, saying his name again, Remus, Moony, Moony, and grinding himself as deep into Remus as possible. He buried his face in Remus’s neck and the rest of him collapsed with it, even if Remus’s own chest was hot and sticky and threatened to glue them together.
After the moment passed, the exhaustion set in. Jesus Christ, they were both knackered. Sirius peeled off him and rolled inwards to the sofa, jettisoning Remus to the side, where he lay and counted the ceiling squares in, well, squares, talked without end to keep his jaw from grinding, and pretended that Sirius’s many bones weren’t jabbing him in soft places he’d prefer to keep unjabbed. Sirius stayed awake with him in the afterglow. That brief moment gave him enough energy to nip off for water, a flannel, and a piss—the latter, arguably, being the most relevant—and then he was out after fifteen minutes, maybe, of Remus’s rambling.
The curtains were already drawn and so they slept there on the sofa like dead stones. Even if there wasn’t really enough space for the both of them, this was where they made their home.
Notes:
Summer at last! I think they both deserve a break, don't you?
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, Summer 1979, Part II will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 31 January, a Friday. Being a 'part-of' chapter, this means I'll be posting every week until there's no more parts to post!
If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is Darklands by orestesfasting, a tormented, beautifully evocative epistolary R/S fic that hits eerily close to home at times. The writing is so sharp it makes my neckhairs stand on end.
Chapter 11: Summer 1979, Part II
Chapter Text
According to Sirius, who, being honest, was not always a reputable source on these matters, he was the first one in the year to crack Apparition, but Peter had been the second. Sirius accounted for this in saying that Wormtail had always been his most determined when he was fleeing from prefects and, as a chessmaster, destination and deliberation were obvious fits.
He recounted the tale fondly: the cavernous Great Hall with its everburning wall-sconces throwing warm, scattered gold light and its false stratospheric ceiling painted a murky overcast grey. The professoriate had cleared it end to end, the four great House tables vanished and replaced with a series of wicker hoops with generous amounts of space allocated around them. Professors watched from on high at the head table. They held wands at the ready. Sirius could do a practised impression of Peter’s pale face, frozen and a touch too wide-eyed with concentration, and a worse impression of the sudden crackly whoop! the boy had given when he claimed second place on that podium with the sweat of excitement still darkening his straw-coloured hair. Damp half-moons stains bloomed out from the armpits of his untucked shirt. Very classy, like. This sort of assessment was normal for Sirius—praise and sarcasm, equally presented. Of all of them Peter got the worst of it. Something about his need to ingratiate himself with others, Remus thought, irritated Sirius’s aristocratic sensibilities. Sirius had been taught to watch for the Parvenu: those who climb.
How ironic it was he’d end up shagging a gay half-blood werewolf with only a few dozen Galleons to his name.
A gay half-blood werewolf who turned out to be the only one of them ever to Apparate outside of Britain. Being the sole confidant who understood the circumstances under which Remus had done it, Sirius regarded him with a quiet awe, and the rest thought he was either lying or mad. Remus wasn’t quite sure which he preferred.
Apparently at Hogwarts their Apparition License instructor had been very stringent on repeating a number of rules that, of course, Remus had never heard and thus had had no choice to obey or disobey. There were an endless number of them: don’t Apparate while ill, or injured, or intoxicated, and certainly not again after a Splinch; don’t Apparate across seawater, and if you must, choose the shortest possible distance, i.e. Apparate to the seaside, then from shore to shore, then from there onwards; don’t Apparate multiple times in a row, which seemed in direct contradiction with the prior; don’t Apparate while pregnant (Sirius ribbed him endlessly on that one); don’t Apparate while elderly; don’t Apparate too far; don’t Apparate too near; don’t Apparate into an underground; don’t Apparate onto a moving object; don’t Apparate without a firm grip on all side-alongs; don’t don’t don’t.
After a diplomatic handjob, Sirius agreed to go side-along with Remus instead of competing to see who could stick the proverbial landing. Not because he’d given up—it turned out that the Black family’s roots were in Marseilles, and so Sirius knew well the Côte d’Azur and shite all about the Atlantic Côte d’Argent.
Remus called him a cheeky beggar and wrote back to Lily that they were all set.
While he’d picked the spot, Lily was their coordinator. She’d been made Head Girl for good reason, although even she was struggling to organise them. They totalled seven: Remus, Sirius, Lily, Mary, James, Peter, and last as a late addition was Marlene McKinnon, who shared a year with Mary and who Remus knew barely at all. Both Emmeline Vance and Benjy Fenwick declined, citing other vague commitments. It was the brush-off Remus expected from the two post-postgraduates. Christ knew exactly what they were getting up to, but probably it was all glamour and fancy-dress parties and rubbing shoulders with all those esteemed witches and wizards to whom they’d spent the last three years ingratiating themselves. Probably they were drinking wine on the Mediterranean and being fed olives by virginal hands. Benjy would’ve been able to take them all to France without issue, which was making this whole thing something of a titanic pain.
Long ago Lily’s parents had taken her to Barcelona in a well-intended attempt at a family roadtrip and stopped along the way in Bordeaux, and, being Lily Evans, no one doubted she could nail several long jumps with two side-along passengers. That was Mary and Marlene done. As for James and Peter, however…
The Pettigrew family hailed from France, but those roots were old and had a strange Scottish intermission before finally settling in Britain, so he’d only ever been to Paris. James Potter was worse: he’d never left Britain. His parents had been all over the world, Bombay and Sydney and Fort-de-France and Rekjavík, yet he’d been too young, then, later, too attached to his friends to venture further south than Devonshire. Their plan was to Apparate from London to Paris, hopefully without Splinching themselves, and fly the rest of the way on broom.
Sirius thought the idea was hilarious and Lily threatened to murder James if he died, which was about all you could say about that.
Remus and Sirius arrived in Bordeaux on the tenth, the evening after the July full moon. Having a flat in Soho was nice for that: so many people there were night creatures too, and so, for once, they weren’t out of place sleeping the day away after a night of shapeshifting. They needed the rest. The change had been awful—another reason for Remus to never touch coke again, as it’d been three days and he still hated the taste of air—but sleep carried them through the thin silicone straw of Apparition. They smoked on the Pont Saint-Jean, a modern bridge still in its teens but with a spectacular view of the old Pont de Pierre viaduct with its coppery brick arches and black iron lampposts. The sleepless city lights sparkled like twilight stars on the troubled dark surface of the Garonne. Exploring further was impossible with only an hour until the next available train to Arcachon. Once there, they caught the last evening tour bus out of the smaller coastal town, packs slug over their shoulders and the night blood alive in both of them. Yet, as he caught the other tourists gawking at them when the pastoral French countryside failed to hold their attention, Remus often wondered what, if anything, might be giving them away.
Sirius wore a thin summer vest and was obsessed with muggle swimming trunks, and so Remus thought he looked the part of the backpacking leaver, what with his scruffy facial hair, tied-back dark curls, incessant leg-bouncing, and his pale face glued to the filthy, smoke-stained bus window to watch the dunehills roll by in the night. By contrast Remus sweltered in his drainpipes and button-down shirt. The evening was bleeding heat and yet humidity took its place, gluing fabric to Remus’s skin and hair to Sirius’s.
Did they think he was Sirius’s older brother? A teacher, perhaps? He’d folded his sleeves back and rolled up the hems of his jeans, but it did little to ease the sense of being out-of-place. His paranoia soon settled when he realised that the sleepy tourists were gawking at him as much as at anyone else and no one paid them more than two glances. Most were preoccupied with quieting tired children or otherwise too deep in their cups to care about the odd pair of so-called ‘Englishmen’ (even though Remus was Welsh) at the back of the bus.
It was France, after all.
From the bus stop at Dune du Pilat—known also as the Dune of Pilat, which was the tallest sand dune in Europe—they crept under cover of nightfall into the treeline of seeded pines and continued onwards. The sand was so stark and white it was almost luminous. Sirius, in his feverish good spirits, stopped them five minutes in to press Remus up against a prickly salt-sprayed pine tree and snog him within an inch of his life.
In that moment, with the deafening roar of the dune cicadas and the nearby coast overwhelming the air with the scent of sea salt and pollen, Remus closed his eyes and was left only with the touch and taste of Sirius. Sweat, ash, chocolates. It was as normal as he’d ever felt since the Pyrenees. Sirius’s mouth and hands ran over him like the waves, smoothing away his rough edges and leaving him raw and exposed. Remus gave only the feeblest protest when Sirius stripped off his own clothes in the process.
Clothes that he threw (along with his pack) to Remus before shifting into Padfoot and running ahead into the dark. Still cheeky, that Sirius Black. Still so hard to hold onto.
Padfoot loped and looped around him for an hour of human walking before they settled on a dry spot in the dune forest too far from everything to be found by accident. Which, of course, was how they wanted it. This was a very illegal kind of camping, without permits and whatnot. Not to mention the magic. They had normal tents—Lily insisted that they keep this holiday as grounded as possible else they risk burning down the Gascony Moors—but no one had complained about bringing one or two essential facilities out into the woods. Knowing Sirius was half-blind in the dark, Remus tasked him with traipsing about as a dog to flatten the endless carpet of ferns and low shrubs and pack down the white, ivy-laden sand while he managed the loo and their shared tent himself.
When that task was out of the way, it was midnight, and he and Sirius set about finishing the one they’d left unfinished so close to the beaches. Remus liked that about these woods. You could be as loud and as obnoxious as you liked to a screaming audience of horny cicadas. It was all the Wald, hold the Einsamkeit—a phenomena that ought have its own precise German word. Waldüberfüllung, which was also a literal descriptor, come to think of it, for Remus’s mouth that night.
Morning came and, a little while later, so too did Sirius. It was the best way Remus knew to wake him up from a lie-in and the daze afterwards bought him enough time to manage any requisite mischief.
Remus’s Comprehensive Locator Charm was more useful than he’d assumed. With twenty minutes to adjust the parameters and another ten to roll through the complex casting procedure once, he produced a decent map of the forest around them, complete with the few muggle campsites nearby to avoid, every well-trodden path through the dune forest, and the edges of a nearby lake and town only an hour away that they could use if they found the coast too crowded for their tastes. While the map wouldn’t update itself and the names would fade after five or so minutes, Remus’s squinting at the dune revealed three important names crowded around a presumed bus stop: Lily Evans, Mary Macdonald, and Marlene McKinnon.
He went to inform Sirius that the ladies had arrived and yet found himself interrupting a conversation. Sirius lay across their sleeping bags with a mirror compact in his hand and was speaking in quiet, subdued tones. It would’ve been easy for Remus to eavesdrop. Second nature to him as a paranoid werewolf, actually, and yet he didn’t. Instead, he ducked his head through the entrance of the tent and waved a hand for Sirius’s attention until those grey eyes flickered towards him. Remus jerked his head as if to say, C’mon, then, allons-y, &c. &c.
“Talk to you later, Prongs, yeah?” said Sirius. “Your girlfriend’s waiting on us and she’ll hex off my bollocks if we’re late.”
James’s laugh was deeper than Remus remembered. Fuller, like it’d finally been fully baked and had a golden crust to it.
“Best keep your bollocks away from Lily at all times, eh?” replied James. “But how do you know she’s there? Haven’t got a secret mirror with her too, have you, Pads?”
Sirius cleared his throat. “Remus said. Well, said with his eyebrows.”
“Ah,” said James, and the pause that followed was too long for comfort. “Think I’ll let you get a move on, eh?”
“Cheers, Prongs.”
“Cheers, Pads.”
Sirius clapped the compact shut and the first half hour of their hike to the beach bus stop was spent in contemplative silence. Or, no, not silence, but the dull roar of dunebugs. He’d adjusted overnight and though he could hear them still if he focused, his mind was slowly tuning them out, like ambient static. He couldn’t guess to the nearest hundred thousand how many cicadas there must be. Nature was fecund here: all of it short and crooked and sprawling, concealing ankle-hungry ridges and hills beneath small mounds of thorny sea-green briars and anthrocyanotic red bushes. Every tree was pale-barked. A teaspoon of sand had migrated at some point into his left trainer. He held Sirius’s hand—his fingernails were varnished black, which he never did at school, and which Remus rather liked—as they summitted a beachside climb, and luxuriated in their little moment of peace. It could’ve lasted longer, too, but Remus was rather enjoying this new strange game where they talked to each other about their feelings. They had fewer fights, and the ones they yet fought were less severe.
“So,” began Remus, aiming for nonchalance. “James?”
“Hm? Ah, yeah, he and Wormtail should be here by late afternoon,” replied Sirius. As Remus turned to watch him, he saw Sirius’s grey eyes flicking left-to-right and back again, like reading a page. Tracking thoughts. Remus trailed a finger under the soft padding of his collar before Sirius brushed it away, probably thinking it was a midmorning gnat. “Weather’s great for flying today, but he thinks it’ll rain tonight.”
“Mm.”
“Yeah.”
“You nervous?”
“Extremely, yes, however could you tell?” said Sirius. He grinned but there was only half the life to it. “He’s one of my best mates, Moony. Oldest friend. I wanna tell him, but—did you know Lily said she’d break up with him if he turned out to be a cock about it?”
“I did not, no.”
“It’s a lot of added pressure.”
“And when you say ‘tell him,’ do you mean to say—”
“—about me,” said Sirius, quick, and it was his turn to watch Remus’s face. “I mean, I’d love to tell him about us, yeah, but I know that that’s not—Jesus Christ,” he continued, groaning into his hands, “Moony, I’m a bloody mess.”
“Maybe we should save the ‘I’m shagging my other best mate’ conversation for after we see how he responds to the ACDC conversation.”
Sirius’s neck flushed, but his eyes flickered with something more raw, more sensitive. “Yeah, well,” said Sirius, “it’s more than just shagging sometimes, innit?”
“I should hope so,” said Remus. He bumped Sirius with his hip and slung an arm over the shorter boy’s shoulders, and, sensing the need for prompting, used his other arm to thread Sirius around his waist. His face was burning hot, but the embarrassment was a pleasant kind of fire this time. He hoped that the bright morning sun bearing down on them like a terrarium heat lamp would give him some cover. “We share a flat together,” continued Remus, “and there’s one bed in the whole place. Unless James thinks you’ve been living alone this whole time.”
“You’d be surprised, Remus. Mary knows there’s only one bedroom and she still thinks you’re as heterosexual as they come.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“S’pose you could guess there were two beds in the room,” said Remus, musing. While, yes, the idea of their cover dying frightened Remus, he wasn’t going to perform heroic measures to resuscitate it. “Do I—is there something wrong with me? From the amount we touch in front of others—”
“—I’m the only one you really touch, Moony.” He shrugged under Remus’s arm. “That, and they saw how I was with Prongs, although he shoved me off more often than you. People notice things. It’s not always the correct thing.”
“I’ve touched Lily and Mary.”
“Have you initiated a touch with them?”
“Of course I—”
Remus fell silent. He blinked.
“Jesus Christ,” he replied. Jesus Christ. “I—no, Pads, I must have at some point.”
“All right, Moony, or—”
“—I cannot remember the last time I, of my own volition, touched someone who wasn’t you or a werewolf. Padfoot, tell me I’m wrong.”
Sirius squeezed Remus’s flank as if to say, There, there, it’s all right, Moony. I’m no stranger to these sudden breakdowns, you know. Then, aloud, he said, “You picked up Lily, once, and I’m sure you recall the shock on her face from that. And there’s Benjy Fenwick,” he continued, voice lower and slyer, “though I s’pose you never had an audience with him.”
“They must think—oh, and with the scars—Padfoot,” he continued, dragging them to a sudden stop. “They must assume I’m some touch-starved, horribly-damaged piece of work using his bisexual friend as a way to cope.”
“Jesus Christ, Moony. They’re your friends. No.”
“Oh, well, good then.”
“They think we’re both horribly-damaged pieces of work,” continued Sirius, tone flat, “and that we’re both using each other as a way to cope. Mary says I latch on to straight men ’cos they’re incapable of loving me back, so it keeps me safe and means I never have to be vulnerable.”
“Fuck. What does she say about me?”
“Says that you’ve got issues with your body and with sex, so you use your best mate as a substitute for intimacy ’cos you know it’ll never lead to anything physical. Never have to confront your body, then.”
Remus snorted. A moment later, Sirius wheezed a bark of a laugh.
“Well,” said Remus. “Fat lot she knows, like.”
“Didn’t have the heart to tell her she was dead wrong in every way, Moony. Bless her.”
***
Because it was France and she was Mary, he and Remus found her chatting up two men and one woman at the bus stop and, again, because it was France, neither the men nor the woman seemed to mind the competition. The sun was unbearably bright. The metallic coconut stink of sunscreen was so thick in the air it was all he could taste. A slumbering saurian tour bus sat dormant beside them while a long lineup of tourists and locals trailed towards a bright wooden bungalow promising cold drinks and frozen sweets. It being a hot day, Mary wore a simple floral bikini top with short trousers that drew Sirius’s eyes up the curve of her thighs, and, alas, reaffirmed that Remus’s interests lay firmly elsewhere.
‘Firmly’ being the operative word for Sirius.
Remus and Lily watched with mixed disgust and awe as Sirius strolled up to the bus stop, melting Neapolitan ice cream cone in hand, and winked at Mary, who in turn dipped the edge of her cat-eye sunglasses to watch him. Her three other suitors paid him no heed until she barked something at him—a negotiation of some sort, according to Lily, who, apparently, was decent at reading lips—and Mary slipped her hand to the small of Sirius’s back to guide him forwards and away. She licked up the side of his ice cream in a manner that suggested she was not actually interested in sweets. Her three suitors gaped after her and never caught the stupid grins on both her and Sirius’s faces.
“What’d you say?” asked Lily, shaking her head despite her smile. She wore her hair free under a sunhat, which was something of a rarity, and a mysterious sarong skirt that billowed like her hair in the ocean breeze. It was tied in an arcane knot high upon one hip.
“Asked if Sirius here’d like to suck my cock,” replied Mary. “And he said—oh, wait, there’s Marls done changing her digs, then.”
The four of them turned in place to look at a small beach hut used as a public loo and changeroom. A woman of medium stature, long face, and poise was approaching them in a one-piece swimsuit with technicolour stripes, although that was not what drew beachgoers eyes to her. An entire family, not French, turned to gawk at her from beneath a white canvas cover, all their tourist trap shopping forgotten. Her chestnut hair fell in a long wave on one side of her head, and the other side might once have had hair itself, but her scalp was almost ruffled by the scar tissue on it, which climbed down and cut across one cheek to pucker it with raised red lines like scrunched-together paper. The same kind of burn scars followed down one shoulder and the opposite leg and pockmarked her fair skin in haphazard places.
Someone had done a remarkable job healing her—they looked old and faded, as if they’d happened a dozen years ago. Still, however, their origin was cursed, and so she would never be rid of them. Remus felt a kinship in that.
“Jesus Christ,” said Sirius, voice low but not quiet.
Lily cuffed him around the ear. “Sirius!”
“What?” cried Sirius. He rubbed the side of his head, looking wounded. “Am I not allowed to ogle and objectify the only woman I’d ever known to have more detentions than me?”
“A good save, Sirius,” said Marlene. She moved with a slight limp in her burned leg and so took a while longer to close the gap between them all. “Merlin, let’s have a look at you, shall we?” she continued, hugging him the same way he’d seen Sirius hug James, sending his ice cream to an early grave against the scorching pavement. She held him at length by the shoulders a moment. “Such a pleasure to see you, and after so long—is that a dog's collar?”
She was in the same year as Mary, Remus knew, and yet she felt considerably older. More mature. An adult proper on their silly little trip to France. They all chatted for a minute, catching up—Marlene had been on the Quidditch team and was thus eager to hear how Sirius had taken to being a flying instructor—before she fixed her quick brown foxy eyes on Remus.
“You look familiar,” she said. Her eyes flicked to his rolled-down sleeves. “Are you—”
“Remus,” he said, and held out a hand like they were at a business meeting and not, say, a group of five friends at a beach. She took it and then swung herself forwards to clap their shoulders together, again in that blokey kind of way. Blokey-er than Remus managed, actually. “Remus Lupin,” he repeated, feeling stupid. “Probably you won’t recognise me off the Quidditch stands and without my book in a nose—or, piss—James Potter’s friend,” he continued. Barely. Christ. “I was a year below you for a while.”
“For a while?” she asked. There was amusement in her keen dark eyebrows.
“Remus went to France in his fifth year,” said Sirius.
She looked from him to Sirius and back again. “Does Remus usually let Sirius do all his talking for him?”
“Trust me,” said Mary with a laugh, “once you hear Remus tell a story, you’ll understand why he’s not to be trusted with his own words. That, and he’s the only poor fucking sod I know who’s managed to somehow suffer a sore throat three times this summer so far. Sickly little thing. Spare his voice, would you?”
Mary with the save. Great. Amazing, actually, and from that moment onwards Remus vowed to wedge as many people between him and Marlene McKinnon as possible. She was highly intelligent, inquisitive, and perceptive; they were at a beach where it was acceptable and expected, even, to take off one’s clothes; and Remus hadn’t the years to lay of groundwork to cover up any holes in his convoluted alibi. One look was all she’d need to see straight through him, and, even if he could spin her a story more convincing than lycanthropy, the thought would be on everyone’s minds. And probably he ought to tell Sirius to take it easier on his bloody throat, at least when they were going to be having polite company or Mary over the following day. What a great holiday this was turning out to be.
It wasn’t fair to Marlene, of course. He learned a lot about her in the hike back and more during the time it took for the ladies to set up camp.
Her family was enormous. It was the sort of family who benefitted from and arguably needed a family tree, if only to keep track of the cousins and sisters and siblings-in-law and the inheritances, though on the latter apparently Clan McKinnon had a habit of passing nearly all property into a collective trust. The McKinnons had been early critics of the Ministry’s War response, and, earlier than that, a proponent of Squib rights throughout the sixties. Marlene found the use of Dementors to be vile, the Kissed a violation against nature, and thought fondly of incorporating more muggle technologies into their magical world. Her politics were unflinching and Marlene was vocal about them in a way that made it clear these were non-negotiable positions for her. You couldn’t agree to disagree, not on such fundamental issues.
Which was annoying because it meant Remus liked her. Mature, funny, iconoclastic—she even knew about muggle politics. After a foul dig at an early grave for Thatcher, Remus cracked a grin.
“There he is,” said Marlene. “I was wondering what this mysterious Remus believed, having heard so much about him already.”
“Good things, I presume?”
“According to Mary,” she explained dryly, “everyone in your program wants to shag you through the wall.”
“Never a sofa.”
“No?”
“’fraid not,” replied Remus. “It’s all only a joke, of course.”
“Of course.”
Remus never asked how she’d been injured—the War was the clear answer, and the details both unimportant and not for Remus’s ears—but he did ask about her time after leaving Hogwarts.
Her response came with that same conspiratorial undertone he’d read in Benjy and Emmeline’s letters. The vagaries were growing suspicious in their similarity.
From there, the entire plan to buffer his contact with Marlene collapsed when James and Peter arrived, sweaty and tired and the latter sunburned by hours of travel. Both had an improved sense of fashion since last Remus had seen them, dressed as muggles instead of their robes, though as per usual Peter had styled himself after James and ended up a lesser copy. James had the confidence required to wear vertical stripes, to leave so many buttons undone on his shirt, to roll them to the elbow and generally show off so much warm dark skin, but in particular to wear those oddly-distracting short-shorts—ochre yellow short-shorts that exposed twisted pink flesh on his thigh where lay a pair of crescent scars, bold for dune hiking and bolder still for broom-riding—while Peter simply looked like he was wearing his father’s tennis clothes. Swimming in them, actually.
They swung off James’s broom and crumpled to the ground, the pair of them, whereupon they were promptly pounced by everyone, actually, except Remus and Marlene. There was shouting and brawling and kisses shared between James and Lily (lips) and lesser-successful ones with more cursing involved from Sirius and Mary (cheeks).
Jealousy wasn’t the right word for it—longing, perhaps, and regret, because Remus realised he was once again standing outsider to a kind of camaraderie that was locked off from him forever. Even as they all stood and dusted sand from their clothes and crevices, James’s myopic brown eyes grew cool as he looked at Remus.
“All right, Remus,” he said, nodding his head down once. Although his hair was spikier and features rounder than Lily’s, he reminded Remus of her in that first moment on the train. He fixed his round-framed glasses and then looked away. Seaborne wind rustled through the ferns and pine trees, bringing with it awkward quiet and James’s honey-y body soap scent.
Peter was worse in his indifference.
“Hi,” said Peter. The wind had not been kind to his skin or slicked blond hair. While James’s short sight always let him see the best in people, Peter’s inquisitive nature let him see the potential of things, whether person or plan. If he saw any potential in Remus, he hid it well.
“Prongs,” replied Remus. He tilted his chin down at each of them. “Wormtail.”
They didn’t hug or shake hands. Remus could’ve initiated it, he supposed, but for such a warm and heart-sleeved person, James had managed to cool the neat 30 degrees of the afternoon heat and chill Remus’s heart. Such anger didn’t become him—or, no, it didn’t become them. They’d been Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot & Prongs, once, the terrors of Gryffindor Tower. Now whenever James so much as looked at him, he shrank away like a kicked, bristling dog and tried to make sense in his head of what he saw in James’s clenched jaw, his hardened eyes. Betrayal? Grief? Some sort of indelight melancholy, perhaps. That was one of the few emotions in which Remus was usually legible.
All this was made worse by the revelation that the five of them had plans for parasailing. Three, Sirius, James, and Mary, were mad for flying already, Lily had always wanted to try it, and Peter, albeit not a frequent flyer himself, at least wanted to watch them all wipe out up close. There was a conspiracy drawn already to ‘borrow’ a set of parasailing equipment or otherwise replicate it after dark (doing so, of course, beneath Lily’s watchful notice) to see what sort of hijinks they might be able to manage with the complete library of kinetic and atmospheric and mass-altering charms they now possessed, having the ability and freedom to cast more or less any manner of spell at their leisure. James and Mary were battling it out in fierce whispers as to who would make the maiden voyage of the Dune’s peak, and whether or not Apparating back up to the top would count as cheating.
Sirius caught Remus’s furtive glances and gave a one-shouldered shrug.
“We spent most of the summer so far and every term together, yeah?” he said, bumping Remus’s shoulder. “Wanna catch up with my other best mate. And,” he added, lowering his voice, “Prongs might catch on that something’s up if someone makes a joke about us shagging. Or worse, he might try and ‘defend my honour’.”
It was an ironclad defence and made Remus feel not at all better.
Marlene was also a mad flyer but silenced all offers with a single lifted hand. No one pushed her further, and that was how she and Remus ended up sitting together at the very top of the Dune of Pilat.
Remus dug his toes into the pale white sand over and over like burrowing worms and basked in the setting sun. He felt like a glutted salamander sunning on a grand red stone. He’d nicked a pair of sunglasses from a vendor down the beach and relaxed, elbows braced, watching in the distance as his friends glided on parachutes kept aloft by motor boats and the prevailing winds. The perspective was warped, like a trick painting: the Dune was colossal, titanic, like an entire ecosystem unto itself, and yet the shining ocean too was vast and the incline not-so-steep that only when he looked back behind him at the short stubby trees of the Gascony Moors behind him could he realise he was a hundred metres above sea level. Not quite the Eiffel Tower. There were far too many families and seagulls and wine-tousled people—in fact, Remus might have been a wine-tousled creature himself—for it to be quiet, but in the absence of silence there still was peace. Peacefulness. Marlene was good for that.
Was.
“How did it happen?” she asked. Her speech pattern was not unlike Dumbledore’s. Although she never raised her voice, the sound always carried. “Saw the marks under your sleeves.”
Remus was thankful sunglasses hid his eyes. “Don’t like to talk about it.”
“I can tell.”
He bristled at that. Yet, when he shot a look at her, she already had a hand up to quiet him, and continued, “It’s why I’m asking. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a blushing beauty myself anymore.”
“Sirius would argue otherwise.”
“Sirius,” she replied, “isn’t in this conversation. Nor is Mary, nor anyone else. They’ve been running interference for you.”
“That’s nice of them.”
“Really?” she asked. “I thought it was patronising and insulting.”
Remus choked on his wine. Those poor delicious grapes died, he thought, only for him to spill their guts down his chin and the front of his button-down. His scruffy facial hair already felt sticky. Sweat and wine. Gross.
“Pardon?”
“It doesn’t make you angry?” replied Marlene. She lay back on the sand, and Remus noticed it stuck only to her fair, lightly-haired skin where there were no burn scars. She didn’t sweat enough from her damaged skin for the beach to adhere, or perhaps it was the lack of oil? He wasn’t certain. “It made me angry,” she continued. “I used to be the terror of the Quidditch team, Mean Marlene. Then I was Marlene the Maimed. Shut that down as fast as I could.”
“They don’t—well, I haven’t told Mary how it happened. She wouldn’t even know what she was protecting me from, even if I agreed she was protecting me.”
“Have you met Mary? Since when does she need a good reason to protect someone?”
“Point taken.”
“Sirius knows?”
Remus shrugged. “He does.”
“That sounds correct. Cheeky little bugger always could weasel his way into everything.”
Remus blinked. Maybe it was the alcohol, but—
“Were you the other part of his and Mary’s threesome, then?”
“Nope.”
Damn. It was a shot in the dark but he’d thought he’d had it.
“Are you lying to me,” he continued, “because the threesome was so awful it gave you those burn scars?”
“That would explain the endless parade of compliments,” she said. Inclining her head in a regal way, like she wore a crown she feared would fall from her head, she looked at Remus. “Still incorrect.”
“Don’t take it personally. Sirius can be a touch of a flirt.”
“A touch.”
“A very large,” said Remus, “very sensual touch.”
“Are you—sorry, are you attempting to pull for him right now?”
Was he? “Am I?”
“At least you’ve caught on,” she said, and reached, expectant, for the wine bottle. Remus acquiesced. “I don’t brook people pussyfooting around my injuries, Remus. Hearing the jokes makes me feel better, and I’d rather have people gawk at me than suffer their pity.”
“Oh, good,” said Remus. “I was groping around in the dark there and worried I was making a terrible areshole of myself. No one actually called you Marlene the Maimed, did they?”
“It was an analogy.”
“Because Charrlene is much—”
He ducked the wine bottle. The swing was slow and purposeful, because she’d been a Beater in Quidditch and thus could have killed him outright if she wanted to.
She sipped from the bottle. She was still poised in doing so.
“Merlin, I never understood wine,” she said, and then passed it back. “Would you still rather not talk about it? I haven’t seen whatever it is you’re hiding, but given you’re the only one on this beach still wearing trousers, I have to assume they’re as bad as mine.”
“Would you believe I simply forgot to pack swimming trunks?”
“It’s France,” replied Marlene. It was indeed France. “You know as well as I do that Potter would be jumping in starkers if he forgot his. Mary told me she’s planning on swimming topless.”
“She’ll snap necks, like,” said Remus. He blew out a breath between his teeth. “I’m not ashamed of my body around strangers. Muggles in particular. It’s true—I’ll have you know I was dancing shirtless, no less, in a warehouse with a thousand strangers just last week. With people I know, however—”
“—you’d rather not become Marlene the Maimed.”
“Yes.”
“But you are. They’re protecting you, aren’t they? Treating you like fragile glass?”
Remus opened his mouth, and, finding no words, filled it with wine instead. What was it he’d had to say to Sirius? You can be rougher. Don’t have to be scared of breaking me?
“Are you sure,” began Remus, “you’d rather not I keep trying to set you up with Sirius?”
“Certain, I’m afraid. Were you the one who set him up with that blasted dog's collar?”
“No comment.”
After that, Marlene gave him peace again. They sat there atop the dune and amid the screaming and the tired and the wine-drunk and watched the edge of the sky glow bloody sienna, orange, pale golden yellow against the silver sea on the horizon until it became a whole host of colours Remus knew that a thousand years of language had failed to describe. There were no words you could put on this sunset. It didn’t need them.
Later, when their flying friends returned, soaked to the bone and frozen by wind, they lay on the beach until well after dark. Hooligans, they were. Yobs. They drank wine and shared overpriced French chocolates in the cool dark of night, and, when they saw the torches of policiers scanning the beach for oiks like them, they ran shrieking into the woods and vanished like ghosts.
***
There was a spectre stalking Remus, and that spectre was magic. Being reared around casual sorcery often numbed you to its wonder—there the seven of them were, clustered around a smokeless (or, rather, invisibly-smoking) campfire on beach towels and hard sturdy trunks and fallen logs, untraceable to any muggle authorities who might still be traipsing around the Gascony Moors and its young spindly maritime pines, on the French Côte d’Argent. Remus didn’t have a passport. As far as he was aware, approximately zero of them did. And yet this, this was restraint, just as Lily requested: mundane tents, mundane firewood gathering, mundane cooking. Sort of. Mostly.
“Moony, she looking?”
“Not at present.”
“Brilliant,” whispered Sirius. He narrowed his eyes at the bundle of tinder before him, a damp crown to the logs James had split (also discretely with spellwork), and shielded his lips as if to blow on the nonexistent spark therewithin. Instead, he whispered something inaudible: the name of fire in a long-forgotten language.
A tiny heartbeat of flame licked up the tinder, and slowly it grew. Sirius leapt to his feet, clammy arms thrust towards the night’s sky, and bellowed.
“See, Black?” called Lily. Only now was she looking up from whatever distraction James had concocted—possibly something with the Snitch he’d stolen years prior, which he played with like a cat batting about a mouse, letting it twitch about on gossamer wings only to snatch it from the air with his Seeker reflexes. Or possibly he was just talking to her. Inexplicably, he could do that now, James. Open his mouth and entertain her, despite years to the opposite effect. “I knew you could do it. We’ll make something of you yet.”
At some point James had draped her shoulders with a jacket, all their beachwear not yet discarded. There was sand glued between Remus’s toes, somehow up his trouser legs and down the back of his button-down.
Remus suspected foul play. He was still narrowing the culprits.
And so it went. They sneaked all manner of spells and enchantments behind Lily’s back and on occasion before her front because, being honest, she wasn’t looking too too hard for it. Her hairbrush was magic. Most of their food—rations, Peter called them to much mockery—were preserved with magic. The bloody loo was magic. As much as Lily had wanted some normality to their trip, Remus realised that this was normal, now. Hardly could you study the arcane arts for seven-or-so years and not come out with a skewed perspective.
Peter, one of possibly two (three? Marlene was something of a mystery, still) of them who could cook, had opened a few tins of beans and salted ham and something that looked and smelled and had the suspicious, unmistakeably-gelatinous texture of cranberry sauce, and was doing something mysterious with them over a fire in a deep wide pan. To their collective disbelief he insisted that there was no subtle spellwork involved. To their collective hunger, too. The smoke was taking on a sweet, savoury aroma, and two dozen slices of toast had been impaled on various objects to crisp up by the fire’s edge. He was famished: aside from wine and a scant few French pastries, they’d eaten little all day.
From the seat beside him—a large sweating stone James and Marlene had wrestled out of the bushes—Mary nudged his shoulder with her own and waggled her cigarette case at him surreptitiously, a casual, almost delicate bend to her wrist. She rested her chin on it and batted her eyes at him.
“My, what have we here?” drawled Remus.
“No smoking by the fire!” said Peter. He shot the pair of them a murderous glare. “Or the food.”
“It’s not tobacco.”
“Doubly so, then,” replied Peter. “I’ve a weak constitution.”
Sirius jabbed at him from his sand-covered blanket with his foot. The firelight did awfully nice things to his bare leg, pale and bony though it might’ve been. His swimming trunks were riding up at the thigh and down at the hip. At some point Mary had painted his toenails black.
“Oi,” said Sirius fondly. Loudly, too—heads often turned whenever he spoke. He prodded Peter’s thigh again. And again. And again. “Take that back. Your constitution is probably my favourite thing about you.”
“Get your foot away from my kitchen.”
“Get your kitchen away from my foot.”
The conversation deteriorated rapidly from there. Remus and Mary, sensing no opportunity for resuscitation, absconded towards the treeline around camp, elbow in elbow in what was presumably the fashion of tipsy tossers since time immemorial. The moment Marlene crawled out of her tent, fingers wrapped around the neck of two wine bottles, Mary darted low to catch her elbow as well, and so the three of them soon took refuge in the dark. It was amazing how quickly the oceanside dunes swallowed sound and light: they were barely fifty paces from camp, yet the roar of cicadas and the looming pine trees above them were more powerful than any illusion they might’ve conjured.
Chatting shite proved difficult given the ambient noise. Mary and Marlene had loud voices and the will to regularly employ them, but the day’s excitement had lulled Remus into a kind of silent, sun-baked stupor. The two girls—women, witches, what have you—were discussing with an unfollowable fervour which ghost stories they would share around the fire that night. Muggle and magical tales colliding. Remus soon tuned them out. Not rudely, he hoped, but he was enjoying the moment of relative inattention. Waiting for the heat of smoke in his lungs to reawaken him to the world, like the night-magic of France seemed to be awakening the world to them.
“…’tchu think, Remus? Remus?” Mary snapped, a dark, manicured hand flashing in front of his face. “Oi oi, Lupin. Stay sharp. Riddikulus, and all that.”
“Sorry?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve got pissed on wine and one—”
“No, no,” murmured Remus, cheeks flushing. “I’m fine. Was lost in thought.”
Marlene raised her eyebrow—the one on the unburned side of her face, that was—at him.
“Thoughts of…?” she asked.
“Oh. Er, trees.”
“Trees.”
“And their shadows.”
“And their shadows,” repeated Marlene. The corner of her mouth turned up. “We were thinking of heading back before the others send a search party.”
Remus laughed. “We’re only a walk away.”
“Exactly. They’ll send a search party,” explained Marlene, “and then we’ll need to form a search party for their search party. Things will escalate. And I don’t know about you, Lupin,” she continued, glancing sidelong at Mary, “but I’ve never been too fond of hide and seek, which this will inevitably become.”
“You two go ahead,” murmured Remus. “I’ll catch up in a moment, like.”
“Enjoying the solitude?” asked Mary wryly. And he was, but it felt too frank an admission, so he shook his head.
“Enjoying your spliff.” He waggled the burning end of it at her. “Quality’s shit, love.”
“Don’t tell me you’re gonna finish that on your own.”
“Unlike Peter,” replied Remus, “I happen to have a very strong constitution.”
“This from the boy who was poorly all year, every year,” said Marlene with a frown. Or, half one.
“Consider it medicinal. Now, allez.” He shooed them off, gentle, with the back of his hands and the spliff between his teeth. Birds from the nest. “Or prepare to play some childish games.”
“Don’t get lost,” said Mary.
“Don’t be found,” said Marlene, darker. The pair of them linked up and vanished, more or less, into the underbrush and night.
A warmth bloomed in his chest and a smile across his scruffy face as he smoked. Ghost stories. It wasn’t Christmas, yet they were to do it as though they were Americans, gathered round a campfire in the dead of night. Probably he would be bullied into telling a scary story, and probably they would not accept him talking about muggle bankers coming to take your house away. He wondered if he could get away with reading a Poe, some classic like The Raven or The Tell-Tale Heart. He hadn’t his books on him but he could more or less remember the important bits from the latter.
A rustle in the bushery behind him. Remus spun.
“Whoa, easy, mate,” said James. He had both hands fanned out defensively and a towel slung over his bare shoulders. On reflex Remus glanced down to the faded pink scars on his thigh—old enough it was that you could lose the details, now. As a pair they peeked out from the hem of his yellow short-shorts trunks like a shy guest. “Just me.”
“Sorry, like.”
“Have you seen Padfoot?”
“This is the part where I say, ‘I thought he was with you.’”
A beat.
“So—”
“—are you going to—”
“—can’t be arsed, no.”
James snorted like, yes, a deer, running a hand through the mess of his spiky hair. “Peter said something. Pads said something. Peter said he thought the point of painting your nails was to make them look good, not like the toilets. Pads declared he was going to find better company and something fun to smoke. Rising and gliding out and wandering off by himself. Which brings us to here.”
“Where he is not,” said Remus, shrugging. Then—because he felt like a fucking comedian, apparently—he softly said, “Alas.”
James snorted again and it felt somehow like victory. He wandered over to the widest pine and squinted up at the sky, his glasses bumping up against his face. Again Remus remembered that his own eyesight was orders of magnitude better than James’s, and better than most everyone’s in the dark. He wondered if it took away from the beauty of things, and perhaps if that was why he never developed a notable aesthetic sensibility for such things—the perfect silence of the stars, &c. &c. Then James was tugging down his waistband. Piss.
“Oh, fuck’s sake, James, we brought a loo.”
“Someone’s using it,” replied James, cheerful. There was something about men, wasn’t there. Always looking for a pissing contest.
A bit of ash dropped on Remus’s bare fucking knuckle, piss. Remus swore and looked away and puffed. When he was done, James bumped into him, light, shoulder to shoulder. Again with the Boys’ Club antics.
“Mm?”
“Pass me the spliff, would you?”
“James,” said Remus, frowning, “you don’t smoke, like.”
“A lot changes in three years, Remus.” He lifted his hand up until his brown skin caught the dim light of the spliff. His fingers smelled strongly of sweat and body odour. He stepped closer—round eyeglasses catching reflecting the ember back at him. One of the lenses was smudged. “What’s that Padfoot’s always fond of saying? ‘Sharesies’?”
Remus frowned deeper at his hand still. “This is unsanitary.”
“You wound me.”
“I know where that hand’s been.”
“Do you?”
“Mm.”
“Fine.”
“Fine,” repeated Remus. It didn’t sound fine. In fact, he had a growing suspicion that James’s mirth might, might’ve been a cover for something more aggressive. Pissing contest indeed. Perhaps he was worried about Lily—years, years ago, rumours had run rampant like fire through Hogwarts about one Lily Evans having a schoolgirl crush on a sickly fourteen-year-old Gryffindor by the name of Remus Lupin. Despite (or perhaps because of) years of friendship, James had challenged him to a duel. Publicly. In a courtyard. Before all their erstwhile peers. When said sickly fourteen-year-old boy declined, James refused to spare him a word for a month. Tip down thy lance, coward.
There was wine on his breath now. Perhaps he was feeling brave. Perhaps he, like Remus, was tripping memory avenue. The stag had been a perfect match for him, hadn’t it—always had he loved his contests of dominance, even before he became an Animagus. That’d been half the story with Severus, of course.
“Fine,” repeated Remus again, quieter.
“Shotgun me, then.”
A pause. It wasn’t a question. The roar of cicadas around them masked the blood roaring in his ears, the dark the flush in his cheeks. Though, if he’d had any worry that James knew of his terminal homosexuality or that he was involved with Sirius, they could be safely stowed away for now.
Shotgunning, for the uninformed, was principally a social phenomenon, though for years James had railed on and on that it couldn’t be as bad for your lungs as smoking the spliff yourself. You could accomplish it a number of ways to differing effect, but the basics always remained the same: one party held the lit end in their mouth, the other the butt of the spliff. Lips together, or almost, depending on preference—hence the social aspect. Trust. Flirting, as it usually was with him and Sirius. The smoker then dragged while the other blew through the spliff.
For added complexity, you could then reverse the process: after the first hit was successfully shotgunned, you flipped the spliff and took your places, whereupon the initial smoker blew the smoke held in their lungs through the spliff again while the new smoker dragged. There even existed a lesser version, known by the same popular terminology but meaning more or less to snog someone silly with a brief pause to exhale your mostly-absorbed drug-breath into their lungs, but he’d doubted that that was the version James was asking after.
Depending on lung strength and capacity (and rolling proficiency), any one of these processes could devastate a hand roll in two or three rounds. It also, pharmacologically speaking, had no noticeable effect Remus ever noticed, beyond the greater amount and speed at which you ended up smoking. That and the probably rush of neurochemicals if you were shotgunning someone you hoped to shag. Proximity and plausible deniability, now those were a volatile cocktail, even for the average teenage witch or wizard.
Hence.
Eventually Remus felt the sting of the nubby roach reaching his fingerknuckles, so, dazed, he dropped the filter and vanished it with a backhand. James’s eyes were closed and skyward again—high above them, the faintest rays of starlight caught on the wisps of his smoke. He’d held his breath long, on that last one, and pulled away with a cocky nonchalance. Probably he was very very high. Probably that had not been the wisest decision.
“Perfect silence. Cheers, Moony,” said James casually. He chucked Remus on the shoulder and didn’t wait for him to catch up. There was treesap in his hair and at the nape of his neck. His skin was tingling. “Back with us. I reckon someone’s found Padfoot by now.”
***
“…and they never found his body.”
“Boo.”
“Boo indeed.”
“No,” said Sirius, lips tart like a lemon. “What’s the opposite of ‘boo’? I had scarier dreams when I was six.”
“Coming from you, mate,” said James, “that doesn’t surprise me at all.”
“Oob.”
Lily snorted. “Sorry? Mare, are you having a stroke?”
“It’s the opposite of—”
“Ah,” breathed Sirius. He tilted his scruffy chin back, firelight snagging in his whisper of a beard like in Remus’s own fuzz. His eyelids had lulled shut. Remus wanted to kiss them or do worse things until they flew open. In moments like this it felt almost physically painful to not be running his hands all over Sirius’s exposed skin. “Clever bird.”
“If you hate my scary story so much—”
“—and I do, Wormtail, I really do—”
“—then you can bloody well come up with your own,” grumbled Peter. Sirius had always had that way about him, hadn’t he: deflating Peter before he’d got halfway done inflating himself. “I’d like to see you do better.”
A low whistle from Marlene. “You going to take that, Black?” she said.
“Hm,” said Sirius. “A curious idea.”
“Yeah, Padfoot. This wouldn’t be a hard decision for any true Gryffindor,” said Peter, which earned him a round of groans from about the camp. “Unless you’re—”
“—six years old, yeah? Why, Wormtail,” replied Sirius dryly, lulling one eye open to leer at him across the fire. He rolled over like a dog, exposing his pale belly and the coarse dark hair on his chest to the stars. “I do happen to be a child. And that can mean only one thing.”
A beat.
They were a volatile combination, Peter and Sirius—early on it had been like spliff and liquor, chocolate and marzipan, contrast on contrast. With years, however, something had gone off, their chemical compositions spoiling and leaving them less like fireworks and more a garageport drug lab ready to detonate under anything less than strict supervision. Even before he left Hogwarts, by fifth year they’d stopped playing each other in chess, preferring instead oblique broadside snipes from across busy rooms at parties or, here, at duneside bonfires. He had the unerring sense that there’d been an incident no one would talk about. Sirius, who historically took maybe one out of every six or seven chess games off Peter, had perhaps the acumen but not the studious masochism required to commit hundreds of optimised permutations to memory: that was rubbish, he said. Why bother reading about optimal forms when he could puzzle it out in his head?
Lily sat up slightly straighter in her chair—she’d got tipsy and thus transfigured one of those horrid folding fabric-and-plastic things Remus’s mum had sometimes brought to the docks—and dropped her wineglass into the grassy sand. She swore, not loud. Didn’t move. Her free hand was carding idly through the mess of James’s dark hair while James made the worst kind of satisfied noises imaginable, like a randy bloody puppy. Those stupid bloody shorts. On her other side lay Marlene, who, without opening her own eyes, groped for the glass with a downturned palm, elbow high, like a carnival claw machine.
It was on the other side of her.
Her face was half-buried in a towel-turned-pillow.
“Would anyone care to—ah, fuck it,” said Sirius. He made a grand show of peeling himself from his lounging towel and wobbled on one foot, then the other shaking each like a crow to the point that James lurched to keep him from tumbling into the fire. “Hide and seek,” continued Sirius. His teeth popped the K. He stretched high, bony shoulders rotating in bony sockets, and a dark crop of hair peeked up above the hem of his swimming trunks, Hello-o-o Moony. “Anyone? No? Hold on, I’ll lead by example. Prongs?”
“Mate.”
Sirius backed slowly from the campfire, stepping with suspicious care over various discarded obstacles—a cooler, a short tower of packs, half a pair of boots—until he tripped over his own fucking feet and smacked his ear against a pine tree. James shook his head, slow, and rolled his eyes. Licked his fire-dried lips once.
“Mate. Mate.”
“C’mon, you lot used to be fun. Let’s go run around. I bet you there’s other campers we could join. Or terrify.”
“So mature, Black.”
“Haven’t you heard, Marls?” drawled Sirius. “I’m six.”
He raised both brows at them—at James, and maybe Remus, maybe—in what was quintessentially a See? gesture, maybe, and Remus looked back to James, and James’s expression was perturbation and disbelief, and there were sand noises, and he looked back, and Sirius was gone. Piss.
“Bollocks.”
“What a load of wank.”
“Charming, Pettigrew,” muttered Mary. She turned her exacting eyes—no, no, those were her sunglasses, which she’d donned despite the abject nighttime and dwindling campfire—on Remus, then James. Lips pouted. Expectant.
Remus lolled his head over at James. James jutted his neck out. Remus jutted back. It felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, his head. And the fire was so pleasant. And warm. And he had the sneaking, paranoid suspicion that Sirius wanted to run about as a dog, which was something only James could keep up with, given the lack of full moon. Which, actually, if you let the logic run, would inevitably end with Remus being confronted with Sirius naked under the moonlight, whereupon James, probably also naked, come to think of it, would immediately uncover the secret of a) their theretofore shirtlifting tendencies and b) their clandestine relationship. No thank you, thank you very much.
“Bollocks. Bollocks bollocks bollocks,” muttered James, followed by a few murmured, soothing apologies to Lily as he staggered to his feet and extracted her very drunk hand from his hair. He tugged the seat of his shorts out from his arsecrack with only middling success. “Anyone coming with me?”
“I’ll do the next one.”
“Up yours, Macdonald. Marlene?” asked James. Remus looked to Marlene, and she was shaking her head against the sand. Or seizing. One of the two. “Wormtail,” James tried.
Remus closed his eyes. The fire snapped like a twig trod on by a deer.
James cursed again and again and then Remus heard nothing but rumbling fire, cicadas, and his own breathing. When he opened his eyes James was gone.
“εὐοῖ,” said Marlene. She’d found the empty glass and raised it. It was rimmed with sand and not salt. “Who’s next?”
“I’ll tell another one,” said Peter, soft. “A better one. You lot ever hear the one about the dark wizard Ekrizdis?”
A still silence fell over them. Marlene was the first to scrape together a coherent response.
“Peter,” she said, tone flatter than upset. The thought lodged—Peter, she always called him, not his surname. “Merlin. Is this appropriate?”
“It’s different,” replied Peter. His pale face was rounded out with pursed lips and an argument wrinkling his forehead.
“Different.”
“Ekrizdis isn’t about all that stuff James is always on about,” replied Peter, batting a dismissive hand through the air at no one in particular. “it’s not political. No one ever tells a story about Ekrizdis where anyone likes Ekrizdis, not even other dark wizards. He’s an individual, not a society.”
Remus turned back over to watch Marlene, who opened her mouth—there were some points of Peter’s that desperately needed some elaborating—but like most people, she had underestimated Peter’s ability to think on his feet, to extemporise or borrow a surprisingly succinct and cogent argument.
“‘Political’?” said Mary, slow.
“Do you lot want to sit here talking politics,” muttered Peter, “like always, or do you lot want a stupid scary story.”
It wasn’t really a question, but nevertheless they all knew the answer. He let the silence tick by.
“From the very beginning, Ekrzidis was destined to be the worst kind of dark wizard,” began Peter. He hunched forwards, elbows braced on his knees, shadows from the firelight pooling in the creases above his eyelids, on his forehead, in the hollow above his pale lips. “Evil had always festered in his soul. He was power-hungry. Cunning. Manipulative. He was cruel for cruelty’s sake. Muggles and creatures and witches alike were just a set of tools for him to repurpose, like a wand of magic. He began as nothing more than an ordinary wizard whose family ruled iron-fist over an ordinary muggle village. They were wealthy. They were feared. But it wasn’t enough. And that’s how it is, huh? Nothing’s ever enough, and when you have everything, you always want something more. Something next. We know all know the type.
“Who knows if you could say he loved her, but after he rose to the top of his family, Ekrizdis set his eyes on a witch—”
“—Oi,” said Mary, “the version I’ve always heard said it was a muggle girl.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Does it matter?”
“Yeah.”
“—his eyes on a muggle girl who—no, hold on, this doesn’t make sense. No, see, the girl has to be a witch, because it makes the insult of her loving another man in the village impossible for Ekrizdis to bear.”
Mary snorted. “You really—”
“—no! Obviously not!” said Peter with a huff. “But Ekrizdis’s motivation—”
“—Jesus wept, it’s a bloody scary story, mate, who gives a toss what his motivation—”
“—it’s not my belief, but it would be accurate to the time period—”
“—and for all we know the man could’ve been a wizard—”
“—how many wizard sailors do you know, huh?—”
“—it was a different time—”
“—exactly!”
“Stop!”
Lily’s voice quieted the camp, even hushing the cicadas for a moment before they continued their belligerent orchestral orgy. She blinked twice, fast, and looked considerably more sober than she had moments ago. Then she blinked again at Peter, who abruptly threw up both hands.
“The dark wizard set his eye on a muggle girl from the village, who loved a different man. A fisherman. At first Ekrizdis thought to just kill him, but he was cunning, and he knew that death was rarely the end of such things. The girl would never love his beloved’s killer. So, he bided his time. He shuttered himself in his magical studies. He made himself appear different from his family, experimenting on villagers only in the utmost secrecy, going out to forage for his potions and experiments just as she foraged for, uh, herbs and stuff. And though he didn’t win her heart, she believed his ruse to be true, that he was a sensitive soul who opposed his family’s tyranny. She trusted him. She told him things about herself and her life that she felt she couldn’t tell other people.”
Lily shuddered by the fire and pulled James’s jacket tighter over her shoulders. The poor girl. They’d all heard some version if this tale many, many times.
“She was heartbroken, as it turned out, by the murder of her grandmother, killed none other than by Ekrizdis’s family for some reason or another. So Ekrizdis decided this would be his task: return her grandmother to her, a deed which the fisherman could never hope to accomplish,” he said, then, after a pause, “whether he were a wizard or not. That was Ekrizdis’s arrogance.
“He toiled for many moons, comforting the girl even as her neighbours and countrymen disappeared around her, one by one. The cobbler, the marketstall hawker who sold flower cuttings, a boy she’d played stones with as a child. Night by night, their dying screams echoed in Ekrizdis’s laboratory, unheard by anyone who could answer their cries for mercy. Each of them suffered a terrible fate as Ekrizdis searched for the keys to unlock power over life and death itself. Eventually, he even started to turn on his own family, who worried that his rampant murders would rally the commoners against them, that if the girl were to die, their son would see sense—and soon the garden behind the manor was lined with his family’s graves.
“Finally he returned to her in the dead of night, and led her out into the forest to reveal his life’s work—but not the cost. He gave her a stone, which she turned thrice in hand, and a vision appeared in the air before her: the spectre of her grandmother, called back from the grave. But the girl soon learned that her grandmother was not happy to be called back, for she did not belong in this world. She told Ekrizdis to send her back, and the girl fled in tears.
“He was furious. ‘How dare she throw his toil back in his face’—his words, as the story goes, not mine—and decided that if she didn’t appreciate his gift, it was because she no longer grieved for her grandmother. She’d accepted her death. That wound had healed. He was clever, Ekrizdis.
“He visited her again when the moon was dark and the air full of burning pitch, when flames consumed his family manor, and told her that he loved her, that his family was to burn, and that he would only grieve for her. He left the stone in her possession and said that he would leave this in her trust, that he would devote the rest of his life to returning her grandmother to her just as she was in life, but that he would have to leave, for he could not overcome the stigma of his family. But after he left—to study life and death, but not for her sake—he was faced with questions. Where was he to live? Where was he to acquire more test subjects?
“An island,” said Peter darkly, “hidden by the stormy skies and frigid waves, in what we now call the North Sea. An island where despair freezes the soul. An island inhabited only by dark spirits, most would say,” he continued, slowing his words, as Remus sat up on his elbows, as the others exchanged reflexive glances at the darkened, shifting treeline, “but that we, now, call Dementors.
“No one knows what dark promises Ekrizdis made to keep the Dementors at bay. Or what darker threats. Or,” murmured Peter, “if he protected himself like all of us might: with a Patronus Charm. He had happy thoughts, Ekrizdis. Most of them just involved unhappy people in unhappy situations. But however he managed it, he laid the foundations of a dark, mythological fortress, built on the bricks of nightmares. For as long as anyone could remember, the villagers along the coast blamed everything on the faraway island: foul weather, foul air, plague, monsters, missing people. It was the perfect cover. He only made their myths into truth.
“Ekrizdis lured his unfortunate sailors in oh so many ways: a false harbour, fires shining in the distance, stone teeth beneath the wretched waves. He bewitched their ears with song. He summoned storms, muddled their maps, tricked the stars and moon to turn north to south—sometimes, it’s said, he ventured out onto the water himself with Dementors on his heels and swallowed entire ships into the night like a leviathan. And he was patient. And he knew what the fisherman’s boat would look like.
“He was much older, then, when his boat ran aground on the island of Azkaban. He’d wed the girl, now well a woman herself, after all. But for all Ekrizdis’s cleverness, he never had the forethought to imagine that they might have a daughter.
“It didn’t stop him. The fisherman soon joined the uncounted dead wandering the shore with all the rest of Ekrizdis’s failed experiments. And soon came his beloved.”
A gentle prickling crept up Remus’s neck, not the back or side but at a curious angle that he realised might be some form of insect. Mary snickered at him when he slapped it—everyone glanced over, necks snapping, and he heard Lily hotly whisper ‘Jesus Christ’ under her breath at him—while Marlene fully sat up, arm braced on Mary’s stone seat.
“The fisherman’s wife was no fool. Even before the island, she understood that Ekrizdis had not been a good man, that his stories of innocence were fables, that the stone he’d gifted her was born of dark desires. On her own she’d sailed the treacherous North to find Azkaban, and find it she did, with fury and determination in her heart. She landed its shores, awash with Inferi, its walking dead. She met the fisherman for the very last time.
“No one knows what thought must’ve run through her head when she used her sea axe to lop off his. What she must’ve thought when she burned his writhing undead body on the beach of that cursed island with all the other restless dead. But she pressed on. She pried open the unlocked doors of Azkaban, climbed every haunted step to the top of his malignant fortress, and found Ekrizdis waiting for her. Dementors, too. But she did not falter.
“‘He had made her a promise,’ she said, and that if he were a man of his word, he would keep it—but she also said that she had made her peace with her grandmother’s murder and had made her peace with the fisherman’s as well, having always known the sea would take him from her one day. Both had lived full lives, however long or short. But it had been his daughter’s first voyage at sea, and they would not have died had Ekrizdis not meddled with them.
“And so they struck a pact: if he would honour his deal, then she would give him anything. If he returned her beloved, her only child, to her, she would give him anything.
“And so it was that Ekrizdis threw open a door to reveal her daughter, alive, just as she’d been when Ekrizdis took her captive. Ekrizdis couldn’t lift the dead,” said Peter, grim, “but he was clever enough to trick the living. He told the fisherman’s wife what he wanted in return for her daughter’s life: her eternal companionship. ‘If she were a woman of her word,’ he said, then she would honour the terms of their deal. They would be a family. Finally he would get what he wanted.
“And so she went with him, the fisherman’s wife, the dead blood of her husband still on her axe, the shivering of her young daughter clutched against her trousers. Ekrizdis gave them a chamber at the very heights of Azkban and extracted a vow from her that she would never again leave that island’s shores. That she would never raise a hand against him, on the pain of her child’s life. And she was a woman of honour. She kept her promise.
“She kept it for weeks, months, some say, until the very moment Ekrizdis let down his guard, when the moon was dark and the storms were raging at his will to harvest more sailors. She cast open the windows of her prison with her child. They threw themselves from the highest point of the tower into the nest of Dementors at its lowest heart, for it was the only manner of escape from him the fisherman’s wife could imagine—for even then, it was said that Dementors could devour the very soul itself.
“Others say different. Aurors guarding our modern-day Azkaban, people who have relatives in the prison itself—even the occasional prisoner who doesn’t go mad or starve or wither away before their sentence is up.
“They say that when the moon is dark and the storms are at their worst, you can sometimes see her ghost wandering the shores of Azkaban, a pale while light in the distance, with her spectral sea axe still in hand. It’s the only white light you can see for miles, but it’s not warm, like a Patronus. It’s cold. It’s as cold as cold ever gets, because she’s as cold as cold ever gets. They say Ekrizdis finished his life’s work. That he found a way—that he pulled her back,” said Peter, finally sitting up straight, “and trapped her there, to keep her from ever being at peace with her beloveds: grandmother, fisherman, daughter. That before he met death at a great old age, he let the glamours and illusions that protected his island fade so she would spend eternity luring sailors and their children to their watery graves,” he rumbled, “just as Ekrizdis himself had done before.”
Remus exhaled. His chest had developed some inexplicable ache. He blinked a few times before someone prodded the fire and added atop the embers a new log, which soon began to bathe the five of them in fresh firelight and pine smoke and desperately-needed warmth. He looked to the others—Mary was pissing about with her cigarette case, Lily had her face arranged in a manner that suggested sobriety and deep thought—but in the end it was Marlene whose expression burned in Remus’s often expression-illiterate mind. She had a face of stone, yet her auburn hair was more or less glued to her forehead by sweat, and her unblinking eyes were trailing silent, inaudible tears.
He felt embarrassed, then, and looked away, as though he’d been caught peeping through someone’s cottage window at night. Or day. Probably peeping in someone’s back window was not better if you did it during midday.
“Er, good story, Peter,” said Remus, voice thick. He swallowed hard. “Boo indeed.”
“Thanks.”
“And imagine if she were a witch,” began Mary. Even from her it felt half-hearted, her classic sangfroid chipped away, clammy, sweating fresh humid condensate. Peter held up both hands defensively, however, and cut her off.
“I agree, okay!” said Peter, and probably not to assuage her. Though in typical Pettigrew fashion, he then added, “She overcomes a lot more this way, I guess.”
“Like the horrible trial of, I don’t know, not being a wizard?” asked Mary.
“Like cutting off an Inferius’s head with an axe!” said Peter, exasperated. “That’s really hard even with magic! I don’t even know how to swing an axe. Why are you always having a go?”
Mary scoffed and didn’t dignify him with an answer. Not that Remus was sure what rankled her so when it came to Peter, but he’d been on the wrong side of this before.
“Lay off her, like,” said Remus casually. He mustered all of his Boys’ Club knowledge at once. “She’s cool. And she’s not wrong. And, er, on a more substantial note, doesn’t anyone think we ought go look for James and Sirius?”
“I just don’t get why it’s a big deal?”
“Actually,” began Lily, an abrupt interjection. Her green eyes were strangely alert. “There’s a lot we don’t really know about Ekrizdis. This sort of learning fable is usually a massive distortion of the truth, where the telling changes every time depending on what lesson the storytelling wants to impart. We know Ekrizdis was real. Obviously. Obviously all the dark magic praxis is indisputable, but did you know, for example,” she continued, “that some scholars think that Ekrizdis might’ve been a woman?”
“What?”
“Sorry?”
“No?”
“Fuck off.” That last one was Mary. “If by ‘some’ you mean ‘two’ and ‘scholar’ you mean ‘unaccredited lunatics’, then, sure, you could say that,” she said airily. “Jesus wept, Lils. Don’t foist this on women.”
“It’s—for one, it’s not me. I happened over a volume on an extinct bloodline curse that I realised was mentioned in one of those early, early renditions of the Ekrzidis myth by some witch or wizard who wishes it on Ekrizdis, and—the point is, it’s a bloodline curse that only manifests in women. Allegedly,” she mumbled, quieter. “It was eradicated in the 1600s and not well documented even then. But it’s not about that.”
“No, I get it,” said Peter. Heads swivelled. Remus’s included. He did?
“You do?”
“I mean, if that’s true, then it means the story’s not real, right?”
“Oi—”
“—hold on, Mare,” said Marlene abruptly. Her hand clapped over Mary’s knee. “I want to see where he’s going with this.”
“So,” he began, “if that’s not true, and the story’s not real, it means there’s a real story out there that someone tried to cover up. And why would they do that?” asked Peter. He ran a hand over his slicked blonde hair, a pale imitation of James. “Because maybe she was a witch who ran away and became powerful on her own? Because maybe she broke a bunch of their laws, and they had to make up stories about her killing a bunch of people to get her power? Maybe she just, I don’t know, robbed graves or something. Like that guy.”
“What guy?”
“Da Vinci?”
“Da Vinci never robbed graves, Remus.” Lily tutted, drunk yet chiding. “He hired people do that for him.”
Mary scoffed. A thundercloud had fallen over her face, eyes still hidden by her askew sunglasses. Her hair (as was all of theirs, being honest) was a shambles.
“Not that that’s better.”
“No,” replied Peter, “but you sort of have to admire them, don’t you? Being so ambitious, so sure of themselves, that you don’t even flinch when it involves doing something bad. There’s whole sections of our D.A.D.A. textbooks that probably wouldn’t exist without everything they found in Azkaban. Like with graverobbing muggle doctors.”
“Da Vinci,” said Mary, tart, “wasn’t a doctor.”
“But doctors, historically, did use ill-gotten cadavers for anatomical study,” said Remus quietly.
“Whose cadavers,” said Mary, quieter. “And there’s a world of difference between medicine and Inferi. So, no, Peter, you don’t sort of have to admire him.”
“Agreed,” said Marlene.
A log gave way in the fire, spitting cinders into the air and thudding into the coals as if to punctuate the beat, and yet still no one said a word. Remus summoned his Boys’ Club wisdom once more. He hurled a loose sandal that’d punctured the corner of his vision at Peter like a throwing knife.
It went wide. Very wide. A lorry might’ve fit through that gap and only with minor damage to its paint job. Peter turned his head to watch it fly by, amused, before looking back to the lot of them. His pale eyebrows slowly climbed up his paler face, not unlike an actor unaware he’d missed his cue.
“Oh, yeah,” said Peter, “agreed. Bad turn of phrase. Uh, who’s next?”
While they discussed, Remus crawled away through the stony sand on his knees and elbows until he could manage to stand without all the blood rushing out from his brain. He did a cursory circle of the camp’s perimeter and stared with no little paranoia into the distant dark, waiting for some fleeting glimpse of dog or stag, of Sirius or James. It would take another thirty minutes and a fresh spliff smoked in silent vigil before they returned (thankfully, blessedly) unharmed. Sirius’s neck was flush and his pulse still hot with exertion when he fell in beside Remus and stole the last few gasps of his joint, a grin on his lips.
James stalked past the both of them and went straight for his tent, pausing only to scrape the mud and grass from his bare feet before crawling in. A perplexing pair of white cords dangled over his arse—oh, his short-shorts were on backwards, that was it. Remus tutted once at Sirius. A gentle thing. He shook his head fondly.
“Put him through his paces, didn’t you, like?” he murmured. He leaned down and, emboldened by firelight and everyone’s intoxication, snuffled the top of Sirius’s head and his seasprayed dark curls. “I take it no one saw you. Oh, you smell like nature.”
“Shoulda come with us, Moony,” whispered Sirius wryly. He heaved a soft, satisfied sigh, slinging an arm around Remus’s hips. That, actually, was more or less enough to get him hard. He turned them both away from the fire with a flush as Sirius continued, “Christ. We ought to stay here—France is so much bigger than Britain, there’s no one around for kilometres. I couldn’t smell anything but our camp and the forest. You can scream and shout and no one will hear you. No one to see you. I must’ve switched between me and Padfoot a hundred times, and it’s the most wonderful feeling, Moony, you should’ve come with us.” He sighed again. “Can’t we stay?”
“I’ll consider it. We’ve a life in Britain that probably needs tidying first, like.”
“Yeah.”
“And I think we’d soon miss it. Too many memories, there.”
“Yeah,” murmured Sirius. He yawned, stretching out his bony limbs and bare bony torso to a torturous length. Remus spared a glance back at the campfire and saw things beginning to be packed away, their first night drawing to a close. “S’pose that’s the problem, innit? And,” he continued, his crooked fingers catching the collar of Remus’s button-down, hot breath tickling his ear, “we can always make new memories, can’t we?”
***
Few memories haunted Remus. Each one that succeeded, however, haunted in a new horrifying way, and that moment, laying there in the dark of their tent did not disappoint because it was both new and indeed horrifying. He’d been braced. He’d been prepared for a week of James’s unquieted, obnoxious snoring. Nothing in this world could have prepared Remus for the sounds of James and Lily very wetly shagging.
Their tents were pitched—oh, Jesus Christ, even the phrasing was horrid—a fair distance apart from one another, but James, he realised, never understood the degree to which Remus heard things other people did not. At least that was what Remus told himself until Sirius pulled his lips away from Remus’s neck as well as his hand from Remus’s Y-front briefs and whispered in his hear that he, too, could hear them shagging. It was not an uncommon hazard of being a crowd of drunk adults on holiday, but it was also not not uncomfortable. Those inebriated grunts were burned into his head. And the clapping—as though someone was flogging a ham.
Their campsite was more cramped than it ought because no one had forethought as to their sleeping arrangements. Mary and Marlene shared a tent. So did Remus and Sirius. Peter, however, assumed he’d be sharing with James, while James assumed he’d be sharing with Lily, which meant their small trampled clearing now had to fit three doubles and one hastily-transfigured single tent.
Hence the sounds being audible even through the buzz of cicadas.
“What do we do,” whispered Remus. “I can hear everything.”
“Everything?” whispered Sirius.
“I am not giving you details.”
“Even if I call you a good boy?”
“Padfoot.”
“Then observe, Moony,” whispered Sirius. He turned his head in the direction of nylon fumbling and shouted, “Oi! Prongs! Evans! Keep it down, will you? Some of us are trying to sleep.”
Remus, still giddy with wine, was enjoying the nonchalance with which Sirius rolled back and continued kissing his neck and collarbone. He enjoyed more so the fingers dipping back under his waistband.
Yet the string of foul curses from both Lily and James had not ceased. They matched Sirius’s volume, but after that followed the sound of a fumbling fabric and then a zip on nylon. Footsteps quick right after that.
“Sirius—” was the only warning Remus managed before their own tent was yanked open and Sirius was dragged out by the ankles, his wide clear eyes in the dark the last thing Remus saw. His hands left parallel trails of deep gouges in the pale sand.
It was funny. He’d thought he was locked out of this camaraderie, but one he heard the struggle occurring on his temporary doorstep, he saw it for the figurative door it was. A leap of faith. He took a moment to tug a pair of trousers over his pants and button them. Then, still crouched, he charged out of his tent. The starlight was bright. Crooked pines loomed above like spectators to the colosseum. James had Sirius in a headlock and Remus slammed into him sidelong, taking his legs out from underneath him and earning a new slew of ruder curses spat through heavy breaths. Sirius had made Remus an expert at this sort of thing what with all their practice.
Until of course Peter and Lily joined the fray. Both of them were smaller than James and Sirius, yes, but Lily was screaming like a Viking berserker, and Peter had been the go-to target for upset prankees looking for vengeance on the Marauders. He was a dirty rat and fought exactly like one, and Remus was an elephant trying to catch a mouse.
Why they were fighting was unclear. It no longer mattered. Battle lines were drawn and thus far it was him and Sirius against the world. Between the latter’s subtle levitation and Remus’s lycanthropic strength, it should’ve been an assured if pyrrhic victory. Yet then came Mary and Marlene, both of which had, actually, no stake whatsoever in this fight as they’d been the furthest from the grunting sex noises. They complicated things as a third party: Mary was tall and willowy and impossibly fast, tripping legs here and there and yanking like a trickster, while Marlene evidently had the time to cast a spell that made her six times as heavy as her medium frame ought.
“Blood!” shouted Marlene into the night. “Blood! Blood! Blood!”
There wasn’t much blood, being honest. Sand was not productive of scrapes or bruises, just irritation and abrasions. Nails and flying elbows, and, in Peter’s case, a penchant for teeth drew some, and Remus’s nose was definitely bleeding, but if the Blood God were judging their brawl, they’d all been found wanting. So when the dust settled—and by dust, Remus meant sand—Remus had James pinned on his belly, Lily had her elbow around Remus’s neck, Mary was on the ground with a twisted ankle thanks to Peter, Peter was telekinetically pinned to a tree by Sirius levitating his nightshirt, and Marlene had a lead-heavied foot on Sirius’s left tit. Not a single one of them was fully dressed.
Mary, Lily, and Marlene were staring at Remus’s scarred bare skin in the starlight. In the moment Remus took realising this, James rolled out from under him and then dug a skinned knee into Remus’s own back as Lily pulled away, chest bearing down on his shoulders.
Which, yes, meant that of all of them, the only team to lose was him and Sirius.
“Tossers, the lot of you,” said James. He sounded upset—truly gutted, not in that golden-brown James way. Hot wine stayed on his breath and prickled Remus’s ear. He reeked of sweat and sex. In their elevated state, James’s heart was pounding so fierce he thought the others might even hear it. His palms were clammy and his fingers damp. “We can’t have one good night to ourselves? You two always have to play the fool, do you?”
“Padfoot’s the one who—ow—said anything!” cried Remus. The knee in his back was digging in.
“Ah, cheers, Moony.”
“Everyone for themselves, Pads.”
“James!” called Lily. She was grabbing him, now. Pulling back on him although he didn’t relent. “Oi, James, ease up, will you? You’re going to hurt him.”
“Oh, piss off, Evans, I’m not fragile.”
“My eye,” moaned Peter. “Remus, your elbows are lethal.”
“Let him down,” said Lily. She was trying to take charge, although he gathered from the generality of the statement that she still didn’t know, exactly, who was pinning him.
Sirius released him with a subtle twist of his fingers. He was getting good at that.
“You two,” growled James. He pulled his knee out of Remus’s back. Sweet relief. “You’ve been off at school, you have no idea what it’s like—”
“Potter,” said Marlene, sharp, and he fell quiet. That was new.
“Out with it,” said Sirius. He was already under Marlene’s iron heel and one to always call a bluff. What was she going to do? Cave in his chest? “If he’s got something to say—”
“We haven’t seen each other in months!” spat James. “So forgive me for wanting some peace with my girlfriend while you’ve been off laughing it up at school without us.”
“Peace?” Remus snorted. “Didn’t sound—”
The knee was back and heavier and this, Remus realised, was not horseplay. Not camaraderie. He slapped the sandy ground twice, loud, and out of schoolboy reflex James relented.
“Jesus Christ, I yield. Geroff me.”
There was a long, cicada-filled pause as no one, Remus realised, knew what to do.
A moment later they moved. Mary hobbled over to help Peter with his eye, Marlene was yanking Sirius to his feet, and Lily was dusting Remus off, although he only turned over on the sand to watch the stars. Breathed simple breaths.
“What the fuck, Prongs.”
“What the fuck indeed, James,” said Lily. She didn’t cuff him around the ear the way she would either Remus or Sirius—the privileges of dating, he supposed. “I can understand going after Black, but Remus, really? What’d he do?”
“I bloody tackled him is what,” replied Remus. He was snappish. The looks Marlene threw him were rueful. She hadn’t intended this. “When he jumped on Pads, who kindly informed you two that you were shagging louder than the bloody cicadas. Self-defence.”
“Don’t yell at me, Remus,” said Lily, sort of yelling at him, ish. She had that judgemental tone like she was superior and not a Viking with red humid sex hair.
“Stop ordering us around!”
“Don’t yell at her!”
“Oi, Prongs, don’t yell at him!”
James’s lips fired back in silent reply. So did everyone else’s.
A few metres away, Marlene was holding her wand with a very tired expression her face. One that said, You’ll get your voices back when you agree to behave. She then gestured at James and Sirius who, after a pause, gave each other a begrudging and blokey hug, although in Remus’s eyes it measured as painful. Such was the Boys’ Club way.
“Play nice,” said Marlene. “I’m going back to bed.”
“I’m getting a shirt,” said Remus. He couldn’t handle the way they were staring at him in the starlight.
When he returned, James, Lily, and Sirius were still arguing in circles. A literal interpretation of the expression, as they were pacing around each other like circling dogs.
“Prongs, how is it my fault you couldn’t schedule some time off from your stupid tutoring—”
“—it’s not that simple,” said James.
“Get Wormtail to cover for you! Honestly,” said Sirius, “it’s like you’ve learned nothing.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“James,” said Lily, “We can just move our tent. It’s fine.”
“It’s not about the tent!” said James. His frustration was tangible if inexplicable. “He pulled a disappearing act on me. All this stuff about getting into the postgraduate program without me not splitting us apart, talking every day on the mirror, and then nothing. An entire sodding year of nothing. I’m lucky to catch you twice a month, Pads, and then even then you’re bloody distracted with that stupid lovesick look in your eyes. Then today—you can’t expect to show up after all this time only to pretend that everything is exactly as it was a year ago.”
Lily’s eyes flew up to Sirius. She didn’t know him well enough to recognise his expression, but James was an expert in interpreting Sirius. Better than Remus, apparently.
Sirius winced. “Studies get hard—”
“—you’ve been out of school nearly a month! And here I find out,” continued James, his myopic eyes settling on the probably-blurred figure of Remus, “that not only did you pull a Moony, he’s your new best sodding mate.”
Oh, Jesus.
Remus’s fist snapped forwards of its own accord. Well. That was for the official record. He did it because his knuckles felt good hitting the square of James’s rounded jaw, even if was a dirty fucking hit, but God. Sometimes you needed to throw a punch.
James was on the ground and Lily’s fist hit Remus’s jaw wrong, he could feel it. Her thumb was tucked inside. It snapped his teeth shut into his tongue and Lily’s hand gave a sickening crackle.
“Oi!” called Mary. “Bloody Christ, I’m not running a clinic here!”
Righting himself, Remus spat hot blood into the sand. James, still on the ground, was somehow watching him with a touch more respect. How was that for ‘pulling a Moony’, motherfucker?
“Got something to say, Lupin?” he spat.
“Leave him out of it,” snapped Sirius, “or at least pick which one of us you’re cross with, Christ. You’re like a bloody bird—”
“—Sirius—” began Lily.
“Yeah? You’re defending him like he’s your bloody boyfriend,” replied James. That bitter satisfaction drained from his look, however, because Sirius’s eyes steeled over in the dark, and when he looked to Lily, she was wearing a tight frown. “What?” asked James. He looked back between them, ashen. “What’d I say?”
A beat.
“I shag blokes, Prongs. Frequently.”
“What?” said James. He stuttered to fill the silence, a staccato to the cicadas. “No, wait—Merlin, that’s not fair. That’s not—you, you can’t—congratulations?”
Lily snorted at that, then Sirius a moment after. Remus had his jaw still tight, but he was on the verge.
“‘Congratulations,’ he says,” said Sirius, giving Lily a shrug. “Not the worst I’ve heard.”
Realisation dawned on James a moment later, bare chest still heaving with anger if not exertion. “Wait,” he said. Something uncertain flickered in his myopic eyes. “You and Remus are—”
“—James!” hissed Lily. “That’s not how that works.”
As those two bickered, Sirius shot Remus a look as if to say, Perhaps, Moony, we ought to save the full coming out for when Prongs isn’t royally put off with you.
Remus’s own look said, Yes.
“Look, Prongs,” said Sirius, helping James to his feet with a grin, “I’m sorry that I chucked your big romantic night. I am.”
“I’m sorry,” replied James, also grinning, “that I spoiled your apparently gay ears with my straight love.”
“Oi, I still fancy birds.”
“Oh? Wait—”
“He’s ACDC,” said Remus, rejoining the fray.
“ACDC?”
“It means you do both. Birds or blokes.”
“Both? You can—both?”
“Yes?” Hah. Christ, he’d forgotten how ignorant James could be, sometimes.
“Right.” James stared at him, still unsure. “And you’re—”
“—pulling a Moony. Night,” he added, specifically to Lily.
Was it a healthy way to resolve that conversation? Not at all. It was negatively healthy, actually, the pinnacle of unhealth. Still, Jesus. It felt good. Or, no. It felt good to hurt James, but the night as a whole, it was gnawing through his chest and his ribs, now. What a model performance. The both of them, like. He spat out more of his own blood and opted not to hold his nose. Let it ooze.
From there, he circled back to Mary and Peter.
“Your eye all right, Pete?” asked Remus. He was still rubbing at it despite Mary’s insistence not to do so, and Mary herself was squinting at it with a light on the tip of her wand.
“Should be fine,” she said. “Nasty shiner in the morning, though.”
“Roguish good looks for him, then. To help you on the pull.”
“I guess,” said Peter. “Is Padfoot really…?”
Neither Remus nor Mary filled the blank, so Peter swallowed and shrugged.
“It’s a weird world, I guess. As long as—”
“—don’t,” said Mary. “Don’t finish that unless you want your eye out.”
“What?”
“Sorry, Pete,” said Remus. “Only way Padfoot’s pinning you against the wall is with a kinetic spell.”
“That’s not—eugh.”
“Eugh?”
“Even if it weren’t a bloke,” said Peter, shuddering, “it’s Padfoot. That’s like shagging James. Or someone’s dad.”
Well, that wasn’t a perfect understanding, but it was workable. Probably.
Remus rolled his eyes and shrugged. “Speaking of, Wormtail,” he said, elbowing Peter lightly—he only flinched a little, and Remus remembered they were dangerous weapons—and continued, “how’s your mum and sister? Still well, I hope?”
All colour drained from Peter’s already starlight-paled face. He tensed. Remus blinked.
“What the fuck, Remus?” said Mary, and before he could respond, Peter hit him with a hook to the nose and a knee, hard, to the gut. Remus’s vision went spectacularly white and then impossibly dark. He crumpled. His nose welled up like a fresh crimson spring. Speaking of dirty fucking hits, but then again, Peter had learned from the best, hadn’t he?
As he lay there writhing in the sand, he remembered one of the last chess games he’d watched between Peter and Sirius at school, with Sirius insisting, for the audience of the listless Gryffindor common room, that he was barely trying. Privately Remus thought that was too easy a smokescreen. If he studied and still lost, Sirius might’ve been forced to admit that he wasn’t quite the prodigy he believed himself, or, shock of all shocks, that Peter himself might’ve been owed some credit, his unripened moony face and all. He couldn’t say for certain. Sirius never copped to it. This time, scenting blunders in the water, Sirius began to nip at Peter’s heels, bleeding him out, trade for unfavourable trade. Peter’s weakness finally presented itself as his aversion to defeat. Eventually it came out that he would do anything and everything necessary to protect his king and required a great deal of focus to suppress that instinct.
By all accounts it became unbearable to watch: bereft of pawns and lesser footmen to sacrifice, Peter threw his knights and then his bishops to the pyre, finally trading a queen for a queen to halt Sirius’s relentless pressure. What remained was one of Sirius’s beleaguered knights toying with the king, always out of reach, while Sirius’s lone remaining pawn crossed the board one bloodsoaked square at a time. He winced at the memory of it, or perhaps that was his broken fucking nose. Peter hadn’t yielded. Say what you would about the little man, but when you backed him into a corner, he fought tooth and bloody nail to survive.
Later, Sirius had bragged to him that he’d been right: there was little point in learning a thousand forms if you could instead master the one form of breaking your opponent. The rules were much more flexible when you operated outside of the constraints of the game that way.
Much later, Peter (quietly and without prompting) apologised to Remus one evening in their dormitory. Apparently he had fallen asleep in Charms, earlier that week, and he’d done quite the popular impression of it to a few other boys.
Remus rolled over in the sand and opened his eyes. He wasn’t blind. The stars were still there. His entire skull ached.
It was decided they ought all to bed after ‘all the night’s excitement’, as Lily, ever the diplomat, worded it. Mary cleaned him up and dragged him back into Sirius’s tent. Her brows were furrowed, and her expression furious. She explained herself in furtive whispers.
“They’re dead, Remus. Aurors did them by accident,” whispered Mary. She sounded irate that she was being forced into the position of defending Peter Pettigrew. “Pettigrew told us on Hallowe’en? We sang Auld Lang Syne twice and you wouldn’t stop hugging him, telling him how you understood ’cos of your own parents. Don’t tell me you forgot your friend’s family died?”
It rang a bell. Imagine that—imagine it ringing a vague bell and not realising in the echoes of it that you were an awful person.
Few of them got much sleep that night, and Remus, none.
***
The rest of the holiday was unsalvageable. It rained in a pathetically fallacious way in the morning. Remus lingered in his tent while the others huddled briefly, wordlessly around a fire only long enough for Peter to cook a passable breakfast of tea and toast. Exactly enough for six people and Christ, Sirius could eat his bloody toast himself, thank you very much. Rain sheeted off his tent in mesmerising patterns. He spent the grey morning drinking an entire bottle of red wine. He woke up at midnight and lay awake until Sirius crawled into bed an hour after, damp and smelling like nature again. For the next two days, the skies remained overcast, the winds were violent on the Dune of Pilat, and the temperature peaked in the low twenties. It made the beach near-impossible to use, given the water of the Côte d’Argent was already colder than liquid water had any right to be.
The Moors of Gascony were revolting against the reign of King Remus the Forgetful and, he was sure, conspiring towards his execution. Remus wanted nothing more in those days than to flee to the Pyrenees again.
Neither James nor Peter could stand to be with Remus and it was only by the grace of Lily Evans that their dynamic didn’t degrade into thrown punches and bloody noses again. She pulled him aside twice, and another attempt was yet rearing its ugly, misshapen, unwelcome head, to ask ‘what was going on’ with him and James and Peter, as though answering those questions wouldn’t require revealing a series of unlikely and unforgiveable betrayals. In private, Sirius confessed that he, too, remembered the singing of funeral songs but didn’t connect it to Peter’s existence, which, actually, was Sirius’s default state when it came to Peter’s affairs.
The problem with that statement being that Remus said it out loud and so they were fighting again.
“Here we bloody go again. Say it—”
“—Padfoot, no—”
“—just bloody say it,” continued Sirius, giving a harsh bark of a laugh, “say what you mean. You’re such a fucking coward, sometimes, Lupin, it’s unbelievable. No, I’m not avoiding you, and I’d never take the piss out of you like I do Wormtail.”
“I never said—”
“Jesus Christ!” Sirius threw up both hands and stared at him like he was insane or had a nosebleed or had just announced he was volunteering for Thatcher’s re-election campaign. His stupid grey eyes were woefully pretty, rimmed with red. “Tell me! Tell me what you said! Defend your bloody—”
“We’re not doing a debate!”
“Again!” He jabbed his index and ring finger at his chest in accusation. “Again, just now! Christ, Remus, could you pick a position and stand—”
“You forgot about his mum and sisters—er, sister—too.”
“What the fuck, Moony.”
“His sister. If you told them—”
“—ah, so this wasn’t about ethics at all—”
“—who the Hell mentioned ethics, no, Sirius, we were pissed, dead legless—”
“—what can I do for you, hm?”
“Yes!” Remus shouted. He winced and lowered his voice, as though the cicadas—the others were elsewhere—might gossip. “Yes, please, this once—”
‘—this once—"
On and on. After his third gentle refusal to explain himself, he thought that Lily had no further reason to be upset with him. His ambient fuckery aside, that she broke her thumb, which Mary healed, punching him was not Remus’s fault. It was a risk you incurred when you threw a punch, especially if you threw it badly and the person you were hitting was, unbeknownst to you, a tall lanky werewolf. Yet she was upset. He wasn’t sure why. Asking was right out: he might’ve had the nerve if only every person at camp wasn’t treating him like a pariah.
Perhaps that was why he stayed. They’d seen his scars and the awful kind of friend he’d been and, Remus thought, in accord with that they probably placed bets on how long it would take before he ran away again.
On the third day, Remus was still there and the weather warmed enough to lift their moods. While the six of them did enjoyable holiday-y things, Remus made frequent trips into Bordeaux or the nearer commune of La Teste-de-Buch, ferrying food, wine, sweets, stronger spirits, and whatever other miscellany the group required. That would be his penance.
If it was, it worked well enough that Sirius came crawling into their tent past midnight and squirmed his way into Remus’s arms in a mixed mood. Remus didn’t ask. There was a War; everyone was fighting and/or upset; and Sirius was falling in and out of moods with some regularity, those days, with higher highs and lower lows. He held Sirius as he wanted to held. Kissed him much the same, and, when Sirius’s needs shifted again—it’d been a few days—Remus got him off. The handjob started off half-hearted, but it’d been a few days for Remus, too, so his enthusiasm took over along with Remus’s tongue and mouth. Not to mention it was an easier way to keep the tent clean.
The morning of day four, they provisioned themselves for a longer hike to the lake on Remus’s map. L’Étang de Cazaux et de Sanguinet, or the Pond as they called it for short and left at the early, early crack of eight o’clock.
James took the map but left Sirius behind at camp. Maybe they were on the outs—maybe Sirius felt guilty about leaving Remus on his own. Maybe because Sirius had attempted a crack at James’s awful snoring, which they hadn’t suffered together since their time at Hogwarts, when they shared a dormitory, and sometimes a four-post bed, before they left and moved out and stopped seeing each other every day, and it’d fallen flat, though with James and Sirius you could never tell how much of a conversation was actually taking place with words. Whatever it had been, Sirius hadn’t rebelled in his usual way. He would stay away from the Pond.
Lily, James, Peter, Mary, and Marlene were likely to spend all day there, it being a three-hour hike, so Remus thought nothing of it when the afternoon rolled in and they hadn’t returned.
Nothing still when the evening arrived.
At the stroke of midnight, Remus left their tent and found Sirius tending the fire they’d bewitched to give off only invisible smoke. His worry was palpable in the way he jabbed the fire. A ring of blackened stones encircled a pit of smouldering, seething red embers. Maybe Remus was better at reading Sirius than he thought.
Initially, Sirius suggested Remus cast his Comprehensive Locator again, but then they stumbled over the hypothesis that, perhaps, the map was wrong, or something was throwing it off and that was why their friends had been lost. There was, as had become evident over the past few days, a military air base nearby, and it made a certain sense that the French might have wizards involved in their air force. It was a lesser-spoken fact that the magical world was involving itself in increasing amounts with muggle geopolitics.
The idea that Thatcher knew about the existence of magic made Remus shudder.
If the military base was indeed interfering with the cartographical component of his charm, there was only one way to be sure. Remus Apparated to La Teste-de-Buch again as he’d seen a tourist trap of interest, broke in under cover of night, and nicked a copy of a local map.
Thirty minutes later, he was back and casting the more difficult component of his charm, the radar-like part, and it revealed three things:
- Remus’s initial Comprehensive Locator had functioned just fine;
- their erstwhile companions were perfectly fine and still at the secluded little beach; and
- from the position of their feet on the map, Lily and James were either climbing a tree or shagging in the woods, past midnight though it might’ve been.
Bitterness was Remus’s anchor. He tied himself with heavy ropes to the mast in his storm of self-loathing and held on for dear life. ‘Holding on for dear life’ in this situation looked like kicking about the fire, overtired, veins hissing embarrassment, drinking yet another bottle of wine, which, as it turned out, Remus had stolen! Just like the other bottles of wine, most of the harder liquor, some of the food, and, yes, the sunglasses that he and Sirius shared. The sum of stolen goods totalled an incomprehensible number of Francs. Which, Remus realised, was only incomprehensible to them because none of them would’ve understood how to change Galleons for pounds sterling for new Francs if not for Remus and Sirius.
Sirius found that statement hilarious after a half-bottle of wine and even more hilarious that the Head Boy and Head Girl of their year, both Gryffindors, had been getting drunk all week on stolen goods and shagging while camping without a permit, even if it didn’t really make sense to Sirius how a person could ‘illegally’ camp.
Once he mentioned Houses, which might’ve been at about three in the morning, they both groaned. Jesus Christ. There were seven of them on this trip. All of them from the same school. All of them from Gryffindor. They were still that group that had never grown past their adolescent studies.
When Sirius suggested they leave, they debated it.
In Remus’s mind their reasons were valid, and Sirius proposing the idea absolved him, he thought, of all culpability. They did not however want to strand their friends. Neither Mary nor Lily spoke French, and while Marlene did, she was a pureblood with an interest, not a foot, in the muggle world. His mother could’ve survived longer in the wizarding world than any of them in muggle France, and—wait, well, shit, that was an idea, wasn’t it?
Remus explained with drunken clarity that he had an idea. A plan. A mad one, yes, but those were Sirius’s favourite kind. In the twilight before dawn, they tinkered with it, workshopped it, folded in Sirius’s bike as the perfect means of transport.
With that much planning involved, you couldn’t call it running away. Not if you did it in the morning after the group returned. They did, at six in the morning, all looking in a terrible state.
Remus and Sirius bid them their own sobering goodbyes, slept off most of the booze, and packed up their tent. Perhaps the plan was more daunting sober, but Remus was yet unswayed and Sirius retained his conviction to help Remus. They Apparated back to London, where Sirius was tasked with shoring up his bike and Remus went in search of a bookshop that might still be open at that late hour.
In the most monumental act of hubris ever to theretofore occur in Remus’s life—bearing in mind Remus had run from a suspicious wildfire on foot, been poisoned by an academic rival yet tried to see it through on his own, and walked into an ambush set by werewolves in an all-nighter warehouse loo—Remus decided he needed an atlas and as many detailed maps of Wales as possible, and the more recent, the better.
What was the point of having magic if you couldn’t invent a spell to find your own mother?
Notes:
This is one of my favourite chapters, and also one that has received the most edits since I started writing MLDTHB. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. It's terribly cold right now, but If you're ever travelling to France and don't know where to go besides the French Riviera, Bordeaux is nothing if not drinkable. You will probably have to pay for all the wine, however.
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, Summer 1979, Part III will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 07 February, a Friday. Being a 'part-of' chapter, this means I'll be posting every week until there's no more parts to post!
If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is you're allowed this happiness by dykesiriusblack, a three chapter Wolfstarbucks (R/S/J) fic that I really love because it has the uneasy, jockeying, competitive dynamic I love to see between James and Sirius. It's set in the Hamptons in United States and functions both as a Wolfstarbucks character study and a meditation on class. Go send the author some love!
Chapter 12: Summer 1979, Part III
Chapter Text
All of the stress, that foundation of fear and fury for Remus’s psyche, came to a head for the first time when he was six years old and had been cleared for re-entry into the world by a private healer whose silence cost most of the Lupin family’s already-modest estate. His parents let him out into the front garden. He remembered pink foxglove bells, bright yellow poppy, the white and pale lavender heads of flowers he wouldn’t know for a few years, yet, milkmaids and cornflower. Seeing the outside world through more than a window felt fuzzy and bright and unreal. The farflung fields around him exploded in fresh heather. The only structures in sight were distant farmhouses. He hadn’t been left alone since it happened. His heart beat so fast he thought he was dying. He lost sight of his parents for a moment when Hope stepped away to answer the telephone. Christ knew what Lyall was doing. It was the first time he had a nervous fit and would not be the last.
Being a child, Remus did not understand what had happened. He did not understand why his family had needed to sell their home on the outskirts of Cardiff and move across Wales; he did not understand what happened every full moon or why he’d been kept in bed for several months; how his father grew distant; his mother, so close; nor the welling emotion inside him that felt, at times, like a wireless playing every song at once at such a high volume, you couldn’t hear anything at all. Each time Lyall came to his room and asked him what he’d like to bring to their latest, shabbiest cottage, and what he’d like to get rid of, it felt like he was being punished for a crime he hadn’t known he was committing. It was a clockwork ritual they followed every summer so as to not attract attention, what with all of Remus’s howling and conspicuous injuries. Like clockwork, his face grew hot, and his mind sullen. He sulked. He found himself unable to breathe and lay on his bed at night, sleepless, until his mum came in in the morning and stroked his hair and let him fall asleep with his head in her lap.
At Hogwarts it happened less often. The wonder of first year, the sea of floating candles and the night’s sky and the great feasts kept the fits at bay, but by his second year they returned with cruel and exacting intent.
Remus felt so behind compared to his peers. Sirius and Peter had perfect recall. Lily was brilliant, popular, and almost universally well-liked, while James was a prodigy from a family with a vast magical legacy. Remus was a child thrust among the precocious. Beyond their studies, they also had an emotional maturity Remus lacked, vivid social lives, and time for mischief. Sirius in particular breezed through all of their first- and second-year wandwork with no effort, putting him kilometres ahead of any student, and a world apart from Remus. Sirius was a better spellcaster than most of the third-year class and possibly half of the fourth. Even the older students recognised this, allowing him to join their exclusive circles at tableheads in the Great Hall, behind the foggy, sweating glass panes of the greenhouses, in conspicuous blind arcades on the third-floor corridor, where they held court, unbothered by the deluge of younger and older students rushing to and from their next lesson.
When Sirius sussed out his lycanthropy, Remus had one such nervous fit.
Most of it was a blur, but he would always remember thirteen-year-old Sirius crouching beside him, whispering his own secret in Remus’s ear: the Black family had given Sirius an heirloom wand on his fifth birthday, the same day they began his magical pedagogy.
It didn’t stop Remus’s fits, but it helped, and, in time, Remus rose to match with his peers on the grace of his own merits and with friends to keep him grounded. They came to respect his knowledge of the library— how much time he spent bearing down on his scholarship, if albeit to a lesser degree. Sirius taught him how to cope. While Remus assumed it was another manifestation of Sirius’s genius, that was not the case. Early in third year, the first week in fact, neither of them could sleep, and so Sirius crawled into his four-post bed, uninvited but not unwelcome. They lay there in silence—or, no, Sirius lay there in silence, and Remus listened to the thunderous, frantic beating of Sirius’s heart, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you could talk about when you were an adolescent lycanthrope living among humans—watching the faint starlight from the window cast odd shadows on the bold crimson curtains. Sirius turned over on his side and leaned in so close that his curls tickled Remus’s cheek, his itching neck. He whispered that he had nervous fits too, sometimes, although they looked much different and they happened in private.
Both of them still suffered the occasional fit in the years that followed, although, as Remus grew older, he also grew to hate the terminology. Muggles at that time called it ‘anxiety neurosis,’ and the sudden bouts ‘anxiety attacks.’
For the poetry, Remus preferred the term crise d’angoisse, or crisis of anguish, as while often he felt under sudden attack by paroxysms of emotion, so too did he often weaponize that silent crushing agony against those around him. Rarely did they deserve it. Still, he thought ‘anguish’ was a fitting word for it—Remus knew the many ways in which pain could manifest beyond simple fear—but what fit better was ‘crisis.’ A crisis was a boiling point, yes, but it was also a moment of resolution, and the world, like his thoughts, could stay still in the aftermath. At least for a little while.
Depending on the day, Remus wasn’t sure if he preferred the crisis or its accumulating events. He’d have preferred neither, of course, but in the two months they spent searching for Hope Lupin, Remus suffered both.
That first day back in London, they cleared all the furniture away from the longest wall in their little Soho flat, sticking up every map they’d found of a Welsh town or city. Furious determination helped Remus pen out a forked variation of his Comprehensive Locator on the back of a local café flyer. So too helped Sirius.
“This might sound mad,” began Remus, who always worked through strong emotions better as a problem to solve rather than a property of human existence. He jabbed the back end of his pen down at his untidy script and notation. He could still make out the big black letters on the other side of the flyer: MAYFAIR'S COFFEE SHOP: HOMEMADE GOULASH HOT VIENNAS WITH BREAD. “So, when I first developed the Locator, it was like a radar pulse. Don’t look at me like—I didn’t have our old notes at the time, all right? And Peter’s modifications to the Homunculus Charm were clever in third year, I s’pose, not the worst on efficiency, but totally irrelevant to the sort of impromptu modularity my thesis needed. So: radar. It sends out a wave, and with some of the platonic reification frameworks I kludged together, it intuits what it hits into an actual object instead of a shape, which is how it can tell what’s a wall—important—and what’s a chair—not important—and then draw you a map of it. Mostly I’ve been focusing on architecture. Plants have been something of a nightmare, though I’d rather not get into that.
“So, at least initially I thought that reification component had to ignore Beings, because trying to platonically idealise a person would short out the charm or explode the map, or, er, me, I s’pose, but then Emmeline said something that inspired me.”
“Emmeline and inspiration,” said Sirius, thoughtful. He had his chin between his thumb and forefinger, bony elbow braced on their mismatched dining table. “Who’d have known?”
“She often inspires terror, like.”
“True. Continue.”
“What if,” continued Remus, “I made it more like a curse, sort of?”
“Never mind. I understand her role in all this, now. Bloody Slytherin.”
“She’s our Slytherin, and I said sort of. What if I rewrote the spell such that the platonic component rebounded off of thinking things? Why not draw on their knowledge rather than intuit it? And then I thought—”
“—oh, here we go—”
“—why stop there? Why privilege just things that I think are thinking, when a squirrel or Thestral might know more about the area than a human? Most animals have weaker mental barriers than Beings—excepting cetaceans and octopodes and every raven in London, of course—and I can ultimately have all the collected information be refiltered through the caster’s priorities as long as I can get the conversion efficiencies right.”
“So, like a radar pulse that makes other things give off radar pulses?”
“Just the once, yes,” said Remus. The air was cooler here but infinitely damper than the Gascony Moors. Sweat curled the ends of his hair around his ears and at the nape of his neck. “Not only would it mean you didn’t have to continually cast the spell to track movement, I think it would also make the most, well, mappy kind of map, because it’d be the average sum of the knowledge in that area. And it could do names, because—”
“—it’s borrowing their knowledge. Moony,” said Sirius, thin brows furrowing, “that’s as brilliant as it is horrifying.”
“Horrifying?”
“Horrifying.”
“Padfoot, why is it—”
“Well, it sounds like you’re about to go around imbuing pieces of parchment with the gestalt knowledge of their surrounding collective,” explained Sirius. “Sounds a hop skip and a jump away from creating a consciousness.”
“You once charmed a piano to play itself so sadly,” said Remus, expression flat, “it started weeping between its keys.”
“Ah, yes. Poor Granny Piano. We had to throw her out, you know. The moisture warped the wood and strings and ruined her sound. There was mould festering between the ivories, Moony.”
“Right. Well.” Whimsy did not always mean fun. “As for the Locator, I have to test this wonkier hypothesis on some ordinary maps, first. They have set boundaries. Otherwise…”
Sirius winced. “A rebounding curse-ish that has no limits. You almost invented magic syphilis, Moony. Except it’d only get worse for you the more it spread,” he said. “For one beautiful, orgasmic moment, you’d have mapped the entire world in your head.”
“And in the next, I think my brain would liquefy out of my head. Not,” he added, “that I could get it up for that kind of magic. Honestly, I think the whole thing’d just short out if I cast the net too wide.”
“Let’s not try. I adore your head the way it is.”
“Really? I thought you wanted more tongue.”
“Did I?” asked Sirius. He folded both arms behind his neck, under his cascade of dark curls, and grinned. “Maybe we should reassess later. More data.”
It was the swottiest kind of flirting they’d ever done, and yet there Remus was, thinking about slipping a hand under Sirius’s shirt while the other worked through all the arcane fasteners on his Stuart tartan trousers. He’d save those thoughts for later, however. Time was of the essence.
Because this kind of magic was, well, insane, loony, even, and because they were in the middle of a War, Remus set Sirius to the task of covering their tracks rather than helping Remus cast the Locator itself. Not that he could teach Sirius the charm in such a short time—in a way, it’d become personal, rebuilding Remus the same way that Remus was building it. One by one he laid a network of preparatory spells over each creased map. They’d stuck them up with mundane pushpins on the off chance that a Sticking Charm might have an unexpected interaction with his thesis. For lack of a better option, they were tiled on the wall in a haphazard way that maximised their space, the uncovered window punching out a wide, square hole into the darkened street below. It spilled over to the adjoining walls, like thriving moss, or an infection, or something the incurably insane did when they forgot to take their pills for three months.
The fundamentals of his Comprehensive Locator were so clear to him he thought he could even divide the enchantment over every map at once, if albeit at a reduced lifespan. He’d lose detail, the granularity of it all, but the alternative involved looking at censuses and repeatedly casting the spell, which was already something of an involved affair itself, a few dozen times in a row. Probably they would find it less exhausting to travel on foot, and probably it would take less time. Sirius concurred. As long as he was confident his modifications would work, Sirius would stabilise any irregularities in the casting and conceal it with a few tricks he’d picked up from his own original research. The problem being, of course, that Sirius thus far only knew how to transmutate magical residue into either heat or light. Light wouldn’t do—they’d burn out their retinas and blind half of Soho—nor did they fancy turning their flat into an oven and then a building fire.
“Moony,” said Sirius, “I think it’s my turn for a mad idea.”
Which is how they ended up with the idea to translocate the heat a hundred or so metres upwards into the London sky at a slight angle. If everything went to plan, the heat would be distributed over the city, rendering it negligible, and there’d be no way to trace it back to their flat. In an ideal world, no one would notice, given it was the tail-end of a heat wave and already evening when they put everything together.
The world, however, was not ideal, a giant fucking headache, actually, so when Remus ran through the casting and passed the point of no return at around fifteen minutes in, he felt his skin growing hot and heard the panicked inflection take over Sirius’s archaic Greek grammar. His fingertips gave off thin curls of clear, wispy smoke, like an unextinguished fag. To their credit no one exploded or haemorrhaged to death—Remus’s nose did, however, bleed for a half hour thereafter and his hair smelled singed—but the Muggle news the following morning was ablaze with questions of why, exactly, the temperature peaked in London at just under thirty-three degrees centigrade at nine o’clock in the afternoon, 16 July 1979.
The heat wave lasted another three days with renewed vigour thereafter, and they resolved never, ever to cast the Locator again. At least not without some serious redrafting first.
Remus gave Sirius a simple Indexing Charm to tinker with, as he no longer trusted his own decision-making and was in desperate need of a cold shower. Irma Pince was its inventor. She used it to search books for specific phrases or words, and so Remus thought that Sirius, who was better at illusions and glamours given his work on the bike, might be able to stick a Colour-Changing Charm onto it such that a map would turn, say, red, if it had a certain name on it.
When he returned from the shower some thirty minutes later, shivering, Sirius blocked the doorway out.
“Promise,” said Sirius, a grave look in his grey eyes, “you won’t be upset or do anything rash, regardless of what you see.”
Remus’s heart quickened and he promised.
The wall was—well, if you’d ever seen a swot’s notes, you might’ve recognised the colour-coding that usually came with it. Maps that displayed neither ‘Hope,’ ‘Lupin,’ ‘Hope Lupin,’ ‘Howell,’ her maiden name, nor ‘Hope Howell’ in full grew pale and wan, while each of the others had its own associated shade. Red was for Howell, a common surname that dotted several maps, and yellow for Hope, an ever more common name. Any map with the name ‘Hope Lupin’ on it would glow a bright fluorescent green.
Allegedly. None of the maps were green.
Sirius didn’t hold him—touching Remus during those moments was a mixed bag, to say the least—but he did crouch beside Remus as he hyperventilated against the wall, whispering in his usual calming way that this wasn’t a grim portent. There were several possible explanations:
- There could’ve been an error in their casting;
- Hope could be somewhere Unplottable;
- She might be under personal protective enchantments; or
- She might have left Wales, because, as Sirius said, who wouldn’t want to leave Wales given the option?
The last one earned a sniffling chuckle from Remus. It short-circuited the crise d’angoisse, and Sirius stoked that small ember of humour into a full laugh before wiping the tears from Remus’s face with a smooth, crooked thumb. Another crisis tamed by that Black magic. He suggested a break. Far too much Indian takeaway was ordered and picked up and only about a third of it eaten: fresh hot samosas, a sharp, spicy dish of steamed fish wrapped in banana leaves with an acidic chutney whose name Remus couldn’t recall, but which he remembered from a lunch with James and his mum, Euphemia, and a sweet cool rabdi for dessert. Once his neurotic mind was under control and they’d finally put something in their stomachs, Sirius explained that he, personally, favoured the third option.
“If the Aurors did indeed go looking for her,” he said, shrugging, “then their own Locators must have failed. They would have found…”
“Her body,” finished Remus. He took a deep breath. “You can say it, Pads. I won’t be upset.”
“Right,” he said, giving a sharp nod. “So, unless there’s an Unplottable mass grave somewhere, I don’t think it’s likely. The purebloods running to the Dark Lord’s side hate muggles. Why would they hide the thing they’re proud of with magic that complex?”
“And she wouldn’t leave Wales. Never,” said Remus. He didn’t trust himself with longer sentences, not yet. Too at risk of bursting into tears again. “We can eliminate that one, too.”
Operator error was realistic but not something they could verify. That left protective enchantments, which, as Sirius explained, had one upshot.
“Unless your father was a master illusionist—”
“—Lyall was not, no.”
“Then he probably enchanted something to hide her,” said Sirius. He’d begun tying his hair back whenever they worked on a project together, automotive or not, although loose curls always sprung free of their own accord. “Objects or clothes work, but most witches and wizards choose jewellery. Easiest way to keep it in constant contact, lowest maintenance. And that means—”
“—she might remove it for a moment. Brilliant.”
“Even if she puts it back on, it has to be a very, very strong enchantment to resist everything that’s been thrown at it between us and the Aurors,” he continued. His thin brows furrowed. “Should be able to spot it with that eye charm I taught you, but, Remus, you should know—”
“—this is all speculation.” finished Remus. “She could be dead. Or, we could be missing something. Such as her body being in a grave with the amulet or ring or what have you still on her. Got it, Padfoot.”
Sirius rubbed his temples. “You said you wouldn’t—”
“—sorry. I know. You’ve done amazing work here, Pads. Thank you.” Remus meant that in earnest. He never forgot Walburga Black, but they so seldom talked about Sirius’s old family, Remus had no barometer for how this search might be affecting Sirius—what painful memories they were reawakening. Maybe, he hoped, Sirius would find some comfort here. “If she’s still alive, I’d like you to meet her,” continued Remus, quiet. He cleared his throat. “Meet her proper, like. S’pose I’d like for her to understand who you are to me.”
And, Jesus, he was crying again. Sirius was too, but he’d quarantined it only in his eyes. Or, no. Almost. His reassuring whispers sounded with a breaking voice. Only twice before had he seen Sirius Black cry ugly.
When the tears were done, all of the sitting furniture in their flat was rearranged to face the overflowing wall of maps.
They took it together and they took it in shifts.
Remus’s blood was rich with nervous energy and so he often sat with Sirius, watching the various maps of Wales change colour, pale, and the names upon them crawl around like black and linguistic ants. His eyes dried. The light outside brightened and dimmed and he made an infinite number of cups of tea, each one more watery than the last, and an infinite number of trips to empty his overtaxed bladder. The chaotic, singular, unrepeatable movements of Soho nightlife carried out all their beauty out below his window and on occasion made Remus aware of this fact by injecting a burst of obstreperous clamour into their otherwise quiet flat. He could see black names moving on the insides of his eyelids. Though Remus couldn’t sleep, he let Sirius snore up against him into the bright unasked-for morning and settled for frequent naps the following day. He rested his head in Sirius’s lap until his eyes fell shut, slowly. When he snapped awake and started, Sirius would stroke his shaggy hair and whisper quiet calming words until another nap took him again.
Both of them alternated for the days and nights when it came to cooking, as neither wanted to run off for takeaway and risk missing something. All drugs went out the window too.
Not in the literal sense. They had the essentials packed and knew that speed was essential for catching up with her if, if she showed up. A few hours delay could set them back to square one, and, by Remus’s maths, their wall would only last a week before the enchantments faded.
By the second afternoon, Remus was going a little loony. Loonier than usual. The human brain wasn’t meant to stare at a wall for twelve hours at a time. Sometimes he stood; sometimes he sat; sometimes he lay on the floor before the sofa, the scruff of his cheek unbearably itchy in the zebra-print carpet; and a few times out of sheer boredom Remus lifted a magnifying glass to stare at the names crawling over the maps of Wales’s largest cities. There was a defect to them, one he couldn’t see in the less-populated maps. He noticed that, sometimes, there were ‘holes’ in the maps that seemed to follow fixed routes. Except you couldn’t see the holes, not directly. The ink of the walls and streets and cartographical minutiae dissolved around these blank spots and reformed behind them. The names of people crossing them vanished and reappeared. Oftentimes the holes stayed in place for several hours before moving again, and sometimes they moved off the edge of a map or ceased to exist outright. Twice he lost track of them. He almost convinced himself it was a delusion until Sirius had caught him staring, nose almost brushing the wall, and he sheepishly admitted that he thought he’d found an odd anomaly in their maps. He wasn’t certain Sirius believed him until one such hole moved before his very eyes.
The holes were rare, too. Remus had found only three among all the maps they had on up the wall and, while Sirius agreed it was odd, he let Remus down gently when Remus suggested it could be the sign of protective enchantments.
“These spells wouldn’t block the terrain or other people, Moony,” said Sirius. His voice was soft. “Cloaks, shrouds, wards—if she’s protected against scrying or locating or anything else, it’ll leave her off the map but won’t change her surroundings.”
By the thirty-six hour mark both of them were going mad. The patterned wallpaper behind the maps was taking on a life of its own and Remus thought, sometimes, that it might be moving like the ant-sized names. He caught a glimpse of his own messy signature wiggling free of one frayed map’s edge, Aberystwyth, like a ship sailing over the horizon to uncharted lands. When he blinked it was gone. Sirius asked him if he was all right and Remus found his mouth dry.
“Moony, darling—you sure you don’t want anything to eat?”
“Oh, fuck off.”
Sirius snorted.
“Ah, I’m so scared of the Big Bad Wolf.” He pried open Remus’s hands and inserted into them a cup of tea, pleasantly warm, and two ibuprofen in a crumpled white paper napkin. “Don’t go anywhere. I’m making you a bloody cheese toastie.”
“Jesus Christ, Sirius—"
Twenty-five minutes later, however, at around half nine, Sirius was winding Remus through slow, improvised, moody steps set to the record player’s tune of Cosmic Dancer when their flat flared fluorescent, radioactive green.
Remus’s neck ought have broken with how fast it snapped around. The glow was already fading, but he threw himself over the sofa and pinned a hand against the small, undetailed roadmap of Milford Haven, a small fishing town hit hard by unemployment. Remus had never been.
They threw their packs and other things on Sirius’s bike within minutes.
The roar of the wind and engine were unlike anything he’d ever known.
Five hours and a square four-hundred kilometres later, they were there.
***
Moving through Milford Haven was much like moving through time for Remus. Never before had he been somewhere that felt as touched by the present as it was its own past.
At three in the morning it was as much asleep as the rest of Wales, with only the distant lights and smoking chimney stacks of the Pembroke Refinery casting light from across the Cleddau estuary. Half terrace houses, half three-storey Georgian domestics. The old high streets were lined by old soldiers, houses of weathered hewn brownstone and red brick and pebbledashing. Walled-off overgrown gardens (front and back) on occasion were overflowing with rubbish, rust-bleeding service appliances and precariously-leaned ladders arranged with all the care of an abandoned hobby. Conspicuous blue tarps sat idle with wet heaps of stinking transplanted soil atop them. A small scattering of whitewashed council homes stuck out among the surrounding forest of sessile oaks. There were not an awful lot of fishing boats moored at the docks or out on the water. The coastal mudflats still stank of salt and drying mud whenever the tide went out, but underlying that scent was something bleaker, something more nefarious. The air tasted unclean. Patches of iridescence—industrial run-off, or perhaps a subtle leak from the new refinery across the waterway—dotted the landscape, but those vibrant colours, here, meant death. Milford Haven was in hospice.
There were only two inns in town, one of which barred him and Sirius from entry. Their light, reassuring touches to the elbow or shoulder, Sirius’s crooked grin, and requesting one bed to keep costs down set off alarms in the first innkeeper’s formerly-kind eyes.
“This is a Christian establishment, gents. Think you boys best find somewhere else to stay, yeah?”
At the second one, Remus passed them both off as reporters working on a story about unemployment along the Welsh coast. The desk clerk—an elderly woman with a stern lip—brightened at that. She had a lot of thoughts for their hypothetical article.
“You should talk to Felton down at the dockyards—he was one of the last trawlers to be laid off, him,” she said, tearing off a piece of stationary with her wide fingers to write the address. Her hair was greying and worn in a tight knot. “Lispeth at the fishmarket, too. Her husband used to deliver for the military, you know.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Remus.
“Are you sure about the one bed?” she asked, and Remus followed her eyes to the door. He’d already sent Sirius out to tend the bike. “Your colleague there looks a little…funny.”
“Budgetary constraints,” he replied, tight-lipped. He caught a glance of his reflection in a mirror behind the front desk—he hoped she’d think his eyes were rimmed with red from lack of sleep. “Paper’s only going to cover so many expenses, I’m afraid—speaking of people to talk to, however,” he continued, preferring a different line of conversation, “you wouldn’t happen to know of anyone new to town we could interview? Someone with an outsider perspective. Maybe a working woman?”
The clerk pouted her lips. “That’s very specific, dear. I don’t know if I know anyone like that. Not many have come around to Milford Haven as of late—not enough jobs to go around,” she said, whispering the last words as though someone might overhear.
Unemployment was taboo to speak of in Milford Haven. Everyone, of course, was quick to say what a shame it was that all the fishing trawlers had been retired, but the ships were the talk, not the workers who’d lost their jobs to the refinery and overfishing.
As Remus and Sirius poked around town in the unslept morning, they often found themselves in the blurry and suspicious gaze of those older working men. Except while ‘working’ once meant a long day on a boat hauling nets, now ‘work’ more meant ‘working on their second pint before noon’. They sat on algae-stained stoops of businesses they weren’t patronising with weatherbeaten faces and hard eyes. They watched the pair of them less like sheep amused by unlikely stimulus and more like—like Nietzchean sheep, sheep that could feel contempt, loathing, perhaps, as though Remus’s smart button-downs and Sirius’s cool black leathers were the sole source of Milford Haven’s economic struggle. Come evening, Remus left a pub—he’d only been in fifteen minutes to ask after anyone fitting Hope’s description, though he added enough questions to keep his cover as a journalist—to find three red-faced men in a crowd around Sirius and his bike, fists clenched at their sides and jaws locked. Swaying in their cups. They were trying to pick a fight.
Sirius was on a knife’s edge. His fingers were twitchy, and his pale face was twisted into a slight, grim smile. In all the years he’d known him, Remus had twice seen him back down from someone testing his mettle, and Remus had not been the stabilising variable in that equation. What they were doing already bordered on illegal. The last bloody thing they needed was Aurors panting down their necks. Yet somehow by the time he’d got to the bike, he’d decided that if one of those blokes took one more step towards Sirius or said another fucking thing about his hair, he was going to make them bite a drainpipe. It became hard to tell who was holding back who. Sirius yanked him back by the elbow while snarling something vicious over Remus’s shoulder at another bloke, the one with smiling eyes and an empty brown bottle in his hand. Then, as quick as it’d kicked off, a regular patron of the pub—middle-aged, with dark curls and a fishing cap—came to their rescue and shooed off the drunken crowd by threatening to tell their wives where they’d been. He caught the look in their eyes and their mutual readiness to fight.
“Be careful, like,” he said. “They don’t much enjoy the look of that bike.”
“Me or my friend neither, it seems, like,” replied Remus. The man chuckled.
“Friend, yeah. Good luck with that.”
Afterwards, they agreed that they ought always go in and leave together. No more splitting up.
“Are you—Moony, hey, don’t cry,” said Sirius in a hushed voice. Remus hadn’t even realised his eyes were watering.
“I’m not,” said Remus. Jesus. That was happening more and more often. “Was just afraid I’d have to set them on their arses and spend the night in lockup.”
Sirius grinned at that. It didn’t reach. The rest of him was still watching the men stumble down the street. He scrubbed at his eye with the heel of his hand and sniffled.
“Me as well,” replied Sirius. “Salt in the air, and all that.”
A lot they learned from the locals. A church parishioner told them almost everyone was Christian; an accountant estimated the population at about fifteen thousand; from a barman they learned there was stiff competition for work, both here and everywhere else in Pembrookshire county, and that the refinery had taken away a great deal of old jobs but the promised new ones never surfaced; and, according to Lispeth the fishmonger, she’d seen a woman matching Hope’s description at a pub on the coast. She thought she was a dishwasher. Probably because she was washing dishes.
“Pubs prefer women for slim work, these days. Less chance they drink on the job,” said Lispeth, who had a very fish-like mouth and eyes, actually, “and right tidy to look at, like.”
The fishmarket was hollow. A ghostly reef with many stalls and not many fish. Remus wondered how she stayed in business. A rough Hessian awning shaded them from the drizzle above. It was stained red in the vague pattern of a Welsh dragon, sort of. Raindrops beaded along its edge.
“Interest you in a fish, dear? Or our special catch?”
Sirius looked intrigued. “Special—”
“—c’mon, Pads. We’re losing daylight.”
Indeed they were. They’d been there three days, riding around on Sirius’s bike. Remus felt they were moving too slow, and yet, he realised, word was getting around ahead of them that they were asking after one woman in particular. People recognised him before he introduced himself, and a few refused to answer any questions.
“It’s not proper,” said a grocer. “Two young men asking after a woman like that.”
Their magic was limited. There was a War going on, of course, so they kept their wands on them at all times, but they also knew that every spell cast would draw more attention from the wrong kind of people. Spellcasting and ritual left its invisible fingerprints on almost everything it touched, and powerful sorcery could grip a thing, a place, a person with enough strength to bruise—and in London, perhaps you could get away with it, with elaborate decorative illusions in your flat and major conjurations in disused alleyways or parks, but there were no Aurors standing watch over Milford Haven. They would be summoned by open attacks on muggles or a Dark Mark over one of two local inns. Nothing less would do. That had been the point of using Sirius’s bike. Discreet transport. Untraceable. It’d do no good to find Hope only to bring trouble to her doorstep. Conspicuous spellcasting out here would be like sticking their thumbs out on the motorway, and getting in the first car that stopped, and telling the driver his defenceless mum’s address.
Even if they were willing to risk exposing themselves, however, they didn’t even know what spells they ought cast. For once, magic wasn’t the problem. Their overreliance on it was.
Being Wales by the sea, it rained often, light enough to not to weather them too much, yet with enough density to ruin all visibility. Fog was almost as ubiquitous. Mornings. Evenings. Noon, nine o’clock, four o’clock. Over the course of fifty metres the world dissolved and became a progressively wetter, greyer silhouette. Rain hampered them and kept the townspeople indoors. It also fucked with Sirius’s eye charm, the one to see traces of enchantments—they couldn’t quite figure out if it was the transitive nature of magical contamination, rain acting as a better conductor of arcane effluvia than air, or if the waterway was special, or, Christ, if the local refinery had some deeper occult purpose, if it was putting more than just pollutants into the air and sea. It might’ve been the charm itself: Sirius admitted that it was halfway his own invention, something about converting residue into light on the retina, and—it didn’t matter, okay? It wasn’t working. The point was that they weren’t finding his bloody mother.
On the fifth night, Sirius stripped off in their boarding room and turned into a shaggy black dog with one white eye and returned two long, worrying hours later with a nasty set of purple bruises blooming over his very human ribs. All the blood drained from Remus’s face.
“Fucking teenagers threw rocks at me.” He swore and shivered, dripping wet, while Remus swaddled him in towels. His curls were heavy and drenched. “Barbarians. Decent arms to them, though.”
Neither of them were healers and the bruises didn’t look too bad, but it didn’t stop Remus from fussing over him until Sirius waved him off, annoyed.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Anyway, I overheard some old birds on their veranda playing bridge…”
Sirius explained that they, apparently, were not the only pair of travellers who’d come looking for Hope. It was something of a scandal: no one knew why she was so popular or unpopular, or where she’d really come from, or what she’d done or what she owed or to whom she owed it. It was the perhaps most exciting thing to happen in Milford Haven since the Pembrokeshire bridge collapse. It’d come out at bridge that no one could agree on her name. Everyone agreed, however, that she likely had good reason to stay lost—and she was, once again.
“Took a cab out of town after she heard someone was looking for her,” said Sirius. He watched Remus with even eyes and worry on his angled chin. “’tchu want the good news or the bad news first?”
“Bad, like.”
“Caught a look at one of them, I think, when I was a dog. The enchantments on him were like neon, Moony. He was wearing a suit in the rain. Tie and all. I nabbed his scent before I got out of there—wasn’t sure if he’d spot my own charm.”
“And the other one?”
“Was my other worry, yeah. Moony, I know it sounds mad to tell from a glance, but—”
“Death Eaters?” asked Remus. In Milford Haven? Jesus Christ. He tried not to pale and probably failed. “But—how? Why?”
“I'm sorry, Moony.”
Remus shrugged and blinked at the ceiling. Itchy eyes. “What’s the good news, then?”
“She caught a cab out of town two days ago. Three now, I s’pose,” replied Sirius. “Means she’s safe.”
“For now,” said Remus, and Sirius put an arm over him. If you forgot the War and the manhunting, it might’ve been a cosy kind of boarding room. “What do they look like? The pair, I mean to say.”
“One’s a well put-together bloke, the other’s a rough-looking type, I heard.”
“Are you sure,” said Remus, “the bridge ladies weren’t describing us?”
“Moony! You aren’t that rough.”
Remus let himself laugh at that a moment before he pounced on Sirius, who yelped. His ribs were still buggered.
“Know how you can make it up to me, though. Come here—ah, good boy.”
It felt weird. Inappropriate, even, to be enjoying anything, let alone flirting, let alone sex while they were in danger. Remus wanted to drag them onto the bike and follow his mother’s trail right then and there. Except, of course, they didn’t know where she’d gone next, it was after midnight, and Sirius had been attacked by teenage yobs. Even when your world was falling apart, you could enjoy things. It was erlaubt. The alternative was holding your breath for months, maybe years, and it didn’t make you wise. It made you dead. So, Remus gave himself over. In those small moments with Sirius, he let himself relax. They could breathe.
Or, well, when Sirius let him, at least.
Soon tracking Hope Lupin became a perilous game of cat-and-mouse. She was personable, kind, and clever; she made friends easily; knew the language; the culture; and she wore the story of a woman on the run, a powerful spell in its own right. Even if they were quicker than her, they too had to be careful, because their stalking had earned them a pair of stalkers themselves.
Remus convinced a cabbie that he was, in fact, Hope’s son, although they only shared a round nose and a strong chin. It took some spin—the vitriol Remus mustered when claiming that his father was finally in gaol for assault was thoroughly convincing, according to Sirius—and the cabbie claimed that his colleague dropped her off in Haverfordwest to the north.
A day after they arrived, they were riding to the far end of town to begin their canvassing when Sirius tensed in Remus’s grip. It was unusual, of course. Sirius came alive and loosened up on his bike, and even though Remus felt the thing was a death trap, he appreciated that he could hold Sirius around his waist and liked very much the look of him in a sleek leather jacket, dragonhide or not. They pulled over a few alleys down and Sirius yanked off his helmet, a wild panic in his eyes.
“It was him,” whispered Sirius. “The bloke in a suit—saw him on the corner.”
“Did he—”
“—can’t have. Bike makes us blurry, nondescript like, while we’re on it. Should do, anyway.”
“Should?”
“I’m—Jesus, Remus, it’s a work in progress, okay?” replied Sirius, snappish. He stretched with a wince. His ribs were still bothering him, that much was clear. “They’re not exactly frugal with their magic.”
Remus blew air in a narrow stream between his teeth.
“Christ.”
“Easy, now. We’ll puzzle it out,” replied Sirius, and they tried.
There were gains and losses. In Haverfordwest, they found Hope’s trail in two days, only to discover she’d stayed a single afternoon for cab fare and a kip, after which she went north again. This came courtesy of a pubowner bought off with some spliff. Sirius reckoned he was a bit of a misogynist, much the same way he reckoned his father was a bit of a dick. Still, it boded well for them: Fishguard was a much smaller place, a hamlet, really, and ought be easier to canvas.
The further north you went in Wales, however, and the smaller the community, the more likely it became that people spoke Welsh, and more importantly that some of them spoke English as a tertiary language. It slowed them down. Remus knew only what little his mother taught him—less than that, actually, as he’d internalised only some of it and then spent three years away from his family—and as night fell, they were turned away from every boarding room they could find. He’d never learned to drive himself. They parked up along the quay at sunset. While Sirius was hunched over a map they’d nicked from a local shop, muttering to himself, mad with sleeplessness, he stared at the dark circles under his own eyes in a parked Ford Something’s wing mirror and let his vision go fuzzy. The closer they got to Hope Lupin, the further away she appeared.
Rather than risk camping in the thin Welsh woodlands without magic, which might actually kill Sirius outright, they prowled the outskirts of town looking for abandoned, derelict, or otherwise unoccupied homes.
They weren’t the only ones. Unemployment was hitting all of Britain hard, let alone Wales.
Once they found squat in which to shelter from the rain, Remus wrapped his jacket around his elbow and busted in a jammed-up sliding window.
Great. That was him, breaking and entering, making his mother proud. He jammed furniture up against the broken window, locked all the doors, and slept six hours huddled up against Sirius for warmth and what little comfort they could find. They balled up their packs for pillows on a sofa that probably didn’t have things living in it and used a motheaten linen curtain as a sheet. He went to bed cold and woke up sticky with sweat. He wore his stale, slept-in clothes like armour.
That became the routine.
From Fishguard, Hope went to Cardigan, another small town on the River Teifi, where she became one of three triplets. Each night they stayed, they heard a different rumour: she’d been seen hitchhiking south towards Narberth, which was unseemly for a lady of her age; she went inland to Newcastle Emlyn and asked after the rail station there for transport; and she followed the coast north to Aberaeron, with the intent, their informants presumed, to continue further. They swept south, first, to catch all three. Two were dead ends—no one had seen her. It cost a week to clear them. She’d followed the coast, and their shadows had beaten them there.
Where that evoked panic in Remus, however, Sirius set his brain to work. He had a theory and shared it while they settled down for the night in an unlocked but well-kept caravan they’d found in the woods. The bike was leaned up outside it.
“I think her protection could be fading,” explained Sirius, working his way through a frown. Remus was brushing his hair and, despite the man’s protesting, stared at his bruises while channelling Mary.
From the wastebin of condom wrappers and sultry mood lighting, it was probably a sex caravan, but Remus was not one to look a sexy gift horse in the sexy mouth. The caravan had electricity, running water, and food including sweets, and probably an owner who’d be upset to find them there, but it was a needed break. They showered for the first time in a week. Aberaeron was full of surprises.
“If there was an error in Lyall’s casting,” he continued, having taken up Remus’s habit of calling him Lyall whenever possible instead of your father, “or if something’s muddling it, then it could be faltering. Would explain how your charm picked her up for a moment. Also explains how they’re tracking her.”
“And she wouldn’t know,” replied Remus. “Even more reason to find her, like.”
“Remus, I don’t wanna be—y’know, I dunno what word ought go here, ‘rude’ doesn’t fit—but there is an alternative explanation too. One with a conclusion I don’t think you’ll like.”
“We barely use magic ourselves, Padfoot. Do you really think they’re tracking us?”
Sirius gave a noncommittal shrug, though the way his shoulders tensed gave the impression he was bracing for impact. “According to the locals in Milford,” said Sirius, tentative, “your mum had been there a month or two. Since we picked up her trail, though, she’s started moving from town to town every few days—isn’t it worth considering, at least?”
“What would you have me do, Pads? Stop looking for my own mother?”
“Moony…”
“Would you?” asked Remus, and Sirius flinched. He hadn’t meant for it to sound so harsh, so he reached for Sirius’s hand and squeezed. “Shite, bugger. I—if it were James or Lily or Mary or anyone else you cared deeply about, I mean to say. Would you err on the side of caution, even if it meant they might be hurt regardless? Or would you boldly fly into action?”
“I dunno.”
“Bollocks. You absolutely would,” replied Remus. “In a heartbeat.”
Sirius snorted. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Moony, but my decision-making process isn’t particularly something to aspire to. Speaking of decisions—"
“—the moon’s not till the eighth. We’ve got almost a week.”
“And if we haven’t found her by then?”
Remus preferred not to think about that, and said, “Padfoot, I’m freshly showered. Is this really the line of inquiry that you want to pursue—”
“—while in a strange muggle sex caravan?” finished Sirius. His grin was a little more crooked than usual. “Would be a waste, wouldn’t it?”
That happened more often. It became a habit. Not the sex—that was inversely proportionate with their hygiene—but the interrupting of dangerous thoughts with sex. Sometimes, it was the only moment in which Remus could breathe, and yet sometimes he felt worse afterwards, like he’d taken a lovely thing and dragged it through the mud.
In the afterglow he asked Sirius about it, and the boy shrugged. There was a reason people called it ‘blowing off steam,’ he said, cheeky and basking in the fairy lights, except that was exactly what Remus wanted to know: what steam did Sirius need to blow off? How was he feeling about this? About everything? The War? But the emotions of Sirius Black were more impenetrable than the vaults of Gringotts when he wanted them to be, and every time Remus dipped his toes into larceny, Sirius dipped his fingers under Remus’s waistband.
That only got worse as August’s full moon approached.
They hit Aberystwyth on the coast—you could tell how far north in Wales you were by the names—and, being both a major town with its own university and the cultural border between North and South Wales, their two-day canvasses were replaced with a week-long slog. ‘Working woman of middle age who looked vaguely like Remus’ was not exactly a rarity here.
It dragged them over the full moon and Remus’s energy, both in shagging and in searching, took its toll on Sirius. Sitting in their boarding room the night after the full made Remus’s blood boil over with worry. The only thing that kept him from going out on his own were the dark circles under Sirius’s eyes and off-yellow patches across his thin ribs. Watching Sirius’s fingers twitch in his sleep, and his pale, angular features twist up with dreamspun anxieties, that quick beat of Remus’s heart slowed until it almost stopped. Fucking Hell—what was he doing to Sirius?
As much as he felt the urge to break something, Sirius’s head was in his lap. So, Remus breathed. He did arithmetic. He whispered soothing nonsense and stroked Sirius’s dark glossy curls until sleep, too, took him.
They’d been looking for his mother almost a month, after all. They could afford to lose a day.
***
Porthmadog.
Wrexham.
Rhyl.
Colwyn Bay.
Bangor.
These weren’t obscure curses or magical creatures, they were major settlements in North Wales, and, though each one brought Remus closer to Hope, they also posed their own challenges and glutted themselves on four weeks of his precious time. When he pushed through August, Sirius nearly lost his resolve. 1 September was approaching like an oncoming train. Despite Sirius’s warnings, Remus was ready to play chicken with it. He had no intent of quitting, not when they were so close to finding her—even if, as Sirius reminded him, he’d said the same thing last week, and the week before that as well. Remus, however, needed no such reminders. He said as much—perhaps more—and it sparked another fight.
They went to bed angry and woke angry too.
Fighting and fucking had become roughly the same thing, sometimes with literal roughness, and yet Sirius refused to break himself from Remus’s shackles even though he offered to go it alone half a dozen times.
Well. ‘Offered.’ It was true if you counted Sirius slamming the door to their squat a counteroffer.
After a fitful and unsatisfying sleep alone, Remus woke on September first to the sound of pissing rain on an old Welsh tin roof and expected to find their farmshed squat empty. Instead, Sirius had returned with breakfast, still hot.
“The first week doesn’t matter, anyway,” he muttered. His curls were squashed by fatigue and, presumably, his helmet. The ends were damp. “We’ll catch up—if they don’t drop us from the program first.”
Worse still, while the enchantments on Sirius’s bike were holding up, its physical elements were not. Nearly two months of daily use, energetic transmutation, and a few muggles knocking it around for fun and/or revenge proved to be the motorbike’s limit, and they had to walk the thing for an hour into the outskirts of Holyhead—the western-most point of the Isle of Anglesey. Given the constant drizzle and the fact that Welsh summers averaged about twenty degrees, it left them wet, miserable, and bickering yet again.
6 September would be the full moon again, marking nearly two months of searching and their journey’s end. His mother was a hard woman to track, yes, but there only two roads onto the Isle, and another two roads onto Holy Island itself. If they somehow missed her here, she’d be able to run all over the country again with no guarantee she’d remain in the West—there was even a ferry, here, that sailed all the way to Dublin. All roads led away from Remus.
All of Remus’s roads led to the pair of Death Eaters. Whether they were stalking Hope or him and Sirius was yet unclear. Sirius had been the only one to see them proper despite two months of fleeting encounters. Although, Remus once kicked in a padlocked door only to discover the barn reeked of another werewolf—the rough-looking one of the pair, he presumed—and whoever they were, they carried a familiar scent. Old, like Socrates in the Forbidden Forest, and even somewhat like Remus himself. Needless to say they made themselves scarce and found another squat to make their home that night. It’d been a few weeks since and yet that scent was burned into Remus’s olfactory memory.
When he and Sirius talked about the pair, they called them the Suit and the Odour, making faces while doing so as if they were childhood monsters who weren’t real or, like Boggarts, were defeated by laughter.
A lifetime of growing up in a world where almost every problem was solvable with magic did that to you. It changed the way your mind worked, hitting you with a sudden tonal shift, like if in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the faeries pulled out rifles and trench shovels for Act III—THOUGH SHE BE BUT LITTLE, SHE IS FIERCE carved on the side of a screaming mortar shell. And, much like a mortar shell, habitual spellcasting often scrambled you up and left someone else to reassemble the pieces, because the ‘almost’ of ‘almost every problem’ usually left out every single thing you actually wished you could fix. That was the cost of magic. Remus had lost himself in the whimsy and found he didn’t much like the person that emerged.
All this he mused over as he leaned his weight on the mossy, rain-dampened brick wall of a semi-rural Welsh alleyway. A clogged drainpipe vomited irregular bursts of runoff onto the uneven cobble road. Sirius had apparently seen an older gent working on his car while they wheeled the bike through one of Holyhead’s less put-together neighbourhoods and had gone back to negotiate for—well, Remus wasn’t sure, exactly, as he preferred to help with the magical side of things, but Sirius needed something for some kind of physical repair. Remus offered to go with, of course, but Sirius told him he better tend the bike. Its nondescript qualities worked better with one of them near it.
Or at least so said Sirius. He was taking his sweet time and part of Remus couldn’t blame him. He was a bit of a nightmare to be around. Several bits, actually, although the other part of Remus was blaming Sirius for that nightmare because the boy was straddling the boat in the most annoying way possible. Sirius ought either be in or be out, but this half-stepping and pussyfooting suited neither of them. The boat was about to capsize.
The mangled metaphor did little to ease Remus’s headache. It helped even less that, when Sirius returned with some borrowed tools, he also had a tiny little plastic sachet between his crooked fingers that contained six pills. He’d been alleviated of twenty pounds for them.
Jesus Christ. The last time Sirius used muggle money had been over six years ago, and even then it hadn’t been his—James had paid for the cinema. Thereafter, they started sneaking in for the thrill of it.
Remus was trying hard not to lose his wits on Sirius. Probably. He was trying a decent amount, and the rest he blamed on a combination of the September full moon and that Sirius was often deliberate in angering him. Sometimes Remus wondered if he liked the rougher sex that followed.
As Sirius explained it, widows in Wales had something of an operation—trading their late and/or dying husbands’ medications or sometimes their own in order to pay the bills. It was how he’d got his paws on what Remus thought might be Valium. He’d been thoroughly overcharged for it, of course, although Sirius wasn’t having that explanation at the moment.
“Moony, we’re fine on cash. I still have something around a hundred pounds sterling on me.”
“That’s not much, Padfoot,” replied Remus. He winced. His splitting headache made the idea of partaking only all the more enticing. “It’s not like when we went to the cinema in third year. A hundred quid is worth now maybe a third of what it was ten years ago. Inflation,” he added offhandedly.
“Inflation…that’s when your muggle economy stretches like a balloon—”
“—Sirius—”
“—’cos there’s more air, as in currency, but the same amount of balloon, attached value. I did a NEWT in Muggle Studies, you might recall?”
“Right.”
“Apology accepted.”
Remus ran his hand through his hair. A very James thing to do, although Remus hadn’t showered in a few days and they’d been on the bike, so his fingers snagged and he swore.
“I don’t want to run around thieving and breaking into places if I don’t have to.”
“On the beach was all right, though? Do the French lack laws?”
“Those were tourist traps and off-licenses. They’ll be just fine. Here,” Remus continued, annoyed, “there’s been a spike in unemployment due to the recession—”
“—which is when they try to suck air back out of the balloon.”
“Sort of. Well, no, a recession is just when the economy goes down for a while, except ‘the economy goes down’ isn’t a phrase that makes sense, and,” said Remus, who wanted nothing more than to end this conversation although Sirius was being very patient with him, “in all honesty it’s very complicated and I don’t understand all of it, but the powers that be are currently trying to suck the air out of the balloon, except they-stroke-we need that air to breathe.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. S’pose it makes the air in the balloon more valuable because it’s scarcer and because they didn’t have to do anything, actually, to make it more valuable—they just took things away.”
“Ah. So they’re like the Ministry with the Kissed, then.”
“If Margaret Thatcher was a Dementor,” replied Remus, “then yes.”
“How is it you know all of this, again, Moony?”
“My mother was a trade unionist.”
“Ah.”
“I also spent some three years on a mountain watching my world fall apart with nothing to do but read about it,” he continued, willing his headache away. The moon’s proximity wasn’t helping. Blood thundered in his ears. “Which, come to think of it, is also like coming face to face with a Dementor.”
Sirius snorted. “Try living through it.”
“What is that—”
“Nothing, Jesus. Not what I meant.”
“Could you just focus on fixing the bike instead of buying mystery drugs from widows, please?”
Sirius shot him an even grey glare. “Ah, cheers, Moony,” he said, tony icy, “now that you’ve said that, I’ll just fix it, shall I? Thesis Reparo? Want a cuppa while I’m at it?”
“Padfoot—”
“—do you know how a carburettor works, Remus? No? What about a combustion engine?”
“I’m not an idiot,” Remus fired back. This fucking headache. “They use a mixture of oxygen and fuel plus an ignition source for combustive propulsion, which—”
“—have you ever touched one?” Sirius interrupted. His neck was flushed red and his sarcasm acidic. “Could you fix one? Without a wand, of course, ’cos in case you haven’t been paying attention, this is uncharted hybrid technology and my literal thesis project, Lupin. Do you think I enjoy failing at my only job—helping you—once again?”
The way he said ‘only job’ sounded less like a commitment and more of a burden, so Remus glared back at him. “Well, fuck, Sirius, if helping me find my mother is such an inconvenience for you, why don’t you bloody piss off?”
“I’m not you.”
Remus’s heart, already pumping quick with latent anger, sped so fast Remus thought it might stop or explode.
“I’ve spent the better part of a year helping you, Remus, even though you’ve tried just as hard to shut me out of everything—even though,” continued Sirius, snorting with that stupid aristocratic derision again, “you’ve said you’ve forgiven me a dozen times by now, ’cos every time you say it, I believe it less.”
“I didn’t ask—”
“—no, see, Remus, that’s the bloody point. I gave my help ’cos you needed it, and I have never once held that over you. Because,” he said, “that’s not what people do. You don’t leverage the people you love.”
“That’s rich. You helped me because you feel guilty—you still treat me like that stupid little charity case you and James found on the train.”
“Wow, Lupin. That’s how you see us?”
“And—fuck!” Remus was acutely aware that people were staring down the alley to watch them, but he didn’t care. They were in an alleyway in semi-rural Wales. This shite happened often. “It’s about you again. You don’t understand what it’s like—”
“—I have been trying—”
“—you were kicked out of this high-class world and you still somehow landed higher than I can ever get on my own. You have access.”
“Access,” replied Sirius, “that I’ve been trying to share. That you’ve been denying all bloody summer.”
“Imagine—God, I don’t know if you’d ever understand.”
Sirius stuck his chin out. “Try me, Lupin.”
“Imagine how guilty you’d feel if you had an exit. An out,” said Remus, trying to calm the simmering of his veins a moment. “Except taking it meant you were leaving everyone else in that shitty place you left behind. You go to a nicer place, but then you have to watch everyone who could’ve been you struggle.”
“Ah,” said Sirius. His voice was hollow. “So, me and Reg, then.”
Remus blinked. “That’s not what I—”
“Fuck off, Lupin,” spat Sirius. He hurled a wrench at his toolbox and the metallic clatter echoed against the old bricks of the alley, and, in the silence that followed, wiped off his hands on his jeans. A snap of his fingers gave the bike a slight blur.
Then he was storming off.
“I’m taking a break,” he called.
Or, well, there were more expletives involved, but that was the gist of it.
Well, sod him. Everyone had been giving out to him as of late about leaving or running away while pretending they weren’t all massive hypocrites. Remus didn’t have time to chase after Sirius or soothe yet another one of his hyperbolic, aristocratic moods. Nor did he have time to keep watch on a nonfunctional hybrid motorbike. Holyhead, like most Welsh towns, was small enough that you could walk across it in an hour, less if you were quick about it and knew the layout. With hours until sundown, he had time to start canvassing and still easily make it out of town before the moonrise. Sirius would come back with his tail tucked between his legs soon enough.
He didn’t come back when Remus pestered a series of petrol station attendants.
He didn’t come back when Remus questioned every waitress, clerk, and innkeep who fell in his frantic path.
He still didn’t back when the sun began to set and a cabbie asked if Remus was one of those rent boys from London he’d heard about—he’d fired back flippantly about the cabbie not being able to afford his prices yet received a generous if suspicious offer in reply, and thus declined even if he and Sirius could’ve used the funds—which is also when Remus started to worry. He could do the moon without Sirius, of course, and he’d told him to piss off, but he’d take a metaphorical door slam, loud and clear in its intent, over this Irish goodbye. It was unlike Sirius. Uncharacteristic. Too subtle for a boy whose pranks had at minimum six steps and three moving pieces. Who’d planned a murder so ingeniously, no one had gone to prison despite its abject failure.
The last red flag Remus needed waved itself in frantic desperation upon returning to the alleyway. Sirius’s bike was still there, as were his borrowed tools, though someone had filched the wrench. The message was clear.
“S.O.S.,” said the toolbox. “SAVE OUR SIRIUS.”
The Suit and the Odour had been here. There were other scents, yes, two or three others that were unfamiliar and foreign to Remus’s nose, but he was almost pathological in his memory of other werewolves’ smells and had spent too many years around Sirius’s blood—pranks and amateur duelling had had that side effect—to not recognise it. In fact, the blood lead away with a deliberate pattern to its spotting, a few drops here, a few drops there, such that every time the scent grew weak, another breadcrumb led Remus’s nose forwards again. Remus followed, of course.
It was an ambush. He knew that. Sirius had come back to the bike expecting Remus and found himself attacked instead, and perhaps that guilt was what propelled Remus to pursue the trail, breaking from his brisk walk into a jog as he left behind alleyways and old stone houses for the wet and overgrown fields of Wales. If he didn’t give chase, the Death Eaters would have little use for Sirius, and—well, finishing that thought would do him no good. His blood was boiling enough, and Remus was giving chase. He’d play their game and buy a little more time to think. His hands were restless. Heather streaked past him in springing violet clumps. He flexed his knuckles over and over and thought about that night two months ago outside the pub in Milford Haven. The building pressure in his bones would either tear him apart or let him moult this too-tight shell. His skull felt too tight. His skin was an ill-fitting pair of boots worn too long. He followed the hot scent of spilled blood.
The light rain was good for tracking. It kicked up scents, made them stronger in Remus’s nose. He broke into a sprint. His blood was on fire. Over the damp grasses and late-blooming summer wildflowers and fragrant spruce trees, he could smell the Odour.
The rising full moon, however, was even better for it.
Waves of agony wracked him just as he crested a small hill by a set of ancient standing stones, and Remus toppled over. His forearms splintered and expanded, growing long while the skin of his fingers ripped clean from the nailbed and his clothes split down the seams. Though Remus never could hear much over the sound of his own wailing, he always felt the top of his spine curl and arch forwards like a beckoning finger—and, on Sirius’s word, the sound alone was near enough to make a dog vomit. Remus vomited too. Probably. His mouth and throat were already on fire, it was hard to tell.
A minute later Remus was clad only in rags and the clouded moonlight was honey on his wounds. His skin felt fresh and new, like the underflesh of an old and freshly-peeled scab.
He cast back his head and howled.
A returning howl, furious and old, let him know he was not alone. Remus loped off towards it with his own furious intent. Underneath everything was Padfoot.
Wales was a barren blowing wasteland compared to the Forbidden Forest. The trees were children and the underbrush weak, sowed in a reticent and half-hearted attempt to repair the damage done by centuries of logging. Moving through them was easy, which, the wolf in him knew, was the point. This was meant to be a hunting ground.
Remus had one hope, one ace up his lupine sleeve—or a pair of them, actually—because even among his old colleagues in the Pyrenees, Remus knew precious few werewolves who remained cognizant and in control of their transformed bodies. Nor were the denmothers a teaching lot: Remus had had to puzzle out the ritual for himself. If the Odour was working with Death Eaters, they were unlikely, Remus thought, to be in full control.
Which meant that if Sirius could become Padfoot—
From the small coppice of trees ahead came a human scream, mighty and fricative and full of deep power. To a human, the voice would command respect and fear. That was the Suit. The ringleader. It silenced the other smaller cries of confusion and anger following it but not the familiar panicked yapping of an injurious dog.
Remus burst through the underbrush and caught a fleeting glance of a figure clad in a dark hood and black cloak. Another was running behind them, taller, a vaguely familiar gait—only a moment later they were gone, tackled by a silvery flash of fur and teeth and replaced by a gurgling shriek. The Odour was tearing into the flesh between their neck and shoulder with tooth and claw. The reek of iron was unlike anything he could remember. With one wet tug of its jaws all movement and sound in the prey before it died away at once, abruptly severed. Spitting bone. Saliva flooded his lupine jaw. The Odour’s bloody head lifted, slow, nostrils twitching, and she beheld Remus with reflective yellow eyes. Eyeshine. Her silvery fur was stained a deep crimson at the muzzle and elsewhere paled by the clouded moonlight. The young trees around them cast odd, spindly shadows on the meadowy ground.
When she stood, still hunched, the Odour was a few heads taller than Remus. Her pelt was scarred and bared in patches, but those old wounds were not the self-inflicted tolls of restraint, no. She was a soldier. The thing stood before him was a dog of war.
Immediately Remus knew he wouldn’t win a fight. Not a direct one, at least, and his odds for the indirect were almost as unfavourable. She knew the terrain, these woods, and Remus was still learning this body. Not only that, but—
Remus’s ear caught another struggled yap from a dog and he bolted after it. So too did the Odour after Remus.
The stench of human blood was overwhelming. Intoxicating, too, in a way that made Remus feel vampiric, but he thought that might be an advantage. Something he could exploit. If he could run the Odour into the path of another Death Eater, her instincts might divert her attention long enough to get them away. Given the wild fervour with which the Odour was tearing through bushes and other underbrush while every patch of briar caught Remus’s fur and tore him, there was a problem with that plan. Remus had about five breaths before she would be on top of him. He was no longer entirely certain she didn’t possess her full faculties as a transformed werewolf, yet the alternative was so terrifying he couldn’t theorise around it. His canine mind refused to consider it. The animal in him would not yet yield.
Four breaths later, Remus thrashed through a bramble in blind fury only to watch a flying length of barbed chains whip round and lash deep into Padfoot’s shaggy black flanks, earning a yelping cry from the dog and ensnaring him mid-lope. He hit the wet grass and left a smear in the mud as he struggled. A wizard in a grey three-piece suit strode forwards after him, wand in hand and humming, loud, as though he were the conductor of an orchestra and not a dark wizard about to kill.
The Suit levelled his wand again at the dog on the forest floor before looking up at the werewolf sprinting towards him. He swivelled, throwing up a domed shield half a breath before Remus slammed into him, but that was standard beast-fighting wizardry and so the Suit didn’t expect Remus to leap, clambering up and over said dome without breaking pace. Rain spattered on the invisible barrier in a worsening barrage. It soaked into his pelt and chilled Remus’s hot skin.
Eyes locked. The Suit had a plain and ordinary face. Remus wasn’t sure what he’d expected—something sinister, perhaps, but the Suit was a man, nothing more, nothing less. His head craned to track Remus’s preternatural speed over and back down the opposite side of the shield, and, though the Suit turned his wand on Remus, he didn’t mind. Better him than Padfoot.
The Suit only managed to fire off a single nonverbal curse before the Odour collided into the back of his shield, shattering it and sending the four of them flying in all cardinal directions.
Whether it was his back or the bark of the tree trunk that gave a sickening crack as Remus impacted it, he could not say. His own chest was already on fire. Alchemical fire. He rolled over and scrabbled at his canine chest, claws raking through his muddy fur. He found them. The Suit’s curse had embedded several silver darts into Remus’s side, and although each one burned with acid, they’d only found bone. None had slipped through. Happenstance. Lucky lucky lucky. It scalded his paws to yank them out, and yet he did, stumbling to a bipedal stand and letting the blood mat his fur. Remus felt woozy. The oak tree behind him keeled over, suddenly, like a slow actor who’d missed a cue. His eyes could scarcely follow the duel happing a dozen meters away.
The Odour was a flashing silver knife cutting neat circles around the Suit, who deflected her with a lackadaisical precision despite his shredded suit-jacked and bleeding headwound. A blurry orca harassing seals on an ice floe. She moved with such speed and him with so little, it felt funny. Out of place. Even as she blinked and dove at him from all angles, the Suit was herding her, Remus realised—directing the Odour back to task. If she was at all self-aware, her ire for her human handler far, far outweighed any devotion to the Death Eaters.
Behind them, Padfoot wriggled free of the barbed chains and rolled to his paws, bloodied and stumbling. Clumps of fur and skin had been torn away from his belly. He was drenched and mud-soaked and shivering. He loped with a distinct limp. They weren’t going to outrun anyone, not in their state.
Which was why Remus charged directly at the Suit, who was busy putting up yet another shield between himself and the frustrated Odour. She was terribly injured too—a thick branch protruded from between her shoulder and collar, piercing clean through her flesh and deadening the arm—and yet her yellow eyes caught Remus’s own. She doubled back, timing her and Remus’s attacks together.
Pack, her yellow eyes seemed to say.
His tie was off-kilter. Blood and rain flowed down from his temple, over his brow and into his left eye, which he kept scrunched up because he couldn’t spare a hand to wipe it away again. The Suit cast his wand towards the Odour and an open palm towards Remus. It was the safe bet—even wounded, she was the bigger threat. At that same moment, however, Padfoot twisted back into the naked, bleeding form of Sirius Black, who, sprawled in the thick grass, twisted several fingers together and yanked upwards. The Suit’s ruined jacket proved to be his undoing as his sleeve jerked upwards. Remus’s teeth collided with hot, squishy throat.
Thick oozing metal on his tongue was the last thing Remus felt before he lost himself in the blood and the viscera and the victory and the wounds of war, all dragging him into that empty dark void of unconsciousness.
In that void he was not alone.
***
Being only five years old, then, Remus had little memory of the aftermath, though he remembered stirring in bed not long thereafter during that strange space between night and morning. He’d woken, mumbling and crying, throat ragged and in desperate need of water. This feeling was much the same.
He felt between times. A cup lifted to his parted lips, feeding him small, soothing sips of water. A voice crooned to him to lie still. It hushed his feeble muttering. Whether it was Sirius or his mother was unclear and, for a moment longer, Remus wanted to lie still and embrace the ambiguity.
The world had made him tired. He deserved a little peace.
“Remus, love, don’t cry.”
Remus blinked and rubbed an eye with the heel of his hand. “Mum?”
“Shh, Remus,” whispered Sirius. He was staring down at him, Remus’s head cradled in his lap. His eyes bore dark circles beneath and his face was wan, even for Sirius. He looked ill. “Just drink a little bit more water.”
Although he tried, Remus drank too quick and sputtered. Sirius let him up, then, keeping his hands on Remus’s shoulders—perhaps to keep him up, or, Remus thought, perhaps to keep him down as he thrashed about. He blinked at his surroundings. A condemned house with boarded-up windows. They were back at the squat. Fading daylight crept through the cracks between planks along the walls, through old bedsheets hastily pinned up over the broken windows. Remus heard no rain. His stomach growled and twisted, as though it couldn’t decide if it was ravenous or was about to be sick. It eventually chose the latter, and, to Remus’s embarrassment Sirius had a well-decorated bucket on hand. The boy held Remus’s shaggy hair back as he was sick inasmuch his empty stomach allowed.
Afterwards, Sirius smoothed a hand over Remus’s bare back, his cold crooked hands soothing against the fire raging under Remus’s skin. His blood felt like hot sludge. The sweet rotted juice of rubbish, directly in his veins.
“Where,” panted Remus, frantic, “did they—”
“—dead,” said Sirius, quiet. He brought a damp flannel to Remus’s mouth. “The whole lot of them, except the werewolf. Three Death Eaters, and, ah, they had two Kissed with them as well. They were the ones to grab me off the bike, but they’re gone too. She was thorough.”
The taste of metal crawled over his tongue like a cockroach. He didn’t ask his role in the slaughter. The haunted look in Sirius’s eyes told him enough.
“I saw your mum, Remus,” said Sirius. He folded his fingers through Remus’s shorter crop of hair and then brough both hands to rub his face, up and down. He looked almost high—like how Remus felt in the aftermath of the admixtured cocaine, desperate for sleep and yet unable to find it. “I had to carry you back. Couldn’t keep my hands from shaking so I made you lighter and put you over my shoulder. It’s funny,” continued Sirius, giving a little smile, “you started snoring. It felt like we were on holiday again. I think that might’ve been the haemorrhaging, but it really did.
“I s’pose it makes sense I saw her. Hope, rather. She wasn’t gonna catch a cab on the other side of town, now, was she? Turns out she wasn’t taking the ferry to Dublin after all. It’s funny, I s’pose I thought she might recognise me. I wanted to stop her, get her attention, but, y’know, I was carrying her rag-clad wounded son on my shoulder and I was oozing blood under my coat, so I—you have to understand, Remus, I didn’t know what to do,” he said, voice breaking. He was rambling now. “She was talking with the cabbie a minute and I took a look at the cloaking spell Lyall put on her. Turns out he’d cocked it up after all. Rush job, I s’pose, and that charm you cobbled together in London happened to poke a big hole in it, but I fixed it.
“I—Remus, I only had a minute to decide what to do, and after all that—I don’t know why they went after her or if they were after her at all, but I saw a door for her, Moony, a way out, and all I could think of was Reg, and I couldn’t take that away from her. There are some mistakes you don’t get to make twice. I patched up her protections and let her go. She’s safe. No one can follow her, not even us, and, and I don’t know if I would do it the same way again, but I think I might. You have to understand, I didn’t know what to do, or what I could possibly do. I couldn’t ask you. I had a minute, Remus, a minute. Less, even. I asked myself if the Remus I knew would rather have her be safe and far away or close and in danger, and—say something, Moony.
“Say anything, even if you never want to speak to me again.”
Remus rolled over and looked up at the frightened boy above him, dark curls plastered to his forehead by sweat and exhaustion, pale, slender cheeks made even more gaunt by blood loss. All of his midsection was wrapped tight with coppery bandages, and every muscle in his body, albeit so tired, was tensed, braced against an incoming blow.
Too tired and broken of spirit to do much else, Remus curled an arm around Sirius’s back and pressed their skin together. He closed his eyes.
“Take us home, Padfoot,” croaked Remus. “There’s nothing left for us here.”
Notes:
Milford Haven is one of many Welsh cities that bore the unmitigated blows of Thatcher's economic ravaging and regressive monetarist policies. In 1981 unemployment was sky-high. Now, in 2025 (at the time of writing) it is something of a tourist economy with marinas and maritime museums and a reconverted-outdoor-swimming-pool-turned-water-garden that was inaugurated by Margaret fucking Thatcher of all people in 1990, the year she left office, where, after 11 years as Prime Minister, unemployment had risen across Wales from ~65,000 people to ~86,000. The word I see used most often is that Milford Haven has been 'beautified', though I could think of other more appropriate words. An unbelievably overwhelming proportion of them are still Christian—as in, approaching ninety-nine percent. In some ways Milford Haven is the perfect Welsh microcosm.
This chapter marks the end of Book I. Don't touch that dial! Remus and Sirius will return soon in Book II, but, first, we'll be enjoying a brief Intermission, posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 21 February, a Friday.
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is This Is Not Your Year by montparnasse, a 17k Sirius POV First War fic that features the crabby, irritated, unsettled dynamic I love between Remus and Sirius sometimes. Don't let that frighten you: montparnasse's R/S feels compelling to me because it's never love which is in question, but the nature of that love.
Chapter 13: Intermission: End of Book I
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
The Daily Prophet, 15 July 1965
BLOODLESS MINISTER HALF-HEARTED, CLAIMS MALFOY
WHITEHALL—In the wake of yet another werewolf attack on the magical children of Britain, Minister for Magic Nobby Leach faces great criticism from sitting members of the Wizengamot for his ‘half-hearted’ and ‘bloodless’ response, says opposition leader Abraxas Malfoy.
“Ours is not the time for novelty,” said Malfoy when asked about the recent string of lycanthropic infections. “On the matters of cultural heritage and to whom we leave our magical legacy, a muggleborn Minister is ill-equipped to lead, and it shows in the lacklustre, bloodless, and frankly half-hearted response to our current crisis.”
Sources from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement (DMLE) agree: according to Aurors who spoke with Prophet correspondents on the condition of anonymity, Leach favours ‘anticipatory’ deployment to protect the Squib occupation of Wizarding establishments such as the Leaky Cauldron and the Ministry’s own Floo Lobby instead of tracking down suspected werewolves and other political malcontents.
Why illegal Squib action needs protecting and our children, evidently, do not, sources could not say.
Funding for the Department of Creatures (DRCMC) has been slashed under Leach’s reign, who, as the first muggleborn Minister for Magic, made waves by redirecting resources to education and staffing at St. Mungo’s. While public reactions have been mixed, some vocal opponents such as DRCMC head Gwyn Selwyn have panned this move as ‘an attack on a rich history of private tutorship’ and ‘undermining the independence, both financial and otherwise, of Britain’s finest healers.’
Others, such as up-and-coming legal critic Malodora Snyde, argue that a direct line can be drawn from mismanaged capital to the werewolf attacks today.
According to Snyde, “Whether you believe Minister Leach is mad or a visionary, abandoning his fiduciary duty to the Werewolf Register and by extension all of magical Britain is, I think, an unquestionable error. Progress is not progress when its reckless haste comes at the cost of irrevocably ruined lives.”
Minister Leach could not be reached for comment by the time of this story’s printing.
MSSR PRONGS, ESQ., &C. &C.
17 JULY 1978
DEAR SIR PRONGS STOP
YOU MAY BE PLEASED TO KNOW THAT I RECEIVED TODAY, FIVE MINUTES BEFORE THE TIME OF WRITING AS IT HAPPENS, A LETTER FROM ALBUS P.W.B. DUMBLEDORE, ORDER OF MERLIN &C. &C. OFFERING ME ONE OF FOUR SPOTS IN THEIR ‘PRESTIGIOUS’ POSTGRADUATE PROGRAM AT HOGWARTS STOP YOU MAY ALSO NOT BE PLEASED TO KNOW STOP AND IF SO IT IS BECAUSE YOU ARE A SORE LOSER THE SIZE OF A HORNTAIL STOP NEENER NEENER STOP
AS I HAVE NEITHER HEARD FROM NOR SPOKEN TO NOR OTHER, CLEVERER INDIRECT OBJECT VERB HERE’D YOU IN A MONTH, A MONTH PRONGS, THAT’S FOUR WEEKS IN CASE YOUR TINY PEA BRAIN COULD NOT CALCULATE IT, I AM FORCED TO ASSUME YOU HAVE FINALLY ENTERED INTO EVANS’S FANNY AND BECOME ONE FLESH, NEVER TO SEPARATE, NEVER NEVER NEVER STOP
I AM WOUNDED PRONGS STOP I THOUGHT WE HAD SOMETHING SPECIAL STOP
YOUR MUM SENDS YOU WELL WISHES IN YOUR NEW EMPLOYMENT AS A TUTOR STOP HAHA PROFESSOR PRONGS STOP AND ALSO SHE HAS ASKED ME TO ASK OF YOU WHEN SHE MIGHT EXPECT GRANDCHILDREN STOP I THINK THIS MAY BE A JOKE STOP BUT I AM NOT SURE STOP I AM LOST WITHOUT YOU, ADRIFT, AND WANDER YOUR BEDROOM AT NIGHT LIKE A PALE AND HANDSOME VICTORIAN GHOST STOP
YES I HAVE A VICTORIAN NIGHTIE STOP I FOUND IT IN A MUGGLE COSTUME SHOP IN THE VILLAGE STOP BRILLIANT THESE MUGGLES, REALLY STOP
I EAGERLY AWAIT YOUR REPLY STOP HOWEVER I WOULD APPRECIATE WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT AS WELL STOP AS YOU MAY RECALL, PRONGSIE BOY, MY APPLICATION WAS SOMETHING OF A JOKE, A PROTEST VOTE REALLY, EXCEPT THEY HAVE RUN WITH MY IDEA AND NOW I AM OVERCOME WITH FEAR STOP I KNOW NOTHING OF MOTORBIKES OTHER THAN THEY ARE SEXY AND FIT STOP SEND HELP STOP
YES I KNOW STOP PETARD STOP HOISTED STOP &C. &C. STOP
MY THOUGHTS ARE A DANGEROUS THING TO LEAVE ALONE WITH ME STOP I CANNOT BE TRUSTED WITH THEM STOP VISIT SOON OR ELSE STOP
HUGS AND KISSES AND A VICIOUS WET BUGGERING TOO XOXO LOVE PADFOOT STOP
ALBUS DUMBLEDORE
30 AUGUST 1978
ALBUS,
Because I realise I didn’t answer in my prior correspondence, Adelaide is well, thank you for asking. (Little bugger keeps me on my toes despite her age. I don’t think she enjoys new environments very much, though the same could be said about me.)
The reason I’m writing you so last-minute is because I have received confusing word from the postgraduate board and their turnabout time is insufficient for me to have matters arranged for the train ride tomorrow.
If at all possible, please send me the final (truly final) roster of incoming postgraduates as well as their academic record summaries. It would make for a poor first impression to welcome postgrads who are not there and leave out the others who slid in under (or over) the wire.
While I understand you can’t comment in any official capacity on the withdrawal of Emily Leach, she was, if not a friend, then an apprentice of sorts during my two years with the program. While I’m obviously biased, her academic record was unparalleled (except by my own) and I was looking forwards to having some actual competition.
From P.A. as well! Wouldn’t that have been a shock?
Speaking of (or writing on) P.A., the other part of my confusion is regarding Leach’s supposed replacement. The board failed to send over his full application, and his records are even shabbier (beyond forgetting his OWLs or NEWTs, they didn’t even list what school he went to after Hogwarts, they just wrote ‘French Pyrenees’). I know the board is fielding fire from across the board (clever, don’t you agree?) but this kind of shoddy recordkeeping only bolsters arguments against the program.
Please advise.
As for the other thing, I’ve attached as requested the abridged notes of my latest research expedition with this letter. (I’d have sent the full thing, but that might kill the owl.)
Please metre your disappointment: the Powers That Be at the Ministry delayed my approval for visiting Azkaban until after term start, citing “security concerns,” which I think means they’re worried I’m an ethics review commissioner or somesuch.
(Ha! If they only knew.)
I’ll keep this letter short so you have sufficient time to reply and so I can post it before this afternoon. Our chariot awaits, after all.
GLORIA, G&T.
SIRIUS O. BLACK III
28 NOVEMBER 1978
YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED to attend the funeral service for Josephine and Violet Pettigrew. As arrangements are still being made, the service is currently scheduled for 1 February, 1979. Please indicate your attendance in the boxes below.
HI PADFOOT,
This is a really hard letter for me to write. The ministry she they aren’t releasing their bodies because the ministry is keeping their bodies while they ‘figure out’ what happened. The Aurors said my family were su a bunch of awful things and I know they’re not true. They made a mistake but that only makes me angrier.
I know that we haven’t always been as close and you and Prongs or you and Moony Remus but it would mean a lot to me if you were there. My family liked you a lot despite everything.
You can bring Remus if you want but please don’t if there’s going to be fighting. Mum wouldn’t want that.
Hope to hear from you soon
WORMTAIL
BENJAMIN FENWICK
21 DECEMBER 1978
DEAR BENJY, IF THAT IS HIS REAL NAME
Do not say it.
You said it would happen and I said it would not and so I beg of you, please, do not say it. Do not write it. Do not ring me and breath heavy into the receiver knowing I will know and then think it. Thatcher’s polling is punishment enough without me having to stomach your know-it-all political machinations, oh Great and Future First Gay Black Muggleborn Minister for Magic.
God save the queen and all that jazz.
Hope your family’s well, and I’m sorry you couldn’t see them over the hols but maybe it’s for the best. I’ve been back less than week and I’m already driving them round the twist with the new security I want to put up. I can tell my mum wants to ask about J, but she’s not yet.
Hate the hovering, love that she hovers.
I thought this Christmas might be normal but I reckon it won’t ever be normal, which is awful because I used to like the holidays. Jesus, I miss the drunk carolling.
There’s been a lot of that and I don’t mean carolling. Was out at an all-nighter two days ago and you’d be horrified at how things have changed. Pleased too because you called it, but still.
They’ve taken over, my friend, and they
have
no
rhythm.
Gutted. There’s skinheads crawling out of every nook and fanny and I can’t tell the queer punks from the punk queers anymore. My taste’s been ruined by academia. Hope you’ve had more luck pulling in the village than me, and maybe you’ll learn their names this time. Ha!
You should get your gift in the post a few days after Christmas. Wish I could’ve owled it, but both my nans are over until Old Year’s Day and they’re allergic. Mum don’t mind the lack of mess, though.
I won’t spoil the surprise, but it begins with “a m” and ends with “assive supply of exciting goods.”
That’s the other thing about these all-nighters. I could do without the white supremacists, but some magic’s moved in at the same time. The drugs are to die for, mate. In the literal sense too. If ever I’m on my deathbed, I want nothing more than for you to feed me hit after hit of this new stuff they’ve got until I ascend beyond this mortal coil. Once you try it, you’ll know.
Please keep me apprised as to the dramatics of the hols. I need to maintain my omniscient appearance in front of the others, less they forget I’m their patron saint of gossip.
LOVE,
MARY
P.S. YES BECAUSE I KNOW YOU’D BE FURIOUS IF I LEFT IT OUT, I DID TELL HER, AND SHE SAID ‘I NEEDED TIME’ END QUOTE. MAYBE THAT GIVES SOME CONTEXT ON THE WISTFULNESS.
The Daily Prophet, 31 December 1978
MINCHUM MINCES WORDS OVER ‘NAUGHTY LIST’
WHITEHALL—After a harrowing attack that left three dead and dozens more wounded, Minister Minchum walks a fine line between inciting panic and downplaying grave affairs. Full statement copied below.
“I am pleased,” said Minchum before a limited press group, “that the efforts of Aurors and our intelligence experts at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement limited the physical damage perpetrated by our enemies unknown. However, my solemn heart understands that the pains of such a violating attack go deeper: they wound our hearts and minds as well.”
Minchum declined to answer questions on how detailed all stolen records were from the muggle-bound ‘post office’ of Hogsmeade or what measures would be taken, if any, to remedy the theft.
DMLE Head Bartemius Crouch likewise dodged all questions, instead focusing on his accomplishments since being appointed, including ‘a streamlined process of ensuring threats to the State do not escape justice’ and the new sub-office of Kissed liaison agents.
“Azkaban is no longer a drain on our resources,” he explained, “and by next year, the reformation programs will ensure that even our most egregious offenders contribute to the betterment of magical Britain.”
Crouch ended his briefing with a call imploring any and all with information on ‘threatening activities’ to come forwards and keep their communities safe.
It comes as little solace to those whose lives and livelihoods became collateral damage in the unclaimed attacks against muggleborn businesses in recent weeks, and the question remains: is this an ill omen for things to come in what analysts speculate may be Minchum’s final year?
D.
15 FEBRUARY 1979
Sorry to not reply sooner, as I’m very hungover and very busy with my VERY SUCCESSFUL project. None of the bids are high enough for my liking, yet, so I may hold onto the research another year to get them antsy. Make them beg for it, you know.
Innuendo, hilarious.
Aye, I’ve got a good feeling about the latest crop. If you recall the ones from that All Hallow’s Eve night, aye, THAT one, I tried hard myself to forget it, but the encyclopaedia and the disgrace are shaping up well. Bit daft but loyal. We might make something of them yet. Even if they are absolutely twisted, and no, you don’t know the HALF it. You don’t want to know.
B’s got eyes on a cherry you might like on his side of things. A real stunner, apparently. Thinks she might be on par with you given enough reassurance.
None are good in a pinch yet, but it takes all sorts, aye? Besides, we can’t all be YOU, D, even if you can be YOU more than any of us can be US.
I’m not nervous about finishing. You’re nervous about finishing. Also, my knees are fine, please stop asking.
Don’t mind the above spot. It’s sick.
Advise on new partner, S.P., need to know if ‘fair flyer’ means ‘fair’ or ‘FAIR, WINK WINK, AYE, E?’. I have a reputation to maintain.
Give love to G&F and tell F I might have a match for him if he can tolerate a sizeable ego.
More innuendo. Hold all applause to the end, which is now.
E.
VYNAMERE DUSTRADE,
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TO THE DAILY PROPHET,
SNAKE, SWINE, MORDRED TO MERLIN
11 APRIL 1979
I HOPE THIS LETTER reaches you poorly. You deserve no happiness, no joy, wonder, or satisfaction in your life, and if the quality of your drivel is any indication, you do currently suffer a terrible lack of all that and more. Your cowardice belongs in a children’s tale.
The coverage of the Prophet is abysmal. There is, if you have not noticed, a War, and yet no Prophet publication in the last eight months has used the words ‘War’ or ‘Death Eater,’ or even ‘murder’ when pertaining to the death of a muggle. This kind of prejudice is career-ending should it be laid out to the public. The world is crying out for a rival to the Prophet—one that actually pays its copyeditors—and you are priming its birth.
When your readership collapses, you’ll only have yourself to blame. Unless you discover a ‘novel’ way to blame it on the former Minister Jenkins, you raging misogynistic bottomfeeder.
If you have any shred of self-respect left, which you’ve no doubt stolen from someone who can actually look themselves in the mirror, you’ll resign, apologise, and then become a hermit, because the alternative is that you drink yourself to death in a decade’s time.
No one will attend your funeral, because no one attends the funerals of disgraced hack writers who play nice with murderous supremacists.
The choice is yours.
CORDIALLY,
MARLENE MCKINNON
WALBURGA V. BLACK
15 APRIL 1979
MOTHER,
He has not done anything of note. Like much the rest of his life, his affairs are dull and disappointing, and his disposition has been evened, I suspect, by the absence of Potter’s corrupting influence.
I have found no truth to the rumours, although I will notify you at once should this change.
With your permission, I would like to remain at Hogwarts for the duration of my break, as my NEWTs demand significant attention and so too does my postgraduate application. You will be pleased to know that Horace Slughorn has procured a number of gleaming endorsements from his contact network as to my academic rigour.
Please give my best regards to father. I hope he is managing his health well and that his trip to the West is serving him well.
YOUR SON,
REGULUS ARCTURUS BLACK II
The Daily Prophet, 7 June 1979
OPINION: KISS THE RING, BY MALODORA SNYDE
Every magical child in Britain knows the story of Babbitty Rabbitty and Her Cackling Stump, a tale as instructive in matters of justice and persecution as it is in structural hierarchies. It reminds us that there is no such thing as ‘society.’ We are individual people, and our oppressors, the overambitious kings. Minister for Magic Harold Minchum is one such disastrous royal.
Though he follows in a line of two equally awful Ministers, Nobby Leach’s weak constitution and Eugenia Jenkins’s soft attitude towards lawlessness merely set the chisel to Minchum’s wild hammer. His overzealous response ventures far beyond ‘seeking order’ and, in this author’s opinion, lands not far afoul of militarism. One need only look at the prerogative of Minchum’s Ministry to see this is true.
While I, like all other respectable witches and wizards, harbour no sympathy for the depraved and deviant souls that dwell in Azkaban’s depths, Minchum’s Ministry has almost tripled its issuance rate for the Dementor’s Kiss since narrowly defeating Abraxas Malfoy in the election of 1975. Surely we cannot say that murder and mayhem—as perpetrated by wizards—have grown thrice as common in only four short years. I, myself, have never felt safer among my kind.
Yet in the night sometimes I lie awake and worry about the people who might darken my doorstep. I hear a sound and wonder if perhaps a humble opinion piece such as this one has been deemed ‘too dangerous’ for public consumption and if I will find myself and my family on the dangerous end of an Auror’s wand, or the unfeeling iron grip of the Kissed. As Minchum continues to censor public speech and indeed label criticism ‘criminal,’ I cannot help but wonder when, not if, an outspoken wizard mind will count as a ‘criminal enterprise.’
In the telling of Babbitty Rabbitty, children learn that years of loyal service will not protect them should their mad king, desperate to steal all magic from others, turn on them to soothe his own failing.
I only hope that the people of magical Britain have paid attention.
MALODORA SNYDE IS A WEEKLY CONTRIBUTOR TO THE DAILY PROPHET ON MATTERS OF OPINION AND MAGICAL LAW.
EVANS, LILY
17 JULY 1979
DEAR MS. EVANS,
Though our time together was short and though I am no longer a Professor at Hogwarts, please do not think I would abandon my investment in your academic progress. Rest assured I will be following your research until its conclusion. I hope it as well appreciated by the world at large as it is by myself.
You will, I think, rise to great heights, Ms. Evans.
My belief in this fact is only strengthened by the knowledge (hopefully delivered after your own learning, goodness!) that you will assume the responsibilities of the board-postgraduate liaison.
Congratulations, Ms. Evans! This is an honour of the highest accord and well-worthy of celebration for a postgraduate only entering her second year. They must be thoroughly impressed with all you’ve accomplished thus far.
As you will doubtlessly come to learn, Professor Dumbledore has been unable to secure the services of a new instructor for wandless magic. While he is perfectly capable of teaching himself, it is safe to say the Headmaster is a busy man, and so, should he be unavailable, it is my strongest recommendation as the departing instructor that Sirius Black be placed as a postgraduate lead for wandless magic.
Though not a true replacement, Black shows both an intuitive understanding of the art as well as a more concrete understanding of the underlying thaumaturgical mechanics. With some practice and the right assistant, he may yet make for a fine teacher.
In other pedagogical matters, there is another postgraduate who may pique your interest, this one an incoming one. While I had hoped to be her advisor (just as I’d hoped to continue being yours!), other pressing matters demand my attention and so I humbly ask that you look after her in my absence. She will be, to my understanding, placed in Theory: Ms. du Pont is a paragon of Arithmantic cryptography and will feel out of place so far from Beauxbâtons if the others do not give her a warm welcome. I implore you to do so, if nothing else because I believe she will provide keen insight into your own research.
Remembering correctly, Mr. Lupin is a colleague of yours and also completed his studies in France. Introducing them may aid in ‘breaking the ice,’ so to speak, though I am certain you will have no difficulty befriending her regardless.
Please do keep me updated as to your own academic progress and life’s journey! Contrary to public belief, we Aurors do have lives outside of the workplace.
And, as a closing note on the matter o
(The remainder of the letter has been burned away at the bottom, leaving only a singed edge.)
REMUS
10 AUGUST 1979
DEAR REMUS
I’m sorry I didn’t send you a letter back sooner. My English ritin is shit and last moon was a rite cunt. Load a shit came our way. I’d tell you all the det detale details if I didn’t know you’d come runnin, bird that you are.
We can’t find Siobhan anymore since the full. Apollo told me he was going to Dublin cos she has family and a bairn there and I hadn’t the heart to tell him back she wasn’t gonna be there. Terra reckons she’s dead. Other wolves been sniffin at us for weeks now.
One found me in the wrong part of Manchester but turns out he was bent as me and I got him to promise he’d say he couldn’t find me to his Pack.
Told you I can handle my own shit well nuff on me own. Melon never even got his cock out. Away you go you fuckin clown.
Cheers for the hunner. Sweet on me, are you? Twy twi two times my normal rate.
Miss your kisses. Your mouth if I’m honest. I never met someone who shags like someone who wants to be shagged so fierce like. Hope we can meet again before you have to go back wherever dead clever boys go after the summer. Give you a proper send off.
Rotten luck, mine.
T’s got a new line on a deal, big on I reckon, so don’t fash over the money and I will pay you back the hunner soon. Can’t fathom how you got it.
Packed some free shit from the new shit with this letter. Think of me when you take it.
Think real hard.
Also rapped some of those zines as you asked. Filthy things them. Promise you’ll try some of that with me when you get back, aye?
LOVE LUV (SIC)
KELLY THE RABBIT
TERRA
30 AUGUST 1979
All’s set! New stuff was a hit at bridge. If your new man keeps up his side of the bargain, all my ladies are open for business.
Lots of room for expansion. Young ones come back from those all-nighters in the city looking for what you’ve got and all the boys are howling for work right now, no matter the field.
God Bless the sailors and God Bless their boats more. Without them there’d be a thousand old ladies out on the street, and their grandchildren too.
Should talk about dosages soon and alternatives to take the edge off. Old stuffs the same but the ones losing their jobs aren’t using for fun anymore, and some of them are getting reckless. Dead customers aren’t paying ones.
Bridge next month?
And can we come up with a better name than Dragon’s Blood? Even the muggle think it’s camp and it might raise some Auror hackles when it takes off. Already had two wizards drop by asking questions. I flogged them off and both looked to be full nancy (I would know, given my husband!) but I think the Ministry’s desperate these days. Takes all kinds except ours.
BEST,
LIS
Chapter 14: Book II: Late to Term
Chapter Text
Going back to postgrad the same week Remus lost his mother for the second time seemed trite, but the truth was that he had nowhere else to be.
Still delirious from his wounds and mourning he didn’t recall much of the journey home. He couldn’t sleep—Christ, no, he wouldn’t sleep—but the bleary grey Welsh countryside gave way to damp green hills and distant drizzled-on farmhouses in the English West Country. Remus rode with his cheek mashed up against the cool, sterile black leather of Sirius’s dragonhide jacket, engine lulling him in and out of hideous consciousness as Sirius tore down the motorway with a seething, deafening roar. London was a tumour on the horizon, and an alien landscape to suffer through. Too many flights of steps. Off-yellow wallpaper. Floral mint-green drapes. Their little Soho flat still had all of their Welsh maps up on the wall, now plain and disenchanted, and neither he nor Sirius had the requisite willpower to tear them down. Nor, too, did they have the strength, what with Sirius’s ragged sides still weeping blood and Remus filtering the silver from his body. Not one part of him was spared aches or sores or a deep, smouldering fever. It was more vicious than every hangover he’d ever had unionised.
Fatigue was a small blessing to that end. They dumped their luggage on the chevron floorboards and toed off their muddy, bloody boots by the coat rack where they’d inevitably trip over them later. Sirius gave no fuss as Remus redressed his ribs. His old bandages were slick with blood, a deep ruby red that stained his fingers. Remus dumped them in the bathtub to handle later. Thereafter they fell into bed and slept near a whole day.
Once, Remus started awake and ran to the loo to vomit the lonely acid of his stomach—most all of the food in their flat had, as it turned out, gone off during their prolonged absence, as foods were wont to do, turning their fridge into yet another local hazard—only to find Sirius thrashing in his sleep upon returning. Fists balled in unlaundered linen sheets. His pale face beaded with sweat and his lips twisted to mutter frantic let-me-go’s, so Remus woke him to spare him the nightmare. Holding Sirius too tight, however, would do little good and much harm, actually, so instead he kneeled by the side of the bed and lay his head in Sirius’s lap, letting the boy rake crooked fingers through his unwashed hair. Soothing others soothed Sirius best.
After it happened a second time, Remus realised his absence provoked the nightmares. He resolved never to let Sirius sleep alone again. At least that much was familiar to him: something he knew he could do as he’d done before, years ago, although Sirius’s nightmares had had a different origin, then. The memory grounded him. It might’ve been the only thing keeping him from blowing away in the wind.
Just as familiar was the letter that arrived by owl for Remus on the eighth, a week after start of term. It was brief. The letters curved with knowing whimsy.
LUPIN, REMUS JOHN
7 SEPTEMBER 1979
DEAR REMUS,
I hope this letter finds you, and with greater hope that it finds you well. Your absence at Hogwarts is deeply felt and so too, I feel, is the absence of Mr. Black, whose flying students have queried me almost a dozen times already as to when he might return. Your colleagues are equal in their worry. These uncertain times do little to quell our paranoid minds, I fear.
As the pair of you have missed the train, I have included herewith a card. On it, you will find the address of a trusted ally who may assist you in transporting yourselves to Hogsmeade should you yourselves be unable.
To reveal the contents of the card, simply speak the last words we shared when I first visited your family home in Cardiff. I, for one, remember them fondly.
YOURS,
ALBUS DUMBLEDORE
Remus no longer cared if or how the Headmaster knew. Hogwarts was safe. Mostly. It was warm, away from the War, and had food beyond anything he could manage while healthy, let alone while tending Sirius or with Sirius tending him. More than that, though, Remus had tried to dip his toes into life after studies, the waters of doing things instead of reading about doing things, and found himself instead thrust into the pool headfirst. What a sorry fucking idea that had been. Rescuing his mum—from where? From what? He’d nearly drowned. He’d nearly pulled Sirius down with him. Even if it was rote, even if he flunked out or produced nothing of import, this, Remus knew, would keep him drifting. He could keep afloat at Hogwarts. He could play the role of an academic. He knew how to do this and do it well.
With Sirius tucked against his chest, still sleeping and heartbeat languid, Remus packed their trunks with a few gentle flourishes of his wand. He’d spent enough hot early summers in their schoolboy dormitory helping James pack up Sirius’s things—the boy wouldn’t do it himself for reasons Remus didn’t understand, and later understood too well—and so he knew, more or less, everything Sirius might need. Required readings; as much muggle clothing as possible; several saucy posters involving the words ‘half-naked,’ ‘women,’ ‘motorbikes,’ and ‘men,’ in a number of possible permutations; the self-compacting record player along with their now joint-record collection; a yet-unopened shoebox; and every small personal gift he’d been given, from James’s compact to Lily's pint glass to Mary’s sleek-handled hairbrush.
Remus only editorialised a little. Such were the hazards of having someone pack for you.
As for the bike, he—well, he decided they’d figure it out later. Remus wasn’t about to let Sirius bloody ride it again, given the rumble of the engine kept his cursed wounds from closing. The last thing they needed was for him to bleed out in the sky and plummet half a kilometre to the ground. Maybe, Remus thought, they could bewitch the bike to fly to Hogsmeade on its own.
This and more Remus ruminated over as he lifted slim cardstock to his lips.
“But what if I’m rubbish at school?” he asked, smiling grimly. Ink bloomed across the card.
“HELP WILL ALWAYS BE GIVEN AT HOGWARTS TO THOSE WHO ASK FOR IT,” it read.
“Moony? Whassat?” mumbled Sirius. He stirred awake without a start, this time, and traced his fingers up Remus’s wrist. It tickled. Sirius yawned.
“Just an old memory,” replied Remus. He yawned, too, and then sputtered as Sirius groped for his chin and found lip instead of fuzz. “Up you pop, then,” Remus continued. “Wallowing in our flat until we starve is going to do us very little good, I think, so I’ve packed our things. We’re going to go visit a friend.”
“You’re certain that’s a good idea?”
“No, actually, not at all. Well, the not starving part, yes, but the rest of it, no, of course not.”
“S’pose that’s never stopped us before, has it?”
Remus snorted at that.
“Not a once, as I recall.”
On the reverse of the card was a street address not too far from the Leaky Cauldron. A walkable distance. Wheelable, too, as they took the bike along with them if only to carry all of their wares, though Sirius drew the line at sitting on it while Remus wheeled it along. It was odd: of course he understood that the intricacies of Sirius’s thesis had kept unwanted eyes off them in Wales, but it was only there, rolling Sirius’s bike down the sidewalk outside of their Soho flat as scores of unblinking muggles parted around them and rejoined the flow of pedestrian traffic without so much as batting an eye at their bedraggled appearance or hangdog expressions that he thought, somewhat sheepish, that he ought give Sirius a touch more credit than he’d perhaps afforded him those past few months. Not one person stopped them as they turned up old Charing Cross Road. He didn’t recognise the address itself, but it led them to an old stone terraced house whose entrance required climbing a few steps below street level and that bore a single subtle yet very specific enchantment to ward off solicitors.
Remus only realised the versatility of such an enchantment as he rapped on the door, dried blood flaking under his fingernails. The door swung open half a minute later to reveal the dark and handsome Welsh-boy-next-door face of one Benjamin “Benjy” Fenwick, who grinned and then promptly frowned upon seeing his and Sirius’s sorry states. He looked much the same—had that same short crop of dark hair, stood with the same moderate build, and looked at Remus with the same kind and worried brown eyes. The worry in them was larger than before and the kindness only the same.
“Merlin’s bloody arse,” said Benjy. He waved them both inside and cast a glance out behind them before shutting the door. “Come in, come in, like,” he continued, leading the pair of them a short distance to a long and burgundy velvet-ish sofa with, curiously, three mugs of tea already poured on the coffee table before it and a sleepy-looking grey owl watching them from atop a perched wardrobe. The grey owl trilled shrilly at their entrance before being quieted by Benjy’s pointed looks. Chocolate scones sat on a tray, still warm. “Sit yourselves down and we’ll get you sorted. No one told me you’d be coming in wounded, like.”
“Ah, this happen often, then, Fenwick?” asked Sirius. The colour hadn’t returned to his cheeks yet but evidently his penchant for humour had, given the grin. They both tucked in like ravenous wolves—another raised brow from Benjy, at that.
“Having folks bleed on my sofa?”
“Rescuing unfortunate blokes from the street.”
“Oh, well, I shagged you, didn’t I?”
Perhaps because Benjy saw they were bloody knackered and just plain bloody, he passed over the pleasantries and explained that he had a few one-time Portkeys linked to the outskirts of Hogsmeade. Safe places away from prying eyes. As for Sirius’s motorbike, however, Benjy shrugged again.
“I’ll send it after you, like,” he said.
“It’s—you don’t mean to say you’re going to summon it to us?” asked Remus, although he knew, yes, of course Benjy was going to summon it to them. “A thousand kilometres away?”
“A thousand kilometres in this dimension,” replied Benjy. He grabbed his tea mug and sipped around his grin.
“Ah, yes,” said Sirius, tutting, “this dimension, how foolish of us to presume. We really ought to know better, Moony, hm?”
“Fools, of course, and nitwits, et cetera. How soon might we be able to leave?” asked Remus.
He reached for his tea and in place of a mug handle found his answer, because he was yanked from the ground, whirling and deafened and blinded by colour, and a moment thereafter was sitting on the smoothed bark of a fallen tree on a hill. Though the air was brisk and damper than in London, Remus felt warmer. The slow-falling sun was on his back and the Black Lake before him, and on the far side of that lay Hogwarts castle, untouched by the fangs of summertime. His eyes adjusted to the sunlight filtered through overcast clouds.
The tea in Remus’s mug continued to swirl with a slight vortex, as though it had just been stirred. Half a second later, Sirius was sitting beside him, a chocolate scone in one outstretched hand, his own tea mug in the other. He sipped it and frowned.
“Don’t let him hear it,” said Sirius, frowning further, “but that was by far the most pleasant Portkey I’ve ever used.”
Remus nodded and sipped.
A minute later, Remus blinked and there was a motorbike before them. No. Actually, Remus didn’t blink, it only felt as though he did because there came no sound or odd sight before Sirius’s bike appeared—like Scotland had only just remembered that it was there and so slipped it into Remus’s field of perception, hoping no one would notice its missed cue. It bordered on boring: no pop, or fizz, or deafening bang. Perhaps he ought’ve spent more time studying under Benjy Fenwick and less time on top of him.
“Sometimes,” said Remus, wondering aloud, “I wonder if any of us are any good at magic at all.”
***
That people often underestimated Filius Flitwick was a terrible wrong, Remus thought, because while the man was short, he was also a master wizard, a duelling champion, an esteemed professor, and had earned, at some point, a muggle doctorate in philosophy at Cambridge. Most impressive of all his achievements was that you could see in his small steps and snappily-styled robes that Flitwick was happy. Content. Troubled by the War, of course, but his eyes still swam with optimism although he’d probably suffered more adversity than most could imagine, as neither the magical nor mundane worlds had been built with him in mind. Being well-admired by the students and faculty alike kept rumours at bay. Most thought he had some undisclosed condition not unlike dwarfism to explain his stature; others, less generous, speculated that his family line included some number of Goblins, or—if a student was particularly nasty and cruel and unfettered by factual accuracy—an Elf.
Flitwick was waiting for them at the castle gates. He stood between the wide wrought-iron bars with his hands folded pleasantly in front of him, his tailored green robes shifting in the light Highland wind. As the gates swung open and Remus helped Sirius through the mossy stone archway adorned by statues of winged boars, he felt a chill pass over him, like stepping briefly through a waterfall or having a ghost pass through you, and for a brief moment he saw Flitwick’s grip tighten on his wand.
When nothing followed, however, the professor relaxed and led them at their own pace up to the castle proper. Perhaps because he was all too acquainted with the unsolicited pity of others, he did not offer to levitate them up the hill. Nor did he bother them with small talk, instead informing them that he and Sirius could either report to the Headmaster’s Office immediately, or that the Headmaster could meet them in the Hospital Wing should they prefer.
Being the martyrs they were, the choice was clear.
Even that was anticlimactic. Remus thought they might have to see Dumbledore individually, but instead they were ushered in together and found Dumbledore sitting at his claw-footed desk and reading a manuscript with beautiful and esoteric illuminations. He closed it to listen.
Remus shared his suspicion that the werewolves on the list might all be suspected Squibs and the details, more or less, of his encounter with Terra and her gang of werewolves. He dropped the irrelevant parts—certain topics were unthinkable to discuss with a professor, and Remus thought there was little importance to his extracurricular activities there, nasal or otherwise—and waffled for a moment over whether to explain that the werewolves recognised him as being bitten by Greyback.
Dumbledore stared up from his seat with inscrutable bright blue eyes behind his half-moon glasses. He did not speak after Remus stopped talking.
“There was one more thing,” said Remus. He cleared his throat. “They, well—I think they recognised Greyback’s scent on me.”
“Most intriguing, Remus.”
Remus blinked in confusion. “Is it? I thought Greyback hadn’t been seen in Britain since the sixties, a few months after—” he began, and then choked for a moment. Terra was an older werewolf, yes, which was rare in its own right, and Apollo had a timeless and uncracked complexion, but Kelly with the short red curls had been about Remus’s age at most. Jesus Christ. He could be a bloody idiot, sometimes. “If they recognised his scent, then they’ve had physical contact with Greyback. He’s back in the country, isn’t he.”
It was not a question and so Dumbledore did not answer it.
“Thank you, Remus,” he said, inclining his head just so, although every small movement was accentuated by his long snowy beard. “Sirius, if you would?”
Sirius shifted his weight from one foot to another and, Remus realised, was looking anywhere but directly at Dumbledore. Most at Hogwarts, student or postgraduate, did not speak often with the Headmaster, and Sirius’s history was not a positive one. Lectures and reprimands and the occasional punishment handed down from on high. To Sirius, Dumbledore was still Albus Dumbledore, Order of Merlin, &c. &c. He was nervous.
Remus put a palm flat on the small of Sirius’s back and jerked his head towards Dumbledore with a quirked brow, as if to say, C’mon, then. I’ve seen you do far bolder things than this.
“I spoke with Regulus as you asked, Professor,” said Sirius, quick, and his grey eyes flicked from Remus to Sirius. “He told me to—he used a lot of foul language, sir, to convey that my attempts to sway him were without fruit,” he continued, and Remus almost laughed at the way he spoke. Very formal and prim, something he’d lost after a few years mixing with the other students. Still a bit of an aristocrat. “I believe that he’s joined their ranks, now that he’s out of school.”
“Do you believe, Sirius,” said Dumbledore, “that your brother might still be saved?”
Sirius was quiet for a long time.
“I see,” replied Dumbledore. He put a wrinkled hand over the top of his illuminated tome again and curled his fingers around the cover’s edge. “If there’s nothing else, then, I bid you both a good evening.”
Remus nodded and turned for the door, but he felt Sirius’s had around his wrist. He wasn’t sure which one of them was anchoring the other.
“Regulus said, ‘I should stay away from that traitor’s school if I had any sense left in me,’ Professor,” said Sirius. He rubbed at an eye with the heel of his other hand and looked very much a child in that moment. “It’s something he used to do when we were both at school. He would yell at me, but sometimes there’d be a clue in it for me to puzzle out. Something my blood relatives were planning to do.”
“You believe that this was one such warning?”
“Dunno.” Sirius shrugged and, in a moment that reminded Remus of himself, straightened, as he’d forgotten with whom he was speaking. It was nice to know Dumbledore had that effect on everyone. “It seems like something they’d do. Attack Hogwarts, or if not the castle, then the village around it. Spread fear and send people running. Ruin the last good thing we have,” he continued, frowning. “It’s how my relatives preferred to fight their battles. Nothing’s sacred.”
“For all our sakes,” replied Dumbledore, solemn, “I hope that we are wrong. In the meantime, however, I believe you have both earned your rest—your studies resume tomorrow.”
Dumbledore pulled open his tome to continue reading.
When Remus and Sirius left the Office, they found Flitwick had not waited for them at the bottom of the spiral stair. That, apparently, was that. Special tasks complete. Back to normal life once more. Just ignore that War-shaped thing behind the curtain, if you would, thank you.
They took a circuitous route to the Hospital Wing to avoid as much gawking as possible. It was something only possible in such a large castle with proportionately few students—you could hide from people, here, with all the nooks, crannies, and secret passages, and when you very much needed it, you could even hide from yourself. They lingered on a high stone viaduct, one of the few that overlooked the deep ravine between the castle’s sections and gave a vertiginous view of the cold grey river that fed into the Black Lake, to share a funerary smoke, watching students on lower bridges and courtyards mill about like ants. His thoughts slowed. The lumbering animal which had settled on his chest back in Wales ceased barking in his skull and began to roll over. He could pretend to be a normal student again with normal problems. Sometimes that was the healthy thing to do. Introspection was like firewhiskey or cocaine or the good kind of rough sex, Remus realised. You could only tolerate so much of it at once before it broke you apart. The pair of them were broken enough already.
As they lay in the long and narrow hospital bed—they’d been each assigned their own, of course, but Pomfrey was downstairs tending to students and so they’d crammed themselves together in one—a thought struck Remus.
“You never told me about your talk with Reg,” he said. “Not,” he added after a pause, “that you have to if you’d rather not, but—well, s’pose I never gave you the opportunity.”
Sirius shrugged, and Remus felt it. “Something of a sore subject, if m’honest.”
“I gathered as much, actually.”
“Rude.”
It was Remus’s turn to shrug. “I had to ask. I can’t keep on assuming that things are as they were when I left. Or, well, I could,” Remus continued, “but I think all that would earn me is more fights and bruised egos.”
“And yet I loved bruising egos with you.”
“Padfoot.”
“The angry sex is good, though.”
“Padfoot.”
“What?” said Sirius, wry. He trailed a finger of Remus’s eyebrow where he had a poorly-healing cut. Pomfrey had already triaged them, curing the minor cuts and scrapes and stared warily at the jagged wounds left by the Suit’s barbed chains on Sirius’s ribs. They’d heal under her supervision, Pomfrey assured them, but the spell was dark, and as such would leave an angry scar. “I’m sure Pomfrey’s heard much worse than the idea of us two shagging,” he continued, “unless I forget to mind my ribs. Unless you’re afraid Mary’ll pay us a surprise visit.”
“Doesn’t it worry you?”
“Poppy? Never. There must be a dozen sex-related injuries a month here, and I already cast a Muffling Charm. Poppy can’t hear a word we’re saying.”
“The shagging. The angry shagging,” Remus corrected, and he flopped his head back against the sterile hospital pillow. “I feel it might be unhealthy.”
“Why’s that, Moony?”
“I—well, I’m not sure, come to think of it.”
Sirius snorted at that. Which was annoying, of course, because he often did so when he had a convincing line of logic thought out already and was just dying to demonstrate it to you.
“Isn’t that where these things generally start?” asked Sirius. “Seems strange to worry about something and not know why you’re worrying. People have happy ecstatic sex all the time and no one bats an eye.”
“Being happy is a positive emotion.”
“Is it? And, anger can’t be?”
Remus blinked. “It’s not often considered—”
“—the worst part of getting to know you again, Moony,” Sirius interrupted, “was all the bits when we weren’t talking. For me, at least. It bothered me when we weren’t being honest, and when we were, sometimes I got so twisted up and instead of giving out bad, I stormed off and felt like pure shite afterwards. Like I was back before fifth year—pulling away every time something happened ’cos I couldn’t explain how I was feeling. Now, though,” he continued, voice lowering. “I’ve found some nonverbal ways to work through my feelings, and I think that’s positive.”
“I broke my literal,” said Remus, “actual foot, Pads. That is not a positive emotion.”
“Have you broken anything while shagging?”
“Well, no. Although sometimes—”
“—at least we were still together when we were angry. It—I dunno—it felt as though I could storm off without storming off, if you gather my meaning. Stop the conversation when it was too much for me but still make you feel good. And if I couldn’t put the words together to do it, I could show you. Physically. Can’t well do that with James, can I?”
“Lily might object.”
“‘Might,’ he says,” replied Sirius with a snort. A moment later, however, he blinked and his lips parted too soon and the words followed out late. “And you wouldn’t?”
“I’m not the jealous kind, Pads. Envious, yes, but never jealous.”
“Ah.”
“‘Ah?’”
“Ah.”
“Are you—”
“—we never talked about it, I s’pose, but how do you feel about Fenwick and I…?” asked Sirius. He trailed off and, again, Remus wanted to laugh. It felt so, well, young. Playground. Back when no one could muster the willpower to say the word ‘sex’ aloud.
“Copping off? Drove me mad, like,” replied Remus. “In the good way, I mean to say. A real shame we never acted on it earlier. Though,” he added, a flush creeping into his cheeks, “I did. Act on it, as you might recall.”
In the short pause that followed, Remus played with one of Sirius’s long, loose curls, twisting it round his finger. Sirius gave a short bark of a laugh.
“You are twisted, Moony, y’know that?”
“I’ve been told I’m something of a strange creature. But, back to the topic—”
“—angry shagging, yes,” replied Sirius, “very important. I think the proof is in the experience, really. If I hadn’t run off from that alleyway in Holyheart—”
“—Holyhead, like the team, and Sirius—”
“—things might’ve gone differently.”
“All right, a) you cannot blame yourself for that, Padfoot. Or if you can, then we’re at least equally to blame, and much more likely I am a significant part of it because I said some rude and hurtful things too, and beyond that, I was the entire reason we were out there,” said Remus, tilting Sirius’ scruffy chin up to meet his eyes. He felt his heartrate quicken, but perhaps as a mark of progress, it remained slower than it ought. “And,” continued Remus, “b) we were absolutely not going to shag in an alleyway while it rained.”
“It’s Wales, Moony. They’ve seen worse,” replied Sirius. “You were a right arse though.”
“But I don’t feel bad about it, Pads. Not entirely.”
“What?”
“The guilt around social access and yours about Reg. That conversation.”
Sirius fell quiet and remained that way. He wasn’t going anywhere, Remus supposed, and maybe this was his way of showing that he was trying to learn—to not storm off.
“You told me to try and make you understand,” Remus continued, “and when I did, you threw it in my face. I know you’ve done a NEWT in Muggle Studies, but this—I know you must realise it’s not a class, Pads. It’s one thing to understand the concept of economic inflation, and it’s—Christ, like—you saw what some of the places we stayed in were like, yeah? There’s a human cost to what’s happening in Britain right now, and, yes, I may not know personally everyone it’s affecting, but it feels personal to me. It’s not something I can dispassionately discuss or explain. And I tried to help you understand. And it wasn’t my intent, but even if it was, the comparison still holds: you feel guilty about Regulus because you left him behind. I feel guilty every time I think about leaving any of it behind.
“Whether it’s Mary and her family, the werewolves from the Village in the Pyrenees, the ones I met over the summer, even these two kids, Trouble and Strife—and not to mention the people I see on the street, who I could give a twenty-pound note and yet I don’t. It—Jesus Christ, I’m nineteen and every moment I’m not running out and distributing a thousand bottled Bluebell Flame Charms in the winter until they drag me off to Azkaban for breaching the Statute of Secrecy, I feel personally responsible for every person that freezes to death. And every moment I’m not burning down the office that preserves that Statute, I feel this overwhelming guilt.
“Maybe—and, in fact, I hazard, almost certainly—it’s not the same kind of guilt you feel with Regulus. Yours is stronger and more personal, but it’s, well, it’s your family. I feel like my guilt is stupidly impersonal by comparison, and then a moment later I feel like the weight of it is much bigger, because—well.
“When did you start questioning the Kissed, Sirius? Was it before or after you started worrying about your brother becoming one?”
Sirius gave a rattling breath. His eyes blinked in rapid succession and Remus realised that he, too, was on the verge of tearing up. His lungs felt wholly inadequate for the amount of breath his body needed, right now.
“That’s not fair,” said Sirius.
“I’m not—Padfoot, Jesus, I’m not calling you a bad person.”
“But you are.”
“I don’t know,” said Remus, quiet. “If I am, then I’m also a bad person. I only started questioning things because people I knew started to suffer, or because I met people who were already suffering, even it grew bigger than that later. I think it’s unfair to expect a kid to know otherwise when they’ve been taught that the world ought work a certain way,” he said, rambling, “and you, Pads, you try to help everyone you know who needs it, even if they—usually I—am-stroke-are a complete goat about it.”
“But you can’t stop thinking about it,” said Sirius. “It wouldn’t stop with just saving Reg or Mary’s brother. You wanna save them all.”
“Well, it sound hubristic when you say it like that.”
“As many as you can, then?”
“Better.”
“So, Remus,” said Sirius, reaching over the bed to fold his hands over Remus’s. “Why can’t that include you?”
Remus opened his mouth, closed it a few seconds later, and fifteen more thereafter deflated and said, “Because I’m martyring myself.”
“According to you, Moony,” said Sirius, “that’s a bad thing.”
“Because I’m afraid?”
“Better, that. Of?”
“I don’t know,” said Remus, although there were a thousand reasons in his head. Each one snagged on the other, trying to pull them out. “Of losing touch? Of betraying the cause? Of getting complacent?”
“Moony, if all that separates you from them is not paying rent—”
“It’s more than that. I do research at a prestigious postgraduate program. I do literal, actual magic. And I live in an owned flat with my—my Padfoot,” he explained, ignoring Sirius’s arched eyebrow and gesturing instead to the hospital room around them. “We get pissed and-stroke-or stoned and-stroke-or otherwise high on the regular. S’pose I’m afraid I’m already out of touch.”
“If I had the entire Black fortune at my disposal right now, Remus, do you think that would be enough to fix all of the problems in Britain? Most of them, even?”
“We could fix a fair few.”
“Now, if we shrink that amount down to the booze money we spend—”
“—it could still help—”
“—it’s not all on you, Remus!”
“But it is,” replied Remus. Jesus. He wished he could explain, but instead gestured madly at the sheets and tugged at the seams of his clothing. “So many things, even the sweets from the shop—they’re tainted. I snorted Troll marrow, which I doubt was ethically sourced, even if Trolls do regenerate.”
“Ah. That’s a horrifying thought,” said Sirius. His eyes went wide a moment, and, from the working of his thin dark eyebrows, Remus watched the cogs turn in his mind. “Also an apt metaphor. Costing that Troll an arm and a leg to feed their family. Did you know Trolls eat their way out of the womb?”
“Not helping, Pads.”
“Right. Would you give it up? All of it, if it meant it stopped tomorrow?”
“Of course, but—”
“Then, when the time comes,” interrupted Sirius, “we’ll do just that. But they’re also not just helpless people, or Trolls I s’pose, Remus. They’re not the Kissed. They’re people or Trolls with a bunch of awful paths ahead of them, and running away doesn’t help them, not really, it just takes another path away. We can’t just wash our hands of things after spending however many years fucking them up.”
“So what am I supposed to do with all this guilt?”
“I dunno, Remus.”
“Oh, cheers.”
“What I know is trying to solve this kind of problem all on your own,” said Sirius, ignoring his sarcasm, “is the kind of thinking that makes even the most extraordinary witches and wizards explode. You’re not fighting some static problem.”
“I’m fighting,” said Remus, breaking into snickers at the ridiculousness of his own statement, “the entire Thatcher regime, which is backed by the Ministry, and probably a whole load of other geopolitical organisations.”
“Alone. At nineteen.”
“As a gay half-blood werewolf.”
“Ambition is good, but that is maybe the definition of hubris, Moony. There’s more than one way to be out of touch.”
“That helps with some of it,” said Remus. “Still want to burn down the Ministry, though.”
Sirius rolled flat and lifted Remus’s hand over his own heart.
“Remus Lupin,” he began, and Remus felt Sirius’s heartbeat in the pause that followed. They were matching pace. Both anxious and hot-blooded and flush with worry. “I solemnly vow that if ever engaging in magical terrorism becomes the best moral path forwards,” continued Sirius, “I will personally help you carry it out.”
“Cheers, Pads.”
“It’s my go-to line when I’m on the pull.”
***
When he and Sirius passed through the door the postgrad lounge, they did not need to apologize to it for it to appear and swing open. Someone had taken any unauthorised enchantments off the place during their long summer absence. What Remus found, however, was that while the door needed no apology, the ten other witches and wizards within the lounge needed several.
His mind had been preoccupied, and so Remus had forgotten that he was on bad terms, more or less, with everyone in the room until the very moment that the heavy door closed behind them with a heavy metallic click. Ten postgraduates were gathered by the fireplace in a rough half-moon shape. Mary, in all her long-limbed glory, was perched on the spine of a squat beige sofa before the hearth like a flamingo over a river, and her surprise at their entrance soon smoothed into something passive and unreadable. Lily stood beside her and faced a small crowd, but her green eyes flicked over to Remus and, perhaps in absent reflex, she rubbed her knuckles. Severus was a dark stain in the background, and as for everyone else—
“Oi!” called Lily, voice booming and snapping all heads back to her. Her hair was a touch longer and in her trademarked plait, not a single red hair out of place. The seven-headed marble hydra carved into the mantlepiece behind her gave her a bright, stark, and somewhat imposing figure, even though Remus was taller than her by more than a head. “Now that our latecomers are finally here,” she said, and a wave of relief rolled over the postgraduates, “we can begin.
“For the incoming postgraduates out there: welcome. This week has been chaos for you. You are confused, you are worried, and you have a thousand things to juggle. You’ve heard a thousand rumours. You have a thousand fears. For many of you, this will be the first time you face a serious academic challenge, and almost all of those challenges will be of your own making. Bask in this moment. Take a breath. This, unfortunately, is the least stressed you will feel for the next three years. If you heed my advice, however, you might survive, and there are three things that will carry you through:
“First are your revision groups. They are your lifeline; they are mandatory; and they are pre-assigned by your focus area. When you think you’re drowning, they’ll keep you afloat. They are the wind under your wings and you will tumble to your death without them. Every witch and wizard who completed their thesis in this program did so with the aid of three other people just about as clever as they were. Remember, brilliance isn’t enough. You won’t get anywhere in this life all on your own. Accordingly, each revision group contains four postgrads, and relates to one of three focus areas: Theory, Fieldwork, and Practical Applications.”
Lily gestured to the sofa nearest herself, where three postgraduates sat. One Remus recognised: the tall Irish heckler from Remus’s first year, Jacob O’Neil, who stood and gave a mock bow. Beside them were two unfamiliar faces: a short, wide-faced witch with dark curls under a fisher’s cap, and another witch in a French sundress with a beret overtop her braids. To Remus’s keen nose, she reeked of delicious and acrid cigarettes.
“Jacob O’Neil, myself, and,” began Lily, gesturing to the heckler and then the fishercap witch, “Margaret Morley represent the focus area of Theory in descending order of year. Our theses revolve around the nature of magic and the magical world. While it is sometimes regarded as the hardest focus area, you should know that the faculty makes no such distinction. In Theory, we are also joined by Pascalle du Pont, formerly of the Beauxbâtons Academy of Magic—Hogwarts accepts applicants from all regions of the world for its postgraduate program.
“Fieldwork I hope is somewhat self-explanatory as a focus area. If it engages with the external magical world in a concrete way, it might belong in Fieldwork, whether it’s tracking dragon migration patterns or cataloguing the effects of rare herbs. Our current Fieldwork postgrads—again, in descending order—are Rucha Nagar and Sophia Stone, Severus Snape, and, our incoming postgrad, Amir Maalouf.”
None of them stood, which was probably for the best. Severus, who looked to be the tallest, only just crested six feet when he wasn’t slouching, and the rest were considerably shorter than him. Rucha was just as overlookable as she’d been the previous year, Sophia was still short and posh, and the new postgraduate, Amir Maalouf, looked weatherbeaten and to be at least twenty years older than the rest of them. There were peppery grey flecks in his thick dark hair and wrinkles creasing both the corner of his eyes behind his glasses and his mouth, although at the current moment he was not smiling. Accompanying his baggy tweed jacket was, Remus realised, a tweed-handled cane. The older wizard caught Remus staring and something in his chest did a somersault so he looked away with violent force. Jesus Christ. Remus was pathetic, sometimes.
“—Mary Macdonald,” continued Lily. She was gesturing in their direction. He hadn’t caught a word she said until Sirius’s subtle elbow landed between his third and fourth ribs. “Sirius Black, Remus Lupin—who also completed his studies in France, if I’m not mistaken—and our incoming lower-form postgrad for Practical Applications, Nathaniel North.”
Sirius tugged him up by the arm and, ever one to lean into a bad reputation, the two of them gave curtsies. Remus looked around for Nathaniel and his eyes stopped on a thin, sort of gangly freckle-faced boy that reminded Remus of a younger, thicker-browed Sirius, albeit with short raven hair instead of long, bold facial piercings, and most of his visible skin marked up with half a dozen dark-ink tattoos. Nathaniel North was nigh unrecognisable: gone was the underspoken boy who wore jumpers and looked surprised to be noticed. Summer had done a number on him.
Behind him, Remus noticed the smoky French witch, Pascalle, watch him with narrowed eyes. He looked away from her, too, once he put together why she might be staring.
“—Oi, Lily,” said Mary, giving a loud and dramatic stage-whisper and grabbing Remus’s attention, “then why are there four postgraduates in each focus area, if there’s only three years?”
“I’m glad you asked, Mary. Each year, the faculty also accepts a fourth postgrad to any one of the three focus areas, and they represent the second-best proposal they received. Because this is a highly intensive program in which it is entirely possible to fail out,” said Lily, stressing the last words with as much emphasis as she could manage, “that fourth postgrad acts like an understudy. Last year, for example, our double pairing was Remus Lupin and Sirius Black.”
Mary gave a dramatic cackle. “It means the postgraduate board thought one of them would burn out from the stress—the ‘shooting star’—and the other one had the worst proposal out of the four they accepted. Consider one an emergency replacement. And yet,” she continued, winking at the crowd, “they’re still here. For now.”
“But, Mary, I’m confused,” said Lily. “How do we know which one is the shooting star, and which one’s in fourth place?”
“Talk to them. You’ll know.”
There came a small laugh from the remaining postgraduates.
Well, piss, Remus thought, so much for earning the respect of the four incoming postgrads. Sirius had bristled beside him as well, but they couldn’t well do much. Acting out would look like an overreaction, even if Gloria Ahmed herself hadn’t had the audacity to call out the pairs directly and even if Lily and Mary were getting back at them for something that seemed so far away, now. He hadn’t any jokes ready.
Which meant the only thing left was to be sincere.
“I was the fourth applicant,” called Remus, and a few curious heads turned to watch him. He cleared his throat as he stood and put on what he felt might be a professor-y voice. “Evans is correct. My revision group saved my academic career from meeting a very sad and embarrassing end,” he continued, giving Mary an apologetic look. He couldn’t read her expression—he never could, probably he never wound—but whatever the rumblings were beneath her classic Mary Macdonald sangfroid, he was more or less certain that they were three-dimensional rumblings, complex and undetermined. “I owe them the world and hope to return the favour, but not only to them, but to the rest of you as well. As I work in the library, I’m happy to offer my help to anyone looking for specific research material.”
“Remus is selling himself short,” said called Rucha from across the lounge. For such a small witch, she could have a very loud voice. “I don’t know anyone who knows the catalogue of the library as well as him. Not even Madam Pince.”
Mary rolled her eyes, painted lips turned up at the corners. While every postgraduate head was turned to watch Rucha, she wanked off the air and winked at Remus.
“There’s a reason Sirius Black was the shooting star,” said Mary. The heads turned to her, too, and Lily gave a slight thin frown. “His thesis is as brilliant as it is a mess, and when it comes to that other thing—how about you show off for us, then?”
The crooked grin Sirius wore was a mixture of self-satisfaction and clownishness. He stood as Remus sat, curtsied, and nabbed a quill from a nearby table to hold in the flat of his upturned palm. Wordlessly and without a wand, the writing feather took flight and levitated in a small, looping circle above Sirius’s head, while a flame appeared in his other palm and floated towards the feather in a parallel loop.
If you didn’t know what Sirius’s face looked like in quiet concentration—which, being not dissimilar from his trying-not-to-cum-yet face, Remus reckoned only he and Mary might recognise—the feat appeared even more impressive because Sirius broke no visible sweat.
“The same way Remus has offered to help with research,” said Sirius, smothering the flame and catching the quill, “you’ll all be invited to try your hand at wandless magic in the coming weeks. I’m happy,” he continued, giving Lily an absolutely shit-devouring look, “to assist anyone who would like some additional instruction.”
“If you two are quite finished?” replied Lily, and Sirius sat. She turned back to the rest of the postgraduates, who seemed, Remus thought, less intimidated than he had been in his first year. “Are there any questions?”
Remus, Sirius, Mary, Jacob O’Neil, and Rucha stuck up their hands at about the same moment, and Lily heaved a great sigh of stolen thunder. The throne of Gloria Ahmed, now declared dead instead of missing, was a hard one to fill.
***
Settling back into old patterns was no soothing balm on his fresh-burned loss, but perhaps, Remus thought, that was a good thing. He did not want to be soothed. While, yes, the painful thoughts of his mum sometimes ripped through him like an icy wind on raw wet skin, other times it kept him grounded, gave him focus and vision when it came to matters like Regulus and Ahmed’s research. His brief, bleak encounter with life after study had given him a taste of Britain’s crueller delights. Looming deadlines were the spurs to the ribs he needed. The awfulness of the world was a pair of horse blinkers and it helped him pass those first few dragging weeks of September.
“Mr. Lupin,” said Irma Pince. She wore her raven-feather hat at a jaunty angle again, having not spoken to the general student body in some time. The very moment Remus’s performance improved the point that he could reshelve books faster than students could misplace him, Irma Pince began to station him at the front reception to handle a great number of intricate clerking jobs for which, of course, she was far too busy herself. “The books were lonely without you. Some of them refused to be removed from the shelf at all, not knowing if your expert hands would be there to return them home.”
Most mornings he was dragged out of his warm bed at a cruel and unjust hour. Not only could Sirius be devilish in his convincing, it also kept Remus from wallowing alone in bed.
On one such morning, Sirius stamped the nub of his broomstick against the trim green Quidditch turf and, by the grace of some pre-prepared sonic spell, it gave a loud, stony booming noise like a dropped boulder.
“All right, you lot!” called Sirius. The small crowd of heavy-robed students snapped to attention in the early morning fog. “Fifth, sixth, and seventh-years—as well as those who’ve received special approval—you’re with me. We’ll be drilling the same advanced flight manoeuvres from last year,” he continued, a wry grin spoiling his attempt at authority, “so I hope for your sakes, you spent the summer practicing instead of faffing about.”
“What about the rest of us?” asked a squeaky-voiced child, who might’ve been eleven or fourteen, clutching themselves against the cold. Jesus, they all looked so young.
“Until I get to you, you’ll be doing simple manoeuvres while flying laps. Mr. Lupin will be there to catch you,” he added offhandedly, “should any of you fall, of course.”
There came a groan from all the younger students.
Remus couldn’t blame them. Sometimes he felt he held a losing ticket having to keep his own company, what with his dreadful performance across the board.
“Ah, Mr. Lupin,” said Professor Flitwick, frowning and peering his already-low head to stare even closer at Remus’s microcosm map of the middle courtyard. He was still catching his breath. Two students in black cloaks—he couldn’t quite catch their Houses, from this far, and at this angle—gawked conspicuously, whispering, one of their tiny, infantile hands curled in a familiar insulting gesture at the thigh. “A valiant attempt, but you’ve bungled the platonic component again. The peonies were interpreted as roses, you see.” He gestured with a stubby finger and ignored the steam coming from Remus’s ears and the sweat from his pores. “It also—ah, it gave all of the beetles a unique name as well. Delightful if incorrect. Let’s give it another go, yes?”
When all other obligations fell away, well, there was always the study group.
“Jesus buggering Christ!” exclaimed Mary. She dropped a hefty grey tome on their table with an equally-loud thump. Pseudoanimate Thaumaturgies was the title. A wisp of mould was growing on its spine and the thing was over two-thousand pages long. The thickset bookshelves around them swallowed much of the sound, but still, in the unpierced quiet of the library, it was like a car backfiring. Remus winced. He ought to say something. One seventh-year student hissed at her from a nearby writing desk, although that hiss died on his lips when Mary shot him a glare. Making enemies with one of the two healers at Hogwarts was a poor idea.
“Um, Mary?” asked Nathaniel North. All the tattoos and piercings hadn’t hardened his speech pattern. “Why is Jesus buggering Christ?”
Sirius snorted. “I still don’t believe that’s real.”
“This might be it,” Mary continued, ignoring them. “The solution I’ve been looking for. I just need—Lupin,” she said, snapping her fingers at him. He rolled his eyes at that, of course, but looked down at the mouldy grey tome nonetheless when Mary slid it towards him, fingers-first, like a dog bowl. “You’re the one with the Indexing Charm,” she explained. He’d tried to teach them all, but they’d all given up seeing as he was always there to do it for them. “I need you to find any section on living spells. Oh, and…”
Remus also didn’t want to forget the pain.
Pain was useful, a teaching tool to temper his stupidity and force him to confront the things he’d left buried, as, not only had he been reckless in his pursuit of Hope, Remus had never grieved for her, not truly, even when she was presumed dead by all involved. He hadn’t shed a single tear for her. Not for Lyall. It had all been too much, too quick: he’d lost her and found her and lost her again. He hadn’t laid eyes on her. On harder nights, while Sirius’s stubble dug into his naked chest and his skin was too hot to sleep, he found that every time he closed his eyes it wasn’t the Suit whose shocked expression stained his forebrain, but the agonised, resigned plain face of his own mum. He’d put her in danger; he’d almost got her killed. He hadn’t thought about her. He couldn’t not think about her. So much of his time had been spent reconnecting and drowning in nostalgia that Remus had kept the present at an arm’s length.
This he would change. This, he thought, must be what growing up looked like. Putting away all those childish things.
And he ought to celebrate, really. He and Sirius still had all of their fingers and all of their toes; no one he loved had died; and so few missing mothers were ever found alive again in their time of War, even if you couldn’t see or hear or talk to them again. It should have brought him a happiness of which every other wounded student at Hogwarts could only dream. How strange it was, then, that Remus cried for her almost every night.
His mother sneaked up on him like a monster in the dark. He’d be making tea, browsing a muggle paper, and catch the name of a Welsh town he’d visited with his mum; he’d be reading a pseudo-Eratosthenic tome and catch a reference to Greek mythology, one of the pernickety, apocryphal errors she couldn’t stand. He’d be lying on the wet grass of the castle grounds as the sun rose a certain way. It scarcely mattered. Each time the world would loose from its axel, unanchored, spinning off-kilter, and his lungs would be empty despite his frantic breathing, and he’d awaken on the cold bathroom tiles of their dormitory, or a loo, or a broom cupboard, or in the high branches of a tree. Sometimes he startled awake in bed with Sirius stroking his hair. Other times Remus tasted her in the food of the Great Hall and thought himself a cannibal for eating the same jam spread she loved on scones.
When he couldn’t eat or sleep or read about ancient map-makers from the Odyssey, Remus threw himself bodily and mentally at the brick wall of the Kissed.
Gloria Ahmed’s research was an enigma wrapped in a tungsten Faraday cage within the belly of an emotionally-unavailable dragon that, of course, made its home in the Mariana Trench. Trying to crack into her cipher was a masochistic task. If it were a thousand-piece puzzle, not only did you have to find the pieces in a maze, you had to chop the trees and press their wood into pulp first. Some serious assembly was required. An assembly line, actually.
Which was why Remus was stood outside the dormitory of Lily Evans with his pale knuckles hovering before the door. His stomach was twisting and empty and ready, he hoped, for a banquet table of crow.
“—you’re bright, Lupin,” said the echo in his head, “but you’re not that bright. Not enough to crack my codes, not enough to guess my research.”
But Remus didn’t have to be clever enough to crack her codes or guess her research. He was done trying to be the kind of hero he’d read about in novels and histories. The world was not in desperate need of a hundred Godric Gryffindors.
“You’re a perfectly decent postgraduate, sure, but you deserve to know that if you’ve been put into this weird game, it’s not because you’re a player. You’re a pawn,” continued the echo, “and we both know what happens to pawns in a game of chess.”
Pawn to D4, bitch.
Remus gave the door a measured and even knock.
Several steadying breaths later, it swung open to reveal, as expected, Lily Evans, although she’d lost her tidy red plait in the evening and apparently a not-insignificant amount of makeup Remus hadn’t even realised she was wearing, what with the dark circles under her green eyes. She stared up at Remus in confusion. Dismay, too, perhaps. Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t to greet a werewolf at her door clad in a forest-green jumper with a fluffy white cat knit on the front.
“First,” began Remus, quick, before she could regain her composure, “I’m sorry. Sorry for a lot of things, actually, but very generally for being an awful friend, and very specifically for breaking your hand on my jaw even if, well, that last one is a bit of mixed fault. Second, yes, I have a lot of explaining to do, and I will do that whenever you like. And third,”—he took a moment to catch his breath as he was speaking quite fast—“I would like to host a funeral and I think I need your help.”
From between her teeth, jaw now a touch slack, Lily made a single, exhale-y breath of a noise. A tired replacement of a laugh, or a noseless snort at Remus’s audacity. Perhaps both.
“Evans?” called a smoky French voice. She pronounced it with the stress on the last syllable, very French, like, and with a distinct accent. “Ça va? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, du Pont, thanks,” replied Lily over her shoulder. When she turned back to Remus, her eyes were firm again. Poise fixed like a fencer, and, just like one, she cut quick past all of his defences and said, “I don’t know how many apologies I have left in me to accept, Remus. I don’t have that kind of room left in me. Not now.”
“One more?”
“Maybe,” said Lily. She was quiet a moment and rubbed her forehead. It had developed a single enduring wrinkle. “I know you never studied at Beauxbâtons.”
Well, that was quick. “I did not.”
“Do I know anything about you?”
“Sirius is grabbing Mary as we speak,” answered Remus, swallowing hard and his pride, “and then, if you like, we’ll answer every question you might have. I promise.”
Time slowed to a crawl as Lily closed her eyes and for one horrifying moment, Remus wondered what would be left for him to do if she said, ‘No,’ and then closed the door.
A moment later, she heaved another heavy sigh and looked lighter for it.
“Let me grab a coat,” said Lily.
Not in any particular order, Lily asked who the funeral was for even though they all knew, of course, that it was for Gloria Ahmed; Mary asked where they went for the last half of summer and why Sirius never answered the phone or opened the door when she came round their Soho flat; both enquired as to why they left France so abruptly; but it was Mary, brilliant Mary in the end, who looked at Remus’s sleeves for a long while with her dark eyes and asked, in a low whisper, how long he’d been a werewolf.
They took it better than Remus expected, which unfortunately was not to say they took it well.
“Since I was five years old,” replied Remus, his quiet voice laboriously event-toned. “Though, being honest, I recall very little of my early childhood.”
That was it. The abject pity on both Lily and Mary’s faces mixed with the anger of betrayal—that was the one he hadn’t wanted to see. Not ever. It squeezed his heart and stomach, and his mouth was suddenly swimming with thick, viscous saliva.
“Just give me a moment,” said Remus, turning away.
If you had to pick a place to vomit, the little falling-leaf tree by the Black Lake was as good a place as any. It offered a calming autumnal view, even if it was already chilly this close to the evening. Then Sirius was rubbing his back and the added anxiety of that made Remus sick again. Of all the questions they’d thought to ask him, none concerned his sexuality. Yet.
“I cannot believe,” muttered Mary, mirth underlying her disbelief, “that a werewolf nicknamed ‘Moony’ flew under our noses for five-plus years.”
Sirius clapped a hand on her jumpered shoulder—October was upon them already, so Mary wore two woolly jumpers while Lily was wrapped up in a coat Kelly-green coat, though neither of them questioned why Sirius had no shirt on under his own long ash-grey one—and he gave a shrug.
“Cheer up, Macdonald. Plain sight’s often the best place to hide.”
“Oi, Black,” replied Lily. “Anything else you’ve been hiding in plain sight you’d care to share?”
“Moony and I’ve been shagging nearly a year, now. Licks my arsehole thrice a fortnight.”
“If you’re going to take the mickey—”
“—look,” Remus interrupted. That was untrue. It was much more often than thrice, which was not the point, actually.
Remus took a breath to, well, breathe, and wiped off his mouth with the sleeve of his own thin jumper. He hadn’t quite listed the detailed benefits of his lycanthropy—most of which, he presumed, were not recorded in formal literature—and he wasn’t about to start with the way the impending moon changed his mood and body temperature. From his pocket he produced a large foil wrapper of chocolate, though his hands were trembling too much for him to go about snapping it, so he left it on the damp grass as though leaving bait for a wild animal. Ambient, perennial Scottish wetness soaked up his patchy elbows. Behind the girls, a distant murder of birds—crows, probably—swarmed over the lake, circling some recent dead float, no doubt, though for a moment their formation took on an odd shape. Like a flying ‘V’ with several odd bends; not unlike antlers. Lily’s red-plaited head had them for a crown only for a brief second before their formation dissolved. A trick of perspective.
“Odd birds, like,” he murmured.
“What?” asked Lily. She craned her neck over, expression befuddled. “Magpies?”
“One for sorrow, two for joy,” replied Mary ruefully. She too stared over at the swarming birds. “How many is that?”
“Take the number of magpies, multiply by nine, then you take the whole root,” recited Lily offhandedly. “If it’s larger than thirteen, you go again. So if there’s a hundred and fifty—”
“Thirteen.”
Heads swivelled. Mary narrowed her eyes at him.
“You do that in your head?”
“Never mind me. I wanted to apologise for my behaviour, like,” continued Remus, gesturing vaguely back down at the chocolate as though it might distract from his knowledge of roots, “and realised there was no way to explain how fundamentally broken my brain is without also explaining this. I do, however, get some privacy.”
“It’s dangerous, Remus,” said Lily.
“I happen to agree,” added Mary. She gestured, rapid-fire, to the old scars under his clothes, as though they were plain to everyone through his thin jumper. “If you haven’t been tearing into yourself, then it means you’ve been out doing God knows what every full moon. You could kill someone—”
“—Mary. Mary, love.”
“Oi oi, Sirius.”
“’tchu think, maybe,” continued Sirius, who’d inched closer to Remus in a sort of defensive position, “on this one occasion, Remus might possibly know what he’s doing? Better than someone who figured out, say, three minutes ago that the yob named ‘Moony’ was a werewolf?”
“Padfoot—”
“—don’t have to be a prick about it,” grumbled Mary. She uncurled her long limbs which had theretofore been tucked to her chest and around her knees on the lake grass. There was a saying about tall inflexible trees in the wind.
“Who else knows?” asked Lily. She was scrutinising him with those wide green eyes. A study of some kind. Remus realised only then that he might be the first werewolf either Lily or Mary had met in person, and so it followed they might need more than few minutes to orient themselves.
“Aside from you two and Sirius?” replied Remus. “James, Peter, Dumbledore, Pomfrey, McGonagall. My mum as well,” he added, and then his chest was aching again.
“Severus too?”
Remus nodded. He didn’t trust his voice.
“You can’t tell anyone,” said Sirius, quick. “No joking about it either. Not a single quip.”
Mary looked aghast. Her makeup always accentuated her expressions, like a glamorous clown, almost. “Who do you think we are? Lils, come on. Back me up?”
“Second her. You said your brain was broken. How so?”
Remus’s lips moved like he were a drowning fish pulling in air and left with nothing to use it for. Sirius, however, came to his rescue. Went to heroic measures to rescue his already tarnished reputation.
“Moony’s like me,” he said, then frowned. He tilted his chin upwards, defiant. “Or I’m like Moony. We get worked up over things others might not, sometimes anything, really; we’ve got trust issues; and we’ve got more complexes than your average Shakespearean drama. His comes with a fresh coat of paranoia, though, and mine’s more of a really long rollercoaster that’s dressed like Ziggy Stardust.”
“It’s not an excuse,” said Remus. He counted in the back of his head and took a deep breath before he spoke again, voice croaky. “I just—I was a kid, y’know. It twists your head up.”
“James,” said Lily, frowning. The neat little gears turned in her head. “Severus. That—oh, bloody sodding Hell, Remus, you did it to me as well, didn’t you?” she asked, eyes widening with incredulity. “How often does that work?”
“I—look.”
“You are both unbelievable. There—there were Aurors, Remus. We had five separate Defence professors and twelve postgraduates. If this did not fit perfectly with everything I know, I’d bloody believe it was another lie,” said Lily. She was standing, now, staring down at him with her redding face. Remus wasn’t sure if it was embarrassment or fury. Both, maybe. “Now I know how you bloody boys feel, I want to punch you.”
“Mind your thumb, love,” said Mary. She was recovering better, although her brown eyes and plucked brows still wandered between confused and betrayed with aimless intent. Her long willowy fingers unwrapped the chocolate slab on the grass and broke off a small square, which she began nibbling on, not unlike a digestif for the brain.
“And—bloody fuck!” said Lily. She threw up her hands in one moment and then dug her fingers through her red hair a moment later in tangles. Sirius wrinkled his noise as she continued, “Speaking of you boys—is that what this past summer was about? Why James nearly twisted Remus’s arm off?”
“Pads was dodging James’s calls,” replied Remus. The look Sirius shot him was deadly—cold grey eyes in a curly black frame—but they were being honest. Or, no, they weren’t, he certainly wasn’t, but trying to be, at least. “Didn’t know how to tell James about our rekindled friendship,” he added, softer, and brushed at Sirius’s cheekbone with the back of his knuckles. There was a great deal of delicious hypocrisy in that, Remus thought, seeing as Sirius was the first of them to bring up going public. “Being entirely fair, you did see how James reacted.”
“Still not sure why Potter took it out on you, Remus,” said Mary.
“He was jealous, like. Couldn’t handle my non-monogamy,” said Sirius, and Lily gave a hesitant tut. Sirius quirked a thin dark brow at her, as if to say, Yes, madam? Have something to add, do you?
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“Sounds suspiciously like what James said,” replied Sirius. “Or are we the only ones who’re being forced to bare our souls, here?”
“Oi. You joked about Remus licking your arsehole.”
“Mary, love. If having your arsehole licked isn’t baring your soul, I—”
“—Sirius,” Lily interrupted, and on some level it bothered Remus, actually, that the idea of him and Sirius being together was so unthinkable no one even bothered to entertain the possibility for a second. “If it were up to me,” she continued, slow, “I would tell you, but it’s not my secret to share.”
“Orright. Fair do’s.”
“We need your help. Both of you,” said Remus, abrupt and unprompted. “Not only with the funeral, I mean to say, but with decoding Ahmed’s research. It’s original cryptographical encoding.”
“I’m in,” said Mary. No hesitation. Between her late brother, inconsolable little sister, and the rare friendship she’d built with Gloria Ahmed, it was clear why. “Even if I’m upset, honestly, that you didn’t tell me you’d stolen her research in the first place—also, wow,” she continued, blinking rapidly, “that confirms everything she said last term. Huh.”
“Of course I’ll help. I know how much your brother means to you, Sirius, even if he’s only ever been a total bloody pillock to me and mine.”
“I’m sensing a ‘but,’ here, Lils.”
“But I have a condition.”
Sirius folded his fingers together as a nest for his angular chin and anchored that perch, elbows-first, in Remus’s thigh. “I’m listening. We’re,” he added, quick.
“Make up with James, the both of you—”
“—done—”
“—because I’m bloody tired of watching you boys go at it.”
Sirius wrinkled his nose again at that. “Could you not—the scolding is fine, really, it’s actually something of a turn-on,” he said, and Lily pulled a monstrous face, “but the way you say boys—it’s ill-fitting. Sort of. I dunno. You could stand to mix it up a bit, I reckon.”
“Men?” said Lily, frowning. Mary beside her snapped off a piece of chocolate and handed it off.
“Ah, that’s even worse, like.”
Mary leaned back on her elbows against the grass—grey patches crept up the fabric as autumn dew seeped into the fabric—and gave a snicker. She winked at Sirius.
“Welcome to the club, then, Sirius?”
“More of a Ziggy than a Mary, I think,” said Sirius, and they stuck their tongues out at each other at roughly the same moment. Remus’s fingers snapped up to pinch Sirius’s tongue, and he sputtered.
Mary inclined her head towards him, then. Waggled her brows, asking questions too vague and, he thought, too fresh to be properly parsed, so in response he wavered a hand. Ambivalence. The werewolf thing complicates everything, actually, he at least tried to convey.
“Well, then, friends,” Lily corrected. She waited a moment—Mary gave an approving nod, Sirius grinned a crooked grin, and Remus, well, he was happy to still be considered a friend. “I think you’ll be happy to know that we’ve been blessed by happenstance. You lot recall the French witch from Beauxbâtons? Pascalle du Pont?”
“The one who outed Remus to us, yeah,” replied Mary. “Not as leggy as me, but better skin. She an expert on the Kissed too, then? ’Cos that’s grim, if the faculty replaced Ahmed already.”
“No, but it’s almost as eerie.”
“Evans?” asked Sirius. “Suspense? You’re killing Moony’s blood pressure, here.”
“Her thesis is on Arithmantic theory. Coding and ciphers and other algorithmic processes specifically,” she explained. Her Kelly-green coat was padded out at the shoulders, giving them a stern, flat, almost theatrical silhouette instead of her usual small shrugs. “She’s a cryptographer. Problem is, she’s not a huge fan of Remus at the moment.”
While Sirius jumped to that with immediate solutions—seducing Pascalle du Pont being principle among them—Remus felt a cool chill creep into his bones and it came not from the autumn breeze over the Black Lake. They were words he wasn’t meant to overhear, spoken in hushed tones in a pub far too early in the morning.
“Happenstance,” began the quiet, whimsical voice, “makes fools of us all.”
That echo followed him into the Forbidden Forest, that night. He’d been eager to see Socrates if albeit uneasy and, having missed the September moon, worried that they might think Remus wouldn’t return at all. Worse, they might revoke whatever protections they used to shield Remus from the denizens of the forest near the full moons.
The glade of aconite was empty when Remus arrived at it, barefooted and out-of-breath, just past midnight. Fallen pine needle stung at his feet and the earth was cold and damp, but, he’d realised, that he’d needed to start meeting the other werewolf at least somewhere near their level. Which was rich, of course, because the one time he’d done so, Socrates wasn’t there to see it. The glade was empty. Or so Remus thought until he scented iron and turned back around.
Socrates was untouched by time, hair still tangled and matted and hanging to their hips in wild sprawls, but what they weren’t untouched by was blood. It dyed their hair a dark brown-crimson in places and glistened on their face in the starlight, thickest around and inside their mouth. Their eyes shined in the dark. Tapetum lucidum. They were hollow behind that.
Remus leapt out of his skin and fell, hard, back onto his elbows, scrambling back, kicking up clumps of soil until his skull knocked hard against a tree. His vision doubled and tripled and went black at the edges. Sap stuck in his hair. When he rubbed his hair, sap clung to his fingers and mixed with black earth. Socrates did not move a breath, then, even as Remus scanned their ragged form for signs of impending violence.
One of their cracked-nail hands held the leg of a deer, freshly blooded, like a child might drag an old teddy-bear behind them. It was yet attached to a hot carcass. After a beat, Socrates continued forwards, tugging the deer into the clearing with no discernible effort. It was a buck, as it turned out. Big pointy antlers; regal and brown; stinking of a deerlike musk and soaked in the metal taste-stroke-scent of blood; and, Remus thought, reminiscent of another Animagus Remus knew with frozen and myopic eyes.
“I am busy tonight, Remus,” called Socrates over their shoulder. They hadn’t a single defensive wound on them. “Come back another time. I will not invite you to dinner. I am not polite, and you have already eaten.”
Remus frowned at that. He was peckish, actually, though he would pass on the deer. It left a trail of shiny flattened grass in its wake as Remus followed after them.
“I have not.”
“He is off his leash, now, and so he thinks his lies are smooth.”
What lie? “I’m—I don’t know why you think I’m lying. Or why I’m off my leash, come to think of it.”
“I smell the blood of a wizard on you, Remus.” They dropped the deer carcass at the foot of their boulder, and sat, cross-legged on the dewy grass, with their back to it. In a grim display, Socrates leaned their head back against the flank of the dead buck and used it as a cushion. Werewolves. Jesus Christ. Drying blood stained their neck like an apron. “More than one. Other humans, too. Did you turn them?”
“No.”
“Killed, then. It is all the same,” they continued, ignoring Remus’s wince. “More will come soon. Wolves, and others.”
“Pardon—what?” asked Remus, and he crouched beside them. Their eyes had fallen shut, and Remus realised there were several bite-sided chunks missing from the buck already. “Do you mean to say,” he continued, voice even, “someone’s planning another attack? Here?”
“He asks the question and knows the answer. Knows who will do it, too.”
“When?”
Socrates cracked an eye open. They watched him, curious, with a wild iris, as though he were a pet doing a trick instead of a person worried for other people.
“Wolves do not tell time, Remus. You know this. Some of them will grow to like their new skins, wolf or leech,” they continued, and then shut their eye once more. “I am tired. If you are Remus, you may stay. If you are the magic boy—”
But Remus was jogging off again into the night, all thoughts of deer carcasses and starlit glades and pine-needled feet left behind. This time he was castle-bound. Remus, magic boy. Neither option fit his skin, but if Greyback was back in Britain, if he was planning an attack here—and if the Death Eaters were indeed recruiting by lycanthropy and vampirism, now—someone had to be warned. If he had to wait another month for Socrates to see him, so be it.
Letting it happen to someone else—well, Remus would be a cliché, then. He’d finally become his father.
Notes:
Dear readers, this chapter was written well before December of 2024, and in fact was written sometime in early 2022. Just to be clear.
Welcome to Book II! So many of my favourite chapters are in this one, probably in part because of the time I got to spend on our core cast of characters. I know that Mary Macdonald is more or less a blank slate of a character, but, hey, that's half of everyone's favourites! Inspiration to draw attention to her cosmetics comes in part from Tom Siddell's early commentary on Gunnerkrigg Court and Siddell's visual styling of Antimony Carver, as well as my own time at uni. Bleary-eyed mornings, staring at myself in the mirror, putting on a full face of makeup before riding the train at an ungodly hour, feeling like I was doing penance to convince my coursemates I wasn't some pretender. But don't worry, dear readers: they're all self-inserts. Every last one of them!
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, All Hallow's Eve, Again will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 21 March, a Friday. If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is the way we look like animals by dykesiriusblack, another R/S/J or Wolfstarbucks pining fic set during MWPP's 7th year, interestingly from James's perspective. It's one of my (many) favourites, and it's so vivid I can smell the smoke on their clothes.
Chapter 15: All Hallow's Eve, Again
Chapter Text
One early autumn evening after a frustrating flying session, Remus was sat by the wide and tall brass-framed bay windows of the postgrad lounge, watching stars rise to the cloudless north and listening, half-awake, to one of Sirius’s stories.
Remus wasn’t his sole audience, or much of one at all, given he and Sirius had their backs together. The window ledge was so pleasantly, fatly wide they could sit like that, each one of them with a bent knee and the flat of their boot braced against the cut grey stone of the walls. Warmth behind him. A plethora of mismatched burgundy cushions filched from faraway places better intended for sitting, e.g. sofas and armchairs and yet more obscure furniture, the kinds with enough elaborate patterned tufts and delicate embroidery that no one dared sit on them directly if they understood how at all you were meant to sit. One such rescued downy pillow was tucked under his arse. Sirius’s head rested where the nape of Remus’s neck met his shoulder. Ear-to-ear, Sirius’s steady heartbeat unfaltering even as he toyed with a loose curl. How he loved to distract Sirius while he performed. There was no better word for it. Or no, perhaps there was—perhaps that word was magic.
While Lily, Mary, and Nathaniel knew the tale well already and, in theory, Remus had been there for some part of it, the other postgraduates less familiar with the antics of Gryffindor house—Jacob O’Neil, Amir Maalouf, Rucha, and even Pascalle du Pont—listened in a variety of states from rapt attention to listless indifference, in that decreasing order. They formed an imprecise half-moon peering up at Sirius from their cushions on the floor, as though they’d settled down for a polite, improbable picnic right there in the lounge.
This story was about Marlene McKinnon and the battles of Hogwarts, circa September, 1975.
As Gryffindor’s patron saint of Quidditch, a sixth-year prefect, and a staunch defender against all things unjust, Mean Marlene McKinnon had organised a defensive pact for all the muggleborn students, who’d suffered increasingly-frequent hostilities by the beginning of Remus’s fifth year at Hogwarts. All talk of toads in boots and spiders in the hair had stopped, suddenly, like a stilled record, and in its place Hogwarts’s eldest students had found a novel kind of cruel silence. A taste for it, too. A muggleborn Ravenclaw was found locked and shivering in a broom cupboard with her head shaved. A boy’s owl vanished from the owlery and never resurfaced. Slurs on lavatory stalls. It began with Marlene and a few friends; it expanded over the course of September to involve nearly twenty students.
Which, in a school that had just under three hundred total at any given time, was not an insignificant amount.
Sirius claimed some credit—Mary got him into it, and so Sirius got James, Remus, and Peter in by association, not that they needed much convincing to hex blood purists—but Marlene was the one to bear the burden in the end. You could only get away with so many pyrotechnic displays in the corridors, you could only lie through your teeth about yet another broomstick injury so many times. A battlefield was not a stable position from which to learn. The professors were noticing the uptick in duelling-related injuries. Some blunt physical ones, too, by Remus’s doing. Detentions accumulated at their feet like dead canaries. A primal anxiety, long-buried, unearthed itself when Sirius mentioned the tension at breakfast every morning in the Great Hall, the quiet clink of silverware until the first Howler—bellowing, shrieking letters which flew about and shouted themselves aloud for all to endure, which to Remus, then, had been a fate worse than death, and horribly embarrassing to observe—inevitably arrived. Marlene herself (allegedly) originated a tradition of burning such Howlers before they could finish with a precise jet of flame, with additional bragging rights if you could do so without being caught. He hadn’t been there for that part, Remus.
Come February the castle was at a roil. After Peter was stunned off a moving staircase in a failed attempt to defend a second-year boy, however, Madam Pomfrey demanded a full-scale inquisition on pain of retiring. Hogsmeade privileges would be revoked for the entirety of the school if no one answered. Marlene was sussed out as their ringleader shortly thereafter, though they never quite figured out how. As Sirius told it there had been a tremendous show of chivalry in the Gryffindor lounge, that night, their mugs full of months-old cocoa powder mixed up with milk filched from the kitchen, their hearts full of courage, but though every Gryffindor in the room whose name Sirius could be bothered to remember, i.e. Mary, Lily, himself, and James bloody Potter himself volunteered to leap on that pyre for Marlene, she had refused them. Marlene fell on her sword nobly. They saw her off to McGonagall’s office with a parade of gold sparks and burning red lions and whoops and cheers and illusory roars. She took a bow before McGonagall shut the door behind her.
She lost her prefect status and was suspended from Quidditch for the remainder of term. For once, however, no one in Gryffindor complained about losing their shot at the House Cup. The trade had been worth it.
Sirius told the story better and with more detail and, Remus thought as he fought a wry smile, some significant embellishments as to the scale and drama of things—he had some logistical questions, for example, about how exactly James swooped down the tower ‘at the last second’ to catch Peter’s ‘frail, gravity-obeying body’ on broomback—but even the most heckle-prone of the crowd, Jacob, listened in silence until the end.
“Savage,” whispered Jacob. He looked at Sirius with a new kind of respect in his amused features. “You bloody Gryffindors up and do anything without a thought, huh?”
Pascalle lifted two fingers from her wider, pouted lips.
“Impressive,” she said—there was a throaty French phlegm to her R-sounds—and she smiled. “Foolish, but impressive, too. I could not do that at Beauxbâtons—no one there gives a shit about anything. Irony is very chic, today.”
“Sounds relaxing, if m’honest,” replied Sirius.
Pascalle gave a light smoky laugh at that and Remus fought the urge to roll his eyes. Laying it on a little thick, there. Beside her, Amir leaned in closer—the older man had a very wide stance while seated and always rested his elbows on his knees, hunching his already shorter frame—and squinted at Sirius.
“Fits with what I’ve heard,” he said, quick, and then furrowed a single bushy brow that was also going grey. “Still think there’s some untruths in there. How do you even fly a broom in these towers?”
“Attends,” said Pascalle, giggling again. She dropped her H’s as she spoke. “I think they have expanded the towers since the Paleolithic era. I read about it before I applied here.”
“Old jokes. Very original.”
“Merci.”
“When did you attend Hogwarts, then?” asked Sirius.
His nonchalance was practiced and, if Remus hadn’t both a) been the subject of said nonchalance many a time and b) heard Sirius tell Mary that he’d always wanted to try it on with an older, more-experienced man, he wouldn’t have recognised the flirtatious tone underlying it. Even if, of course, there was nothing sexy at all about the words he’d said. He was talking to the bloke. This was basic information that you could acquire from your academic transcript. Or perhaps that was true if you were someone like Remus, who could sit in Sirius’s shadow and play with his hair unnoticed. If you were someone like Sirius, however—if you could command a crowd, if people listened when you spoke—then there was something tantalising and irresistible in how he could tug you into his spotlight, to put the audience’s eyes on you. Someone like Sirius could cure anonymity with a word, if he wanted to, whenever he wanted to, and only, only if he wanted to.
The building insanity inside Remus’s head and/or dick met sweet relief when Amir’s brow flattened out and he frowned. He was taking too long to answer the innocuous question.
“I never attended,” Amir explained, flat. Neither his eyes nor mouth were curved in a way befitting the crow’s feet that flanked either feature. Remus’s mind ran through his catalogue of other schools in Europe before Amir cut that thought short. A haggard, half-resigned tone took him over. “Nor any school at all,” he continued. “Not a magical one, anyway.”
Sirius sputtered—Amir had introduced himself weeks ago as a bloody dragonologist, for Christ’s sake—and Remus’s own fuzzy brows arched in what he hoped conveyed pleasant surprise.
“Merveilleux. You are self-taught?”
“In a manner of speaking, I guess,” replied Amir. He regarded her with an even gaze. “I’m a Squib.”
The silence that followed carried across the entire postgrad lounge.
Two workstations down, Nathaniel dropped a quill and swore under his breath.
Remus blinked and became aware, with some remorse, that his jaw had slackened. Amir was lying. Had to be, given he was a forty-something dragonologist with all of his limbs and no visible scars, though he, like Remus, was fond of long sleeves and old-fashioned tweed jackets. He could confirm that one at a later time if Remus was lucky. A study in anatomy. As for the limp, well, that could easily be owed to a mundane injury or simply the march of time. A Squib dragonologist? Everything he’d been taught screamed lie at him. Except, of course, he’d been taught a few lies in his life. There was nothing strictly impossible about it, physically or magically speaking. Every dragonologist he’d ever read had begun their books, covers all snarling beasts and wreathes of fire and scaled, iridescent wings, with an incredibly dry and boring preface about how dragonology was profoundly misunderstood and consisted mostly of a great deal of reading and watching from afar. Remus knew about the Squib borderlands. Not only did he know it, he’d been there and mingled, so he shot pointed looks at the rest of the group, still silent, and cleared his throat. Like with his flying students, he clapped his hands together exactly once.
“Thank you,” said Remus, channelling his best Black grin, “for being the new ‘most interesting person in the room.’”
“You’re welcome? Er—”
“Remus. Remus Lupin.”
Amir’s creased brown eyes lit up with delight. “That is not your name.”
“Oi, Moony, if you two are done flirting—”
“—Jealous, Black?” said Rucha, and, Jesus, she startled him. Remus had forgotten she was sitting right below the window ledge near Remus’s bare foot.
Amir looked between her, Sirius, and Remus with a complex expression—he wore his emotions plain on his face, and eyebrows specifically, it seemed—and then cleared his throat. Very polite, like.
“You’re all half my age,” he said. He shuddered, actually, and Remus felt the proverbial window slide shut on both his and Sirius’s fingers. “Or less. This is unbelievably creepy for me.”
“You’ll get used to it around here,” replied Rucha. “The things they say about Remus—”
“—do not start—”
“—so, Moony,” interrupted Sirius. “Did you wanna distribute those funeral invitations now?” he asked. Being back-to-back, he spoke to Remus by tilting his head flat up at the arch of the bay window above them, which spilled more curls over Remus’s shoulder and tickled the scruff of his chin. “Or were you waiting for them to parade the corpse of your virtue around the lounge, first? I have stories I could share.”
“Save them for All Hallow’s Eve,” replied Rucha. “It’s tradition. Remus, you see, is a ghost.”
Remus would never live that down.
The October full moon and come and gone already and All Hallow’s Eve reared its hollow, pumpkin-shaped head, and yet Remus was still sheepish and cowed and several other pasture animal adjectives as well. Word had got around about the events that occurred some three weeks earlier.
Remus was apparently something of a sight, a known former smoker, no less, with no known athletic aptitude to speak of, running across the castle grounds in plain sight of every arched window. The Book Boggart had never looked so frightened. The prefects on their night-patrols told tales of how he bounded into the castle barefoot and up the several flights of stairs to the Headmaster’s Office, disturbing sleeping portraits, riling ghosts, as well as leaving muddy footprints and other forest detritus in his wake. One such footprint was neatly preserved behind mocking velvet ropes for a week before Filch managed to scrub through the preserving charms by the great doors.
There was much speculation as to why Remus needed to see the Headmaster at two hours past midnight. The bold claimed he was an undercover Auror; others whispered that the Book Boggart lived in the woods, so of course he was there at night; and a pair of deranged and enterprising Ravenclaws spread a rumour that Remus and Dumbledore were secret lovers and that they had photographic evidence to that fact, available to the highest bidder. All that speculation, however, was more interesting than the truth.
He’d told Dumbledore he thought there might be an attack during the coming full moon.
Dumbledore had asked him how he knew.
Remus had said he couldn’t say, actually, but he good reason to believe an attack was coming soon, and so Dumbledore had stared at him from behind those half-moon glasses for an agonising minute before nodding and bidding Remus a good night.
There were no attacks on the October full moon. Not anywhere near Hogwarts, at least.
Sirius was as relentless in his mockery as he was in his affection. His bony elbows and knees and every other bone-dominant part ribbed Remus within an inch of his life.
When he woke, dreams full of Socrates’s bloodied face and reams of paper and maps and Wales and endless nightmares of reshelving his own mother’s obituary again and again and again, Sirius held him under his chin and in his arms until his heart calmed. He left love notes in abandoned books in the library and brochures on anti-werewolf self-defence atop the toilet cistern. For the first week no matter what he said to Sirius, whether it was something about research or breakfast or him having lost one of his socks again, you could flip a fair fucking coin, fifty-fifty, wherein half the time Sirius would stare dead at him, wide-eyed, alarmed, and ask if they should inform Dumbledore posthaste. When night crawled over and so too did Remus, he’d get as far as teasing off Sirius’s boxers with his teeth before Sirius cocked his scruffy, angled chin and whispered, “Werewolf attack!” in feigned panic, after which he would not stop snickering until he came down Remus’s throat.
That was one method that never failed to shut him up. Remus deployed it often.
Whether it was a losing cycle or a winning one depended on where you placed Remus’s relationship with humiliation. Sirius was adept at finding that careful balance between too much and too little in the same way he was adept at using his long, crooked fingers to find Remus’s prostate in the shower, which, given all the thick loads he’d spilled over Sirius’s other hand, made the teasing worthwhile. The wink of Sirius’s grey eyes as he licked him clean afterwards made it even more so. Underneath all that teasing, embarrassment, and horny shame, however, something dire did ache in Remus’s bones—a lupine instinct, perhaps, or whatever remnants of trust he’d built with Socrates over the past several months. Sure, the other werewolf was often cryptic with him, but they hadn’t lied before, only misled. Remus had missed something—another failed test.
It was a peculiar feeling to have when hosting a funeral.
The coppice of trees where the rickety wooden bridge met the edge of the Forbidden Forest was by autumn decorated with gold, crimson, sunset orange, faded pear-yellow, and in places with smatterings of dark, leafy green, like loose and rebellious paint droplets. Mischievous winds kicked up those colours often, tossing fallen leaves into the air like a child desperate to bring some cheer to the otherwise drab black earth and naked grey tree trunks around them. It was cold, this late into October. A small herd of them were huddled together, quiet and shivering. Remus nudged Mary beside him and gave a muted nod. She’d picked a good place for them, here.
Overhead, there was enough tree cover they didn’t have to mind the rain much—it wasn’t pouring, just a light drizzle that gave the whole affair a funeral-y feel—and the pale grey clouds hand enough decency to shield them from any agreeable weather. You couldn’t lay down a casket with a smiling sun that ought have sunglasses. Not that they had one, of course.
Centre all of them was a stubby-legged wood weaving in the shape of a Kneazle. Thick branches formed its frame while thinner ones outlined the ears and tail and haunched back legs. It was jet-black like the original they all remembered. Sirius had done that—he had magic to thank for the shaping of them, but he and Remus had meandered around the castle grounds for a few hours looking for clusters of thousand-eyes aspen trees and snapping off their blackest branches for materials. Remus’s climbing skills came as a useful surprise, as both of them agreed using magic to fetch the branches felt wrong. Too clean and too simple for a witch like Gloria Ahmed. Not hard-earned.
At times, Remus thought that moments so sombre as this brought out the most beautiful and earnest kind of magic in people. Even though he felt he barely knew Ahmed, something squeezed in his chest when he came upon the clearing, half an hour early, and found Lily there, working a series of Charms that ought to be complex and trying at the best of times. Yet there was no laboured concentration on her face, no strain or worry. Her eyes were closed and her wand wove patterns as delicate as they were precise, for she was doing a delicate and precise kind of thing. Even her incantation was lyrical. A lullaby.
Now, with everything in place, it made sense.
Leaves of all shades fell in a slow-moving waterfall around the branch-woven Kneazle. Golden yellow; summer green; ruddy and orange and the decaying middle-grounds all in between; a moment before the leaves touched the ground, however, they creased down the middle and became butterflies, fluttering out and away from Ahmed’s effigy and flying, out of focus, back to the branches above and waiting to fall again.
Sirius would call this kind of magic a ballet.
Remus whispered that to Mary—he was only an inch or two taller than her and could thus reach her ears—and she gave a choked kind of laugh, at that. Her eye makeup was terribly smudged.
All of them were dressed for Professor Slughorn’s All Hallow’s Eve do. If nothing else, Remus, Sirius, Mary, and Lily knew the postgraduates would have cleared schedules and indeed every other postgraduate had shown up for the funeral—but there was more. Gloria Ahmed would’ve appreciated, Remus thought, the spectacle of it. She’d been of simple and purposefully nondescript appearance herself, yes, but that had been paranoia, which did you little good once you were dead and gone. This was giving her rest. No more discretion needed.
Rest ye well in peace, iron tyrant.
“I won’t pretend I knew her well,” began Lily, adopting a formal and thoughtful tone. She wore her red hair up neat and matched her outfit with the rest of Theory by styling herself in ornate and timeless grey robes. The colour of white ashes. ‘Solemn study’ was their theme, or something thereabouts. It felt harder to care about that sort of thing, party dress, when you were attending a funeral.
“Gloria Ahmed was not a witch you got to know with any ease,” continued Lily. “In her own way, though, she was kind and she looked out for all of us. Even if she never let us forget it,” said Lily, allowing herself a little mirth, “she always helped us. She didn’t have to. If you remember that spiel I gave all of you about working with others—Ahmed was the exception. Ahmed was the wind under everyone’s wings, including her own. She could have done everything on her own and instead chose to carry us forwards.
“I know that some of you never knew her, but I thank you all for attending regardless. There’s not a formal program for this or anything, and we’ve all our matters to manage, but a few people have asked if they could say a few words,” said Lily. Her wide green eyes grew distant a moment, drifting down, before snapping back up to watch the crowd. “Maybe, if we’re lucky, we can paint a decent portrait of her for the rest of you using our words.”
Jacob O’Neil was the only wizard there taller than Remus, and, swaddled in darker grey robes with silvery filigree, he was reminiscent of a younger, Irish, and much more masculine Professor McGonagall. He cleared his throat before he spoke, like her, and refused to meet anyone’s eyes.
“She was my mentor. Almost like an older sister,” said Jacob, chuckling, but his eyes did not laugh and they remained fixed on the leaf-littered ground. “A distant one, aye, one that found their other siblings bloody annoying, but she crossed that bridge for me and for me brother. I shared a focus with her and Jon shared a year, so whenever we’d fight, she’d notice and bang our skulls together until we pushed through it. She was like family.”
“—I never asked about her family,” said Lily. “She asked about mine often, though. It made her uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable, I think, but she’d always say that if I didn’t talk about it, I’d drag down the rest of Theory with me. So she sat through all of my whinging about my sister and everything about my parents—sorry,” she continued, voice breaking, “and, anyway, while she gave me good advice, she also told me a lot of hard truths I needed to hear, about myself and other things. You could rely on her for that. The honesty.”
“Honestly, I’m unsure what to say.”
Sophia Stone was a prim, English witch from Fieldwork that Remus had never got to know. He likely never would. She was a former Hufflepuff and an average witch not unlike Remus and, he thought, was possessed of a complex and rich inner life that was easy to ignore when you were so consumed with your own. From the mermaid-tailed dress and scaly appliques on her skin, Remus presumed her thesis was sea-related. Fieldwork’s theme was ‘natural subjects.’
“Gah. I suppose,” she began, uncertain, though her enunciation was too precise to ever be mumbled, “I could say I feared her. I might still. It sounds rude, but I believe that she might have wanted that—she was a witch unconcerned with her legacy and yet had set a very firm one in her wake.”
“—She was, without a doubt, the most intelligent witch I’d ever known.” said Severus. His tone was plain and his robes titrated from deep black at the shoulders to a pale white at the hem like a Draught of Living Death. “All the magical world,” he continued, voice slow and methodical, “is diminished by her loss.”
“—I genuinely believed she would take over the world,” said Rucha. She was dressed like an upside-down lotus, draped in pale pink petals, and her hair the dark black bud of the centre. “I’m not even convinced she’s gone. I know we’re hosting a funeral, but—Ahmed seemed beyond that, didn’t she? She was like a professor when you’re in first year. They don’t exist outside of school. Ahmed didn’t exist outside of research. She was immortal. I was looking forwards to her dark reign.”
“—there was a darkness in her, I s’pose, that resonated with me. Ahmed felt like she had a dark soul. Not evil. Not even tortured. Cynical—that’s it. She was a cynic, and she had these layers of defensive irony to her that, if m’honest, made me feel for her. Made me feel like I knew something about her, ’cos no one and nothing was ever gonna get at her core, not past that heavy iron curtain she’d put up and the thousand traps behind it.”
Sirius stared down at the woven branches and smiled. It was a sad one. There was no crooked tilt to the corners of his lips, even if, Remus thought, he looked somewhat absurd wearing a funeral veil, collar, a torn little black dress, and a motorbike jacket overtop. P.A.’s theme was ‘broken conventions.’
“’Cept her cat. She was so gentle with the poor thing—ancient, it must’ve been—and I thought, ‘This is a woman with a whole lot of love for the world and not a lot of trust.’”
“—so I shouted, ‘Oi! That bloody cat!’”
Mary’s face was dynamic and indecipherable, a tempest beneath the running makeup. She wore a pantsuit again, but instead of sparkling white and a matching tophat, the fabric was a detailed amethyst Ankara dyed amber in long strips and a with a plain white backing to it, all culminating in a piling headwrap.
“If she wasn’t gonna let me feed it treats…” began Mary. She trailed off, then, and cast her brown eyes upwards, blinking rapidly. A dark tear of mascara ran from one eye down her shining earth-toned cheek—Ahmed would’ve loved the drama of that, Remus thought—and Mary wheezed a nervous laugh. “I can’t. I can’t do this, I—Jesus wept,” she muttered, wiping her cheek clear.
She walked with no rush and left a small rush of fallen leaves in her wake. All of them watched her a moment, hearing her heels move from unsteady earth to the distant wet wood of the bridge.
They watched still as Sirius went on after her, and Lily shortly thereafter as well.
Light pale fog swallowed all three.
“Lupin,” whispered Rucha, urgent. She was across the crowd from him but had her wand in hand—it was the only way, he realised, she’d ever be able to whisper in his ear like this. “Someone should probably save this thing,” she continued in a hiss, “and it’s not me. I’m rubbish at public speaking.”
Remus had not been planning on speaking. He was too worried he’d vomit all over the woven Kneazle or accidentally set fire to the leafy butterflies or, for no particular reason, confess to having stolen all of Ahmed’s research material mere days before she went missing. Everyone knew sincerity was not his strong suit. And the way he was dressed—
Sirius had sliced off the sleeves from a knitted beige jumper as well as most of the belly, and done similar things to a once-nice pair of trousers with chocolate stains forever in their pockets. In a particularly flagrant abuse of high-level magic, he’d used an Entropy Charm to fray their edges and, inspired by Nathaniel’s summer transformation, covered over Remus’s scars with black tattoo-like paint. Sirius had pinned him to the bed and put eyeliner on him. His poor bloody eyes still stung. Still, even he’d been shocked by the effect. They had decided, for a night, to revive Remus the Yob, the punk he’d once been and more. Yet Remus felt his numb feet guiding him forwards and the chill autumn breeze on his stomach.
“I, well, like many others,” he began, “did not know Gloria Ahmed and consider that a great loss. I didn’t—it feels inappropriate to stand here, talking like I knew her, but the truth remains that I knew many people who knew her, and never once,” Remus continued, breathing steady, “did someone say their life was diminished by their paths crossing. She was brilliant and chaotic and, though every lost life in our time is like a light going out in the dark, hers was a uniquely bright one. I have never met a witch so confident in her own skin.
“I wondered sometimes about what it might have cost her to get that confidence. She seemed to me a person who had known too much loss too soon—and, thinking about loss, I catch myself saying, ‘She would have been one of the greats,’ but that’s not true. She already was. One of the greats, I mean to say.
“An old—a friend once told me that our futures are inherited by others as legacies, and while I think that’s true, here, I can’t help but wonder if, well, perhaps it’s true in a different way. Losing Gloria Ahmed is a great blow to the world, yes, but our futures as witches and wizards she’s touched, I think, will become her legacy. If we can’t get her back,” he continued, blinking, “then we must do the best we can with the tiny little gifts she gave us. To do otherwise, well—it’d be an insult to her greatness. Her terribleness, too. She deserved better.
“I think—could we do a moment of silence?” asked Remus. He was out of words. He could say something superficially wise, to the effect of Goodnight, sweet prince, but not only would that be poncey and lame, it was also probably de trop.
Thankfully, while no one nodded or murmured, a few of the crowd, Nathaniel, Rucha, even Severus, closed their eyes. The rest of the first-years looked adrift. Out of place.
Funny how familiar they were.
After a minute, Remus nodded to signal the moment was over and, not trusting his voice, and returned to the crowd. Jacob and Sophia brought over a small, ribbon-wrapped bouquet of Scottish wildflowers and set it at the base of the woven Kneazle. The humid air carried their scents on the breeze. They were subtler, woodier scents peppered with acrid resinous ones and earthy undertones, as the flowers of the highlands were a smaller, hardier, and compact lot like many of its people. Some, like the iconic pink thistle, had barbed spines.
None of the flowers there, however, ought produce the medley of scents that crawled over Remus’s nose. Carried on the crosswind cutting through the Forbidden Forest, Remus smelled them, distant and wet and too familiar, and above all of the lycanthropic noise, he smelled her. The Odour.
Remus shivered and excused himself. No one bothered him about it. The funeral was more or less over, for better or for worse, and those remaining were milling about in the requisite afterperiod, recovering, talking about Ahmed, and listening to more personal stories about a woman they all hardly knew. That, and everyone probably assumed he was going after Mary.
It wasn’t entirely untrue—Remus felt awful for her, and if he were better with his words and at keeping the contents of his stomach contained, he would’ve followed her sooner—but the truth was, he was looking for Sirius. Sirius was the only one he trusted with the mad idea bouncing around his head, then.
***
He and Sirius sneaked out by the grace of questionable aesthetic choices. Whereas Slughorn’s last theme, ‘reflecting,’ was gaudy but otherwise simple enough to be inobtrusive, that year the ballroom was styled after a hedge maze—for ‘navigating excellence,’ apparently, although it meant their absences would be that much harder to detect—and all the catering served fresh off the vine.
The world, Remus thought, was not yet prepared for oyster-bearing shrubs.
Nor was Remus himself prepared for schmoozing with the elite and enigmatic overlords of his theretofore tiny magical world. To whom was Remus supposed to pitch his Comprehensive Locator Charm? Anyone in the Ministry would inevitably funnel it towards some grim militaristic use or worse, given that, while yes, the average witch or wizard couldn’t cast a competent Shield Charm let alone a spell of nondetection, combatant Death Eaters did not share much overlap with that group. The last thing the Ministry needed was a map to every disempowered soul in Britain.
Outside of the Ministry, Remus didn’t know of any public magical libraries. Any other library than Hogwarts, actually, and he hardly needed a ballroom with animated topiary dragons to convince Irma Pince his Locator would make an excellent cataloguing tool. Were there magical zoos that needed to keep a close eye on their Krups? Flubberworm researchers unable to distinguish their subjects from one another? And how many Unplottable places, really, were in desperate need of Plotting?
Dumbledore had called his thesis a ‘delightful’ kind of magic, but Remus himself wondered if that was because Dumbledore, in all his age, still saw magic as more than a means to a political end. It was easy to see research and invention and innovation as things of inherent good—or at least neutrality—when you weren’t staring down the ice pick of a transorbital leucotomy. As Remus read, it was considered something of a marvel in its time. Those patients might have had words with the researchers about their good intentions. ‘Might’ being the operative word, of course, because the leucotomy was bit of a gamble when it came to preserving one’s language skills.
All this was well and good and almost convincing enough on its own, but even without it, Remus would have ditched the party regardless. His obsessive mind was running a hundred scenarios at once. His skin itched. So too did the inside of Remus’s eyelids. It was an ache of the joints brought about by a barometric pressure drop, though the storm it heralded was mixed with a bothersome pollen allergy and two rows of sharp canine teeth.
Even within the close and nonlinear walls of the One-Eyed Witch Who Was Actually a Hag Passage, Remus could still smell the Odour. Sirius watched him shiver and the corners of his moustached lips turned downwards.
“I take it,” he said, “you’re not still smelling my perfume.”
“Alas, not. Eau de Lady Padfoot is not principle on my mind, at the moment.”
“Lady Padfoot?” Sirius replied, incredulous. Remus blinked—both at the lack of echo, which always unnerved him in the Passage, and because the acrobatic emotions on Sirius’s trapeze eyebrows were hard to parse. “Remus Lupin,” he murmured, “if we weren’t in the midst of a terrible operation, I’d shag you through the wall.”
“Noted. You liked that, then?”
“It’s perfect. Boyish and girlish, very Ziggy, which is where I think I currently exist.”
“Currently?”
“S’not my fault that I am a hapless passenger to the whims of my own body,” replied Sirius. A moment later, his jaw twisted off-kilter. “And if it is my fault,” he continued, “then I’ll consider it an exercise in free will.”
“You’re so barmy, like,” said Remus with a snort, but that had been Sirius’s plan, after all. Get him laughing. That Remus’s mood grew morose and foreboding as they travelled the Passage had not been lost on Sirius, who knew all too well what memories were bursting from their fresh graves. Even if, of course, there was no guarantee anything was happening.
All Hallow’s Eve was not a full moon. No one could be turned, tonight—or, well, not into a werewolf, and while vampire attacks were also allegedly trending upwards, the Ministry’s latest published estimates claimed there were only a dozen vampires in all of Britain compared to just over a hundred werewolves. Yet, when Sirius suggested (for once, not facetiously) that they inform Dumbledore of the werewolves on the wind, something strange had happened. The spiral stair before the Headmaster’s Office saw them to an open door and an empty room. Or, no, not empty. The tight-lipped figure of Professor McGonagall sat behind the Headmaster’s claw-footed desk. She told them, with practiced nonspecificity, that Professor Dumbledore had other matters to which he must attend. ‘Other matters’ taking place off the castle grounds, if the Marauder’s map was to be believed.
As they rounded the last shallow curve that would take them to the basement of Honeydukes, Remus took a deep breath and leaned down his head to budge his cheek up against Sirius’s dark curls.
“Tell me what we’re doing is not insane,” said Remus, voice mushed by the side of Sirius’s head. “Tell me, honest, if you think I’m walking the both of us into lethal danger.”
“Wrong one to ask, Moony. Mad Black?” He rapped his knuckles against the side of his skull, light. He felt Sirius’s shrug. “Everyone reckons I’m a bit of a ticking timebomb.”
“Oh, right, the inbreeding.”
Sirius jabbed him with a bony elbow—it was unfair, really, because Sirius’s ribs were still almost healed nearly two months later and so Remus couldn’t return the gesture—then muttered, “I’ll show you inbreeding,” which, bloody Christ, earned a gag from Remus and a flush of heat in his cheeks. The ways Sirius could roll the disturbing in with the erotic was a kind of dark magic itself, Remus thought.
“Oi oi, Moony,” Sirius whispered. A dim, silvery light filtered through the cracks of a trapdoor up ahead. “Wands out.”
The cellar of Honeydukes did not smell of sugar, syrup, or rich earthy chocolate. Remus had learned this in his third year. The preservation enchantments over every box, barrel, crate, and bottle were air-tight in the literal sense, and the scents of the showroom above magically emplaced for maximum fragrance, and so it left the storage cellar with a dark and sterile atmosphere, like the unexplored backrooms of a carnival. It oughtn’t have been so eerie, Remus thought, and it definitely oughtn’t have a pair of reflective yellow eyes peering at him from the shadows. Tapetum—
Flashing forwards like a streak of quicksilver, the Odour’s scarred war form lunged at Remus, stopping a half-step to his left where one of her laughing yellow eyes met Remus’s and her powerful jaw met Sirius’s clavicle through his leather jacket and dress. She snapped her maw shut around him like a springing trap and did not release, and there was a wailing noise coming from someone, from Remus, raw and guttural and a mangling of his name, and then, Remus thought, he must have had an aneurysm because Sirius and the werewolf laced their fingers together—long crooked digits swimming in large silvery paws—and began to tango.
The Odour twirled and dipped Sirius before they danced together into a closet. The door swung shut behind them.
Remus looked over his shoulder, his other shoulder, and saw Sirius, pale-faced, wand arm still outstretched. There was an upturned angle to his jaw, Remus realised, because Sirius was scanning the ceiling. Following something.
Something that sounded a lot like footsteps.
To Remus’s dismay, the only storage cupboard was occupied by a dancing Boggart and they’d already slid the false stone that covered the Passage entrance back into place.
Sirius yanked him by the bare shoulder until they were both crouched behind a stack of barrels. His fingers dug into Remus’s skin and threatened to take tattoo paint with them. With his other hand, however, he rubbed gentle circles on the crest of Remus’s back, probably because Remus was giving off a pathetic whimper. He bit it off by biting into his tongue when the door at the top of the stairs swung open.
“S’creepy, like,” said a familiar whisper. Remus’s fuzzy brows furrowed. “Y’sure you heard something?”
“Merlin. Should I check it myself?”
“If you can make it down the stairs.”
No part of Remus expected to see Marlene McKinnon hobble down the stairs of Honeydukes’ cellar, one boot more resistant to the impetus of nerves than the other. She had her wand at the ready and wore functional black robes that covered all scars but the ruffled skin on her scalp and the burn lines of her cheek. Her hood was drawn up. She smelled like wood ash, sweet and resinous. With one even glance she seemed to take in the room, her quick brown foxy eyes falling over the barrels that hid Sirius and Remus without notice before she turned back to the stairs. Her posture was alert, if almost bored.
“Clear,” she said, and yet as she spoke, she flourished her wand.
Sirius’s back hit the ceiling first, and Remus joined him there a half-second later. With the wind knocked from his lungs and held, Remus thought, at bay by the inverted gravity against his chest, he couldn’t quite see her approach. She was dark and blurry. So was the rest of the world, and soon the blood pounding in his ears was overwhelming.
“—let him down!” hissed Sirius. “He’s having a—”
“—answer me,” replied Marlene. Her voice boomed in Remus’s ears. “What did Sirius Black tell me after the Christmas Quidditch match in his sixth year?”
“WHAT?”
“Answer me. What did—”
“‘Y’know, McKinnon, I’ll deny it if you tell anyone, but I’m glad you beat me out for Beater.’ There, pleased, are we? Let him—”
The weight was off Remus’s chest and still he could not find a full breath for a minute thereafter. He barely recalled floating down to the stone floor like a loosened feather.
“Merlin’s bloody bollocks,” whispered Benjy. He was crouched beside Remus, inspecting him like a curiosity in a museum. “Marls, what’d you do to him?”
Sirius, in a move that was probably wise, kept some distance and instead curved his hand around Remus’s calf. He was staring at Marlene with a mix of confusion and vague indignation.
“He—Remus has—you can’t restrain him,” growled Sirius. Discomfort edged into his voice. “It’s a thing, don’t ask, seeing as you bloody attacked us. Which,” Sirius continued, honing that edge of discomfort into a more productive kind of anger, “why, might I ask? Don’t tell me Honeydukes hired on hit-wizards as security.”
A series of synapses fired in Remus’s brain.
“They’re here,” he began through deep breaths, “because of the attacks.” Perhaps his brain appreciated the opportunity to do something other than panic.
To their credit, neither Benjy nor Marlene’s faces moved at the deduction/accusation. Sirius, however, being an actual poker player—he’d won several pairs of knickers and/or pants off their wearers, according to the stories—had told him that an unchanging face was not actually a very good poker one.
“I neither confirm nor deny nothing. Why are you lot here?” asked Marlene. Her face was evaluative.
“S’pose we’re trespassing, same as you. Right, Moony?”
“Last I knew, both of them were wounded, like,” he said. Benjy stood from his crouch and looked between them and Marlene. “We ought to send them back right now. Catch up with the others. They can’t stay here, Marls, can they, like?”
There were others, were there?
“Ought. Can’t,” muttered Marlene. She pulled a timepiece from her pocket without a word. She frowned a tight-lipped frown that, at one side, did not move as much as on the other. In the distance and even muffled as they were by a stone cellar, Remus heard the deep, melodic bell of midnight coming from Hogsmeade centre. It rang once. Twice.
On the eleventh stroke, someone screamed like a banshee.
It might’ve been a banshee.
“You’re to come with us and do exactly as I say,” said Marlene. Her expression was grim and determined. “Stay down and stay out of the way for now. Keep your wands at the ready. If either of you die, not only will it haunt me, I’ll never hear the end of it.”
Then they were out into the night streets. Marlene commanded the pack of them, who, being honest, looked the part of a cocaine-fuelled joke. Two and a half blokes, a werewolf included, and all of them having shagged each other at least once, led by a woman equal parts terrifying and Sunday roast. Perhaps it was the lingering adrenaline and stress in his veins, but Remus felt on the urge of a maddened laugh while they stalked the backstreets of Hogsmeade. Well. ‘Backstreets.’ Despite being the only major all-magical settlement in Britain, the town had a single High Street running through it, and so the alleyways were far and few between and always near overgrown fields of Scottish wildgrasses. Things lived in them: stray cats and dogs, birds, bugs, as well as the invasive offspring of lost familiars. Their surreptitious creeping was set to the soundtrack of toad croaks and scampering rats.
All the while Remus was profoundly useless.
It was not a novel feeling, but in this particular case he had more confidence in it. Halfway through suggesting he cast Sirius’s passive detection charm, Sirius himself explained that, seeing as Hogsmeade was enchanted up the arse and all the way through to its oesophagus, probably, all Remus would do is blind himself in one eye for the duration of the spell.
Keeping mum was simple after that. When they came across a pair of young adults—older than Remus or most of them, though they looked younger hunched in the tallgrass edge at night—Sirius disillusioned the pair of them and gave firm instruction to lay flat until someone called an all clear. Marlene and Benjy kept watch. Remus, by contrast, gaped his lips like a weretrout.
There were noises in the distance with growing frequency—a scream, a shout, a dozen others as unintelligible as they were hair-raising—and yet Marlene moved with no urgency, and never, never directly towards them.
“Could be a trap, like,” whispered Benjy. His spirits were still high, despite the circumstances. “Eyes sharp. Can’t let the Aurors find us vigilantes, aye, Lupin?”
Everything about their circumstances felt absurd. They crossed from Honeydukes past the cackling house of Zonko’s Joke Shop and crawled along the fenceline of several small houses, none with the lights on, clouds of breath freezing in the night air and trailing, pale, behind them like voyeuristic ghosts; Marlene crept down the long, twisting alley between Madam Puddifoot’s perfumed abode and the sterile shopfront of Scrivenshaft’s Quill Shop; and only when they crossed the High Street in a silent sprint to the block of miscellaneous shops between the Three Broomsticks and the Hog’s Head did Remus recognise his surroundings.
The bricks were faded and the mortar rotted away, but the text upon the wall bore four mismatched styles—sprawling, simple, cursive, and bold block letters—read, “MSSRS MOONY, WORMTAIL, PADFOOT, AND PRONGS WERE HE” before ending in an abrupt and permanent chalk-white streak because, being out-of-bound fifth year hooligans, they had been easily frightened by rustling grasses. He trailed his fingers over the graffitied letters softly. He knew each of their hands well and could still passably imitate them. Five years of collective academic dishonesty, writing essays and finishing homework for one another, had trained each Marauder a talent for forgery.
Remus lingered behind to stare at the wall a moment. He wasn’t fifteen again—that part of Remus was gone, even as he laid his hand on the bricks. His senses couldn’t pull him back. Not anymore. Instead, they anchored him to the present in firm place while Sirius tugged insistently at his wrist.
He smelled someone.
Two someones, both reeking of desperate excitement what with the sweat clinging to their skin in the cold and dark now-November morning. Then Remus saw them—they turned the distant corner and stood there, silent, while Benjy and Marlene proceeded towards them, and it took Remus a long moment to realise he was the only one among them to have good eyesight in the dark. It was comical. Absurd, again, because despite knowing a handful of languages, all words left Remus and so all he could do was lift his arm and gesture stupidly at the pair of obvious Death Eaters at the end of the alley. Sirius’s head followed his arm and Marlene swiped an open palm at both of them.
For the second time that evening, Remus was flattened against a hard, cold surface. He wasn’t pinned there—he slumped bonelessly to the ground a moment later, actually—and turned his head through the molasses of shock to watch the fight unfolding before him.
Remus was not a duellist. He had zero or perhaps negative duelling acumen, seeing as it was both verboten at Hogwarts and prone to damaging the clothes he used to shield his reputation and/or naughty bits from public view. James and Peter had, however, dragged out an old film reel from Flitwick’s collection to watch the small man in his natural environment.
This was not a duel. Duels were precise and efficient and about staggering your opponent so you could break their defences and land a single finishing blow. Duels were understated. High art, according to James.
In a duel, Peter had explained, knowledge was key. If you could identify the curse thrown at you, you could counter it and throw it back where it could not be countered again. That was how you got your footing: forcing your opponent to block with a general Shield Charm and thus granting you the offensive position until, of course, they countered your own curse and the process repeated with positions reversed. Hence why there were so many strange jinxes and hexes and hence why Peter, whose first reflex was often a Blasting Curse and second reflex was retreat, had never tried his hand at formal duelling.
Marlene, however, was not countering or retreating. She was deflecting flashy spells of the dark and explosive variety off into the sky above Hogsmeade with concerted effort on her scarred profile because she did not have the luxury of collateral damage. If she reflected them back whence they came, then not even God knew where they might detonate. The flashes in the sky were like a firework show at the London Blitz. Despite the wand in his hand Remus threw up both arms to shield his face when an oncoming rush of dust and debris shot towards him, parting around Marlene and Benjy like a fucking Bludger. It never quite met his face: Sirius’s hands were both raised before him, wand in one, the flat of his palm forwards, an translucent ripple in the air before him where he’d thrown up a shield.
Behind both Marlene and the explosives enthusiast, their respective partners were working spells with a longer wind-up. It was the sort of magic you couldn’t work in a fight: grounded feet and immobile stances. He felt an unsettling pressure build in his ears. He couldn’t tell the bursts and flashes of flame and scalding blue light from offensive attacks and accidental manifestations. The thought of doing anything but crouching down and holding his head between his knees was utterly unthinkable. Smoke was filling the alley. Something had to give. Remus never learned what the other Death Eater was casting because Benjy finished his first—a summoning.
A grand piano appeared several metres above both of the Death Eaters with no audible warning, though the wooden splintering noise it gave as it collapsed over both of them was warning enough to anyone within earshot. It kicked up, amusingly, a literal cloud of dust.
The fireworks ceased in the sky.
Remus let out a breath he’d unconsciously held. Inhaled. Choked on that inhalation, because four seconds later the air fizzled like a fresh-lit firecracker between the four of them, Benjy and Marlene in the alley middle and him and Sirius against the wall, still.
A blink later Remus wasn’t sure if his Shield Charm went through or not because he was blind and deaf and the air exploded in a great gout of pressure and fire, and the last thought in his mind before falling unconscious was a prayer, to whomever, that Sirius was still alive.
***
When he woke he was staring at the deadly emerald shades of the Dark Mark in the sky through the film of centuries-old mortar and fresh dust and eternal Scottish dirt, all cast into the air by the explosion, where it lingered still. Recent. He hadn’t been down long but he was down, thoroughly so, because a large chunk of held-together wall was crushing his right thigh and pelvis with a throbbing agony that quickly grew numb and the rest of him was weighed down by fragmented brick. His first instinct was to Apparate somewhere safe, but without a wand and with the Dark Mark suppressing magical travel, Remus settled for a rattling groan and a bad diagnostic.
His lungs were on fire and also full of cancer. Breath, Jesus Christ, he would give anything for a single unhindered breath, but ‘anything’ was comically out of reach and included his wand and all sounds. His ears rang so loud he thought his head might explode.
Concussion—that was the word.
Remus was concussed and his head exploding, at all times, with every possible thought, and he could not recall a single one once they passed through. They might’ve run out of him at the ears and nose. His upper lip was slick. Blood. Nosebleed. Bad one. There was something pinning down his thigh—hadn’t he known that already?—and then Sirius’ grey eyes were staring down at him and dusty black hair partitioning them off from the world. Sirius was heaving debris off of him with considerable effort and moving his lips, frantic. Remus couldn’t parse the words. His face was grey with ash. It stuck to Sirius’s scraggly beard and thin eyebrows and delicate eyelashes and made him look older, and then his hands, also dust-coated, were yanking Remus’s shoulder from its socket.
The pain was delicious. It snapped Remus back into focus. Bracing his good leg as firm as possible against the alleyway wall to which he’d been spun, Remus pushed with all his beanstalk strength. Debris shifted. Something gave. He wriggled himself free and doubled over, coughing and sputtering again. The agony that wracked through his leg as precious blood flowed through his pelvis and back was almost as delicious as the shoulder pain. He wiggled his toes. Felt them move. He could cry.
Sirius was helping him up, arm over his leather jacket, and he said something at Remus’s lips again.
“WHAT?” shouted Remus and all he registered was the vibrations in his earbones. That was where he gestured—the universal signal combination for sudden explosive deafness—and Sirius nodded, sharp. A blinding flashbulb of light went off in front of them and out of traumatised reflex, both of them ducked for the ground. He spun back. The duel was back on. Remus’s nose was full of soot and other fine particulate matter and his eyes stung, but he could see lights flashing, back and forth, through the haze around them. The duel was back on but between who and who he could not say. Remus briefly wondered if Benjy or Marlene were dead.
The thought was left behind in the alleyway. Sirius was leading him away.
It dawned on him as he watched Sirius’s lips move in a frenzy that Sirius was not talking for Remus’s benefit but for his own. There was a lot of repetition in the mouth movements and a lot of furtive glances at Remus’s face, like he couldn’t believe Remus was still alive. An afterthought struck him, then, and he fished something from his jacket pocket one-handed while he tugged Remus into a dark spot between houses. There was grass underfoot. Soft and damp. It might’ve been a garden.
A wand was thrust into Remus’s loose grip. From the way he was turning it over and over in his hand, you’d have thought Remus never saw a wand before.
Then they were moving again and Remus was whining, whinging at Sirius to let them breathe a moment. Perhaps because of his inability to gauge volume, Sirius relented and dragged them to a stop at the wooden bend of a house. The garden house. Remus doubled over and hacked something thick and congealed from his throat and blew his nose with no compunction into his hands, which he then wiped on the planky-plank wall in childish disgust. Fucking gross.
He tapped Sirius on the shoulder to signal his readiness and they took up formation again with Sirius bearing half his weight and acting as guide. Remus’s own eyes trailed the cobblestone of the High Street—like a child in a car watching the scenery blur by—and there were so many cobbles and, wait, he could feel them, because at some point Remus had lost both of his shoes and tore through his wet socks.
They were turning and he felt something else.
Bodily he bumped into the dark-cloaked figure and Sirius into the one beside the first. The latter two fell over each other, struggling out of view, while Remus and the Death Eater gaped at one another.
She wore a carved mask beneath her hood. Only her eyes, confused and wicked, were visible through the pale, bone-like mask and its snake-slitted eyes. Her hand—covered in a silk black glove, or was that supposed to be black silk glove—whipped up and yet, before she could level her wand at any part of him, Remus’s head snapped forwards and collided with the crown of her skull followed by an unfocused flat-palmed strike to the throat, which she clutched at like it’d been cut. Fear in its pure form grew behind her eyes and overtook all other emotion. Remus wondered, for a moment, if she thought she was about to die.
Her dropped wand rolled off of Remus’s foot and he stared at it, dumb, before stamping as hard as he could with his bad leg. He felt it snap beneath his heel. Not a clean snap, either, a fractured, grind-y kind of break. Was this who they were? What they were without wands and magic? This quintessence of dust. Perhaps Socrates had a point, Remus thought, and then he shoved the Death Eater like a playground bully.
She fell, scrabbled backwards, though Remus didn’t advance on her. Why bother? She left a brush of blood on the cobbles where she’d skinned her palms. The moment she realised Remus wasn’t going to attack her, she stood, shaking, and ran at full tilt towards a side street. Maybe she lived there—maybe she’d done a terror attack on her own backyard. Wouldn’t that be funny?
All the urgency was seeping from Remus’s bones, and with it the survival instincts he so relied upon for, well, survival. It took him a second to glance over at the struggling wizards beside him—his eyes moved, but his brain was a hamster-operated slide projector trying to relay them—and saw Sirius break apart from the man, older and larger, that he was wrestling with.
Both of them had their wands in hand, still. They stood and drew on each other and, before either could cast, the wall beside them exploded and a flying brick clipped the man in the head with such a frivolous lightness it skimmed off his hood, but the man dropped like a loosened marionette anyway. By contrast, Sirius had his hand out to the side and was frozen.
As Remus limped towards him, however, he saw that he wasn’t frozen, he was stuck trembling in place like a frightened statue, and a handful of bricks were levitating in the air a metre or so away from Sirius’s frail and mortal body, the shrapnel of a grenade that had missed their cue to enter.
The bricks fell and so did Sirius to his knees, and it was Remus’s turn to be the rescuer. The problem being, he didn’t know what to do.
He cast a glance about the surroundings, all grass and house and loose paving stones underfoot, and frowned at the wandlights approaching. Shit fuck were they still on the High Street? He couldn’t carry Sirius, not with his leg, so instead he crouched and smashed his bloodied lips into Sirius’s own mouth.
His face twisted through the stages of grief and Remus must’ve blinked because they were jogging as best they could manage down the street towards the Three Broomsticks, where a burly woman, Rosmerta, maybe, was ushering them into a darkened door. From there they travelled through an empty bar with the tables flipped on their sides as cover. Remus let himself be herded up the stairs despite his wonky hip and leg and everything else, actually, because he’d chosen the absolute worst day to wear the minimal possible amount of skin coverage.
Sirius struggled with that part as Remus tried to peel some of it off—his clothes had been filthy and shredded to begin with, being honest—but a moment later Sirius was struggling with someone else. Same height but blond-haired and pudgier.
The wizard looked like Peter, but that wasn’t possible. Peter was—Peter did not exist in this kind of world. This was an un-Peter place to be, and drawing his wand on someone who didn’t have their back turned, well, that was not a thing Peter Pettigrew, resident coward and Warmduscher, ever did.
Once James’s forearm flattened against Remus’s chest and his wandtip was pressed to the underside of his mortared bloody chin, however, Remus was forced to re-evaluate that statement. Maybe that was Peter, albeit a slightly different one, in the same way that this James still had spikey black hair, a honey-y soap scent, and dark round features, but his myopic eyes no longer saw the best in people behind his round glasses. Not now, anyway. His lips were moving in wide shapes and Remus could feel him shouting through their point of contact. Better than a tree again, he supposed. It was funny how history repeated itself.
Remus took it all back. This was absurd.
What was James going to do? Kill him? It was James. James Potter, son of Effie and, oh, what’s his name, the dead one—Fleamont! That was him. They played Quidditch together every summer in James’s back garden even though Remus was rubbish at flying. James had been over at theirs with Sirius and Peter for Christmas Eve because that was when Remus’s family celebrated, and they’d all gone over to James’s for Christmas Day proper the morning after. James could have done nothing and let Severus get devoured by a werewolf, and he did not. James was no killer.
So why did this James press his wand so hard into Remus’s throat he could taste his pulse and thought he might bleed? When did this motherfucker get here? Why was he sweating and covered in ash and shouting even though, for Christ’s sake, Remus couldn’t hear him?
When a gasping laugh broke out of Remus’s chest, Sirius was free of Peter and screaming something at James, eyes wild with terror like the traumatised child, Remus thought, they might all never stop being.
Everything did stop, however.
Without James’s support, Remus slumped against the wall of the room—it was nice, actually, fluffy wide bed, washbasin of some kind on a table—until his arse hit the floor hard. God, it felt nice to sit. To have the world be a blur around you while other people sorted it all out, to not have to worry your pretty little concussed (or was that pretty concussed little?) head about anything. James rounded on Sirius, which was about when his vision began to spin like a weathervane. He leaned his sticky forehead against the wall, relishing its coolness, and fought back the urge to vomit. He tasted its acrid grey sting on his tongue, already. At least he was well-positioned. No sense in getting it all everywhere.
In the end it was Peter, of all people, who managed to restore his hearing. With his wand still levelled at Remus’s head, he tugged his head to the side and dropped something cool and soothing from a pipette into Remus’s ear. The pressure of the world vanished, radio static clearing, like breaching the surface of the ocean for the very first time. He nearly sobbed in relief. Peter, hm? Who would’ve thought?
Peter pressed his wand under Remus’s chin nonetheless.
“What was the first thing I ever said to you?” asked Peter, and Remus had to strain his overtaxed brain a moment to remember. He wondered if that was lost on Peter.
“‘These two are going to be the death of us,’” replied Remus. His voice was dry and crackly and muffled on one side.
“It was actually ‘These boys,’” said Peter, annoyed, “but close enough, I guess. I guess you are concussed.”
There was some discussion not involving Remus about whether Peter should heal Remus’s other eardrum or if they should wait for a ‘real’ healer. James was for, Sirius against. Peter, in the meantime, was assessing Remus to make sure he didn’t bleed to death. Most all they had was the Dittany Peter had brewed, which mended cuts and tears like nothing else but did little of anything for internal injuries. Never mind how they might administer it subdermally. His rudimentary healing spells were crude, though when he rapped his wand against Remus’s temple with a sharp, proto-Germanic exclamation of sorts, the distant shapes of the room—a slanted bookshelf, James’s glasses, the antlers on the wall behind him, the safety pin through Sirius’s ear—came into slightly sharper focus, as though a smudge had been wiped off his very corneas. His building urge to vomit again lay down and dormant. His thoughts slowed. He blinked, once, twice, and realised that the mounted stag’s head was a coatrack, and that Sirius didn’t have any piercings. Perhaps they oughtn’t have let Peter heal him after all.
Yet something niggled in his brain like an insistent cockroach stuck between the folds. It happened in the blinky-blink bit, Remus realised. They hadn’t still been on the High Street but near off it, and in their haste to, technically speaking, get the fuck out of dodge, Remus had taken a left turn when Sirius had taken a right.
Sirus’s was the correct path, hugging the fences the safe way back, but Remus’s had had a sight at the end of it that did not assimilate well into his understanding of the world, no, not at all.
A figure, blurry and loose and nondescript except for their mullet of black hair and filthy appearance stood there, naked, blood-drenched to the elbows and knees. Covered in thick body hair. A corpse, maybe, or maybe someone near death was at their feet. The way the figure stalked back and forth like a prowling, impatient predator was enough to tell Remus they were a werewolf. That they did magic with no wand and used only their hands—they struck them together like two flintstones for a spark and produced a gout of flame instead—told Remus that they were dangerous, but nothing could’ve prepared Remus for what followed.
After lighting the back of the warehouse aflame, they ducked to the ground. Remus watched their bones snap all over at once, like their skin was a stress ball in a tight grip and its contents all gooey gelatine. Ears and a tail and night-black fur and all the other lycanthropic accoutrements sprang from their flesh. They grew two feet taller. They dipped their newfound nose to sniff at the corpse, which was not a corpse, because they rolled it over and ripped open its shirt and sank their sharp, permanent teeth into its flank.
Remus vomited, then. It explained the acrid taste in his mouth.
There was no ripping or tearing involved. It was unanimal. They retracted their jaws and draped the shredded shirt over the wound, then loped, a moment later, out from the alleyway. Which was when Sirius had appeared, grabbed his hand, and tugged him away, of course. The whole misstep had taken less than fifteen seconds and yet, now in the purported safety of the Three Broomsticks, it played on loop in Remus’s memory without end.
At some point, he was whispering the tale to Sirius.
“Moony, Moony,” crooned Sirius, quiet. He both rocked and let himself be rocked in place. Remus only mused for a second over who was comforting whom until he realised, of course, it did not need to be a competitive matter. “S’okay, Moony,” he continued. He drew back to touch their foreheads together. “It was probably another Boggart. There’s no moon, remember?”
Sirius’s skin was cool and clammy but the person inside it was not, and for some ungodly reason he insisted that Remus stay awake even though he was so bloody tired. Which is when Sirius broke of course, and demanded—not asked, he never asked of Peter, not really—for Peter to do as many healing spells as he could safely manage on Remus. Remus did not like the self-satisfied look on Peter’s ratty pale face as he did so.
An hour or two or fifteen years later, maybe, Sirius was feeding him sips of some potion or another and perhaps, Remus thought, he might be able to keep a thought straight in his head. Perhaps.
There came a knock at the door. A patterned one at that.
“Who could that be at this hour?” murmured Remus, wry. Sirius cracked a grin—there he was—while James stared down at him like he was Loony fucking Lupin and Peter, of course, answered the door.
“I was the third person to find out that Lily fancied you,” said Marlene offhandedly. “I was after Mary, Lily being the first one, and you the last.”
She clapped James on the shoulder and he did the same to her, allowing a brief hug in their obvious relief. Sirius, meanwhile, threw both arms around Benjy and kissed him on both cheeks—which, really, Remus hadn’t realised they had a friendship proper, as most of Remus’s own time with Benjy had been physical and/or political—and thereafter lead both him and Marlene over to Remus.
They took turns inspecting him as they debriefed with James and Peter.
“A small host of them came out of the Forest,” said James. He was eager and itching. He ran his hand through his short crop of dark spiky hair over and over, kept fiddling with his glasses. “The intelligence was good, but I didn’t realise how many there’d be. They circled the Black Lake and we had to run from the station before they swarmed us. We heard them Apparating. I can’t believe you’re both alive,” he added. An afterthought.
“Might have your friend here to thank for that,” replied Marlene. She cocked her head to the side and stared right through him. “He, in turn, has Merlin to thank.”
“Remus?” asked James. He sounded surprised.
Benjy was tracing small circles with his wand on Remus’s temple. His skin was cooling. His brain itched just a little bit less.
“Delayed explosion. He cast two Shield Charms at the same time,” Marlene continued, shaking her head and looking back to James. It sounded vaguely correct. Martyr-ish, which was, evidently, his panic response. “One around the origin point of the bombardment, the other in front of him without a wand. Us three were unscathed—it was strong, but with that sort of interference, we managed to protect ourselves. Bloody lunatic move, that.”
“Tidy trick. They laid into us again the second the spell popped, but Lupin here bought us a few seconds we needed, like,” Benjy explained.
“Nearly killed him.”
“‘Nearly,’” said Remus, voice croaky, “is the operative word, here.”
James frowned down at him with uncertainty in his eyes—how was that for myopia, huh, Potter?—and then cast those complicated thoughts aside. “What about the Death Eaters? Dead, or—”
“—one dead, like,” replied Benjy. His face was neutral, and Remus’s creative brain was too tired to imagine all the hilarious and horrifying ways precision summoning could kill a person. “Made certain of that. Fireworks one got away, though.”
“We stunned a few ourselves. Their allies have dragged them to safety, I imagine, but if any were missed, the Aurors will be collecting them now.”
Sirius cleared his throat.
“We—one’s dead by us,” he said, quiet. “Rogue spell clipped him. Saw the light leave his eyes. Recognised them from somewhere, though I can’t for the life of me tell you where from. Family, I s’pose.”
“Prongs?” said Remus, abrupt.
“Remus?”
“I’m sorry—”
“—mate, it was months ago,” replied James, shaking his head in disbelief. He crossed to where Remus was slumped against the wall with one leg outstretched and kneeled not unlike a father before a child with a skinned knee, or a perplexed owner calming a startled, traumatised hound. Glancing only once at Benjy for the go-ahead, he put a broad hand to the back of Remus’s head to hold his gaze steady. His myopic brown eyes were swimming with—well, with something. Blame the concussion. “Let it go, yeah? Forgiven and forgotten, eh? Seeing as you just saved Pads’s life and maybe Marl’s and Benjy’s as well, I think we can call it even for now.”
“—but—”
“—not the night, Moony,” said James. He had a softer tone, that time. He knocked their foreheads together once, light, before pulling away. Remus felt his rapid pulse only briefly. “Let it go.”
So Remus let it go, knowing of course that the thoughts would orbit in close proximity until they crash-landed to his anxious planet surface again at a later time. He engrossed himself in other things—the way the four of them were discussing things, the coatrack that he’d mistaken for a mounted stag’s head before, and, more interestingly, Peter in the corner. He’d stepped away from the group for only a second to rifle through an oaken bureau. As he retrieved a roll of bound scrolls from the drawer, however, a pale mist crept through the wall. Somehow it didn’t surprise Peter. A silver glowing lobster swam through the wall, as dim and surreptitious as a ghost. It whispered with its disturbing lobster mouth into Peter’s ear for only a moment before dissipating. It couldn’t have been a Patronus, of course. Patroni did not do, er, whatever that was. Peter rejoined James, Marlene, and Benjy with his scrolls.
“Reports are in, Prongs,” he said, side-eyeing both Remus and Sirius as he rattled off words. Remus pretended to fuss with one of his ruined socks. “Four out of four, all Marked, none lost on our side, unknown other.”
Oh, great, code. More codes, he corrected, because that was what Remus’s concussed brain needed right now. In his daze he watched James turn away to cast a spell, literally hiding his wandwork from the rest of the room, and caught only the faintest glimpse of a spectral silver wolf loping towards the wall. It passed right through and left a puff of translucent mist in its wake.
Then Benjy, James, Peter, and Marlene broke away from them, fussing over scrolls and polaroids and portraiture, leaving him and Sirius on the floor by the wall. Remus put an arm over him, tucking Sirius’s bony frame tight against his side while he picked at Sirius’s ragged hems. Sirius, in turn, was tilting Remus’s scruffy rounded chin back and forth to examine him.
“You’ve torn your dress,” said Remus.
“Your face is a mess,” said Sirius.
“S’pose Rebel Rebel makes a certain quantitative sense, like,” replied Remus. He wiped at his face with both hands to squeeze the fatigue from it and both hands came away filthy. He couldn’t tell what was blood and what was ash. “Fucking Hell. What have we done? What was I thinking?”
“Moony.”
“I froze, Pads. Not just when the fighting started, but before that, and it was my bloody idea to come out here in the first place. I—Jesus Christ, this is the second time this year I’ve nearly got you killed.”
“I’m a princess, now, am I?” replied Sirius, grinning. Grinning! Mad Black was right. “In case it escaped your notice, Moony—and, really, I do appreciate the implied praise—I also froze worse than James that first time Lily snogged him. Ah, shite—you weren’t—never mind that. I froze, Moony,” he continued, swallowing something hard in his throat. “I reckon anyone in their right mind would, whether it’s the first time or the fiftieth.”
“What’s our excuse, then?”
“Ah, he’s got a sense of humour again,” whispered Sirius, and from the tilt of his head Remus thought he was nipping in for a kiss, but his grey eyes flicked, furtive, to the small audience of four just across the room. Lips curled down at the corners.
Remus pressed his forehead back to Sirius’s.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
It was the last thing they said of substance. Remus’s fingers rarely left the curve of Sirius’s wrist until morning arrived, at which point they were so bone tired Sirius had to snap his fingers every minute to keep Remus awake. With the sun up, the mysterious four of James, Peter, Marlene, and Benjy—all of which disappeared and returned at various points in the night—allowed him off to the castle grounds.
They were due for another lashing. Several, probably, from Mary and Lily and Professor McGonagall, but the one Remus thought most fondly about was Pomfrey’s lecture. If she offered him a sleep potion like his old transformation days, he’d take it in a heartbeat.
She did.
He did.
It’s the reason Remus didn’t learn for nearly twenty-four hours that, aside from him and Sirius, one of the firsties—Amir Maalouf, the weatherbeaten dragonologist and Squib, had for some reason also been absent from Slughorn’s do, though it would be a longer while still before Remus understood the significance of that fact. It was lost in the muted celebration that followed the morning Prophet article.
Though several establishments had been damaged by fire and explosion and a few dozen were wounded, all casualties as determined on 1 November were marked either as injured or missing. There were no obvious dead.
Only Sirius understood why that, for Remus, was no cause for jubilee.
Notes:
Just like my university days!
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, A Week for Sirius will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 4 April, a Friday. If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is The Weather Inside by earlybloomingparentheses, a R/S get-together fic set during the first war that features a repressed/unrepressed Remus that I really enjoy reading, and which I think engages with Remus's lycanthropy in a really intriguing internal way.
Chapter 16: A Week for Sirius
Chapter Text
Sirius’s sixth birthday marked one year of strict magical pedagogy and the beginning of a rivalry that would last some fifteen years. While he would not see the inside of Grimmauld Place’s formal dining room until he was eight and therefore appropriately presentable, he was given the morning off from his studies, on a weekday no less, and taken by his governess to the country estate. They walked the grounds hand-in-hand, along black-earthed flowerbeds and violet-hooded plants and well-disciplined fluffy green hedgerows looming as tall above him as the grey November sky, among other, stranger horticultures. At the stable his riding instructor showed him his new pony. Its name, he was informed, would be Argo. Whenever he told Remus the story—once a year, as it so happened—his grey eyes would lose their focus for a moment, and as though there, he would glimpse another detail before withheld: his riding instructor’s hair was grey, he said, and her skin was like olives. The pony’s nose had been shockingly wet at the touch of his steady six-year-old palm. He hadn’t yet learned that animals could be messy, or dangerous.
That afternoon he reported to the filigreed stacks of their ancestral library to discover an additional tufted chair beside his at the desk where he received his tutors. Walburga did not wait the three months he’d expected and instead gave Regulus, still only four years old, a wand of his own as well.
Orion Arcturus Black set them in direct competition and shackled them together, which was perhaps why postgrad work came so familiarly to Sirius: thereafter his progress was graded, yes, on how well or poorly he took to any given subject material, but along with his studies he gained the added responsibility of tutoring Regulus himself, of elevating a boy two years his younger to his own sterling six-year-old standard. Wherever Regulus lacked, Sirius was made to sit with him, sometimes for hours, and drag him by main force through arithmetic or his Latin or rudimentary spellcasting, until the candles dimmed in the corridors and a silent attendant came to fetch them for supper. When they both flourished, Walburga gave them such steep praise Sirius thought they might boil in it. There were more morning trips to the estate and more rides on Argo; there were choices in his readings (Iliad or Aeneid, Plato or Aristotle, Sophocles or Aeschylus or Euripides); at supper, on occasion, Orion would let him have half a glass of wine so dark and velvety-red it reminded him of the flowers on the estate. The ripe smell, tart and oozing.
On those scant few occasions where Regulus exceeded his baseline, however, those privileges evaporated. On Regulus’s seventh birthday he could command a field mouse to tapdance. Sirius’s had a fit, as did the next, as did the next. No matter how he tried he kept overwhelming them and burning them out. He cried. His pony went away. He never was sure if that was punishment for failure or crying—and, no, they hadn’t killed the thing, but they’d done something almost as terrible and given the pony to Regulus. He never rode Argo again.
Later—not very much later, Sirius claimed, usually while drunk or high or exhausted or some combination thereof, he came to realise they knew what they were doing, that they’d known all along exactly what they were doing. Yet whenever James or Remus raised the question of what, precisely, that meant for Regulus’s culpability, Sirius would stare back at them, pale, drunken face incredulous, and ignore whatever they’d just said, as though it was the stupidest statement in the world and therefore undeserving of acknowledgement. Sirius sober was equally unpliable. Stonefaced denial. He hadn’t said that, and they were putting words in his mouth, and were they calling him a fucking liar?
By age elven Sirius had heard whispers of the madness in the Black family blood and many years thereafter, while he stood beside Remus on the back of a train, sharing a spliff and their regrets, he would wonder if perhaps their blood was not to blame. Genetics seemed too fickle. Too simple and too much of a skive—it forgave of his blood relatives every sin. Not their fault. Not their doing. They were only mad, after all. Except the mad, as Sirius soon came to know, were far more prone to suffering than to inflict it upon others.
If sanity was a precious thing, then the Ancient and Noble House of Black acted as though they had that, too, in excess. They did not, of course. They were frugal with it. They spread it thin, like the last scrapings from a jam jar on Remus’s scone, and divided it with keen avarice between their offspring.
Sirius fought for it often with Regulus. No longer would the boy honour their arrangement to perform exactly to each other’s level, no less, no further. That pact was broken. He’d tasted honey. Sirius too, with vengeance, how sweet—how sweet until he saw what it cost Regulus to lose, which, being over a year younger and lacking the bloodthirst of his elder sibling, he began to do often. Sirius embarrassed him at dinners. He found spiders in the attic and hid them in Regulus’s wardrobe. He spent a week drilling Regulus on French vocabulary only for Regulus to return, red-cheeked, eyes streaming from Orion’s long study because, you see, Sirius had switched the meanings around. Eclipsing Regulus’s spellwork with his own was not worth the hunger pangs on his brother’s face, nor trouncing him in a duel the spoils of war. It festered inside him. If madness was within him, he’d invited it in to take root. He had to rip it out.
Sirius threw competitions. He made himself small. He refused to play his duet part of ‘the heir and the spare’. Rebellion came to him like all other of his hard-studied arts and became his most fervent passion. Self-sacrifice looked bad on Sirius but very, very good on those around him.
It was funny how it stayed with you, that stain, that root, even a decade later.
November reignited that fear in him. Neither of them slept well for days following the Hogsmeade attacks. With growing frequency, Sirius turned over in their dormitory bed and crawled like a nightbug to Remus’s ear, whispering, fearful, that he thought he might be ill. Not only in the way both of them were—childhood was a ball of cancerous masses and scar tissue linked together by a network of healthy capillary action—but in a way Sirius could only understand as both novel and familiar. Even as he peeled free of tumescent anxiety, the highs and lows that plagued his teens were only loosely connected, now, to the world around him.
Sirius felt high without drugs; he slept less than he ought and some nights not at all; the thoughts that once crushed the air from his lungs, many months ago, and dug like barbed chains into his chest remained with him, yet they were distant. They couldn’t touch him. Never, however, in a manner that made Sirius underestimate their severity.
When Remus whispered back, still half-asleep and mind muddled by the impending full moon that none of what he said sounded like sickness, Sirius’s lips made a popping, O-shaped sound in the dark and the topic shifted.
Manic depression was the most recent muggle name for it as far as Remus knew, but he refused to poison Sirius that way—to thrust upon him the label of an unquiet mind. He thought of the Oracle at Delphi and the seers of old, the apocryphal tales following Joan of Arc, and, of course, the creative mania of history’s most homosexual artists. How many of them would meet the healing end of a leucotomy in Remus’s time? What would they do to Sirius Black, prodigy, genius, brightest centre of Remus’s galaxy, if they saw the way he gnawed his nails, let alone the way he dressed or whom he fucked? There were few things more maddening than being told you were mad.
The two of them kept talking into the morning. Sirius would have another terror, otherwise, and nothing twisted Remus’s helpless heart as much as watching them happen.
Remus’s excitement was more tacit and tempered by, well, everything from the moon to the attack three days prior to, with some embarrassment, the preparation he put into his body leading up to Sirius’s birthday. Pomfrey had mended all his wounds—an easy feat, none being dark—and given that she’d been the facilitator of Hogwarts’s petrifying sexual education lessons, one of which they sat through every year, Remus inquired after any charms and/or potions that might be useful to a bloke/werewolf looking to get buggered on the regular.
It was not the kind of magic you’d find in the library.
Remus had checked.
As it turned out, muggles again beat out the literal arcane arts for that sort of thing. No such spells existed. Not even for a lack of trying—Jesus Christ, he could never look Pomfrey in the matronly eye after hearing her explain everything in polite, clinical detail—but the truth of the matter was that your body was not a dirty place, generally speaking, or not inasmuch as your body was informed on the matter, and attempting to vanish or scour the contents of one’s various internal cavities was as perilous as every ancient contraceptive spell. What of the oils in your skin? How much mucus was too much mucus? Altering your own body was the fiddliest kind of magic.
Remus suspected from the way she talked about it that it was one of those paradoxical situations where you could only muster the magic to change your body by, well, more or less arriving there by other means. Very Ship of Theseus. There was a reason Animagi were so rare: it was the same reason you oughtn’t charm your teeth or skin or engorge your unengorged bits. Without an unimpeachable and ironwrought self-image, the results were unpredictable at best. And, of course, if you had such a self-image…
Which was why Remus was starving on the morning of 3 November, both for dick and for any and all kinds of food.
First, however, he absconded to their shared bathroom when Sirius said he was going to try and have a bit of a lie-in before the festivities began. Years of lycanthropic transformation had inured him to the upsets of his own biology, to put it plain, and in some odd way, he felt almost a scientific interest in how far he could stretch—oh, Jesus Christ, he needed to watch his bloody language—the limits of his physiology. Some of the things he read in gay London zines defied his comprehension. They didn’t seem strictly possible. Fiction and wild fantasy.
Except, as Remus discovered, they were anything but.
Some of them were so instructive they read like potion recipes, although the ingredients were pills easily found at your local chemist instead of rat tails and Murtlap essence. A great deal of willpower, too. It was something of a ritual: fasting, focus, offering, discipline, celebration. Practice not unlike the magical arts. If you followed the instructions to the letter—and Remus had, it turned out, a penchant for obeying orders—they manifested in a wonderfully queer feeling. His gut felt beyond empty. Hollow. Über-hollow, really.
Remus couldn’t imagine doing this with any regular frequency. The fasting requirements alone were ridiculous for him, a nineteen-year-old werewolf who ate his weight in chocolate as a stress response. The zine agreed with him. These methods of preparation were sacred and for special occasions—long bottoming sessions and, in Remus’s case, a full weekend of celebration.
Marlene McKinnon’s vigilante group, which thus far Remus knew consisted of her, James, Peter, Benjy Fenwick (and possibly Emmeline Vance as well as Alice Macmillan, if his paranoid conjecture was correct) had remained in Hogsmeade village after the attack. Why, of course, Remus knew not, but he did know they would remain there a while longer and there was some talk as to whether they would join in celebrating Sirius’s birthday. There was an argument to be made somewhere, probably, by someone, about the merits of supervised festivities, but it wasn’t gaining much traction, and in either case he assumed that Sirius could and would inevitably convince James to sneak away and meet him with the Cloak.
As much was confirmed to him as he cracked the loo door, shower still running. Remus was about to invite Sirius in for a wake-me-up birthday massage and shag when his ear caught a conversation. Sirius and James were speaking. The latter’s voice was edged with the tell-tale crystalline tone of mirror-based communication. Remus pressed his cheek to the door, still hot and clammy from the shower. He could feel his heartbeat in his ears.
“Morning, tosspot,” said James. There wasn’t much fatigue to his voice. If anything, he sounded restless, like a tiger pacing the limits of a small zoo enclosure. “How’s it feel to be ancient? Your bones turn to dust yet?”
“You wound me, Prongs. On my own birthday, nonetheless?”
“Someone’s got to keep your ego in check.”
“Think that role’s well-occupied,” replied Sirius, wry. “Could do with a few more ego-fluffers, come to think of it. Crown’s dangerously close to toppling off my very phrenologically perfect head.” He shifted, Remus heard the stale sheets ruffling, and James yelped.
“Careful where you point that mirror. Don’t need to see your ‘phrenologically perfect head’ this time of morning, thanks.”
Sirius snorted. “You should be so lucky. I got it pierced, you know.”
A beat.
“Genuinely?”
“Why? Wanna see?”
“You did not—”
“—okay I thought about it over the summer and the bloke in the shop—who, mind you, was so bloody fit I nearly died—told me he wouldn’t do it a first timer and also I may have been a giant chicken-feathered cockatrice and abandoned the idea entirely,” explained Sirius. You could hear the corner of his lips turning up on one side. The mischievousness of his voice was almost melodic. “It’s metal, Prongs. Even I’m not mad enough to put that in my cock. Not yet, anyway.”
“Yet?”
“How do you piss with it, ‘tchu think? I reckon it’d get everywhere.”
“No change from your usual, then.”
“I’m touched you’ve been paying attention.”
“Why are we always talking about your prick?”
“Prongs, mate, that’s been one of our principal topics since second year. We’ve exhausted everything else. S’pose we could talk about yours for a change, if you like.”
“Pads.”
“Brilliant! Now, as I recall—ah, it’s been a season, now, hasn’t it—”
“Pads! Really?” replied James. His hair made a rustling noise through the mirror. No doubt he was carding his fingers through it as he often did. “Pete’s asleep, not deaf.”
Sirius was quiet a moment longer. His own fingers were tracing a circle on the sheets from the sound of it, though Remus doubted James could hear it, and Remus himself was breathing shallow over the spray of shower behind him.
“I’m sorry,” said Sirius, quiet, “that things are strange between us now. Since…”
James fell silent as well. There was a tinniness to the mirror, like an old telephone wire.
“Remus doesn’t find it strange you sleep naked in the same room with him?”
“Oi! First,” said Sirius, caught between snappishness and amusement, “I do have pants on, thank you very much. They’re Stuart tartan, look, see? These sheets are too coarse for my delicate skin otherwise.”
James laughed. Golden-brown, like.
“Got it. Second?”
“Second, we’ve all been naked around each other our entire bloody lives, Prongs. Mornings, evenings, after Quidditch whenever it rained or took a roll in the mud or every time you tried to show off and ended up covered in fucking dust and sand, Prongs, and before and after every full moon towards the end. Merlin’s tits, James,” he continued, “you have made me laugh so hard I’ve literally pissed myself. Three separate occasions, as I recall.”
“Four,” replied James dryly. “But I suppose you said ‘As I recall,’ so I’ll let the error pass.”
“Funny you should say that, seeing as you didn’t. Also, I was drunk!”
“Didn’t Remus help you—”
“—yes,” mumbled Sirius. The flare of red heat up his neck was audible even through a cracked door. “So, no, Moony wouldn’t mind if I slept with my bare arse hiked above the sheets, the same way none of us ever commented whenever you spent half the night wanking over Lily’s tits.”
“I think that first one might not be true.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“And, being perfectly clear,” continued James, as though his brain only then caught up, “I did not wank over my girlfriend’s tits, as lovely as they are, because I hadn’t seen them yet.”
“Over her scolding you for throwing dungbombs in Snivellus’s cauldron, then.”
“Naturally,” replied James. The warmth faded from his voice after that. “Still, I’d rather you didn’t…”
A beat.
“Yeah?”
“…people can be cruel,” he finished eventually.
“Prongs,” said Sirius with a snort, “since when do you care what ‘people’ think of you?”
“I don’t.”
“Sounds like you do.”
“It’s not—”
“—and who’s ‘people’, anyway?”
“Cruel wasn’t the right word. I don’t—he asked me if you’d ever tried to, well, come on to me.”
“Wormtail?”
“Wormtail. I told him no, and, genuinely, mate, I think it’s settled, but—”
“You’re afraid he’ll assume there must’ve been more? You’re afraid he’ll look at you the way you look at me?”
Silence. The shower hissed on behind him.
“Sorry. Was a bit uncalled for, that.”
“Moony’s rubbing off on you.”
“You just called him ‘Moony.’”
“Look, mate,” began James, exasperated, “I never stopped being mates with Remus the same way I never stopped being your mate, even though you blew me off for months, mind you. He did—seeing him there, in person, it brought up a lot of bollocks I thought I’d packed away.”
The sigh James gave was an older one, aged, but betrayed the normal amount of emotion Remus was used to hearing from him: not much. Anger and disappointment and joy—all the bright, bold feelings that Remus knew from his own father—those were things James wore in the open. Most blokes did. All the tinkering bits of his brain, however, remained under lock and key, not to be unleashed except by inebriation as per Boys’ Club rules or in the rare moments when Remus overheard James talking with his parents during a holiday. Or on rare moments on holiday more broadly, he supposed. He had seen the tears of James Potter an uncountable number of times, yet never once had Remus seen the man cry.
“I don’t have to remind you the sorry state you were in when he ran—when he left,” James continued, correcting himself for Sirius’s benefit. “When I watched you and him faff about, taking the piss out of each other as though it hadn’t happened, it —I’m not sure. It wasn’t a very nice feeling,” he said. “Felt to me I missed out on something important. All those months. You’re supposed to be my best mate, Pads.”
“You’re acting like I cut you out on purpose.”
“Didn’t you?”
Sirius’s nails clicked between his teeth a moment.
“Might’ve done. Blame me?”
“No. Yes,” replied James, and he heard some fumbling on the other side. Papery fumbling. “First it was Remus, and then—I gather you’d be taken aback if one of us told you we fancied blokes after seven years together, even after—well—and you’re—”
“—a royal queen?”
“Was about to say ‘bent as a horseshoe,’ but we’ll take yours, I suppose.”
“Horseshoes aren’t bent, Prongs.” Sirius scoffed, playing the aristocrat again. Old habits. “I cannot believe we made the same NEWTs. Minus Potions.”
“Sod Potions, and forgive me for not wanting to debate the ontological properties of horseshoes. You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Deflecting.”
“Why must you be so keenly observant!” Sirius’s lamentations were followed by a fabric-y flop and a tut from James, who then swore under his breath.
“Merlin—”
“—Prongs?” called Peter, distant and dozy. “Are you talking to Sirius right now?”
“Yeah. Sorry, Pete.”
“S’okay. Should’ve been awake by now anyway. Hi Padfoot. Happy birthday.”
“Hiya, Wormtail. Cheers.”
“Remus not around?” he asked, voice louder as he approached the compact mirror. Then a moment later, Remus heard the wrinkle in his nose. “And could you put some trousers on?”
“Fascists.”
“Long time no see.”
“We saw each other three days ago, and just a few months ago before that,” replied Sirius. He was straining with something, toes snagging, probably, on the gaps in worn denim that so dominated Sirius’s wardrobe these days. The others were more muffled as the mirror was turned away, Remus reasoned. “When you broke Remus’s nose, if you recall.”
“That’s—piss off, Padfoot. He—”
“—he’d been drunk as a skunk, Wormtail, and—”
“—you’re defending him again—”
“—someone has to, seeing as you only go for turned backs—”
“Lads!” snapped James. “No fighting through the mirror. Fixing the thing when it cracks is a bloody nightmare.”
“You didn’t come to the funeral, Sirius.” Peter huffed. He sounded hurt, genuinely hurt.
“A lot was happening.”
“That’s it?” replied Peter. His shock was less than expected—like Sirius’s words only confirmed a foregone conclusion. “That’s all you have to say?”
“Thought you didn’t want our excuses.”
“Piss off. Maybe I do.”
“There—you can’t repeat any of this to Moony.”
“Those words have always preceded a good and intelligent idea.”
“Shut up,” said Sirius, breaking into a lower whisper. “I shouldn’t be talking about this. He might hear.”
“So he is around?” asked James.
“Fell asleep in the shower, I think.”
A chuckle and a snicker. “Some things never change. Go on?”
Sirius took a deep breath. He held it a second, like a hit from a spliff.
“Remus was poisoned by Snivellus—”
“—he WHAT—”
“Oi, Prongs!”
“Sorry.”
“—and Snape, I gather,” he continued, voice still a hiss, “is recruiting from the students on behalf of the Dark Lord.”
A long pause.
“Voldemort,” James repeated, and Peter gave a tiny, tinny squeak beside him. “Pads, are you certain?”
“No. Yes about the poison, less the recruiting,” he corrected, and Remus caught a whispered summoning charm followed by the rustling of paper. He was flipping through one of his many notebooks.
“That’s—wow, Pads,” murmured James, a wry edge to his voice. “That’s a lot of flowcharts.”
“Oh, up yours, Potter.”
“You wish.”
“Ah, in fact Jesus Christ no I do not, thank you,” hissed Sirius. With the venom still there was a sheepish blush, a shy burn to his tone, then. Something of a rarity when it came to Sirius. “You’re my bloody brother.”
Peter snorted. “So it’s on par for you.”
“Bite me, Wormtail.” There was precious little mirth to it. “If you’ve both quite finished—”
“—actually, I have a dozen more jokes about your secret swottiness,” replied James, but he followed that with another long sigh. “Have at it, then.”
“I looked at all the attack vectors and it’s simply too complicated for Snape to have been incrementally poisoning Remus,” Sirius explained, and Remus’s fuzzy brows furrowed. Why hadn’t he shared this with Remus? A page flipped. “But, if there was only one initial incident and one subtle cure,” he continued, “and if it was keyed to Remus’s lycanthropy, it would explain why I was unaffected despite us sharing the same food. We thought it might’ve been a Draught of Lethe, but now I suspect it was an original creation. I’ve never heard of anything like it—and, if Snape is doing that sort of research, who’s to say he can’t extend it further?”
“Why,” began James, whose own brows furrowed in Remus’s ear, “do you and Moony share the same food?”
Peter was silent.
“Why does my bathroom have a window, Prongs? As for the recruiting, I’ve been using the map—”
Oh, hold the fuck on. Pardon?
“—and Snape’s been meeting with the same rota of students outside of tutoring hours. Clandestine spots. If you track the students themselves, long enough, there’s a pattern, sort of, that connects them all, I just haven’t been able to put it all down on parchment yet. Last year, it involved my—Regulus was there,” he continued, words spilling out in a frantic kind of ramble. “Avery, Rosier, a few common bullies, a few students I thought were otherwise upstanding. Not a muggleborn or half-blood among them. Tell me, does that all seem like a coincidence to you?”
James inhaled, sharp. “No,” he said, words caught in a frown, “no, Padfoot, it does not.”
“We never thought…” mumbled Peter. He sounded distraught. “We knew You-Know-Who was recruiting, but…it’s so early. They’re kids, man.”
“Same could be said about us, yeah? And who,” he began—his dog ears might as well have appeared and perked up—and said, “is ‘we,’ exactly?”
“Can’t tell you,” said James, quick.
“Oh that is bloody—”
“—calm your knickers. We want to, Pads, but it’s not our call.”
There was a long pause. Sirius was folding up his journal, what with the papery susurrus, while James and Peter processed.
“I take it,” said Sirius, quiet, “you’re not off tutoring the sequestered youth of tomorrow.”
Though it made no noise, Remus could hear James and Peter exchange glances.
“Not exactly,” said Peter.
“Not at all,” said James.
“Why isn’t Evans with you?” asked Sirius. “I’ve got to be good friends with her, I like to think, or decent anyway, and Prongs she is at least as good as any of us. Better than two of Wormtail put together, I reckon. Why isn’t she—”
“—Pads, I can’t—”
“—it’s not allowed,” said Peter. “Ow! What? He basically knows everything, he saw us, he was there.”
“Protocol.”
“Fat lot of good that did my mum.”
“What’s he mean?” whispered Sirius. Remus ducked his head lower, ear closer to the crack of the door. Gears turning. “‘Not allowed?’”
“They’re together—don’t swing at me!”
“Wormtail!”
James gave another frustrated exhale and banged a fist on something, hard, a desk maybe.
“Merlin’s bones,” he growled. “Fine. They—we work in pairs,” James explained, voice torn, “and because Lily and I are romantically involved, we can’t be a pair. Compromises our judgement, or so they say. And she had a program to go to, while I…”
Remus felt the familiar sting of rain on his skin in an open Welsh field. He remembered his flesh splitting open, a discarded toolbox, the stain of blood in his teeth. Perhaps there was some logic to that.
“It’s a load of shite, if you ask me.”
“No one did.”
“What about—”
“—we can’t say more,” James interrupted. “I’m sorry.”
“Me as well. And for you, Wormtail,” Sirius added, mumbling the last bit. “Your family—they were always polite with me. Wish I could’ve got to know them better.”
Peter choked and, a moment later, Remus heard heavy footsteps and a door fly shut. Christ. Poor Peter.
“He appreciates it, mate.”
“I should write to him,” said Sirius. Regret crept into his voice, then. “I’ve let some things fall to the wayside.”
Albeit muffled, James said, “Look, I should—bugger. I think he’s crying in the lav. Give Lily my love, all right?”
“All night long,” replied Sirius. “Same time next week?”
“Of course. Love you, you bleeding bird.”
“Love you too, wanker.”
“Tosspot.”
Then there was silence.
By the grace of his librarian training, Remus made it back to the shower without much a sound while Sirius, in contrast loudly hurled something with an enormous clatter across the dormitory—a book, or his trousers, perhaps, overturning any number of the careful quasi-abandoned research forks that they left haphazard around their dormitory. He swore loudly. Remus rested his forearm along the slick tile wall, relishing the pressure against his forehead and the hot spray down the nape of his neck and along the odd curves of his back. Being Hogwarts, the water was eternally warm. It pressed the tension from his muscles while he pretended to doze, though Remus still jumped when Sirius’s narrow, moustached lips met his bare shoulder and his arms encircled Remus’s scarred and fuzzy belly.
“S’only me,” whispered Sirius. “It’s okay.”
All his worries ran to the drain like greying rivulets of soap as they kissed. Sirius tasted of morning still, but soon he pulled back. Like a mutt he pushed aside his dark wet curls to stare at Remus, a perplexed twist to his lips. One corner of his mouth tugged upwards.
“You brushed your teeth?”
“I did a lot of things.”
“Good boy.”
Not one for subtlety, he fondled Sirius’s bollocks with one hand and took Sirius’s slim wrist in the other, guiding it to cup his arse with a stifled laugh. The pad of one of his fingers ran over his hole and found it slick. Sirius’s lips parted just so; he gave a startled, almost delighted gasp, like uncovering a secret new use for an old favourite toy. Happy birthday, Padfoot. Watching the wicked, horny grin spread from Sirius’s lips to his eager grey eyes, which raked Remus’s naked body up and down was a gift in its own right.
It was the last time he saw those eyes for a few delicious minutes.
While wasteful, the distant spray of hot water was a nice mist on their backs and kept, at least, the tile warm against Remus’s slumping chest. He had to keep both forearms braced against the wall and yet his shaking legs threatened to give out regardless because, fuck, there was an unparalleled pleasure in feeling Sirius bottom out in him, over and over, without having to worry about cleanliness. Sirius’s fingers dug bruises into his hips. He’d have love bites on his neck and back for weeks. There was a tight, urgent heat in him, familiar and terrifying and which left him so hard he was dribbling against the wall. He wasn’t sure if he was about to cum or piss himself. He felt like he’d finally unlocked the secret of having gay sex. And the tiles and spraying showerhead swore to keep his secrets, too, echoing Remus’s frankly guttural moans and Sirius’s frenzied, half-shouted fuck fuck fucks back at them to the rhythm of hips smacking against arse. Eventually Sirius’s breathless pace broke, and he fell, breathless, his weight against Remus’s scarred back and his sweet mindless words in Remus’s ear. His damp scruff of facial hair tickled the side of Remus’s neck.
That morning set the pace for the rest of the week. Sirius hadn’t let him get off once he knew the extent of Remus’s preparations and, well, upon reflection, that was when he should’ve known things would go off the rails.
***
In lieu of a party, they commandeered the postgrad lounge for Sirius’s twentieth birthday. They tried the Come and Go Room again first, but with Rucha out in the field, none of them could get it quite right, and, in fact, they took turns getting it wrong to a comical and revelatory degree.
Mary’s attempt to control the room spawned a tall chamber with no visible ceiling and every wall lined by portraits of cats in every shape and colour; Lily’s was a bunker, nuclear perhaps, with several arcane locks which snapped shut behind them and took half an hour of collective effort to undo; Remus walked into a soundless blacker-than-black void, which earned him several wild and fearful stares from the others; and Sirius, in the end, had bolted back through the door and shoved everyone out before Remus (or Lily, or Mary, for that matter) could step foot inside.
“No one needs to see that,” said Sirius hastily. His neck, now adorned by a new black dog collar (Remus’s latest gift), was flush. His heart thrummed in Remus’s moon-addled ears. That the birthday and the full moon were only a day removed ought to worry him more. Probably.
Given no other option, Sirius announced that the only trip they needed to go on was a journey inward. He produced, with dramatic flair, a familiar plastic sachet containing six pills.
“That’s not—Padfoot,” said Remus. “Valium doesn’t make you hallucinate.”
“Wait. Really?”
“Really.”
“Not even a little bit?”
“Remus is right,” said Mary. She eyed him appraisingly from her high perch on the camelback sofa. She had a penchant for sitting on its spine. Remus, by contrast, sat opposite them on an embroidered throw rug with the low flame of the hearth warming his back. “I didn’t know you knew so much about drugs, given you won’t take a bloody lozenge.”
“Only the fun ones, and piss off.”
“Regardless,” said Lily, whose face had smoothed over and become legibly illegible, “I think I’ll pass. I’ll be—what do they call it?”
“Boring?” asked Sirius.
“A witness?” said Remus.
“The babysitter?” offered Mary. Lily shot her a foul look up at her at that, and Remus detected a deeper subtext to, well, all that, though he promptly decided that Mary and Lily were grown adult women and so they could manage their own subtext without his meddling, thank you very much. More to that point, they had more pressing issues.
Sirius had only six pills on offer. They were a dosage too low, however, to be recreational instead of therapeutic, and yet even doubling up on them was unlikely to generate the desired fuzzy effect. Whatever part of his brain had been active during his brief stint into warehouse dos on the Isle of Dogs retained a surprising amount of drug lore from that werewolf, Kelly’s, high ramblings. As an assistant healer to Madam Pomfrey and rebellious malcontent herself, Mary too was well-versed on the subject. And, yes, it took some fumbling, but the problem was resolved eventually by two things.
The first was happenstance, that maker of fools. Nathaniel North, Sirius’s old protégé, and Pascalle du Pont had heard their loud and conspicuous musing in the postgraduate lounge and/or maybe been invited to the festivities. Amir the dragonologist had been invited as well—he and Sirius had a side thing going on whether or not the older man was queer and if he’d take either of them to bed, and, if so, which of them first, which, obviously, obviously it would be Remus—but Lily explained she’d personally Apparated him to the field at his request for the weekend and so he’d be absent. Regardless, doubling up the doses was right out. ‘Sharesies’ was a fundamental law of celebratory inebriation. Leaving guests to suffer their sober minds a crime punishable by death.
The second was an impromptu pharmacological lesson on drug synergies. A pill here; a spliff there; some light, light drinking all around; as he and Mary explained, each one would have a compounding depressive effect—‘depressive’ here meaning the opposite of ‘stimulant’—like a host of slow, orchestral instruments in harmony or several numbing blows to the head. At least, that had been the idea.
Remus soon found himself in much the same boat as Lily, however. An outsider. The booze and spliff took, of course, but whereas the Valium had kicked in anywhere between half an hour to fifteen minutes ago for everyone else, Remus still felt normal. Well, ‘normal.’ A touch calmer perhaps and definitely under the effects of spliff and alcohol, but he hadn’t become as relaxed and talkative as Sirius or the others. Even as they arranged themselves around the fireplace he felt an invisible barrier former between him and them. Pascalle crossed one stockinged leg over the other and drew Sirius into a conversation about, er, art, which he couldn’t quite follow; even Nathaniel North, who sat with both tattooed hands cupped around his pint like a child holding a glass of milk eventually relaxed, punctuating Mary and Lily’s animated, impenetrable, lightning-paced conversation on British politicking with thoughtful interjections.
Remus stayed there on the rug. His mind was simply still. He leaned a little more on the drinky-drink and the smokey-smoke to compensate.
Which, being clear, wasn’t the safest or smartest decision, but being a magic secret werewolf at a magic secret school adjusted the parameters of pissing about with your brain chemistry, respiratory function, and otherwise risky behaviour to a considerable degree. His lungs were lycanthropically fortified. His liver was all-the-better-to-drink-you-with. Given that Hogwarts had a deadly sentient willow tree on the grounds and taught students how to literally fly as early as age eleven, on a broomstick, with no safeguards, which was still incredibly mad, thank you, no one ought complain about a little high flying on Remus’s own part. That, and Remus was about ninety percent sure he’d hit a dud with his ‘little helper’. Whoever Sirius had bought these from had tricked him. Probably they were ordinary aspirin. Probably the others were experiencing a placebic kind of mass hysteria.
An hour or maybe several geological epochs later, Remus could not for the life of him keep his eyes open and the English language, actually, had left his body for a holiday to the Paleolithic era. Partially. Specifically all the bits that let him form coherent sentences instead of the ungodly, doglike noises that lived in his throat whenever someone carded their soothing fingers through his shaggy hair. Remus was a post-verbal creature, part human, part wolf, part cosy jumper, part soft, spacious sofa. All groovy, baby.
Someone had moved him to the camelback sofa and put the camelback on a carousel. His inner ear was heliocentric. Wherever his fingers were, they were grasping something unbearably gentle and spongey. Air itself, perhaps. Chatter blended with a spinning record softly crooning. He hadn’t said a word since birth. He had his head in someone’s lap. Probably Sirius’s, given the throbbing hardon that twitched against his neck, but the night was young and so the options were open. Plenty of people had dicks, after all.
“I think he’s asleep,” whispered Mary.
“I believe,” whispered Pascalle, sultry, “he is—how do you say? Baver—drolling?”
Lily rolled her eyes. Eyes oughtn’t make a noise when they roll in their sockets, but hers did, although the noise came off her tongue as she said, “Dribbling. Close, though.”
“I think I’m asleep,” whispered Sirius. His voice sounded conspiratorial.
“You can’t be,” replied Mary. The thought had shook her world. “‘Cos then I wouldn’t be real. I’d be a dream. Your dream. And I’m no one’s dream.”
“You’re someone’s dream, Mare,” said Lily. She had the tone of a supportive and incredibly bored friend watching an uninspired original play. Drunk people did not have interesting things to say. This was truer, Remus thought, of drunk people who were also on drugs. Or, no, probably sometimes they did. This was not one of those times. Probably.
“I am,” said Mary. “I am someone’s dream.”
It was an hour or two thereafter, although, wait, he’d thought similar before, so it was an hour or two or five seconds later. Or backwards in time, actually—that was a growing possibility. The muscle in his brain that kept time was as loose and liquid as all the others in his body, so much so Remus felt like a groovy soup in a skin-shaped pot. He thought about the longitude problem, where sailors could know their north-south position from simple astronomy but not east-west, and how Galileo had proposed a machine of oil and hemispheres to keep an observer still even as a ship rocked in the ocean’s waves. That was him, the oil. Remus. Not Galileo. Remus was trying to keep all of his oil in the hemisphere, and, wait, no, that wasn’t quite right, and, yes. Right. Right. The interesting thing they said. It was Remus’s name, which tuned right through the static. If Remus had had dog ears, they would’ve perked at the mention.
He would’ve liked to have dog ears.
“Remus does look very peaceful, doesn’t he?” said Lily softly.
“I don’t know,” replied Mary. She shifted, noisy, on the squat camelback sofa and was met with a shush from Sirius. It set her giggling, and she whispered, “I was about to say Black looked more peaceful,” she continued, “but ‘peace’ is not a word I’d associate with the look in his eyes right now.”
“He’s sleeping,” hissed Sirius.
“Mate, drug-induced unconsciousness is not the same thing as sleep.”
“Ah.”
“Anyway—”
“Wait,” replied Sirius.
His reaction speed betrayed the level of his inebriation, though Remus’s own was less. Reaction speed, he meant to say. Think. And, slow indeed. Time must have moved forwards. Remus could open his eyes, now, if he wanted, but his brain had smoothed over all its ragged, fold-wrinkled edges and he was content existing on the border of oblivion. If he let that last bit of focus go, it was as though he was the room. All the people in it, too.
“Do—should we bring him to Pomfrey?” asked Sirius. His thin eyebrows knit together with slow worry. Remus couldn’t see that of course, but he could imagine it. “Unconscious is bad, innit?”
“He’s breathing, in’t he?” replied Mary, nonchalant. Sedation made her usual sangfroid almost natural. Often Remus wondered if it was indeed a performance, or if Mary had a stuck dial on her emotional radio that forced her to choose between deafening blasts and a casual, float-above-the-fray airiness, one which enabled her to talk about life-threatening matters the way strangers might talk about the weather.
Sirius hair was in Remus’s mouth and he smelled ear.
“Yeah, he’s breathing. Normal-like. Bit slow, maybe.”
Lily laughed. “Why am I not surprised you know Remus’s breathing patterns by ear?”
There was a playfulness to her now. Remus supposed she got over the boredom as they started to sober up, ish, and became decent conversationalists once again. Yet where Lily’s sobriety drove her to tongue-and-cheek humour, Mary had become sincere in her stupor. The other side of her radio dial.
“You really fancy him, don’t you?” she asked. Remus imagined her brown eyes, all painted up against her dark skin as they often were with, being honest, a kind of cosmetic artistry, and knew that they were more piercing than any blade, bullet, or spell. Much kinder, when she let them be.
Sirius’s chest rose and fell with a firmness in the quiet that followed. Breath in. Breath out. Breath in. Et cetera. Nathaniel and Pascalle were across the room having an languid discussion by the bay window. There was a tink of light November rain against the glass, a backdrop to their muffled words. A woman singing from the record player. It kept the quiet from dragging into uncomfortable silence.
“Yeah. Been mad for him a while now,” said Sirius, subdued. Remus felt his sleek shrug from the bony shoulders to the slim, upturned wrist, which then returned to Remus’s hair. He hadn’t unburned himself of a great weight, only peeled off one outer layer from his many convoluted emotional overcoats. “Hush, though,” he continued. “Don’t wanna wake him.”
“How long?” asked Lily.
“Dunno,” murmured Sirius. “A while, I s’pose. Twisted part is, I only figured it out after he was gone. Cliché, yeah? Never quite noticed how much I needed all those tiny wrapped chocolates slipped in my pockets without my noticing, books appearing on my bedside, loose socks jamming the door to the loo shut, all that jazz.”
“Poor thing.” It was unclear to whom she was referring.
Mary frowned and whispered, “Sirius, you can’t—don’t do this to yourself.” Not, yes, that Remus saw or heard, but her words were a big giant frown, actually, one that grew even bigger and giant-er as she added, “Trust me. I’ve been down this road a few times.”
“You’ve given me the spiel already, Mare. Remember? Latching onto straight men, vulnerability, et cetera?”
“That was different. I didn’t know you were mad mad for him.”
“Ah, great.”
The conversation lapsed. Again, it wasn’t silence—Nathaniel stuttered through a joke and Pascalle laughed her smoky French laugh, which was the only thing about her smoky Frenchness Remus could parse at the moment. Remus vaguely recalled her flirting with Sirius earlier. Or Sirius flirting with her. One of the two. Sometimes he forgot that Sirius was, oh, how had they phrased it? ACDC. There was an hour-long conversation in there too at some point between Pascalle and Sirius, but the minutiae were lost on Remus and only the idea of dirty French whispering remained—a kind of horny archaeological remnant that explained Sirius’s dick going rigid against his neck, come to think of it.
Beneath him, Sirius was tense. Building up nerve. Working up to something.
This was the moment, of course. All Sirius needed to do was whisper, We’re together, or Remus is gay, or Oi, ladies, those hundreds of innuendos we’re always on about? Not innuendo. We’ve been shagging for months and care so deep for one another we might be drowning, and that would be that. Remus wouldn’t mind. Wasn’t that what Sirius wanted? Not only for people to know, but to seize and enjoy that freedom they’d only have here, at Hogwarts, and in scant few other places much more colourful than this in the muggle world; sharing chaste public kisses and sickening all those of recently-broken heart and no longer having to lie to their friends. They could clear things up with James. Sirius would’ve loved that—he loved James, didn’t he?
How odd it was, then, that in the moment Remus knew he wouldn’t mind being open, Sirius chose to keep their secret at least a little longer.
“Mary. Mary, love.”
“Oi oi, Sirius?”
“Kindly shut the fuck up, would you? I’m allowed to make bad decisions.”
Lily cuffed him for that while Mary gave a sigh worthy of high drama.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Black.”
“Just ’cos your secret bird turned you down—”
“—sorry?” whispered Lily. “Her excuse me—”
“Oi, Black, uncalled for. Also,” Mary continued, apparently unfazed, “my bird at least knew how I felt about her, even if she wasn’t likewise.”
“Does Remus know?” asked Lily.
That one gave him genuine pause. Both of them, actually, given the feeble attempts Sirius’s gut muscles gave at tensing up.
“Dunno,” muttered Sirius. “That I’m mad for him? Probably. That I’m arse-over-teakettle over the rest of the kitchen too? No,” he continued, voice still low and muted, “no, I haven’t quite dropped that one in his lap yet.”
“Here’s to us messes,” whispered Mary. Clink. “Oi, Lils, get your sparkling water in here as well. It’s a toast, for Christ’s sake.”
A short while later, Remus pretended to stir awake and needn’t try to fake a yawn or how much he was luxuriating in the stretches. Long-neglected bubbles of gas rearranged themselves in the gaps between his knees and ankles, cueing Lily to shriek and cover her ears—she never could stand the sound of Remus’s joints popping. They sat him up and fed him sips of water from a chilled glass. Mary brushed him down. They exchanged barbs—with hair like that, &c. &c.
“Riddikulus,” she whispered, and smoothed down his hair. “Book Boggart, banished.”
All that came natural. Less natural, however, were all the knowing looks from Lily and Mary, eyes flitting between him and Sirius with some odd mixture of cheer and pity, which, of course, they pretended they were not giving and which Remus pretended not to see.
As for why, well—partly it was none of their bloody business, now, was it? The other part was less exact, nebulous-like, but there was a safety in their privacy. Lily and obviously Mary weren’t bigots, but insofar as he knew, they were both vaguely monogamist. Mary was Sirius’s off-and-on-again girlfriend for years. And, most importantly, neither of them were Sirius, who himself had a better-developed fingerspitzengefühl, to put a precise word on it, than Remus, and who had nevertheless chosen to not reveal anything aloud. He had his reasons. Remus trusted Sirius. Sorted.
Or, almost sorted. There was a small matter of the flush in his cheeks and the warm, fluttery feeling that lingered in his chest—Sirius could be an unintentional poet, sometimes, of the improbable romantic-absurdist variety—and so as the night drew closer to its end, he focused on Sirius. A light, innocent touch to the shoulder here, one to the arm there; fussing over him with a soft grin when he inevitably spilled the last dregs of his wine over his lap; once, when he was certain no one could see, he traced his fingers along the stark length of Sirius’ collarbone, beneath his shirt; and so on.
He was hoping Sirius might catch his signal, one that ought ideally translate as, Hullo, Padfoot, I may have eavesdropped on your intimate conversation and now want to show you how very arse-over-teakettle over the rest of the kitchen I am for you as well, you plonker, so let’s find somewhere private and preferably with a bed, though I’m prepared to make do without, but Sirius was not on the same nonverbal plane as Remus. Soon thereafter Nathaniel North rejoined them while Lily and Mary went to talk with Pascalle and/or coax her into a secret research activity.
Maybe. Remus stopped paying attention because Nathaniel was a burgeoning music enthusiast—it fit with the tattoos and the piercings and his general countercultural aesthetic, even if he also was by all definitions a poseur—and so Sirius, Remus, and Nate, as the former liked to call the latter, moved to his and Sirius’s darkened dormitory for some music playing.
A little bit more than some music playing.
Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures was not the soundtrack Remus enjoyed when trying to sleep, but neither was the intoxicated snickering happening mere inches away from his face.
At some point Remus had crawled under Sirius’s bedcovers and then kicked off his trousers, though, annoyingly, he had exactly one sock still on. Less annoying was Sirius. He lay with him, cradling one of Remus’s stolen arms to his scruffy chest and pressing his entire overwarm back flush against Remus. Nathaniel, Nate, the gangly boy—a boy, Remus called him, even though he was just a year below them—sandwiched Sirius on the other side. The poor sod’s heart was hammering even as he stifled laugh after laugh. Remus knew from experience how Sirius’s nonsense became tenfold as entertaining once you imbibed the right cocktail of eclectic substances. He also knew all-too-well the other effects Sirius Black had on your body in that state. Being close with Sirius was like being in on a joke you’d been missing your entire life. The punchline only got funnier with time.
The snogging noises were even more annoying than having exactly one sock on, perhaps, because Remus’s arm was pinched between Sirius’s slim bony body and Nate’s ganglier but less-gaunt one as the two of them kissed. An odd way, that was, to show you were mad for someone. Purportedly arse-over-teakettle &c. &c.
Jesus, it was sloppy. Nate was caught off-guard, his throat and hands stuck between yearning acquiescence and horny distrust. He pulled back from Sirius—the noise was wet—and his voice was a shaky, excited whisper, like someone about to engage in their first mild crime.
“You’re, um,” began Nathaniel, though Remus couldn’t decide if it was endearing or sad. “Remus is right there.”
“He’s dead knackered, innit?” Right, Moony?” whispered Sirius. He rolled his body, bare-backed and clad in only those stupid sexy tartan boxers, against Remus like a sensual and infuriating wave. What an impossible fucking position to be in. From the way Sirius ground his arse back against Remus’s hips—and, probably, from the subtle, desperate-for-friction grinding forwards Remus gave him back—Sirius had probably gathered he was still awake and very much conscious. Not that he could move, or, no, he could, but that would mean halting whatever was unfolding between Nate and Sirius with all the finesse of a shattering teacup in the middle of the night.
Which put a lot into context, as it so happened.
Maybe they were on the same nonverbal plane after all. Nothing quite said I’m mad for you like inviting your boyfriend-cum-best mate-cum-werewolf lover to recreate your first threesome. This was an act of vulnerability performed in a distinctly Sirius way.
Sirius, Mary, and Nathaniel North. Huh. He wouldn’t have guessed that pairing in a dozen tries.
Nate’s eager hands fumbled and groped with inexperience, and Remus knew this, of course, because the boy would be grabbing for all of Sirius’s bony bits and sometimes he’d brush the back of his knuckles against Remus’s belly, the inside of his thigh, the side of his neck. Not that he could be blamed. Remus and Sirius were something of a package deal. Remus’s face was buried in the back of Sirius’s neck, nose parting dark curls and breathing in exertion and a fresh leather collar. Nathaniel buried his mouth in Sirius’s front: first his lips, then the hollow his neck, the coarse hairs of Sirius’s chest, until Sirius’s legs were twitching and one of his ankles hooked around Remus’s socked foot under the very useless sheets.
Remus let his own lips trail gentle circles on the nape of Sirius’s neck, and he squeezed that borrowed arm a hair tighter around Sirius’ bare waist. He dragged his eyeteeth along his skin. Maybe he wasn’t ready for this, not in full—the scars were a non-starter, and the full moon’s proximity made him an aggressive bed-partner, even when he was bottoming—but he liked the idea. He liked that Sirius knew he’d like the idea.
Nathaniel bunched Sirius’s boxers down around his thighs. Sirius let out a contented sigh, like a fresh-scratched itch, when he rocked his hips forwards to hilt his dick in Nate’s mouth. And each time he rocked back, Remus met him again, slow, dragging his clothed dick against the curve of Sirius’s bony arse as inconspicuously as a desperate, horny werewolf might manage. Sirius managed better: his crooked fingers found purchase in Nathaniel’s short hair on one side and under the bedcovers on the other. He tucked Remus’s dick over front of his pants with a deft expertise and practically dared him to fuck his palm.
Just as well, too, because Nathaniel scrabbled at Sirius’s hips with both hands, either to pull his nose flat against Sirius’s crotch or to keep himself from choking. One of the two. Remus licked along Sirius’s smooth, translucent skin at the shoulder, tasting the sweat on his skin, an audible growl rumbling out of his chest, and yet Remus didn’t care because of the delicious friction. He’d have cum all over Sirius’s hand already if there’d been any lube. His kingdom for a handful of spit.
Sirius needed no such help. Well, maybe a little. His thrusts were frantic, then, his breath pitchy and uneven, so Remus licked a messy path along the nape of Sirius’s neck to the side, where he pinched fine skin between his teeth just above the collar’s rim.
“Ah, Nate, I’m gonna—if you didn’t wanna—”
Sirius never finished the sentence and Nathaniel North was apparently no quitter either. He muffled himself in a down pillow. A moment later, Nathaniel was shuffling back up into position, face-to-face, and Remus forced his eyes shut once more. Right. He was supposed to be pretending to be asleep—the heaviest fucking sleeper in the world, apparently. He felt the rustling and the moving, the languid fixing of smallclothes. Sirius and Nathaniel kissed again a moment.
“Um, could we—again, sometime?” whispered Nathaniel, embarrassment as plain in his tone as his earnestness. Voice slightly raw. Oh, Jesus. Was that—surely Remus hadn’t ever been that bad. Had he? He felt a pang of something almost like sympathy, or guilt, or regret, or maybe his bollocks were simply blue. Nate’s heart was like a hummingbird’s. It slowed as Sirius gave a kind, slight nod against the sheets. He dipped forwards again to peck Nathaniel on the cheek.
The sound of trousers tugged on and a belt buckle fixed in the dark faded soon thereafter.
When the door shut and they were finally alone, Sirius squirmed, turning over in Remus’s grip and kissed him needily. Lots of tongue—but there was something else in Remus’s mouth too. Salty. Cum. Sirius’s.
Oh, Jesus Christ, no, he was that pathetic. Worse. His face was a wildfire. A global fucking tragedy, actually, and Sirius knew as much even in the dark because he was palming Remus’s dick and Remus himself was whimpering like a dog. He wanted to say that he could hear Sirius’s heart racing like never he’d heard it before; he wanted to ask why. All he mustered was a canid whine.
“Good boy,” whispered Sirius.
Remus swallowed hard. “Was that—”
“—yeah,” murmured Sirius. He kissed him again, slower, and then feathered a few along the curve of Remus’s fuzzy jaw. “You liked it?”
“I did,” he whispered, voice unsteady. “I like you more,” he added, and felt stupid immediately thereafter.
“—mate,” replied Sirius, wry, “good thing you told me, else I’d have no idea.”
***
Sunday was the full moon and Remus still hadn’t got off. Normally he kept those kinds of details to himself, but, well. It was an unintended side-effect, and it lingered in Remus’s mind like a dream. Except the knew it wasn’t. Every cell in his body was humming and knew that it wasn’t.
No name existed for it either. It was ‘it.’
His skin was still on fire as he lay naked on the cold wood floor of the Shrieking Shack. Remus thought it might catch fire, derelict as it was and given that his heavy breathing alone was enough to earn a groan from the planks. Every muscle of his ached. His arse, however…
Remus knew his face was aflame again. It might as well have been his natural resting state.
Sirius, by contrast, was crouched beside him draped only in a dark woollen cloak over his pale, bony shoulders and a leather dog’s collar against the cold. He lifted Remus’s head just enough to feed him glorious sips of water, soothing his raw, ragged throat, but Sirius’s own expression was too acrobatic to be legible to Remus’s tired, half-wolfen brain. The memories staining Remus’s mind were too wild to take as anything but a hallucination or an out-of-body experience.
“Padfoot,” whispered Remus, aghast, “did we actually…”
Sirius swallowed. “Yeah.”
“As—”
“—yeah.”
Jesus Christ. “Jesus Christ,” muttered Remus. “Are you—did I hurt you, like?”
“Was about to ask you the same thing, if m’honest. I dunno—the—it sort of happened,” he continued, giving a wheezing kind of laugh. “My brain understood what you were doing, and then I had my teeth in the back of your neck…”
Remus tested his tender shoulder with a ginger kind of hesitation, and, finding it more or less knit, he rubbed at the back of his neck. It did feel bruised, but so did all of him. Sirius hadn’t been spared either. Though he and the rest of the Marauders had found out—with no little panic or haste—that bites to an Animagus form didn’t transmit lycanthropy, Remus still cringed at his tendency towards nipping others, playful or not. Not to mention the scratches.
“It’s fine,” said Sirius, reading his mind. His emotions were squidlike as well: so hard to pin down. Angry pink lines raked his shoulders. They rose up along his back, his sharp hips, his pale bare thighs in fresh triads. “None broke skin as far as I can tell, and the bruises fade after a day or two.”
“It’s not fine.”
“Moony, we both know I relish marks, giving or receiving. And I think I did a number on you as well.”
“Fuck,” said Remus. God, his legs. The smell. “We were—”
“—stuck together a while, yeah,” said Sirius. He looked away, though it only gave Remus a better look at the flush creeping up his pale neck. “Let’s save the overthinking for when we’re not both knackered, ’tchu think, hm? Can you walk?”
Oh, ha-ha. “Pads?”
“Yeah, Moony?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Bite me—ah, wait.”
***
With Monday came the return of their normal routines. It felt a joke—for all the ways he and Sirius had fried their brains over the weekend, they were still only a week removed from yet another major political attack, and, what? Remus was supposed to continue on being a postgrad? It was a cruel kind of humour. We regret to inform you that your family is dead or have become werewolves or had their entire world burned to ashes. You are excused from lessons today, but tomorrow there will be a quiz.
It was not ha-ha funny.
Still, with no other option and nothing better to do, they worked their theses. Remus tinkered with different iterations of his Comprehensive Locator Charm and had drawn nearly a hundred different maps of the library in a hundred different ways, still with varying levels of success; Sirius, by contrast, spent as much of his time shoring up the structure and efficiency of his motorbike as he did fiddling with the combination of enchantments upon it; and both of them leaned as heavy on their vocations as they did on creative substances to drag them through the week. Remus did not characterise the dynamic as a healthy relationship with one’s studies. Not Wissenschaft. Not study for study’s sake.
As it was November, he woke before dawn, and on Tuesday and Wednesday as well. He helped Sirius manage the morning flying lessons, carried that energy through for his self-directed research afterwards until noon, at which point he reported to the library and resumed his Book Boggart ways until the evening came and with it went the student body. Remus took his meals with Sirius, shared in his naps, and assisted, wherever appropriate, with Sirius’s research and with his temporary appointment as a wandless magic instructor.
In most of them he was the second chair. Sometimes, as with flying, he was grateful just to be in the orchestra, and when it came to the wandless training Remus was more often than not a student instead of an assistant proper. Sirius had almost twice as many years of magical pedagogy under his belt and/or collar, of course, so it made a certain sense, though something else for Remus did not. He wasn’t sure when it had happened. At some point Remus had slid into following position and realised there was little if anything he wouldn’t do for Sirius. He was sinking. Though Remus could think of worse things to do than drown in Sirius Black.
The green-eyed envy that once dominated Remus’s outlook had been thoroughly banished or at the very least cowed by time and the harrowing months that still loomed over them like a dark cloud or a distant, heavy-breathed stalker. Success had cost Sirius more than it’d given him back. Since second year Remus knew of Sirius’s predisposition towards night terrors, though they’d become less common with age, and even less so in the short few months they’d had together after Sirius’s emancipation.
They hadn’t talked about it then. They’d revived their tradition of not talking about it after their return from Wales. It wasn’t a subject for Remus to broach. You didn’t peel other people’s scabs. More than that, however, Sirius’s embarrassment whenever they happened, the Fuck, sorry Moony’s, and the Christ, forgive me’s told Remus all he needed to know. Sirius both felt a burden and felt like one, and although Remus continued to crowd him with love, he also left open the chances to get away. Remus knew too well that the charity of others was sometimes straight petrol on the smouldering embers of your self-image.
So when Sirius was struck by a particularly vicious attack in the night-morning of Thursday and both of them knew he wouldn’t fall back asleep, Remus accepted Sirius’s mumbled offer to let him lie in a while longer. They wouldn’t both be needed on the Quidditch pitch another two hours or so.
“You deserve the peace, Moony,” said Sirius. He crept about their darkened dormitory in the predawn twilight and left a wet, equally doglike kiss on Remus’s forehead. “Some laps might clear my head, and I’ve a few circuits I’ve been meaning to put together for the students in any case.”
“If you’re sure, Pads?”
“Yeah.”
Having been on the other end of mortifying generosity too many times—whether from James or his mother or Sirius himself—Remus thought he might be better equipped to deal with his guilt.
That was not the case.
After fifteen restless minutes, Remus rose, washed, broke a fist-sized piece from a slab of chocolate to call his breakfast, then threw his thickest wool cloak over a patchy-elbowed jumper before setting off for the Quidditch pitch.
The castle, like the sky, was still dark and near every student asleep. ‘Near,’ of course, being the operative word, because Nathaniel North of all bloody people was sat behind his workstation in the lightless postgrad lounge writing away like an insane person or Edgar Allan Poe. Jesus. No wonder Sirius wanted North to do him some tattoos—the things, it seemed, were crawling with magic, permanent enchantments on his own body. How much skin had he inked just to see in the dark like that?
He gave Nathaniel a mute wave but never met his eyes. The boy would see Remus flush—he hadn’t perfect recall like Sirius, but the sound of eager lips around Sirius’s dick was a hard one to forget, emphasis on &c. &c.—and he hadn’t the wherewithal for that ordeal right now, so a wave would have to do. That, and while postgrads did not have a curfew, he hoped to spawn as few rumours as possible when it came to the crepuscular comings and goings of Loony Loopy Lupin.
To that end he stalked about the castle in near pitch-black that tested even his sharp night-eyes, which fared less well in the total dark of windowless passages and lower tunnels, so he kept to the high road. When he passed some of the great frosted windows of one corridor, a single silvery ghost which glowed with only a faint spectral luminescence floated idly in the high arches of the ceiling, watching with a certain longing through the glass. It was the colour of a rare deathcap. Remus crept by it as quick as he dared. He’d no idea if ghosts slept, or forgot they could move. Mostly he wanted to avoid the attention of the poltergeist Peeves, who’d no doubt raise enough of a clamour to wake the entire castle.
He passed the ghost without issue.
Portraits grumbled at his echoing footfalls in the pitch-dark castle corridors.
In the distance, he heard scurrying mice.
His journey to the Quidditch pitch proved to be without fruit, or, with more accuracy, the fruit it provided was sour, old, and shrivelled, a dry raisin to what Remus expected. Sirius’s broom and kit were there, yes, as were several large wicker hoops, but Sirius was not doing laps. It was eerily empty. He craned his neck to stare up at the vacant wooden stands and mistook banners drifting on chill breezes for movement. Nothing. Piss. Even a full circuit of the pitch revealed no visual clues. Olfactory ones, however, lead him down a trail off the pitch and on a twenty-minute walk to an uneven hillside edging the Forbidden Forest. His eyes caught the fading silvery light of a Patronus deep within the treeline.
It was Sirius. Even if he couldn’t see the Patronus or the figure casting it, he knew Sirius’s soap-and-sweat-and-engine-oil scent the like palm of his own hand, which, well, sounded very very creepy, actually, though Sirius would call it twisted and kinky instead. Which was where Remus’s mind went because the alternative was confusing and provoked a vague ache in Remus’s chest, like a slow, gentle strangling of the heart. What the piss was Sirius doing?
Remus gained time on Sirius with his longer legs and better night vision and inherent tendency to move like a librarian. He also knew the woods better, although this section in particular was not one of their usual romps. So by the time Sirius crossed the threshold of the wards and shields protecting Hogwarts for which they were both keyed, Remus was maintaining a careful distance of about six thick trees between them, just close enough to hear the crisp footfalls of boots on late autumn leaves. His ears and nose were the assets, here. Looking bug-eyed around trees would get him caught.
Caught doing what, Remus wasn’t yet sure.
Sirius stopped at an arbitrary tree not too far from the wardline. A five-minute stroll, maybe. He huffed a frustrated breath. He tapped the toe of his boot on a root and startled at the overloud sound of it. His Patronus, a silvery translucent wolf, raced about the wide trunks with a nervous kind of energy. Remus kept his back flush to the tree. He wanted his heart to stop racing so fast—it was unfathomable to him that Sirius couldn’t hear its frantic beating.
Like every horror film Remus had ever seen, there was another sharp sound, a crisp, strong, utterly dehydrated autumnal branch snapping in the dark. Further off.
“Sirius.” He recognised the voice. Imperial. Aristocratic. His tone had the fraying, unbalanced edge of someone who had lost and could not again find their cool, which was new. “You came.”
“What in the fuck,” replied Sirius, tone flat, “could you possibly want, Reg?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d come this time. I wasn’t sure if you’d notice—but you and Potter always did know where everyone was.” He laughed in that sharp, barking way that Sirius often did, a bitter sound. “I don’t rather care how. Not anymore. You came.”
The map again. Sometimes Remus wished he’d burned the thing instead of hiding it.
Sirius said nothing. Remus barely let himself breathe. They’d see the wispy condensation of it. His cloak would be filthy with sap and grime, yes, but also, Jesus, fuck, Regulus was a suspected Death Eater, wasn’t he? Why was Sirius meeting with him outside the castle grounds? Why did he have so many bloody secrets? Yet while Remus’s heart quickened with crisis, he wasn’t certain what in particular was upsetting him—that Sirius might be doing questionable things, or that Sirius might be doing questionable things without him. Maybe he was in a touch deeper than he’d imagine.
“Father’s dead,” whispered Regulus. He sounded young.
“Good,” growled Sirius. “Reckon you’re next, like, the way you keep on.”
Regulus jolted at that and it drew a sharp, unfeeling breath from his lips in the cold, as though he’d only had room to keep either the air or emotion hidden in his lungs. The choice had been obvious, of course.
“You’re not at all curious how?”
“Auror got him?” said Sirius, nonchalant. Practiced nonchalance, in fact. “Or did your lamia of a mother finally do him in herself?”
“Werewolf.”
To Sirius’s credit, he did not draw a revealing breath. Remus’s lungs drew no kind at all. Oh God. No, no, it couldn’t be—the odds—
“Where?” asked Sirius.
“Yes, exactly,” said Regulus. His voice was strained and yet still neutral, as though he were reading a difficult dinner menu and not his father’s obituary. “It put matters into perspective. Everything you’ve said…”
Something moved near Remus. Nightbirds, maybe, or maybe a hare.
“You swore an oath,” continued Regulus. “We made a pact.”
“Ah, a great job you’ve done keeping up your end.”
The smallness was gone from Regulus’ voice, then, replaced by a deep, booming anger. “You—you filthy brat,” he snarled. “You’ve no idea what I’ve suffered, what I’ve done to keep us safe—”
“—poisoning my boyfriend?”
Regulus flinched. Must’ve.
“Thought so. Fucking Hell,” said Sirius. “You’re just as awful as them, y’know that?”
“Why did you come?”
Sirius fell quiet.
“You know why,” he muttered, voice unsteady. “We—I’m not—you’re gonna get yourself killed, Reg, I can’t—”
“You’re right.”
“What?”
“I’m not repeating myself,” said Regulus. “Nor are you right the way you imagine. However, I have something I must do, and it is, I fear, likely to result in my death or worse.”
Sirius swallowed hard, although ’tchu need to me to do? was as much as Remus heard before his ears tuned into the soft crunch of leaf under one limping foot and his nose picked up the charred-flesh scent around him. Adrenaline gave your heartbeat a particular cadence.
Remus’s fingers did not make it far before he felt the tip of a wand press to his throat. His breath hitched. The air shimmered before him. Sheets of night peeled away in rippling layers until there stood Marlene in functional black robes, a single upturned finger to her scarred lips. Her unflinching eyes flickered to the conversation unfolding a few dozen steps away.
That was his moment. He could knock—
No. Remus found himself contemplating how he might by force free himself and promptly realised he was about to attack Marlene on Sirius’s behalf. Marlene. Mean Marlene McKinnon, of all people, who’d saved his life at least once and with whom he’d shared an awful bottle of wine on a French sand dune. And if she wasn’t alone, if Benjy or some other member of her vigilante group was here, what was he going to do then? Knock them all out with his fists? Could you even do that to a person without giving them a traumatic brain injury?
He tuned his ears back to the conversation. Two seconds, maybe, had gone by in his head. Jesus.
“You could turn yourself in,” said Sirius lamely. “Defect to the other side.”
“Don’t be naïve.”
“Piss off—”
“—there is no room for mercy in an Auror’s heart, Sirius. This is a war. Don’t be a child,” he said, that Black temper flaring up again before fading just as quick to a quiet, contemplative kick through the leaves. “Nor do I deserve such mercy. Do you… Have you ever killed anyone?”
Sirius took a breath. “S’pose I have.”
“Did you enjoy it?” replied Regulus.
Marlene’s wand against Remus’s throat made his heartbeat throb, painful, in his neck, and he felt a pressure building in his lungs and skull. She was a millimetre shy of his jugular. While the rest of her was indecipherable, her eyes were forever unyielding. This close, he could catch distant moon-brightened reflections in their quick brown foxiness.
“S’pose I dunno,” said Sirius after a long pause. “Don’t regret it. Yet.”
“I think…” began Regulus, though he shook his head, violent, and broke off the thought much like a dog might break the neck of a bird held in its jaws. “In this conflict, I choose myself. I’ve seen all sides involved.”
“Dumbledore could—”
“—Dumbledore?” said Regulus. A mad cackle spilled out from him, then, like Sirius had hit him with the punchline of a hilarious joke. In that moment, Remus saw the deep family resemblance. “Astounding. You sound just like him. Always trying so desperately to save everyone.”
“What? Who?”
“Potter.”
“What the fuck? When did you—”
“I begged him, Dumbledore,” Regulus continued, still laughing, “begged him to accept my application. To keep me away from—from them, for just another year.”
Sirius fell quiet. Marlene’s eyes flickered again, lower—he was crouching perhaps.
“Ah.”
“He sealed my fate the same as every other,” said Regulus. Their breathing was identical, then—practiced and yet still ragged for it. “I need you to promise me, Sirius, that you won’t let me become of those things,” he continued, also quiet. “I can’t—we saw how mother treated them. How hollow they were.”
“You want me to—”
“Yes.”
“What’ve you done, Reg?”
A beat. Long. The crunching of leaves came with it, lingering.
“Please,” whispered Regulus.
Sirius rubbed his hands over his face, drawing another sharp breath, another long, razor-like object into his lungs between the folds of his fingers.
“Okay. Okay, I promise.”
“I’m going somewhere.”
“Tonight?”
Another beat.
“Reg—”
“—come with me. Come with me.”
“Where? You’re not making any sense.” He could hear that rare sound, panic, catching like fresh tinder along the edges of Sirius’s voice, the sterner stuff of his core beginning to go up in flame. “Shite, Reg, what’ve you done? I can—we can help you. Let me help you.”
“I won’t make it a year.”
“Reg?”
“I, ah, I don’t want to die, Sirius,” said Regulus, frustrated. Pained. The words were hot iron on his tongue. “If you don’t hear from me, if I don’t come back again, you must keep your promise. You must. You—you must keep your promise, Sirius, do you understand me?”
“Reg—”
“—promise me, Sirius!”
Sirius, once again made a mere child, rocked back and forth on his heels in the leaves.
“I promise, Reg.”
“I hoped you would,” he said, and a moment later he hissed in pain. “I have to go.”
“Wait—where did he die?”
“Wales,” replied Regulus. “Goodbye, Sirius.”
A booming crack echoed through the trees. It sounded so loud and the silence that followed so quiet, Remus thought he might’ve been rendered deaf. Nose-to-nose, Marlene watched him. She was evaluating him, frozen as still as he was, doing a careful mental calculus. By the sound of it Sirius rocked back and forth on his heels a while longer before rising again, kicking the loose leaf little, and plodding back the way he came. Remus caught a glimpse of his blurry dark curls from the corner of his eye and realised, then, that they were swelling with tears.
Funny. He never quite knew why he was crying, did he?
Christ knows how many minutes of painful waiting later, Marlene tipped her wand up against Remus’s chin and he let himself exhale. God, that would leave a bruise.
“Twice now,” she whispered, flame-scarred face terrifying and hardened by the dark of night, “you’ve been somewhere you oughtn’t. Once is a coincidence. Twice is bad luck maybe. Do you know what three times is, Lupin?”
He shook his head. Didn’t trust words. Nor did he trust the uncertainty bleeding through her in that moment, the restlessness he recognised under her scars. Remus wasn’t supposed to be here and she wasn’t sure what to do about it. Neither was Remus. Jesus. Did she think they’d planned this meeting with Regulus? That they were on his side? Piss. Jesus buggering piss.
“Don’t find out. This isn’t some schoolboy lark, Lupin.”
“Marlene—”
Crack.
Remus was alone in the woods once more.
Notes:
Do not take drug advice from fanfiction writers. Title for this chapter taken from Gunnerkrigg Court, "A Week for Kat."
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, Cracking the Code will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 18 April, a Friday. If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendations this week are Adulthood, war, and pesky feelings for lanky werewolves; or: Reasons why Sirius Black is a walking disaster by ilbaritz, a fluffier R/S get-together fic (sort-of) that I really enjoyed because of the way that it entangles sexuality, trauma, and coping mechanisms for both Sirius and Remus.
Chapter 17: Cracking the Code
Chapter Text
For nearly seven years, one thing that always sparked an itch under Remus’s eyelid was the way the Prophet fearmongered over the other Beasts and Beings that, as rumour had it, were joining forces with the Dark Lord. Werewolves. Centaurs. Giants, Merfolk, Goblins and vampires and Hags—sources of ill-repute surfaced the occasional odd apocryphal story of an Elf emerging from extinction to seek revenge. Why any of the above would follow a fascistic blood supremacist was lost on Remus for several years further.
As he grew older and saw rather than read about the lives lived outside the comfort of academic magic, the story became clearer to him. Or, no, clearer in the sense that it all became much much muddier, all third parties and feigned neutrality and unscrutinised, anonymous backalley deals. You could hardly pretend it was moral, humanistically speaking, but then again if you weren’t a human, you’d seen already where humanity delivered you: the bottom of the pile. A shuffle away from dropping off the bottom of the deck. The way of the Elves. But a Beast or Being with two masters only answered to itself. And, Christ, were the fields sown with loathing. It worried him, sometimes. He ought’ve known his textbooks were lying. Scarcely anything he read on lycanthropy, for example, was ever true—and the time he spent in the Pyrenees shook free every last doubt.
Chima, the denmother he’d known best, possessed a wand. Remus knew that at least one other denmother had a wand of her own as well, but after that, Remus learned he himself was something of an anomaly, both in having gone to a magic school post-infection and having escaped notice in that trim, whimsical world of magical Britain. Esteemed Headmasters with Orders of Merlin did not make a frequent habit of conspiring to keep young werewolves off of the Werewolf Register. It wasn’t as though he were allowed by the powers that be to keep his own wand—his right to have one had never once been questioned by the Ministry. Those other werewolves in the Pyreenes had been turned young. They never had either opportunity, and in the Village proper, there was a single communal wand shared by some sixteen wolves of various educational backgrounds for all of their maintenance needs.
Though Remus’s time in the Village had been pleasant, it was clear he’d shown up in the midst of their golden age, when Bluebell Flame Charms could heat their cabins and so the snow was a thing of whimsy instead of a slow, creeping threat. There was little fond history in that place.
Which made it all the sadder and all the more infuriating because Remus knew the werewolves (and himself especially) had a favourable experience compared to the other denizens of their world. Centaurs were crowded in tiny forests cut back each year by muggles and the Ministry alike; he had no idea how Merfolk were adapting to loose sewage and constant toxic run-off in their waters from shipping freight and other industry; Giants and Trolls were, as he’d learned, hunted for their bodily reagents or literally sold their bodies in the latter’s case; and Goblins and Hags occupied economic niches in the magical world just the same way a hostage occupied a basement: at wandpoint. When you had a core cultural understanding of property in which construction denoted ownership (as per Goblins) or included knowledge itself (as per Hags), you generally didn’t cede said core beliefs simply because the local wizards asked in a polite manner.
As for the Elves, well, they were all dead. The wars for wandlore were a horrifying and genocidal history, except ‘history’ as a concept felt too removed, too sterile to be the correct word used for the death of an entire sentient species. Loss was not something that remained fixed in the past. It carried forward.
So of course they would flock to the Dark Lord. A few hundred years with that devil they knew, the Ministry of Magic, had given them nothing. Their worlds were culturally rich and yet stuck in stagnant pools of toxic brine. They’d be insane not to shake things up, given the chance. A dog with two masters. And how many witches and wizards were there in magical Britain, exactly? How many could they afford to lose? Of their young and their brave? Every wand aimed across the table was a wand not pointed at the forests or a silversmith. And the census of creatures was stale, unanswered, collecting dust in an archive, misshelved into oblivion. They weren’t the worst odds. You couldn’t say that out loud. Nor could you point to the fact that this was the second Dark Lord to arise this century, even if you wanted to wave your hands from the rooftops and shout, This! See all this? There’s a direct line from these hierarchies, these lies, this crushing weight you’ve set on all their chests, to the inevitable rebellions you seem to find so surprising! Because, Remus thought, it was not actually surprising. It was intentional.
Perhaps it was his paranoia talking. Perhaps it was his brain looking for patterns in noise.
Who could say, really.
The thoughts returned to him often over the course of November and well into the first snowy weeks of the following month. Part of his mind still lived in the forest, that night. He hadn’t spoken with Sirius about it—Hullo, Padfoot, I followed you into the woods and, while I was eavesdropping on you and your Death Eater brother and panicking because I might’ve killed your estranged father, directly or indirectly, Marlene showed up and possibly threatened to kill us and—well, you got the gist. It was a hard subject to broach because every time Remus thought on it, he felt the cold pangs of betrayal, those twin icy teeth of anger and sadness. For a person who’d lambasted Remus more than once for keeping secrets, Sirius had kept many of his own. Rules for thee.
There were reasonable explanations abound, of course, and not every secret was malicious. You couldn’t jump to collusion. Tracking Severus’s illicit underground fascistic activities could hardly be classified as dark, and, in theory, he hadn’t promised anything to Regulus except mercy—not to mention their current cracking into Ahmed’s research would make that mercy a restorative, not murder-y one. And he hadn’t made a great deal of sense. You had to consider the context. Really. Even if Sirius had lied to or omitted details in his report to Dumbledore at the start of the year, so what? Remus did the same with his werewolves.
The werewolves. Not his. Even if he was still passing letters to Kelly, the poor sod.
All of them were poor sods. Marlene. Regulus. Sirius. James. Remus. Kelly. Dumbledore too. Each of them had been fooled by one of those mirror-tricks: the closer you got to an idea, the less sure you were it was the right thing to do.
He crossed the Quad with doubt lodging in his chest. By evening it was vast courtyard with a few guttering torches, deep grassy shadows, and the oppressive bite of oncoming Scottish winter herding away even the most stoic of students. High stone walls and wrought-iron gates rose in the distance, not far from the rickety wooden bridge. Winged boars sat sentinel above them, tusks turned out towards the Forbidden Forest afar. It tugged at his throat like a leash, doubt, or like a fishhook in his gills, to urge him towards the forest, but he did not yield. For the moment, at least, Remus would put his faith in Sirius—or his faith, he supposed, in naught but a recognisably-penned note. He could do any of their hands passably: James, Peter, even Sirius’s horrid cursive. They could do the same for him.
“SEVEN PM. STOP YOU KNOW WHERE STOP,” it read.
That was it. Remus felt a buzzing in his skull as he stepped through the doors to the base of the grand clocktower and thought, with elitist mirth, that it was the sign of an improperly-cast Muffling Charm. Or perhaps it was something about the clocktower itself, an odd bit of interference from its inscrutable arcane inner workings. He ascended the hundred-and-something steps that spiralled up around the tower’s long, golden eternal pendulum and glimpsed the giant bell above through cracks in the stair boards. Voices. Voices of an imperceptible nature. You couldn’t tell how many there were or anything about the sound—the details dissolved in an instant in his mind like candy floss on your tongue. The muffling buzz in Remus’s ears matched the volume of voices, growing louder with every step. The moment his head cleared the last step, however, he saw five pairs of boots in the room (two with some kind of a heel and/or platform, three with none at all) and so too did Remus’s ears clear, like breaching the ocean’s surface after a deep plunge. He had a faint urge to sneeze.
Mary, Sirius, and Nathaniel North, Pascalle du Pont, and Lily stood in a very loose semi-circle facing the stairs arranged in that height order. Each of them carried something: Mary held her wand, which she flourished after Remus joined them, giving the air over the top of the stair a shiny lacquer-coating which he recognised as a simple physical barrier; Sirius was turning an ordinary flask over and over in his hand; for Nathaniel, something that resembled a toolbox and a cosmetics kit, though Remus couldn’t see as he was leaned up against a wall; du Pont, a packet of cigarettes; and Lily, a large, heavy, and distinctly muggle-looking trunk that Remus knew well.
Oh. Oh. Remus had expected he might have to, well, do something related to Ahmed’s research, but from the way they were standing—
“Yeah, Moony,” said Sirius. He beckoned him over with a tilt of his head. “We’re there.”
The air was cold and thick with freezing breath, anticipation, adrenaline, and yet more still unexplored as he joined them in the circle, which they turned into a full one. Each time the golden pendulum below them swung, the large pale clock face above them gave a booming tic, toc, tic, toc, at a volume that was consistent no matter where you were in the tower, top or bottom or right in the middle. Little wonder neither ghost nor amortal poltergeist dared venture here. It gave the place a sense of gravity. Time, here, moved inexorably and unmistakeably forwards, whether you wanted it to or not. Remus had been here only one winter ago and while the view was much the same, snow-covered trees swallowing a snow-covered bridge and a horizon swallowing them all, he could hardly say the same about any of them.
Pascalle du Pont had been the one to request the meeting, as it happened. That very morning she’d been examining Ahmed’s encoded research and announced two things: she was confident she knew the correct decryption sequence for the first few pages; and that she would not be going forwards until she met with everyone involved. It begged the question, of course, why Nathaniel North was here, but there were more revelations awaiting him. Lily had agreed to gather everyone and had her own reasons for doing so.
Apparently, she was getting cold feet.
Though everyone had been summoned for the same time, everyone except Remus had arrived some amount of time early, so he’d missed much of the initial impassioned debates, though they were often halted and then restarted by a new arrival. Even Sirius and Mary, both of whom were known to occasionally jab their thumbs in open wounds, seemed reluctant to begin a new round of opening volleys.
Lily stood firm in the camp that they ought to evaluate their position and consider the implications of any further action before proceeding—after all, Ahmed herself had been vanished for whatever she’d written—while Sirius and Mary, having planned ahead together, wanted not to waste a further moment.
The rest of them stood somewhere in the no man’s land, were undecided, or simply hadn’t announced their positions. Lily was courting them, then, and reading from her notes—speechifying something semi-practiced by the fourth time around, now, about how Alfred Noble regretted his development of dynamite due to its military applications, a similar tale of the Wright brothers, Oppenheimer’s nuclear genie, and was capping off with something from Arthur Galston’s Science and Social Responsibility: A Case History (1972), on how his doctoral thesis on growing soybeans lead directly to the development of Agent Orange.
“‘Although scientific societies have in the past avoided involvement in social problems,’” quoted Lily, “‘I believe the time has passed when such a laissez-faire attitude is acceptable. Science is now too potent in transforming our world to permit random fallout of the social consequences of scientific discoveries.” She moved to fold her notes, pleased, but Mary’s hand shot out and she pinched the page.
“You’ve left out the next bit,” said Mary, who cleared her throat and read, “‘Some scrutiny and regulation are required, and I believe that scientists must play an important role in any bodies devised to carry out such tasks.’”
Lily shrugged. “He also wrote that the solution was to stay with your research until its end. I didn’t quote that, either, because it’s wrong.”
“Wrong?” asked Nathaniel.
“You can’t uninvent something,” replied Lily. “Once it’s out there, out there enough, that’s the end, and it’ll continue to be out there. Even if Galston had stayed with his research—mind you, they used developments from his doctoral thesis without contacting him—what did he think he was going to do after he died?” she asked, and the five of them watched her neat red plait unravel a hair in the silence that followed. “Was he going to entomb all his research with him like a bloody Pharaoh?”
Mary made a throaty, frustrated noise and paced as though she was picking up lost words from across the top of the clocktower.
“This isn’t an invention, Lils,” she muttered. “it’s already out there. And even if you think Galston is too optimistic—”
“—he is—”
“—the cat is already out of the bag. We have the Kissed already. How can we be so precious with something that might help?”
“And if it hurts?” Lily fired back. “Look at Nicolas Flamel: famous alchemist, reduced the number of Principal Exemptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration from seven to five with one invention by making himself immortal and successfully transmutating lead to gold, and yet in his banned autobiography, he writes that he’s destroyed every iota of knowledge that might lead to the creation of another Philosopher’s Stone for fear of some powerful witch or wizard becoming an immortal dictator. Including, mind you, a future Minister for Magic. If Ahmed’s discoveries include a how-to for the Kissed, one that streamlines the process or enables them to do even more terrible things with them—I’m not saying,” she continued, huffing, “that we can’t, but I’m saying we ought to think. This is it. This is our last moment to pull back. Not let the lightning out of the bottle. Keep the Stone in legend.”
“I agree with Mary,” said Sirius. Mary threw her arms sidelong towards him and Lily snorted as if to say, Of course you do, but he shot her an even glare as he continued, “I—look, I don’t disagree that we should think, but you’re not asking us to think, Evans, you’re asking us to stop. Except we can’t just wash our hands of things after spending however many years fucking them up.”
Nathaniel frowned, tattooed arms crossed and leaned against the wall as he was.
“Um. We didn’t invent the Kissed.”
“Where do you think this all started?” said Mary, forceful, and towards the end of it her voice was near a shout. She winced. “Sorry, I—but I’m not wrong.”
“Oui. She is not.”
“Thank you, du Pont. What all of us are doing here—it’s not disconnected from the Kissed, not ’cos we do it in a school institution instead of a master-apprentice dynamic like ye olde days. Whatever foul, evil person taught the Ministry how to make the Kissed started off poking around in the dark, the same as we are.”
Nathaniel’s freckled face grew taut and his jaw worked silently as he digested the idea.
“I think,” he said, “I have to agree with Lily, then.”
“Oi, Mary, great job—”
“—oh, shut up, Black.”
“Oui, shut up. He is allowed his own opinion,” said Pascalle, although she sounded both bored—twirling one of many long braids around her finger—and as though she disapproved. “Even if it was a coward’s one.”
“It’s beside the point, anyway,” replied Mary. She smoothed out her woollen cloak and pulled it a touch tighter around her neck to fend off the cold. Deep brick red, trimmed with gold. “Even if we take Oppenheimer as the example, there was no reason he and his team had to turn nuclear physics into a weapon. That was a conscious choice,” she continued, and her face grew steely with every word. “As far as we know, we’re the only one with any inkling or trace of Ahmed’s research. We can control how it’s used.”
“It’s an opportunity,” added Sirius, “that Arthur Galston didn’t have. Nor Flamel.”
Lily’s green eyes were uncertain. She looked towards the rounded window of the clocktower, frowning.
“What is it, Lils?”
“It’ll sound silly.”
“Lily,” said Remus, quiet. “We need everyone in on this. It has to be unanimous—we can’t proceed any other way. I wouldn’t want us to. We have to trust each other, like.”
“I—Remus, I do trust you. All of you,” she said, frowning deeper, “even the ones I’ve only known a short while. You’re not the problem here.”
Remus blinked. “You don’t trust yourself?”
“No, I don’t,” she said, quiet. Her eyes were very far away, now, further than the moonlit stretches of the Forbidden Forest outside the clocktower. “I took over her role, Remus, and—Merlin, I don’t know if—she—I feel her, sometimes, like she’s haunting me. I can’t stop thinking about Ahmed. She—you know that she can’t have started out as she ended. She was a normal witch at some point. Brilliant, but normal, and then she became something else. I don’t know,” she continued, her voice falling to a whisper, “if I want to go down that path. I don’t know if I’ll like the me that’s at the end of that road.”
Mary closed in behind her and draped her round chin overtop of Lily’s red hair, drawing a frown from the latter. She looked up from the window at Mary with bewilderment.
“Let’s put aside,” began Mary, “that you just compared yourself, if you follow it, to all of Gloria Ahmed, Oppenheimer, and Nicolas Flamel.”
“Oi, Mary—”
“Shut up. Ahmed was an isolationist. I don’t think anyone could name a single thing about her that wasn’t related to her participation in the program. She was paranoid beyond belief. She wasn’t well. She had no one near her, not even me, and even if she covered it up well to you lot, the girl was falling apart at the seams. There was a reason the board thought she was the shooting star—she tried to take everything onto herself, shoulder, if you think about it, the literal weight of the world, and—it made me angry, ’cos when she went missing, I thought, ‘Oh. Huh. I expected this.’
“It was funny. The shock never really comes, does it? You hear the stories every once and a while of a brilliant genius witch and-or wizard who blows themselves up, and you never really think it’ll happen to someone you know, but when it does, it always makes sense. It’s never a surprise except that it’s surprising,” continued Mary, “that you’re not surprised. Tragedy struck her very, very slowly, and I never pulled her out of the way or even blinked. She had me fooled. I think I truly thought she was so, so extraordinary that she could do it all on her own, that help would degrade her, that it would drag her down, that she could take care of herself, but she couldn’t, and now it’s far too late to change anything.
“But you,” she began, turning Lily around and ducking her head until their eyes were level, “Lily Evans, Head Girl, picture of patience and beast that you are, are not Gloria Ahmed. You are not alone. We will not let you be alone. If you go dark,” she said, letting herself grin, “we will pull you back with as much force as we require. Friends don’t let friends become mad scientists, no matter what Gloria Ahmed says about them.”
“Mon Dieu,” muttered Pascalle. Oh, piss off, you French twat. “I think I will be sick.”
“Really?” said Sirius.
“I agree to no such restrictions. Not,” she continued, intercepting their heads whipping round with looks ranging from shocked to horrified to very, very pissed off, “that I am planning to be a dark evil witch, but I will accept no restraint on how I will use this knowledge. Whatever it is,” she added as a footnote.
“And why the fuck not?”
Pascalle shrugged. She lit up a cigarette—bought and packaged, not hand-skinned—very casual-like, and breathed hot, cloudy smoke into the giant brass bell suspended above them.
“Mon ami(e), I am the one with the most leverage here. If you did not need me for this plan, you would not have asked me.”
Sirius’s crooked fingers twitched and Remus’s heartrate began ascending a hundred-and-something steps, and his blood pressure with it.
“I have heard much of this Gloria Ahmed,” she continued, taking another drag off her cigarette before crushing the poor, freshly-born thing under her flat shoe. “I have never met her. From all you have said—you, all of you—she was not a nice person. Not always. Never a moral one. If she was not held to such a high standard, I do not understand why I must be as well. My personal investment is not so biased as all of yours.”
“Biased?” asked Lily.
“Um, second that,” said Nathaniel. “I’m not biased. I barely know what’s happening here.”
“She’s talking about me and Mary,” growled Sirius. His fingers were still, now, and that Black temper Remus knew so well had iced over and become smooth, frosty armour. “Yes. Mary and I have a familial investment in the Kissed and figuring out a way to either prevent or undo it,” he began through grit teeth, “but if anything, that should be valued, not discounted or counted against us.”
Mary gave a curt nod in agreement.
“We have very clear reasons for wanting to do this thing with Ahmed’s research. You know why we’re here. If anything, we’re the least suspicious ones in the room.”
“And,” continued Sirius, anger transforming into a righteous one, “even beyond that, everyone in this room ought to be biased. Every moment we spend delaying the decoding or, Christ, talking about abandoning this project altogether is another moment we spend delaying or abandoning the people it affects. The very, very real people. This isn’t just a thought exercise. This is—Jesus, this is life or death.”
Pascalle’s gaze followed from Mary and Sirius’s united front to the others in the room. She settled on Lily.
“Et toi?”
“Do I need a better reason than what Sirius said?” she replied, not meeting Pascalle’s stare. “Maybe—okay, maybe I want to understand more about Ahmed and the world we live in, too, but ending the magical enslavement of people is motivation enough on its own.”
Nathaniel, perhaps anticipating his own turn, cleared his throat.
“I know it sounds lame, but, um, what she said. The Kissed have always freaked me out,” he said, shuddering against the wall, “and I owe a lot to Mary and Sirius. If they’re in,” he continued, perhaps more decisively than he knew, “then I’m in.”
Pascalle met Remus’s eyes.
Why was he doing this? There were a thousand reasons, weren’t there, but the coremost one, the one that had set him upon this path was not a deep and noble and otherwise righteous one despite, well, almost everything he had said to Sirius and others over the past year. If he thought about it, he hadn’t thought about it. You could trace it all back rather neatly. Dumbledore had implied he should, and Remus had never questioned in earnest why he followed, or, more broadly, what he’d come here to do in the first place.
He thought about the leucotomy, both its dark origins and dark legacy in the mental institutions of Europe and North America, and its transorbital variation as a sort of industrialised version, the factory of leucotomies; all the people of brilliant and terrible minds it had changed, permanently, like a chisel on soft, neuroplastic marble; he thought about Rowena Ravenclaw and her year-and-a-day in contemplative seclusion and what a fat lot of good that had done for the legacy of Hogwarts; the death of the Elves; and that single day he had so long ago in this very clocktower with Sirius.
“Sirius, wait, that’s actually—”
“—not unlike opening Pandora’s box, yeah,” finished the echo. “You ever wonder what happens to all the theses after a postgrad’s done with them? As in, what they’re for?”
The silence was dragging, then. Below their feet, the great golden pendulum of the clocktower swung back and forth, enabling those perfect time-keeping tic, toc, tic, toc noises that permeated the tower.
“No,” said Remus.
Sirius’s brows shot up, Mary and Lily frowned, Nathaniel—bless him—looked very confused, while Pascalle’s expression remained perfectly flat.
“No, he repeated. His attempt to match Sirius’s confidence came out a touch flatter than he hoped. Less Ziggy, more Ziggy impersonator. “No, you don’t have the leverage you think you do. If you could decode her research on your own, du Pont, I cannot for any reason think why you wouldn’t have absconded with it already.”
Sirius’s eyebrows stayed high with realisation, but below, independently, his lips cracked into a toothy grin.
“That’s our Moony.”
“She needs us,” muttered Lily. “Don’t you? Doesn’t she?”
Pascalle remained silent. She lit up another cigarette.
“We don’t even know its true value or what’s really inside,” continued Remus, “and, as Lily’s suggested, we could always try and find another way without you. This, er, it’s not some schoolboy lark, perhaps you’d save us a year, or two years, but we’re committed to see this through. We’re biased, as you might recall. We could do this without you. Without Ahmed. We could try another approach. If Ahmed started from scratch, we can too. It’d be harder, no doubt, and we might not ever get anywhere, but you won’t get anywhere without us, either—and who else is there to trust, when Ahmed herself might’ve got topped for this?”
“Moony’s right. If Lily’s the new Ahmed—ah, fuck, sorry Mary—then we need her to parse through everything,” said Sirius, “and Pascalle’ll need our lowly lot here in P.A. to handle, yes, the practical applications.”
“So, walk away and get nothing.” Remus shrugged at Pascalle. “Or you could try it without us. Blow yourself up on your own, like.”
“Get kidnapped,” muttered Mary. “Killed.”
“Merde. You are all so melodramatic.”
“Tic,” continued Mary, quieter, “toc.”
A beat. The sound of clockwork. A scuffed shoe.
Below his feet, he felt the pull and push of the clocktower pendulum, steady and unerring.
“I will not submit to an Unbreakable Vow,” said Pascalle. Remus felt something uncoil in his gut. Oh, Jesus, thank God that had worked. “If your method of protecting this information will not cause me harm, however, then I will accept.”
“Reasonable,” said Mary.
“But if you try to cheat me, I will make you regret it.”
“Less reasonable.”
“Dunno, Mare,” said Sirius. “Better to be upfront about it, yeah?”
Pascalle shrugged and dragged her cigarette again with a Mary-like sangfroid if albeit more obviously sociopathic, and in that moment Remus thought he’d finally got a good look at her. Her long braids and smoky French-ness and, well, all of her general conduct was the product, Remus thought, of a lifetime of slow, arduous ascent. She was a shrewd negotiator by necessity. There was no paranoia to her—paranoia required initial trust later broken—this was a witch who extracted secrets from people and hidden places to trade upwards. It was the only way anyone would’ve allowed her to move in that direction.
“I think, um,” said Nathaniel, kicking off from the wall, “that’s why I’m here. The only reason I’m here at all, really, and then only ’cos I’m the one who can do it best. It’s my thesis, but the plan was Mary and Sirius’s idea.”
“This is sure to be good,” muttered Lily.
Remus blinked and his fuzzy lips split with a frown.
“His thesis?”
“—on that, Moony,” interrupted Sirius. “Me and Mare here got the idea from your lovely display at Slughorn’s do, circa seventy-eight,” he explained with another lopsided grin. “The story you told about Dorcas Meadowes?”
“Black—”
“Patience, Evans. We were thinking about how Ahmed locked down her research the same way, sort of, that the Ministry allegedly locked down Meadowes’s research, and—actually we looked into the Fidelius Charm first, but most of those were in the Restricted Section and we didn’t want to arouse suspicion, and in any case it turns out that that can’t conceal or protect abstract ideas, just secrets and places and I s’pose even people—we thought it wasn’t the worst idea, given it was, y’know, a literal Pandora’s Box. Figure out a way to limit the spread, so no one can open the box too wide before we know what’s inside. And Mary—”
“—I disassembled a Tongue-Tying Charm and a load of others, too, then mixed in some of the components I picked up from Pseudoanimate Thaumaturgies with my own thesis. Then I passed the whole thing off to Nathaniel.”
There was quiet in the clocktower.
Tic. Toc.
“Um, do I—”
“—yeah, mate, it’s your turn—”
“—oh. Okay. Um,” said Nathaniel, shifting from one foot to another, “my thesis is on inkspells. Tattooed spells that—right, you all get it. If I put everything back together the right way, I think I can ink a sigil that won’t let us discuss Ahmed’s research with anyone other than ourselves, er, or anyone not named in the spell at all, even if they should be able to hear us. And once it’s done, ’cos of Mary’s charm—”
“—even Nate as their writer won’t be able to unpick it,” finished Mary. “It’ll adapt and respond to attempts to break it. Probably.”
“Probably?” asked Lily.
“—it’s a work in progress, all right?” replied Mary, deflating somewhat.
“It’s Nathaniel.”
“Padfoot—”
“—no, no, that’s not an insult,” groaned Sirius. He gestured to the gangly boy with the tattoos and piercings and still unabashedly shy demeanour. “He’s—look, he’s the least corrupted of all of us, in’t he? Even if he’s not capable of inventing a seal he couldn’t himself break, of all of us, he applied for this program for the friends and the experience, not the research. That’s the least dark a postgrad can get.”
Nathaniel’s expression twisted up, as though he couldn’t decide if this was high praise or the mild and, yes, a touch insulting kind. Which, actually, there was a lot of subtext to everything going on here, and while perhaps everyone in the tower knew that to some degree, Remus knew the most.
Nathaniel would never betray Mary and Sirius, not without some awful things to shatter that friendship first. Sirius especially—they were apprentice and master, effectively, Nate was his protégé, and, yes, Nathaniel was the least ruined by academia of all of them. At some level, Remus and Nate had also slept together through and/or with Sirius, and, well, possibly Sirius had shagged Pascalle as well, which, hold on, meant that almost all of this ill-begotten fellowship was connected more or less through Sirius’s dick. Except Lily, of course. Or bugger, no, wait, Lily too—she only began down this path because Sirius had asked her to on Remus’s behalf, using a lie-by-omission cover story and—oh, oh Jesus, maybe she was right. Maybe this was a dangerous road to start upon. Cum was not the choice glue, Remus thought, for holding together a conspiracy.
Before he could work up the nerve to say anything at all, however, Pascalle breathed out another hot cloud of smoke and passed her cigarette to Nathaniel, who acquiesced and inhaled, deep, without flinching. Christ. Maybe the boy was harder than he thought.
“I cannot believe,” said Pascalle, laughing lightly, “that I am going to get matching tattoos with five strangers. For lore I do not even know is valuable.”
“When do we start?” asked Sirius. Exhilaration swelled in his grey eyes.
“Ça depend,” replied Pascalle. “If Nathaniel can do the tattoos tonight—”
“Um, yeah.”
“—then I am ready, but we must do a few more preparations first.”
Sirius and Mary were both insistent that they do it tonight. When Pascalle du Pont swept up her long braids into a ponytail and enumerated every little thing they’d need, from Lily’s cooperation in the decryption casting to a means of concealing the magnitude of magic they were about to perform, every problem was met with a solution Sirius and Mary had apparently discussed in depth.
Well, almost every problem.
Though most of the minutiae escaped him, apparently whatever cipher Ahmed had used and/or invented was a layered one. It looped back in on itself frequently in a weird self-referential manner such that it became progressively more difficult to decipher as it grew longer, and denser, and more interwoven, like stratified layers of stone. Apparently. The practical effect was that, excepting the first few pages Lily and Pascalle speculated were a table of contents, decoding the rest of Ahmed’s research would be an all-or-nothing affair.
“It is like a painting,” explained Pascalle in her cryptic and unhelpful way, “by M.C. Escher. When you climb the stairs, you arrive back when you began.”
That they were in the clocktower was no accident. Happenstance made no fool of Sirius Black or Mary Macdonald. Their plan was to redeploy the transmutation matrix Remus and Sirius had used in their Soho flat to categorise maps of Wales. With Sirius taking point, and three assistants to support him, he’d convert all that detectable magical run-off into sound rather than light or heat and time it, more or less, with the midnight bell that rang all throughout Hogwarts.
Which of course meant that with their war council finished, Remus and Sirius had about three and a half hours to teach Mary and Nathaniel the spell while Lily studied the Arithmantic algorithm laid out by Pascalle and made some indiscernible adjustments that, disconcertingly, required her to draw a few drops of blood from each of them with a brass spindle. Thereafter they rotated off to let Nathaniel ink very permanent tattoos onto their bodies one by one in a variety of mundane and inappropriate places.
The sigil he drew was something of a stylistic squiggle, roughly the size of a fist—Lily’s fist, not Remus’s—and bore the six of their names in tiny unreadable script to form a circle around it. Or it would’ve. As a last-minute aside, Mary suggested they include Ahmed’s name as well.
“Seven’s the most powerful number anyway,” she said, matter-of-fact. “I think it’s poetic, too. Carrying her name and all that.”
Mary took her tattoo on the back of her neck between her shoulders; Pascalle opted for her ankle; Nathaniel himself had precious little space left on his body that he could reach, so Remus watched with morbid fascination as he nonchalantly tattooed the sole of his left foot; Lily chose the same—she wanted as few people to see it as possible—and squirmed the whole while; and after joking about getting his on his arsecheek or as a lower back tattoo, Sirius lifted his shirt and cloak to reveal an angry lattice of scars on his ribs with a macabre grin.
“Was gonna get this covered over sooner or later,” he said, wry.
Remus tucked himself in a corner of the cornerless clocktower and tugged his trousers down below his thigh on one side—opposite his bite mark, of course—and let Nathaniel work. To his credit, the boy didn’t say anything about Remus’s distinct silvery scars or anything else eye-catching.
His first tattoo involved a dead woman’s name and a scientific conspiracy. It also hurt like a motherfucker and Remus’s jaw ached from gritting his teeth, but he liked the look of it on his pale upper-outer thigh when Nathaniel was done.
All that brought them to eleven o’clock. Moonlight poured through the window and glinted on the polished brass bell above them. They circled up again and interlocked elbows as Nathaniel held his wand out towards their centre point, incanting in a whisper. One by one, other wands joined Nathaniel’s, and an iridescent glow poured through their cloaks, jumpers, trousers, and boots from where the ink had settled into their skin. His eyes crackled with indigo light and Remus’s tattoo heated, quick, like young embers meeting a blown breath, blurring Remus’s vision white with agony. He bit hard into his tongue to keep from crying out—the others were stifling groans, too—and tasted blood.
When Nathaniel fell silent, the iridescence faded and so too did the burning brand pressed upon his thigh. Remus felt no different.
“Um, okay,” said Nathaniel, lowering his wand. While everyone was breathless and their brows beaded with sweat in spite of the winter chill, the boy was unfazed. His taste for pain rivalled Remus’s own. Perhaps it exceeded his. “I think that should do it. Now—”
“—the easy part,” said Mary.
It was, as it turned out, surprisingly easy. With four P.A. members trapping all magical residue for conversion and both Lily and Pascalle, exceptional Theory postgraduates in their own right, running the Arithmantic decryption spell, there was little opportunity for error. They’d laid out the trunk in a chalked circle, that same stylised squiggle of Nathaniel’s measured out in dusty white lines. The lid was shut but the steel locks were popped.
On their side of things Sirius took lead, of course. Transmutating energies was more his forté than anyone else’s, but, in private, Remus thought any one of them could’ve run the thing solo. This wasn’t compressing all gestalt geographical knowledge of Wales into a few dozen maps on the wall of a Soho flat—it was codebreaking. Tedious, pernickety, and requiring as much patience as it did finesse, yes, but in the end it like so many other things fell to brute force.
You couldn’t see it by the eye, but as Lily and Pascalle gave their wands one last light, asynchronous flourish, it was as though an invisible gust blew into the room: the lid of the trunk flew open with a clattering bang. Sheets of polaroid paper flew into the air like startled doves fleeing an especially cruel cake, and with their frantic flapping they shed symbols and characters like loose feathers. A thousand coded runes peeled themselves free of their polaroids and left technicolour streaks in their wake. They sat in open air above one very long sheet of parchment a moment before they melted with a bass-y, whining groan, into Latin characters, like childish metals being reforged by parental will.
Twelve deep, reverberant bongs rang through the tower and further out, rattling Remus’s bones and eyelids and soft, inner squidgy bits like a train riding the tracks of his spine. He though the vibrations might pull him apart—all of Mary’s auditory protection felt like a shield of wet tissue paper against that booming sonic scalpel. And yet with each toll, the floating Latin letters rearranged themselves into coherent strings, short titular ones that tracked with the style of chapters, headings, and subheadings, then soaked into the parchment below.
As the clocktower fell to deathly silence with midnight’s end, Gloria Ahmed’s table of contents was laid bare to all observers.
Remus felt a wave of shock roll over him. He—they’d done it. Holy buggering Christ, they’d pulled it off. Genuinely pulled it off. No one had died or caught fire or even singed their hair. He felt a wheezing laugh creep up from his lungs like a lunatic spider which, actually, was crushed to death by the hug Sirius gave him, and then Mary, too, joined the pileup, squeezing them three together with such rapturous, celebratory vigour Remus knew he’d have bruises in the morning. They must have looked and sounded completely mental, laughing and jeering and prancing about the top of the clocktower just after midnight, shivering in their boots and heavy, sweat-laden cloaks.
“A few pages worth,” murmured Lily. “It’s not much to go on.”
“Oi, Evans, let us have this, yeah?” replied Sirius.
She shrugged and frowned back down at the long piece of parchment as if to say, Fine. Have this. Go wild having this, Black.
Unfortunately Lily was correct, though Remus declined to say that aloud to Sirius. The table of contents was like a tantalising boudoir polaroid or a decadently-decorated layer cake with no spice or sugar or seasoning. The implications were so, so much more satisfying than what you tasted after sinking your teeth into the airy nothingness beneath.
“PREFACE: ON WRITING A UNIFIED THAUMATURGICAL TREATISE,” read one part.
They were all like that: section titles such as UNINTERROGATED PROPERTIES OF KISSED SUBJECTS or ‘STRING THEORY’ AS A NEW THEURGICAL FUNDAMENT or RUNAWAY MOTION: A PARADOX OF DARK ENERGIES, though the one that interested Remus most was a simpler one entitled ACONITE, LYCANTHROPY, AND ENDURING CURSES: A CASE STUDY IN TWO-STAGE TRANSFORMATIVE RITUALS.
“Jesus wept,” whispered Mary. She looked over at Pascalle, who was scrutinising the parchment with evaluating eyes that reminded Remus of Peter. “This is a lot. How many pages did you say this might be, again?”
“She didn’t say,” said Nathaniel.
“I did not say,” said Pascalle.
“Think what y’want about the bird, but Christ,” muttered Sirius. He was squatting near the head of the parchment and the pose reminded Remus of when they had both been waiting to vomit. “Reckon all the genius in her outweighed the madness by a fair half. More, maybe. You said she was the kind of witch that’d blow herself up, Mare,” he continued, frowning, “but I reckon she’d have pulled it off given half the chance. This thing is sprawling.”
“There’s not a subject it doesn’t touch,” said Lily. Her expression was cool. Collected.
“Fuck.”
“‘Fuck’ indeed.”
Remus’s eyes remained fixed on the one heading. TWO-STAGE TRANSFORMATIVE RITUALS bore into his brain like a beetle in bark or a very insistent dog into one’s bedsheets.
“We should get back to our dormitories before someone comes to investigate what happened with the clocktower,” said Remus, neutral. “We have weeks to study this before du Pont cracks any other part of it.”
“Months, mon ami. Months.”
“Months, then. No sense in us getting caught now.”
They broke off into pairs and each took their own circuitous route back to the postgrad dormitories. Sirius was quiet and contemplative the entire walk back and went to bed without more than a chaste kiss, which, well, yes, was followed some minutes later by a bout of insistent snogging and a very fatigued mutual wank shortly thereafter. Not a word was exchanged between them, which suited Remus just fine. He was just as deep in thought as Sirius, stuck evaluating what, if anything, he actually knew about the werewolf in the woods.
***
In October Socrates had been busy and uncooperative, while for the last moon Remus had been tied—had be dogged—had been otherwise preoccupied with more pressing matters. Not only hadn’t he seen the werewolf in so many weeks, however, Remus realised they were the only one he could more or less share all his worries with, given the other werewolf’s disconnection from the rest of the wizarding world.
Good fortune, that. Remus was doing his own head in and chasing his mental tail. A maelstrom of magic and fur in his head. Even if they saw the whole of it as a lark, some entertaining drama to be enjoyed like a trashy novel, he needed to say the words aloud before they died within him and made Remus septic with rot.
So when the early December moon had passed and Remus felt only its last waning pulls, Remus went out at noon to find them again, hopefully without a bloody deer corpse in tow. Although he’d considered wine as a gift, chocolate was the safe option. They usually enjoyed that—perhaps it was a werewolf thing—and offering Socrates something they might identify correctly as recreational poison was not the way Remus wanted to begin when he was eventually going to accuse them of concealing a second-stage ritual from him.
He started with the lighter topics. His trouble with the flat, the encounter with James, or, er, all of his encounters with James, &c. &c., and meandered, slow, to his possibly having killed Sirius’s abusive ex-father with another werewolf.
Socrates failed to see the problem with that.
“You didn’t like him,” they said.
Snow had fallen across the Highlands in mid-November and stuck, though some of it had grown hard and crusty with frozen rain. While Remus ran warm himself, he boggled, still, at how the other werewolf’s calloused bare feet didn’t even pale at the touch of snow, and at some point realised that their ragged clothing was more for the benefit of Remus’s not-so-fragile sensibilities than any physical comfort. Even as loose, light snowflakes crept through the canopy cover, they melted a hair’s breath from Socrates’s skin.
Though pawprints and tracks and the other signs of vibrant, rich winter-life were visible all around them, Remus had once again found the Forbidden Forest emptied of all its interesting denizens. It was odd. Their disappearance was the means by which Remus learned to identify their existence in the first place.
“No,” said Remus, “I did not. But even if killing people I don’t like wasn’t a problem—which, being clear, it absolutely is—my not liking him had nothing to do with it.”
“Why?”
“When I—well, when I killed one of them, the Suit,” began Remus, quiet and trying to keep his voice from shaking with only middling success, “I lost all memory of everything that happened next. It felt like my moons before the ritual, when the wolf would take over and I’d be put out from my own body.”
“No,” said Socrates.
“No?”
“No,” they repeated. “You are wrong, magic boy. There has always been one wolf. For you, his name is Remus.”
“That doesn’t make—the denmothers had a ritual, or, er, have,” said Remus. He heaved a heavy breath and recalled the bloody deer corpse, realising, perhaps, that he might be in more danger during these visits that Socrates had let on. “You told me there’s another one, but it’s actually another half, I s’pose—that’s what you meant about teaching me the ‘full’ ritual last year and why you said I hadn’t completed it. The first half of it does something to your mind with aconite to make you conscious and aware during the transformation. And the second…”
The wolflike creature in the Hogsmeade alleyway sunk its canine teeth into someone unconscious; night-black fur sprouting under a moon that was waxing, yes, but not nearly full; the care with which they tore open that poor unfortunate soul’s shirt to expose the helpless flesh underneath.
“I don’t know what the second half does,” continued Remus, and it was not a lie. “But I do know there’s a second half. And if anyone were to know exactly what it entailed, it would be you.”
Socrates walked in silence for a while longer, their breathing stuck somewhere between animal frustration and, Remus thought, a distinctly humanoid pleasure. Their long hair was damp and near frosting at the ends.
“What does the name Bacchus mean to you?” they asked after a long pause. Socrates grabbed a pinecone from the forest floor, dry and cracked and buried among the snow-crushed leaf litter, pinching it between their toes and then tossing it up to catch in hand.
“Bacchus?” repeated Remus, frowning. The other werewolf had a way of interrupting his often meltdown-y thoughts with some odd lines of questioning. “As in the Roman god of wine?”
“Is the magic boy asking me a question?”
“No, no. Bacchus—he loves his wine, has an entourage of Satyrs and maenads, very much encourages his followers to get, well, very inebriated and-stroke-or sloppy during his festivals and celebrations. Bacchanals, with a lot of shagging in public, that sort of thing. The Greeks called him Dionysus.”
“Are you a parrot, magic boy?” said Socrates, tone very much annoyed. “Why aren’t you answering my question?”
“I, well—I thought I was.”
“His name means nothing to you?”
Remus paused. “It means ‘Dionysus’ to me,” he explained, “and ‘Dionysus’ means ‘getting so arseholed I fall through the world,’ I s’pose. Familiar feeling, that.”
Socrates tossed the pinecone between both hands as they stalked the winter wood and, without looking, threw it high over their shoulder. Remus floundered to catch it. He wasn’t sure why, of course, he needed the pinecone—it smelled vaguely of pine and more vaguely of foot—but he caught it anyway.
“This is what happened to you when you tasted that wizard,” said Socrates. They kicked another pinecone off from the forest floor and into their hand like a football. “You became ‘arseholed.’ The Bassarids—”
“—Bassarids?”
Socrates wrinkled their childish nose in distaste.
“The maenads,” they continued, “celebrate and dance and chase their instincts until the frenzy clears their minds, and when they have no thoughts left to think, they believe they will finally commune with Bacchus. They long to hear his voice.”
“How is it you know the alternative name for a maenad and the meaning of ‘arseholed,’ but not who Socrates or Margaret Thatcher are-stroke-were?”
“I am Socrates, and I do not know who Margaret Thatcher is because you did not tell me.”
“Oh,” said Remus. “S’pose that’s fair. Did it work?”
“What is ‘it’?”
“Did the maenads, or, well, Bassarids, ever actually talk to Bacchus?”
“No. In that oblivion, they called out for their God and heard only that their echoes were lonely,” replied Socrates. They delivered it neutrally. It was clinical for the other werewolf, and ‘clinical’ an attitude too clean for what Remus expected from them.
“Because he’s not real, or—”
“That is not what matters. You are what you are because of them, as am I.”
“We—pardon?” asked Remus. “You don’t mean to say I’m a maenad.”
“Are you a woman?”
“Well—no, I’m not, although being honest I rarely feel very much like a man either, most days.”
“Maenads are all women, and no maenads are wolves,” said Socrates. They tossed the second pinecone over their shoulder again, not breaking pace, and Remus caught it one-handed. “They wore fox pelts and did not spare the animal from the wizard when they ran wild through the woods as we do. From those encounters came the first of us.”
“We’re not part maenad, are we?”
“A bat bites a fruit. Is that fruit part bat?”
“Maybe?”
“He is guessing.”
“He is. Is he correct?”
“No.”
“Drat,” replied Remus. His fuzzy brows furrowed. “It feels odd that a maenad bite turns humans into a werewolf, unless ‘werewolf’ is a misnomer. They’re both canines. ‘Werefox’ is less intimidating, I s’pose, although foxes don’t howl and my tail is not nearly long enough.”
“I did not say it was a bite or that a human was involved.”
Oh. “Oh.”
“Maenads birthed many things from their unions, each one a creature of frenzy and ecstasy. Most did not survive their time, as most of the maenads did not survive their time. We, however, did.”
“So lycanthropy is heritable, isn’t it? That’s what they all say, though the literature isn’t exactly—”
“Do you ask this many questions of your books when you have more pages ahead of you?”
Point taken. Remus remained silent.
“The cults of Bacchus were hunted and the cultists killed. Those hunting them could not kill all the wolves, not their Packs and not their litters,” said Socrates, who then kicked up a third pinecone, sending it straight over their shoulder without use of their hands. Remus fumbled that one and dropped it. Socrates didn’t seem to care. “The wizards cast a curse instead over Rome to twist the magic of the maenads and bind their blood to the moon. It reveals us and shackles us. Made us easy to kill. We do not generate anymore,” they explained, cryptic. “We contaminate.”
While legends, Remus found, were often unreliable, this part was not too farfetched. Much of magical history revolved around witches and wizards engaging in warfare with other magical creatures to limit their power, access, and influence, whether they were Goblins, Centaurs, Giants, Trolls, or Merfolk. Not to mention the Elven rebellion of the sixteenth century that ended in genocide.
Remus had Elves on the brain for whatever reason.
They were Elves of Germanic and, often, Slavic folklore, which meant they had a love of whimsy, a penchant for literalist contracts, and a bloodthirsty tendency towards wearing the trophies of their conquests, often the very clothes, albeit oversized, of heir wizarding victims. With no limit to their natural lifespan, most grew to be masters of various magical disciplines despite their lack of wandlore.
Remus had read tales from the vicious final skirmishes between wizarding armies and the Elves. According to legend, Dobožalość, the Last Elf, known also as the Wizard’s Lament, had Apparated through every defence of the Chaucer Estate and slain all humans inside, including three-quarters of the Wizards’ Council and some one-hundred-and-one battle wizards. So gruesome and catastrophic it was, no amount of memory modification could contain news of the slaughter, and speculation around Chaucer’s death still plagued the muggle world to this day. They hadn’t even known he was a wizard.
Nearly a century of strategic propagandising helped spread the rumour that Chaucer was assassinated on order of Henry IV, of course, which was useful a number of reasons, principle among them that the Ministry could deny the existence of Elves. Or, well, at least the significance of their existence.
Remus thought often about it when he put his mind to Ahmed’s work. If the Wizards’ Council had been successful in binding the Elves into perpetual service, he wondered if the Ministry of Magic, their direct successor of governance, might not have gone looking for a way to mass-produce obedient servants. They might not have found their solution with the Kissed some three centuries later.
Odd legacies and odder diverging points. Dumbledore would’ve had a field day.
And, as for a spell cast over all of Rome, well. Britain had the Trace, didn’t it?
“So,” said Remus, clearing his throat. Socrates hadn’t minded his silence and the pair of them had continued in their aimless, snow-crunching wander around the great thick trunks of trees in the wood. “The ritual from the denmothers—it’s the first half of breaking that curse, then?”
“Yes. A return to the wild magic of the Bassarids. We are not the first kind of creature to need such a thing,” explained Socrates. “Wizards have long done this. Werewolf, vampire—”
“—Vampires? Wizards also made vampires?”
“Where else would they have come from? Why else would so many beings pass the curse with their bites?”
Remus opened his mouth, closed it, and hurled both pinecones off into the distant woods. One splintered and broke into several fragments upon impacting a tree trunk, while the other vanished into a leafy shrub.
“You are upset.”
“Yes,” replied Remus. He frowned. “If the denmothers know this second half of the ritual, why haven’t they broken the curse on themselves? Or would they stop being werewolves because they aren’t blood descendants of maenads?”
“There is nothing divine in our blood, Remus, not in our, not in anyone’s,” said Socrates. They stopped, sudden, the sat down on the loose-packed snow of the forest floor cross-legged, never minding the cold. Snow melted where it touched their ankles. “I do not know why the denmothers have not broken the full curse on themselves. Maybe they fear it will be lonely if they do,” they continued, frowning a childlike frown. “Maybe they do not want to be wild magic.”
For the first time since meeting them, Remus realised that Socrates might be just as floundering and uncertain as all the other people in Remus’s life who weren’t cryptic and wise and possibly-ancient werewolves. It was funny, that. He recognised something in them—the years of practice that came with appearing effortlessly brilliant, and the way it made other people forget that you too had a complex inner life.
Sometimes, it even made you forget your own.
“I wanted to kill him. The Suit,” said Remus. His throat was heavy with the words. “That’s what you’re saying. And the rush I got from doing it, from beating him—well, that was the peak of my Bacchanalia. I didn’t lose control,” he finished, swallowing hard. “I gave it up. And if I killed Sirius’s father—”
“Yes,” said Socrates. They stuck out a hand towards the bush Remus had rattled with a pinecone, and, a moment later, the bush rustled again, dislodging its last powdered snow coating, and it flung the pinecone back at their hand. They caught it without looking. “You are upset again.”
“Yes.”
“You need time to think.”
“Probably.”
“It is hard for me to think, sometimes,” said Socrates. Their voice was wistful, nostalgic, even, despite its youth. “I hope you will come back.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Everything ends.”
They threw the pinecone high up into the air and Remus tracked it by instinct, cursing himself—except, as he glanced back down, Socrates hadn’t vanished as he expected and instead lay flat, arms and legs outstretched in the snow, vacant eyes watching the forest canopy and the loose flakes of snow that sneaked through.
For another minute they lay still like that, and Remus realised it was his turn, finally, to walk away from them.
***
A week before Christmas break, Sirius took him for a test-flight on the motorbike, and for the thousandth time in his life, Remus fell in love with magic.
Sure, yes, the flight was as harrowing as it was gorgeous—breathtaking in every sense of the word, from the way they skirted the iced-over laketop channels that ran under the castle’s few stone bridges and then soared high above even the tallest snow-powdered spire of the Astronomy tower—but it was a naïve and whimsical kind of magic, one that dealt in wonders and wishes and the things of wild, childish fantasy. They were in a world where things could simply go up, no must-come-down necessary. The moment Sirius revved his engine and vertically ascended a castle rampart as though it were flat ground, Remus felt he’d never be bored with magic again.
Under the bonnet, the motorbike was equal parts marvel and novelty: more sophisticated than a broom, although a commercial broomstick in their age had a few dozen charms on it cast in anywhere between sixty to two-hundred variations, and yet less efficient than one because of its reliance on technology and pesky thermodynamics as opposed to, well, the often-arbitrary whims of magic. It wasn’t air-tight yet, not by a far margin, but neither was it entirely forthcoming. There was a hidden, comforting mystery to the bike. A fitting match for its creator.
Sirius’s dark dragonhide jacket was dry ice on the paper of Remus’s skin; his fingers were pale and bloodless; his teeth chattered like mad. He felt unequivocally, terrifyingly alive.
Remus yelped and yowled and clenched his entire body from arms to fingers to thighs to teeth around Sirius’s laughing bones as they soared over stone archways and around blue-grey shingled towers and past the many wide-paned windows adorning them, some with wider-eyed students watching from behind the frosty glass.
Later and in bed, Remus did much the same, although this time with much less terror and much more death-defying lust. Maybe Remus understood the appeal of thrillseeking and other deathwish-related kicks. Adrenaline did wonders. A drug of its own, that. As they lay sprawled across Sirius’s sticky sheets, both sweaty and dead knackered for no less than three reasons, confidence came to Remus in the haze of fatigue.
“You know you can trust me, right, Pads?”
“Cheers, Moony, but I’ll stick with just your tongue in my arse for now, thanks.”
“And fingers,” he murmured, voice lazy and eyes still lidded with lust. “Not what I was talking about, however.”
“What about, then?”
Remus gave a neutral shrug.
“Very specific, Moony.”
“Anything. Whatever, really.”
“Ah. All right.”
“I can manage things.”
“Gathered that much.”
“Complex—”
“—you’re a dog with a bone, y’know that?”
“Just,” began Remus. He swallowed. “Just, well, a reminder. I know I’m not as experienced—”
Sirius waggled his eyebrows suggestively.
“—still not that.”
“I know. I still haven’t the foggiest—”
“The foggiest.”
“Correct.”
“Sorry, when did you turn forty?”
“Moony, I know I am the mature one—”
“—oh, bite me, you mutt—”
“—much, much more mature,” he continued, giving a lopsided grin against their pillowcase and putting on a posh voice, “but I must confess, whatever you’re implying escapes all of my reasonable faculties.”
“I’m the first of us to have grey hair, I’ll have you know.”
“Moony.”
“Yes, darling?”
“I thought that was mine. For months. Months, Moony. It’s half the reason I quit the fags.”
“Perish the thought.” Remus feathered a kiss on Sirius’s bruise-blooming neck. “You smell better for it, though. Taste better too.”
“However?”
“However,” continued Remus, “That’s—”
“—that’s still not what you were meaning to talk about,” replied Sirius. He gave a sigh and nestled into the damp sheets like, well, a massive shaggy black dog Remus knew. “Do you ever feel we’ve become predictable?”
“I—”
“—hold that thought. Moony, a follow-up question.”
“Is it—”
“—do you ever feel, Moony…’
“Go on, then. Have your fun.”
“…that perhaps we’ve become predictable?”
“Only if you can predict my question.”
“Ah, Moony, you forget. I’m mad, not a seer.”
“Perhaps a different sort,” said Remus, coy. “I believe a few minutes ago you made me see the future.”
“Still not—”
“—however did you guess? Are you sure you’re not—”
“Ah, the bit’s played out, now.”
“Drat. And we never found out what I was getting at, did we?”
“We didn’t,” said Sirius. He pouted his thin lips. “Why do you have grey hair at nineteen?”
“It was a few grey hairs, Pads, in my beard,” said Remus. He traced his own jawline then with fingers—it was an unfamiliar feeling, which was odd, seeing as it was his own face, after all—and scratched at an itch in the fuzz of his chin. “You know why.”
“Ah.”
“The stress of it, I think. Lopped a few years off my life.”
“But now—”
“—I should hope so, yes,” murmured Remus. He traced a light knuckle over Sirius’s cheekbones. Very sharp. Too much so, if he was honest—it looked painful at times. “Also half the reason I quit the fags. Turns out I might actually be here for a long time.”
Sirius snorted. “Perish the—”
“I thought that bit was played out?”
“Well, maybe one more time.”
“For—”
“—for old time’s sake, yeah. The thing?”
“The thing. I know, Pads, I haven’t quite kept up with you on most matters,” said Remus. The knot in his gut had untwisted itself so slow he hadn’t realised it was fully apart, now. He loved this daft idiot after all. “But I—you can trust me with a little more responsibility, whether it’s with the wandless drilling, or flying, or, well, anything else, really.”
“Is that—was that all?”
“You’re so bloody good at everything, and I’ve fallen behind,” replied Remus, quick, “but I’m catching up. I think, at least.”
“Obviously.”
“Pardon?”
“Moony, mate,” whispered Sirius. He cocked his head forwards across the pillow until his nose snuffled, with hot, ticklish bursts of breath against Remus’s neck.
“What—what are you doing.”
Sirius was muffled. “Checking to see if you’re ill.”
“You can smell—”
“—I also,” murmured Sirius, “may just fancy the way you smell. About this academic stuff, if, but, and however,” he continued, pulling back. His thick brows were furrowed as if Remus had just stated the year wrong or something else that ought be very incredibly obvious. “Moony, that’s been our dynamic since second year.”
Remus blinked. Sirius kissed at his eyelashes when he did.
“Pads.”
“Hm?”
“Care to elaborate?’
“Dunno, mate. Your ego’s already inflated enough, if m’honest. Not the only part either.”
“Do not,” said Remus, face hot, “start.”
“Moony.”
“Yes, darling.”
“How many years have I studied magic?”
“Eight and a half.”
“Including,” he corrected, “my private studies?”
“Oh. Fifteen, then—oh.”
“And Prongs?”
“That, I do not know.”
“He got his wand at eight, though they didn’t drill him like my horrid torturers did,” explained Sirius. “And Wormtail—”
“—has perfect recall. These are all facts.”
“So, Remus, what does that—”
“—no, no, I think I got it.”
Sirius trailed a crooked finger across his upper thigh, following the lines of his new circle-and-squiggle tattoo. He inhaled, soft.
“Did you really think—”
“Yes. Up until this very moment, actually. I think my brain enjoys being very cruel to me.”
“I—wow, Remus. You were about the only thing that compelled me to revise. My desire,” he added with wink, “to crush you, I rather mean.”
“How,” muttered Remus. Oh, Jesus Christ. “How did we not—”
“—it is very trite, yeah. Cliché. You terrified me, if m’honest. Had no right being so bloody brilliant with all the shite you had to deal with.”
“Same could be said for—”
“—oi, take the compliment, you plonker.”
Remus snorted. “Consider it taken.”
“So?”
“Thank you, Pads.”
“Mind showing me just—ah, fuck, Moony. Good boy. Yeah,” he murmured, tangling his fingers in the back of Remus’s shaggy hair, “anytime, Moony.”
Not more than a minute later—he knew Sirius’s pent-up timings well, though having someone down his throat usually did strange things to all the rational and calculus-capable parts of Remus’s brain—there came a sharp rapping at the door. Remus jolted and choked.
Sirius, the bloody bastard, firmed his grip just enough to suggest Remus stay exactly where he was with his nose buried in coarse, dark hair and Sirius’s intoxicating scent, although it was just that: a suggestion. Pulling away would’ve been easy enough. His brain certainly would’ve appreciated the oxygen, which by this point was a wartime ration of whatever trickled through his nose, flat against Sirius’s crotch as it was, or through the trenches of drool running down his scruffy chin, but Remus was not a werewolf well-known for doing things the easy way.
It had been known to backfire on him, of course, and this was just one such occasion.
When Sirius shouted nonchalant-like at their visitor to kindly bugger the fuck off because he was ‘buried deep in some important work,’ Remus gagged at the nonplussed and recognisable Scottish lilt that replied.
“I’m afraid I will not ‘bugger off,’ Mr. Black,” called Professor McGonagall through the dormitory door. “Professor Dumbledore requests your and Mr. Lupin’s presence in his office immediately, and I am to escort you there, regardless of your workload.”
The way they moved after that was magic, actually, and also broke the laws of thermodynamics. Sirius practically flung him by the hair like a discus into the bathroom and his clothes in the heap that followed while Remus moved faster-than-light to start the shower. It bought them a few minutes, although the amount of time it took for Sirius to open the door must’ve been suspicious. Too bad for him—it probably sounded like he was having a cheeky wank while his dormmate was in the shower.
Whether or not McGonagall believed that Sirius was indeed having a cheeky wank was indeterminable. The soft rhythm of her boots on the corridor flagstones and weight of heavy ash-coloured robes gave her a grave, inscrutable air that was no less impenetrable after having finished their schoolboy years. She couldn’t give them detention, but she would never stop giving Remus the gift of fear.
Sirius was paler than usual for the whole journey. Perhaps it was setting in on him that he’d casually sworn at McGonagall while bollocks-deep in Remus’s throat and his entire world was shifting on its axis as a result; or perhaps he, like Remus, was simulating every possible scenario in which the both would be summoned to the Headmaster’s Office a week before the holidays and coming up with one very likely clocktower-shaped scenario. They’d been found out. Each of them had a permanent tattoo attesting to their conspiracy. Jesus, what a bloody brilliant idea that had been.
Professor McGonagall did not enter Dumbledore’s office with them, nor did she wait by the bottom of the spiral stair for their return. Remus caught a glimpse of her departing cloak and his ears, a hummed holiday jingle.
The assortment of magical tchotchkes of nebulous origin and uncertain purpose once again sat in the lifted study behind Dumbledore’s claw-footed desk, filling the silence with its curious tick, whirr, chime noises and the air with a sharp lemony scent. Dumbledore himself was not seated, nor was he facing them—he was examining a portrait of an elderly man, grey-bearded and with a single strong unibrow, equally grey, that Remus and Sirius would recognise for different reasons. Remus knew him as a former Headmaster, but Sirius knew Phineas Nigellus Black as another blood relative.
“Remus. Sirius,” said Dumbledore. He turned and his ornate greyish-silver robes turned with him a hair of a second later, giving the sense that they, like the Headmaster himself, had a heavy gravity to them. He raised a hand with many rings and a curtain unfurled from nowhere in particular to fall over the portrait of Phineas, who grumbled in reply and then fell silent.
“Sir,” said Remus, uncertain.
“Be at ease, Remus. You are not in trouble,” said Dumbledore. His warm, whimsical eyes smiled more than his lips, which only ever arrived halfway to their destination before calling the whole thing off. “Though I should wonder, perhaps with some dread, as to why you and Sirius seemed to believe you were.”
“Never, professor,” said Sirius. His neck was flushed but his grin was beaming. “Angels, the pair of us.”
The corner of Dumbledore’s mouth twitched.
“Be that as it may,” he said, his wizened features inscrutable, “I’m afraid I must again ask too much of the both of you. You may, of course, decline without fear of reprisal,” he continued, a frown building, “but somehow I imagine the thoughts have not crossed your minds. I have another task for you, one, I fear, that may consume the better part of your holidays.”
“I take it, sir,” replied Remus, “that this task has little to do with our studies.”
“No, Remus. It does not.”
Sirius swallowed hard beside him. Remus watched the apple of his throat rise and fall, and the confidence build behind it.
“What did you need us to do?”
Remus’s mind swam with the flood of implications that followed, and, while Dumbledore was correct in assuming they weren’t going to say no—he and Sirius affirmed their participation aloud in the same second, a duet of yessir and of course, sir—but in the Ocean of Remus, something deep and eldritch emerged with a will of its own, breaching the surface like a whale desperate to beach itself. He wasn’t even sure why he said it. They were leaving, and then the words spilled out.
“Sir, there’s—well, there’s something else I thought I ought mention,” said Remus, not turning around. Sirius looked over his shoulder with a quizzical look.
“Yes, Remus?”
“I—” he began, and a moment later he drew his eyes off of Sirius. The cogs in his brain ground forward, again as he turned to face Dumbledore. There was a way to say this, to salvage it, perhaps, and have no one be the wiser. “I believe,” said Remus, steeling his voice, “and I assure you that this is both an uncertain belief and yet one I believe wholeheartedly in, that Severus Snape is using his position as a tutor and quasi-faculty to build support for the Dark Lord among the student body.”
Remus felt the hot, icy stare of Sirius’s eyes on the back of his head. That look that probably said, What the fuck, Lupin?
Dumbledore frowned.
“You have evidence to support this?”
“Last year,” said Remus, quick, “when I was studying the map, I noticed that he was meeting with the same rota of students. Avery, Rosier, and several others known to pick on muggleborn students, all pureblood, and frequently in locations that are not conducive to study. It’s continuing now, we think. We’ve been, well, tracking their movements even without the map, though I know using it surreptitiously in the first place was a violation of privacy—”
“—even when wielded with good intention,” finished Dumbledore. He stood still a moment and the silence passed with a tick, a whirr, and a chime. “Political discourse within certain limits is not forbidden at Hogwarts, Remus, though we may find it distasteful.”
“But—”
“—but you believe that there is a more sinister purpose to it, yes?”
Remus nodded. His face was burning. He felt like a child again.
“I will look into the matter. Thank you, Remus,” he said, and a moment later added, “and thank you, Sirius, if I am correct in assuming this was a collective effort.”
As Remus turned back for the door, he saw that Sirius’s grey eyes had iced over into something furiously, intricately aristocratic and that was opaque even to Remus’s eight years of careful study.
Sirius nodded without a word and they left together. He expected something dramatic—Sirius to storm off or curse at him or to say something so acidic it ought leave a scar, but as they descended the spiral stair from the Headmaster’s Office, Sirius held his wrist lightly and did not leave go until they were back at their dormitory. He pressed the pad of his thumb against the small of his palm and ran gentle circles over it. Soothing. Come evening Sirius lay in bed, grey eyes staring far past the posters above. His brief smile when Remus joined him felt hollow; his kisses under the sheets pliant but unexcited. It was almost worse than a blow to the face. There was no tenderness to it, nothing shy or playful or doglike, and yet by morning Sirius was acting his normal self again. Touching and japing and sprawling all over Remus’s everywhere as though nothing had happened. It was perplexing. A cipher in its own right.
Perhaps it boded well for how far they’d come emotionally, even if they weren’t speaking on it; perhaps Sirius understood that Remus had done it for his sake, not his own. Perhaps he’d needed a night to gather his wits. If he truly trusted Remus as he’d said he did, then, well, there oughtn’t be a problem at all.
How wrong they both were.
Notes:
To all the clever readers who guessed it: yes, the branching point for this AU was the death of Chaucer. Good job!
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, Assignment, Part I will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 02 May, a Friday. If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendations this week are You Don't Understand Me by wilteddaisy, a R/S age gap/pseudanonymous hookup fic that I really liked for its verisimilitude, and, y'know, I just find it sexy.
Chapter 18: Assignment, Part I
Chapter Text
At the angry age of nine, Hope Lupin took her moody son out on a rented boat in a perhaps misguided attempt to teach Remus both fishing and patience. She’d learned it from her own father, one who’d craved a son and so raised her as such, and said in her wistful laugh of a voice that she enjoyed the quiet contemplation on the water more than anything about the fishing itself.
“The ocean wears down all things, cariad,” she’d murmured, smoothing cool globs of sunscreen across his nose and bucket-hatted forehead. Her hands were firm, tough, an unexpected detail, like the wide stubby scar on her left cheekbone. She always said she’d tell him when he was older. “Nothing to hide behind on a calm sea, like.”
Being nine, of course, Remus didn’t appreciate the wisdom or prescience of her words and the deeper implications were thoroughly lost on him. In a way, that defined much of his relationship with his mum: she’d always treated him as a person instead of a child.
Sometimes it backfired. It was a bright blue-grey morning, brisk, still-winded, thin silver clouds on every horizon. The young Remus had insisted he was old enough to decide whether or not he needed to wear a lifejacket. When Hope countered that it wasn’t safe to go without one, Remus pointed out she wasn’t wearing one, either, and so when his overzealous reeling of a large Atlantic something-they-never-identified ended with him plunging headfirst into the water, he sank like a panicking stone and only survived by the grace of his mother’s strong swimming. He still remembered how dark it looked beneath him, how deep and black and looming.
Not only did he lose the fish and the fishing rod; not only did he lose his love of swimming and gain a fear of deep water instead; he’d have to wait six more years before he put two and two together to realise he didn’t like lifejackets for the way they pinned his arms in place.
For of how much he did it, introspection was not his strongest skill.
In his time, then, Remus did not enjoy being left alone with his thoughts, and though he enjoyed it about the same now, he recognised that his mum had been right. You couldn’t hide in a calm sea. You could, however, drown in the calm waves below, and quite quite easily. Remus was doing just that with Sirius Black.
Worse, however, was the worry gnawing its way outwards like a desperate rat trapped inside his belly. Sirius might not be the problem. Remus might. He was exploring his issues with excess the way a surgeon explored a wound: tenderly, uncertainly, for he’d picked up somewhere a habit of throwing himself into things too quick and with such disturbing force he often left bloodstains on the proverbial wall, yet that alone was not his only problem; Remus was unreliable both in his own narration and his interpretation of others; he was clingy; hungry; he hovered about Sirius like a cloud of opaque smoke; and then, minutes later, he’d feel resentful for their mutual proximity and wonder when last he spoke to someone at length without Sirius there or without the conversation eventually drifting to Sirius’s affairs. The diagnosis?
Remus was drowning, yes, but not in the passive sense. Remus (subject) was drowning (active gerund verb). Slightly expanded, the complete phrase was, ‘Remus was drowning Remus.’ Which, of course, was a terrible conclusion to arrive at, and a cruel one, too given their timing—like a bride at the altar having just thrown a nasty bouquet over her shoulder only to realise, with dawning horror, that she wished nothing more to be someone in the crowd catching it.
Dumbledore had hitched them together for what might be the entirety of Christmas holidays if nothing interesting happened soon. And if nothing happened soon, Remus was going to explode. Sirius would be left to clean up his mess. Again.
Nothing quite said, Of course I love you, you plonker, but I fear I’m rapidly losing my sense of self and you’re unfairly bearing the consequences of my emotional spiral like a werewolf-shaped splatter on the wall smelling equally of booze and cheap chocolates. Or, well, words could say exactly that and just as well, but it also sounded distinctly like a running-away phrase, another cowardly retreat for which Remus had become so widely-known, and the last time he’d had a fight with Sirius while navigating the War, they’d both escaped death by the very scraggly hairs of their chinny-chin-chins.
So perhaps it was worth waiting until they were no longer in potential mortal peril. Perhaps he could hold his breath just a touch longer. Drowning oneself (active reflexive verb) in Sirius was not an unpleasant death, after all.
The pair of them were able to pass as muggles. Sirius had done away with his hideous patchy anorak (later, when pressed, he’d admit to having donated it to a charity shop instead of burning ‘the poor, tortured thing’ as he first claimed) and furnished him a few replacements. Though the sturdy maroon flight jacket clung in odd places, with its furry black collar and oddly-inflexible wrists and an unfamiliar tug at the small of his back, he had to admit was warm and sleek. It stopped wind like nothing else. If he was to be charioted around on the back of Sirius’s bike for the foreseeable future, it would be something of a necessity, even for a werewolf, Sirius whispered, a wry tug to the edge of his mouth, who was uncannily hot.
With his heavy bovver boots and muddy brown gloves—he’d sawn the fingers off at the second knuckle—Sirius teased that he looked like one of those ruddy-cheeked blokes far far too interested in the British Royal Airforce for all the wrong reasons. It was the exact sort of thing Sirius loved to do: walk you into a funny little trap of his own design. As though he wasn’t the oddest looking of the pair in his slim ash overcoat, a wisp of black chesthair tickling Remus’s eye whenever it fell open. He’d taken to not wearing shirts lately. Something about espionage and the ease of slipping into Padfoot’s skin. Colour him guilty. Remus hadn’t questioned him too directly on that front.
Unlike their previous tasks, ones that were related directly to Remus and Sirius’s intimate personal lives, this was a broader, more general job, and by this point Remus knew a test when he was offered one even if he hadn’t a clue what said test was for. Not that it mattered. He and Sirius were overachieving hypercompetitive postgraduates. They didn’t need a reason—they needed only to know it was a challenge. The rest they could put together on their own.
Though it was nearing Christmas in London, what little snow had fallen had long melted away during the driest winter of Remus’s lifetime, leaving the evening sky clear if hazy above them and the streetlamp-lit roads mercilessly cold. Hoarfrost crept over sunless red bricks in unemptied alleyways. Storefronts painted stark black and burnt orange and baby robin-egg blue thrust sale signs at him in the margins of twenty to fifty percent discounts. His ears threatened to freeze off. Sirius dragged him to refuge at a familiar cosy corner-facing café that promised not to close until past midnight. There, they sat by the foggy, frost-crept window and pretended not to watch the much more interesting windowless pub across the street. The Duchess of Richmond’s Evening House was not an outspoken enterprise despite its name.
As a whole the premises were empty. Someone had cast a lesser version of the Muggle-Repelling charm over the street, thinning all foot traffic except for the boldest Londoner rats and eliminating the vehicular as well, though Sirius’ bike was parked at the curb behind a dusty service lorry that, like most of poor London, had seen better days. Skip bins overflowing. That same charm had the unfortunate and probably-intended effect of torpedoing every muggle business on the block with enough time. It was the only reason the café-owner put up with them, Remus imagined—although this was the third time in a week they occupied the window booth for hours on end, dressed to unimpress as they were, Sirius’s muggle money spent just as well here as anywhere else. Probably better here, actually, given the commercial curse cast over all these unsuspecting muggles.
The café was rough: checkered black-and-white linoleum cracked where it met the walls and counters, both with flaking beige paint; the foam ceiling tiles had the rust-brown ring-shaped stains of untended leaks, leaving them white and dirty like the gills of a mushroom; even the jukebox hadn’t worked before Sirius paid it some sleight-of-hand ministrations. Not to mention the small fortune they paid for stale coffee and pastries to fuel the stakeout.
Across the street, a single witch unrecognisable to both of them stepped out the front door of the pub. She wore plain blue robes and an unfashionable hat, and, in what would probably be the height of excitement at their evening, startled at the sight of a tiny brown rat lurking beneath the wheels of the lorry nearby.
In a moment she recovered her poise. With a cursory glance either way down the road to assure her breach in dignity had not been witnessed—poor luck, that—she continued walking, eventually vanishing from view.
Riveting, like.
Remus recorded the uneventful happening in one of Sirius’s many small journals and went back to staring at the milk swirl of his coffee. Sirius doodled on a greasy napkin. Both were suffering terminal cases of boredom. A week they’d spent tracking Malodora Snyde and her husband, which was about as long as it took for Remus to start having second thoughts.
Snyde was a political commentator and a loathsome one at that. Well-fed, well-dressed, well-educated. Children. Adult children. Adult children with children. She wore tiny round spectacles on her tiny round nose and had a perpetual expression of alarmed amusement in every photograph she’d seemingly ever taken, as though she were in the know and you weren’t. Remus knew her from the Prophet and had often cursed both after reading what was best described as pureblood drivel, if such drivel were written by an aspiring autocratic cog. Snyde was plainly in the pocket of political spectres such as Abraxas Malfoy and his fascistic elite, and her critiques of the current authoritarian turn of the Ministry were less complains about their authoritarianism and more its flavour, yes, but stalking her still turned Remus’s stomach. Snyde simply didn’t seem very Death Eater-y. All she’d ever done according to Remus’s research was write—Dumbledore had even implied as much.
So, when you broke it down, actually, Remus, fighter-of-the system, yob that he was, was tracking the movements and activities of a political commentator and reporting said information back to, well, who knew, really? Dumbledore? Some rogue Aurors, maybe, if Dumbledore was in contact with them? Probably not the Ministry greater. Whoever it was, they were taking Remus’s vaguely communistic stomach and doing a secret-police shaped jig upon it.
Remus did not like it. If he had to put a precise, articulate word to it, then it felt distinctly yucky.
Sirius was not so easily convinced, and nor was he wrong. They’d spent hours already whispering over it if nothing else to pass the time, and the conversations went something like this:
“Yeah, Moony, she only writes,” said Sirius, “but she writes horrible and damaging things about innocent people. Scapegoating them. She’s a propagandist.”
“I propagandise to you and others often, Pads. I don’t fancy anyone following me around either.”
“You don’t know that no one isn’t following us around.”
“If they are,” replied Remus, “it’s because we’re secretive spies and not because I’m whatever the wizarding equivalent of a trade unionist might be.”
“We don’t have those. Or unions.”
“I know that, Padfoot.”
“Yeah, but I have to state that for the purposes of this conversation you’re simulating in your brain, Moony. Your big, swollen, sexy sexy brain.”
“I think this might be going off the rails a little bit.”
“Well, Moons, I’ve got something I’d like you to rail right here, et cetera, et cetera. And, hold on,” he continued, frowning like a hyperactive wrinkle in Remus’s purportedly-sexy brain, “while your idealised fantasy version of me is flirting with you, he forgoes compliments to say ‘et cetera’? Christ, Moony. You wound me. And why am I not naked and calling you a good boy?”
Jesus, he needed something to smoke and/or drink and/or snort. The world was so much easier to handle when your brain cells were dying.
Remus wanted to go into the pub across the corner, of course. He’d suggested so to Sirius, who promptly shot the idea down because the pair of them were recognisable and they had no way of knowing who might be in The Duchess of Richmond’s Evening House at that time of evening.
“We’ve exactly three nights worth of records as to who frequents it, Moony,” whispered the fake, simulated Sirius. “Not exactly a precise dataset. Incomplete, too, as we don’t arrive here until after the Snydes do, you ravishing beast, you. Have me on this table. It’ll break the monotony if nothing else.”
Impatience only looked good on Remus in the bedroom, where, apparently, his mind always went in the absence of all other stimulation. He drummed his fingers in his pocket and Sirius stared with narrow flat brows at him across the table. Unimpressed. That was the word.
“Moony,” said the real Sirius, “hand it over.”
“Pardon?”
“You know what, you plonker. The mirror,” he murmured, wry. Sirius made a beckoning gesture with two crooked fingers and Remus felt a twitch inside him. “You look like you’re having a wank under the table.”
“I am not having a wank under the table.”
“Nevertheless.”
Mortified and flushing red, Remus stopped drumming and obeyed orders. The slim compact fit neatly in Sirius’s palm, just as it had in Dumbledore’s office.
“You’ve seen such a device before, I presume?” he’d asked.
“A two-way mirror.”
“Very good, Remus. Should at any point you require immediate aid or something seem deathly important, you are to whisper the word ‘Phoenix’ thrice into it and then give your location. Under no circumstances,” he’d added, his wrinkled face grave, “are you or Sirius to charge in by yourselves. Am I understood?”
“Yes, professor.”
“—Moony?” whispered Sirius. He was leaned forwards on his elbows conspiratorially and frowning. “Oi, give him back. Moony’s not allowed to think deep thoughts when he’s supposed to be appraising my work.”
Sirius slid the greasy napkin over to him as though it were an encoded dossier and checked over both his shoulders like he was The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Maybe. Remus hadn’t read that one yet and disregarded the thought entirely, instead squinting down at the napkin.
“Is this all you got out of Ancient Runes?” he murmured. The grease on the napkin wasn’t helping, of course, but it was a decent rendition of several interlocking sigils.
“You’re doing it again.”
“Mm?”
“Being cruel to me?” said Sirius, exasperated. “When I’m your elder?”
“Do not start.”
“I need your approval.”
“How bad—”
“—extremely badly. It’s dire, Moony. If you don’t give your approval right now,” Sirius whispered. He slumped back in the booth until his torn-denim knees knocked Remus’s under the table and only his tits were above the lip, and continued, “I may truly wither and die.”
“You can’t get a piercing or a tattoo—another tattoo, mind you—based on whether or not I’ll like it, Pads. It’s your body. Only your opinion matters.”
“Boo. I am withering as we speak.”
Sirius had got no less than three tattoos in the week they’d been back. Privately, yes, Remus loved the look of them against Sirius’s skin what with it giving Sirius even more excuses not to wear a proper shirt under his coats, but also privately Remus, resident loopy loon himself, thought it was a little insane. If a tattoo artist told you they wouldn’t do another one because your current tattoos were too fresh and it was clear you were rushing into them, the proper thing to do was listen, not find another tattoo artist and trick them into believing your new tattoos were old by using magic. Inasmuch as Remus understood the culture, that was both Not On and a very poseur thing to do.
“Of course I like them,” whispered Remus. “The ear piercing is, in a word, very—”
“—fetching?”
Remus snorted. Gave a slight nod as Sirius inclined his head just so to let the small safety pin dangling from his right ear show beneath his hair, though Remus’s eyes, in truth, trailed from there to neck and back again.
“I was going to say ‘punk’.”
“Good boy. Go on.”
“I’m biased, though.” Remus slumped back in their tradition until his tits, too, were just barely above the table lip, and a smile crept out the corners of his mouth. “Reason and love keep little company together nowadays, et cetera. I like everything you do and everything that’s on you.”
“But more so—”
“—if they’re off you, yes.”
“You’re making this whole spy business very hard, y’know.”
“We could pop off to the loo. There’s a lock.”
“Moony.”
“Well, I’m not wanking you off in public, Padfoot. This is not the place.”
Sirius barked a laugh at that, although his eyes grew suddenly pensive. Wickedly so, in fact.
“Moony, does that mean—”
“—oh, hold that thought,” said Remus. He sat up proper and leaned towards the frosted-over window, squinting again. A boy from the alley. Red curls, short frame clad in a heavy green tartan scarf as well as clothes too thin against the cold, and an enthusiastic limp in his step that suggested either a recent masochistic accident or that the boy was something of a size queen. Could it be?
Kelly was looking back at him. A confused grin split across his lips and then his mostly-there teeth. Sometimes Remus forgot that windows, like the occasional magic mirror, worked two ways.
“Oh, bugger. I, oh fuck my arse and call me—”
“—Moony?” said Sirius. His eyebrows were high and his grin equally alarmed and lopsided. “What’s—”
“That’s the one—oh, buggering piss.”
Kelly McCallaghan, that rabbity werewolf he’d met and/or shagged more than once over the summer, was a touch thinner and paler than Remus remembered and his coppery curls a touch longer, like he’d grown in a winter coat. Two of his teeth were chipped, now, on the right—incisor and the one beside it—giving him even more of a flirtatious and perpetually-amused rabbit look. Remus wondered for a moment if he’d done it on purpose. As he stepped into the dim light of the café proper, however, the fading purple bruise decorating his eye on the same side suggested otherwise.
Kelly caught the café-owner’s dirty look with a grin and a blown kiss riposte, at which point the man grumbled and turned back to washing up in his otherwise empty establishment.
“If it ain’t me lucky day,” said Kelly. “That ye, dead clever?”
He bumped his hip against the hard seat of their booth beside Sirius, who, behind his own curtain of glossy dark curls, was evaluating Kelly. Every part of him, in fact. Particularly his ass, which gave Remus some small pause for reasons he’d explore not now, actually. Remus rose—knee hitting the table and nearly overturning his cold milky coffee with a jolt if not for Sirius’s doglike reflexes—and moved to hug the other werewolf. He came up only to Remus’s mid-chest and was far too scrawny for his liking, but still Kelly gave good hug.
Warm. Alive. Jesus, he’d been worried a while.
Still cheeky too. As Remus pulled back, Kelly tugged him down by the nape of his neck, and, ever-pliant, Remus tasted cigarettes and a whiff of something pungent on his lips. Herbally so. Sirius cleared his throat and Kelly broke off the kiss.
“Who’s this handsome bugger, then?” asked Kelly. Sirius swivelled in place, then, staring at Remus with amusement and a dangerous kind of inquiry.
“Yeah, Remus,” said Sirius. “Who am I, again?”
“Kelly, this is, well, Padfoot. My Padfoot,” he added, and their collective expression indicated that Remus’s addition in fact asked more questions than it answered. “We live together. And snog,” he continued, quieter, trying to assess Sirius’s inscrutable mood. “And shag, and care for each other very deeply, perhaps not in that order of importance.”
“Gotcha,” he said, eyeing Sirius carefully. His weight shifted from one foot to the other nearest the exit and his unfamiliar confidence flagged. “Step on any toes, did I?”
“Dunno,” replied Sirius. “Could try it again. I’ll see how I feel about it.”
Kelly laughed at that, high and chirpy. Very rabbit. “So we’ve got dead clever and now dead charmer, aye?”
Oh, great, they were flirting. That was what Remus needed right now.
“What brings you to this part of London?” asked Remus. He took his seat and gestured for Kelly to join them, though he did so neutrally, indicating neither side in particular. He also signalled for the café-owner and was thoroughly, intentionally ignored. Figures.
“Ye mean ’cos I said I was gettin’ out o’ town a while?”
“Well. Yes.”
Sirius’s expression did something acrobatic as Kelly doffed his coat and tartan scarf and slid in beside Remus the same way a tiger might slide in beside a swimming duck—a distinctly canine flash in his eyes. His pupils were blown. Neck was flush.
“When was this, Moony?”
“We still write—”
“—‘Moony’?” wheezed Kelly. He stared at Remus, eyes boggling. “Really?”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Only one way to do that to me. He kens, then?”
“He has a name,” growled Sirius, “and he is in fact right here. A part of the conversation. And, yes, he kens, thank you very much.”
“Padfoot—”
“Hold on. Moony and Padfoot?” giggled Kelly. “That’s what you’re goin’ with?”
“Oi! Padfoot is a very nice name.”
“Bit of a hellhound, are ye?”
“Don’t tell me I look like a saint.”
Kelly sat back against the plastic leather of the booth and stretched both arms up, with one not-so-subtly worming its way behind Remus’s back as he was too short to hook it over anyone’s shoulders.
“It’s not got that good feel in the ear,” mused Kelly. He’d changed, Remus realised—the boy had a lot more confidence than Remus remembered. “Can hardly imagine someone shoutin’ ‘Padfoot’ while you’re havin’ them silly over the back of a sofa.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Oh, aye?”
“And it’s more a breathy whisper, as I recall,” said Sirius, leaning forwards on his elbows and letting his coat fall open. Kelly’s eyes flicked down to the ink on his chest, the scars and seal on his bony ribs. “Not as loud, but much needier. ’Specially if I call him a good—”
“—shall I leave you two to it, or—”
“Sit. Stay.”
Things continued roughly in that fashion for the better part of an hour, with Remus doing his best to surreptitiously scrutinize the corner pub. The competition happening over Remus’s spoiled virtue helped not at all, of course. Gradually, however, Kelly redirected more and more of his attention to Remus, peppering him with questions and perhaps noticing his distraction.
“I wouldn’t do over the Evening House meself,” said Kelly. It was a complete non-sequitur and did its job perfectly in catching Remus off-guard. He floundered. “Or is it someone inside you’re after? Dead clever pickpocket, are ye?”
“Pardon?”
“Remus, a blind lad could see the way you’re undressin’ the place with your eyes. Both o’ ye. What’s the game?” asked Kelly. He stirred his own lukewarm coffee with a tip of his finger. “Any chance you’ll cut in an ol’ friend?”
Sirius blew a low whistle between his teeth. A mocking gesture—he was enjoying this far too much.
“The boy’s seen right through us, hm, Moony?”
“Transparent, like,” murmured Remus.
“Knew it!” said Kelly. “Who’s the mark?”
“’fraid we can’t cut you in, Rabbit. Not a job of our own design,” said Remus, and it was not a lie. “We’re just running it.”
“Shame.”
“Yeah,” said Sirius, lip twitching. “Shame. Very much shame. I’m still here, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“You never did answer,” said Remus, ignoring Sirius.
“Answer what?” replied Kelly.
“What brought you here to this part of London. A job of your own, I presume?”
“Maybe one involving the very same location we’re currently casing?” said Sirius, louder, and though Remus had no idea, actually, how he came to that conclusion, Kelly’s smooth, freckled expression ruffled with reluctance.
“Both dead clever, then,” he muttered. He nudged Remus in the ribs and gestured with a subtle thumb out the window at the corner pub. “Aye, I’m gettin’ a look at things. T’s got a meet here tomorrow night, so I thought I should—”
“—reconnoitre the terrain?”
“Where’d you pick up the poshboy, again?”
“Actually, Padfoot picked me up, as it happens,” replied Remus. “Likes his strays, this one.”
“Glad to see one of us is movin’ up. You even sound posher since the summer.”
“You’re doing well for yourself as well.”
“Moony, if this is the point where I ought offer both of you a room—”
—aye, there’s a toilet nearby, I reckon—”
“—okay, Jesus, I need a piss. Too much coffee,” muttered Sirius. “Don’t start shagging on the table until I’m back, yeah?”
With Sirius absent, Kelly let out a little breath and Remus launched however unwisely into a barrage of questions. How had he been these past few months? Did Apollo end up coming back from Dublin? Was he ill? Were the moons doing him okay? Good limp or bad limp? Right bonnie; aye, eventually and with a broken heart; nah; fairly decent; and so good, Remus wouldn’t believe it.
“Is Terra’s, well, enterprise keeping you afloat? You’ve got somewhere to say to go with your new kicks, yeah?”
“Depends on the night and my charm.” Kelly shrugged. He pulled a hair away from Remus, then, and his eyes kept flickering between the loo door and the front door. He couldn’t quite recall through the lens of cocaine whether that was a new habit of his or an older one. Hypervigilance. An eye on every ingress and egress. “T’s got a place, but it’s absolutely crawlin’ sometimes.”
Remus blinked.
“With wolves?”
“Who’s askin’?”
“I thought you all weren’t into the whole ‘Pack’ thing,” said Remus. His fuzzy brows furrowed. “In your letters—”
“—they just kept showin’ up, and T never has the heart to turn ’em away,” groaned Kelly. “Some are kind, bless ’em, but the others are nasty and hopeless an chattin’ all kinds o’ stupid shite. Never can take it for how much they give out, though,” he said, and grinned his chipped smile.
“Imagine it makes it harder to take gentleman callers,” Remus mused. “But, what kinds of shite specifically? Not about Greyback, like?”
“Lotta questions for someone who, last I saw, didn’t have a wand or two Galleons to rub together,” replied Kelly. His tone was joking, but his eyes were reassessing Remus again. That familiar paranoia. Remus’s own nose twitched, trying to pick out anything new or strange. “Same lad,” continued Kelly, “who’s now got a flat, a poshboy, and a few inches in his pocket that ain’t just happy to see me.”
“I’m very lucky, and Padfoot here is very sweet to me.”
Kelly met his eyes for a long time, then—the other werewolf had quick brown ones that reminded him of Marlene, though his were more rabbity than Marlene’s foxy—and gave a single curt nod. He knew that kind of arrangement. Remus knew he knew. They both let it go uninterrogated.
“Well,” Remus continued, tapping his knee to Kelly’s shorts-clad one under the table, “if you’ve nothing-stroke-no one better to do by night’s end, you should come round ours for drinks or a cuppa.”
That was the way to phrase it. If he’d told Kelly there was a sofa available for him, he’d have to turn it down. Remus knew the stubborn pride that came with, well, all this.
“Aye, I might,” replied Kelly, noncommittal. His finger drew a circle in the dirt of the table and he said, in a normal voice, “Don’t look now, but I think there’s your mark.”
Remus blinked. Kelly only had a corner of his eye to the pub, and yet as Remus slowly scanned, head frozen forward, he did indeed recognise someone on the dimly-lit street. The dragonologist Amir Maalouf was not, however, at all the person he expected to see, hunched over and hurrying out of The Duchess of Richmond’s Evening House with a wide if terrified smile on his weatherbeaten face. Remus turned away and at that same moment, Kelly slid over and across his lap until he was nearest the window, blocking most of Remus from view.
Sirius’s his footsteps approached, heavy boot on old linoleum. He groaned.
“I said not to—fucking Christ,” he whispered, dropping below the table’s edge. They must’ve looked unhinged to the café-owner. “Is that—”
“—yes.”
Amir rounded an alleyway corner trailed by an inquisitive rat and promptly both vanished into the night. He hadn’t been carrying anything other than his cane and from his gait seemed in poor shape, though Remus hadn’t seen him in person since early November. That he was a magical pub in London, even one with a reputation like the Evening House’s, oughtn’t be suspicious at all, and yet…
Not more than five minutes later, Malodora Snyde stepped out from the pub, her husband helping her down the one steep step to the street as, while both of them were the plump and jolly-looking sort, he was much taller than her, while she was much more stylish. They both wore conservative grey woollen cloaks, embroidered with silk, each matched with an ornate woven hat.
What were the odds?
“Padfoot, you don’t think—”
“Maalouf’s a Squib, Moony. Why would he—”
“Maalouf?” echoed Kelly. His head swivelled, rapid, rabbit-like, from Sirius to Remus and back again. “Ye don’t mean to say Amir Maalouf, aye?”
“Why do you know that name?”
Kelly eyed Sirius suspiciously a moment before tugging Remus down by the neck and cupping a hand to his ear.
“S’the name o’ T’s new supplier,” whispered Kelly breathily. “Never met a werewolf that could get his hands on Dragon’s Blood before, but the lads and lasses on the street are mad for it. That was him?”
Remus’s brain froze. Ground to a halt, actually, as three levers were pulled in opposite directions, jamming up that complex plastic cogworks with sticky, viscous questions.
- Dragon’s Blood was narcotic?
- Since when was Amir Maalouf a werewolf?
- In what possible world would Terra, Amir, and Malodora Snyde of all people be involved in an operation together?
As it so happened, Remus would learn the answers in reverse order.
***
Although Kelly declined their offer to come round—he spotted a ‘regular’ of his, as he put it, while Sirius and Remus piled onto the bike to follow the Snydes home—he agreed to visit the following day and help them with their yet-to-be-planned plan. Remus didn’t argue. Without help they were flying through thick cumulus clouds.
Sirius did complain. He bitched and moaned about the plan through a dogged mid-afternoon blowjob, actually, because his razor cheekbones and sleek glossy curls and general fuck-off rebel attitude were too recognisable to warrant walking into the Evening House. It was exactly the sort of venue where purebloods played, and though Orion was dead, wait, no, he wasn’t supposed to know, that, was he? It didn’t matter. Sirius couldn’t reconnoitre the grounds as he so put it. What he could do, however, was play lookout with the mirror on standby while Remus and Kelly ventured into the belly of the beast together.
Because Kelly had been turned by a different wolf than Terra and Remus allegedly smelled of Greyback, they would make a decent pair—even if another experienced werewolf were present, they’d have no inherent sense that the three of them were connected. Not by their noses, at least.
It felt nothing like ‘charging in.’ Some light espionage, maybe.
With Sirius’s clothes and a pretty inspired makeup job—nothing too outlandish, these were wizards and witches after all—Remus looked a whole new person. He doubted Amir would recognise him. His once-ruddy cheeks were pale; by some chiaroscuro maquillage he’d moved Remus’s cheekbones up half an inch and made his eyes larger, and larger still behind a pair of steely wire-frame spectacles that sat low on his nose. His hair was slicked back. His forehead felt naked. Sirius had bound him in a starched white shirt and a black leather waistcoat so tight it felt something like a corset, holding his breath like a heel in his gut. When he first looked in the mirror he’d held his breath, thinking he’d look like Lyall, but he couldn’t be further from the case. No. Amir wouldn’t recognise him, though they’d have to test that the hard way.
Unlike the all-nighters and some other magical pubs Remus knew, there was no fringe element to this place. No rats beneath the floorboards. The Evening House was for witches and wizards, full stop. A hostess at the door even stopped them and asked with an icy smile to see their wands.
Her cool complexion cracked when Remus summoned Lyall’s to his hand wandlessly and her apology, profuse—they didn’t look the usual type, apparently, what with their muggle-chic stylings—and she’d ushered them in through a wispy satin curtain without a similar test for Kelly.
It ought’ve been the first clue they were in over their lupine heads, really.
They could’ve backed out. Remus could’ve. It wasn’t too late. He did not, however, and instead nursed a glass of sparkling Gillywater—no onion—while Kelly stared, amused, at the reflective lady-shaped glass his butterbeer was served in. They were seated at the long oaktop bar together, backs turned to the rest of the patrons while Remus attempted to put the scene together from his other senses and what he’d memorised with a glance.
The Duchess of Richmond’s Evening House was a darkened affair like The Leaky Cauldron with its dry grey stone on ancient wood and still possessed of a gaslamp aesthetic, but the walls were bare. In place of portraits and pictures there were translucent satin ribbons hanging and heaving up into the rafters and then beyond, softening the acoustics and the mysterious lighting. The ceiling yawned open not unlike the Great Hall, though this enchantment showed only an open black void swallowing satin instead of the night’s sky. A clear message: in the Evening House, you walked the edge of oblivion.
The tables and chairs were plain oak and yet even without a detection charm up, Remus could feel the magic encrusting the lounge. He could feel it like a silky pillow under his arse. This was a place of magic. Fine crafts were defined here by the quality of the Cushioning Charms cast, not elegant woodcarving. The booths were set far apart from one another, leaving the floor open and spacious, while up upon an elevated stage a young pale witch in a dress as satin and translucent as the décor whispered a sultry song with a background track of muffled murmuring patrons.
Pipesmoke and muggle-style cigars with distinctly non-muggle fillings wafted into the air, giving the pub an acrid, smoky overtone to the subtle-spiced food and underspoken wine flavours that crept across the floor like inquisitive fingers in Remus’s mouth. Not saffron and rich tannins—whatever those smelled like, Remus had no idea being something of a yob himself, but the Evening House was a play at old money, a theatre production trying to capture something past and ideal and thus something that had never truly existed. It was for those who knew longing; for those who knew, in that oddly specific lexicographical way that Germans had long since mastered, the Sehnsucht, that grief for a home that had never been.
An hour went by before Kelly tapped his shoe with a foot and he caught Terra’s menacing growl at the curtain door.
“Of course, mistress,” said the hostess. “I profusely apologize for forgetting—”
“Never mind that,” snapped Terra. She was dressed boyishly for business in something resembling a schoolboy uniform, red trim piping and deep navy panels. Her hair had grown both greyer and whiter in the year, but time wore her down only like a whetstone on a blade.
This Remus learned as the hostess led her in with a ducked head. Along the close side of the lounge was a soft satin curtain he imagined would be sturdier than steel if tested by might, the magical equivalent of a velvet rope. Terra, it seemed, was a VIP, yet as she and the hostess peeled off for a veiled-off booth at the far side of the room, opposite the bar, Terra and Kelly caught each other’s eyes. Her baleful stare alone ought set the boy alight. They were on the outs—that much was obvious—which in all honesty tracked with Kelly being so eager to help them. He’d been wondering. Was that what Sirius had picked up on?
Kelly did not catch fire and instead glided off the barstool like smooth gay butter. It was unclear who was intercepting whom. It was unclear if ever he’d had control of the situation. When they collided, they were properly behind Remus. He couldn’t watch it unfold. From the restrained, furious whispering carrying across the lounge, Remus got the gist. Kelly wasn’t supposed to be here.
“I don’t know you,” hissed Terra, voice low and acidic. “Get lost. I don’t take strays.”
This was going sideways fast. Car crashes were something of Remus’s speciality, but this was a two-car pileup on a busy motorway with no indication as to how many other plots might yet collide with their mangled steel wreck of a break van. Off the rails: what a tidy expression for so much carnage. The wise, safe play would be to bail—grab Kelly, run, feed the meagre info to whomever and thus live to fight another day—but the bold choice, Remus realised, was to be the last car in the pileup. You walked away with the least damage that way. Except it would mean crashing into someone else’s car. That was the ha-ha funny thing Remus was learning, wasn’t it? War and espionage were zero sum. Worse, in fact. They were zero sum and took a greedy cut of every trade, and too often that tariff was paid in blood or tears.
Remus intervened. He was up on his feet and crossing to the gauche, ambiance-ruining fracas in the middle of the floor and arrived just in time to watch Terra shove Kelly back with enough stumbling force he fell against the hostess hard. He caught them both by the arm.
“Oi, oi,” said Remus in a low voice, righting the hostess and Kelly on their feet. “Friend’s had a bit too much wobble in his juice, I think.”
The hostess brushed herself off and eyed Kelly warily before looking to Remus’s very toned fingers.
“Not another disruption,” she warned, and Kelly gave his meekest, drunkest nod.
Terra stormed off with an indignant huff. She’d also changed, it seemed—more aggressive than before if such a thing was possible, and certainly more violent. Remus had to wonder if she was getting into her own supply, but, then, so had Kelly, hadn’t he? Substances weren’t the problem here. Terra’s eyes hadn’t even flickered in recognition.
Back at the bar, Remus ordered Kelly another butterbeer and frowned.
“Someone’s grinning like mad.”
Kelly tapped a finger on his pocket. It jingled, light. He winked.
“Reckon you’ll see soon, aye?”
Another twenty minutes went by. Remus heard the tap of a cane before he saw it through the curtain at the door, and, reminding himself that he was in fact visible, averted his eyes before Amir crossed the threshold. At almost the very same moment Kelly set his empty ladyglass on the bar before him, then, turning it just so, and Remus restrained his eyebrows as he put two and two together. If you squinted…
In the glass’s inverted reflection, Remus watched Amir cross the floor for the veiled corridor down which Terra waited. He was definitely ragged and worse for wear. The smell coming off him was also new, fresh, like recently-churned mulch on a wet mountain slope. Werewolf. That was unmistakeable. Apparently the scent only stuck on you after your first transformation. Amir carried in his hand a light trunk of no visual import, though, from the delicate manner in which he manoeuvred it, Remus imagined its contents were fragile. Glass?
“How does one transport such a thing?” he whispered, leaning over to Kelly.
“Vials.”
“Oh.”
“Simple is just fine sometimes, y’ken?”
Remus nodded and frowned at his timepiece. According to their schedule, Terra and Maalouf were still too early for the Snydes’s arrivals, who tended to show up in the mid-evening: half an hour from now at the earliest.
More questions and more problems. There was a staircase by the bar where attendants crept up and down with small silver-lidded platters and elegant little drink trays full up with a month’s salary worth of Galleons, or what was probably a month’s worth if you had a job. Private rooms. What were the odds an establishment with anonymised seating such as this one would have an anonymous back stair? Not amazing ones. They were the sort of odds that only Sirius would take and Remus never would. Not alone.
“C’mon, thicko,” whispered Kelly, cupping his ear again some five minutes later. Short fingers curled around Remus’s wrist. He was warm to the touch. Unfamiliar. “Now’s the fun part.”
Despite every reasonable faculty urging him otherwise, Remus let himself be led up the stairs by the red curly-haired werewolf, and as they climbed, the stench of lycanthropy grew thicker. Only then did Remus realise he was on the road to a grandmother’s house.
***
Which room hosted said house was unclear. While Terra had a favourite room at the Evening House according to Kelly, it was unoccupied. This, Kelly determined when he lifted a Galleon to his ear and shook his head.
“Nothin’. Shite.”
From there, they used their noses. More than one werewolf walked these velvet halls, but Terra had a particular scent, and with only one close call they passed off as overeager affection, they came to another silent door.
All the doors were silent, of course, and thoroughly bewitched to assure it. The only way to hear inside was the room was to be inside it—except once again Kelly lifted the coin to his ear. Remus heard a curious keening. Before he could ask, however, Kelly lifted two gentle fingers up to Remus’s lips and tilted his own chin at to the door opposite. Which, really, ought to prove another problem: the locks weren’t simple ones or fixed shut by magic alone. They were Goblin-made. Evidently ‘wizards only’ did not extend to manufactured goods.
Ever the provisioner of solutions, Kelly tapped a finger to his jingly pocket and fished out a decorated keyring, flicking out one with a bold #14 on its face. With a muted click, the door swung open, and then shut just as quiet behind them.
“Always wondered how that were squared away,” whispered Kelly, jerking his chin down towards the lock. “S’pose they’d come collect all the locks if the lease weren’t paid? S’pose a Goblin owns the whole lot, and none o’ the patrons know it?” He winked conspiratorially, tapping the side of his nose with his forefinger. Recognising what must’ve been Remus’s confused expression, however, Kelly frowned and shook his head, soft. “To a Goblin, she owns what she forges, and a sale’s just rent. All that bollocks your poshboy knows—heirs and estates and shite—it’s nothin’ to a Goblin. To most of ’em, anyways.”
Huh. He hadn’t known that. Which was embarrassing, actually, incredibly so.
“Somehow,” he mumbled, face a touch hot, “I don’t think the Goblin here had much of a choice, like.”
Back on task: he scanned the room. The room’s contents were as soft and velvety as they were irrelevant to the situation. This was an operating base. Not time to get cosy, no matter how many seductive winks he got and/or possibly gave. Never mind their physical proximity. In a way it was beginning to feel a shade awkward, like arranging a second date only to discover you’d contracted an unlikely infection, and so while you’d put your mouths on each other’s bits for an hour last time, you were going to have to settle for polite conversation this time, or however all that would feel if you weren’t a werewolf. Matters felt if not grave, then slightly grave; if not dire, then slightly dire. There was no way for him to explain to Kelly that this wasn’t some schoolboy lark. He didn’t try. He stayed on mission.
Kelly’s Galleon was a package deal similar to the two-way mirror between James and Sirius, though it involved what Remus identified as a modified Ventriloquism Charm that Kelly had paid off someone to cast instead of dipping both mirrors in a multi-stage potion. While the accessibility was a benefit and rendered the effects one-way, it had, as it turned out, a range of only about ten metres instead of a made-up continent. It was also why Remus and Kelly had their ears flat to the door, noses touching, with the former holding the coin between them.
(It was not the same reason Kelly had his hand on Remus’s arse.)
They’d missed the first chunk of conversation waiting and then looking for the room, and the coin’s connection fizzled in and out infrequently as Terra and her many-pocketed blazer paced the room. At least the boy hadn’t lied about his deft hands.
There were four people in there, as far as he could tell: Terra, Maalouf, and two others. One of them spoke in a low, rumbling kind of voice that rang unusually hollow—Remus reasoned he was a werewolf, but questioned why he hadn’t picked up a unique scent—while the other unknown said nothing at all. He and Kelly only knew the sod was there because the others addressed them. None of them sounded happy to be there and each was on edge.
Though there came no sound of the door opening or closing, Kelly’s breath hitched at the sudden noise that followed—two new voices. Introductions. Remus hadn’t heard her speak before, but Terra gave her away nonetheless.
“Madam Snyde,” said Terra with uncharacteristic restraint. “Mr. Snyde. I’m pleased you’ve reconsidered our arrangement.”
“Mutual benefit is the food of our new world, is it not? Even with such distasteful company.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself.”
There came a deep, breathy, half-snort half-growl, and a sharp, slow tut following it.
“Now, now, Nykt,” drawled the unmistakeable loathing of Severus Snape, “Let’s not be rude to our guests. They are, after all, His guests.”
The werewolf snarled in reply. Nykt. Jesus. He was barely human, and the sound not at all.
“Let’s all take a breath, yeah?” said Amir, voice shaky.
“I take no orders from half-breeds—and certainly not from half-breed Squibs.” Malodora was not as plump and jolly as her appearance suggested.
“This Squib,” said Terra, terse, “is an essential part of our arrangement. All of us are. So let’s put aside our little ickle difference a moment,” she continued, “and remember the bigger picture, shall we? Money. Power. Security. It’d be a shame to lose it all to a bloody bedroom brawl.”
“Quite,” said Severus.
“My terms are unchanged. We ship the Blood, smuggle it where needed and flog the rest for assets, magic or muggle. You take your cut; your crew stops having to part with their dear pureblood funds for our half-breed endeavours. And when this is all over, we get lands of our own—”
“—under wizarding supervision,” added Malodora, sharp.
“Under wizarding supervision, of course. But I keep my Pack.”
“Well?” asked Snape.
There was a long pause in which the other werewolf paced with heavy, stalking steps and laboured breathing that came through the coin clearer than anything else in Remus’s ears.
“Greyback has agreed,” said Nykt. Slow. Deep. His voice ought to rumble the coin. “Two Packs as long as the Blood flows. We’ll share land soon either way.”
“Oh, don’t you worry, darling. The Blood will flow. Isn’t that right, Amir?”
Terra’s voice was sickly sweet and mocking, while Amir’s still shook as he replied, “As long as I get my cure.”
“Cure,” spat Nykt. “We are not a sickness—”
“—not all of us agree,” sneered Malodora. Her voice ran nasal with her wrinkled nose.
“You wand-bitch—”
“—you half-breed—”
“—you animals, the lot of you,” said Terra. Loud, but not shouting; mocking, but not derisive. “If there’s something, it’s on the table. I won’t hold onto my lot otherwise.”
“Not a cure,” growled Nykt. “A ritual. A becoming.”
“It would sure be becoming of you to share it before Aurors swoop in on my lot. You know how hard it is to house this many fresh wolves on a drug lord’s salary when milk—”
The coin sputtered and fell silent, then. She’d paced out of range.
Both of them were barely breathing.
“Fuck,” whispered Remus.
“Fuck,” whispered Kelly.
Two minutes of uneasy silence later, it sputtered back with another curious keen. Malodora was speaking.
“—tinue to tamper with the Register—”
“Stop,” called Severus. His voice grew closer then. “None of you heard that?” he asked, and with venomous derision, continued, “Pity. As an assurance…”
An irritable buzzing filled Remus’s ears and, though he could recognise that someone was speaking still, the words came out muffled from the coin. This was the same Muffling Charm that’d grown popular in Remus’s time at Hogwarts among those with the acumen to cast it, though no one knew exactly who originated it. Funny. Elsewhere it was both rare and a novelty—two essential qualities that made a spell hard to crack—but Remus slipped Lyall’s wand free from his pocket and concentrated, letting his brain tease it apart.
“What’re ye—”
“Hush. I think I can deconstruct it. Crack it, I mean to say.”
Kelly frowned at him, the narrowing of his brown eyes carrying with his small lips and freckled cheeks.
“See, a year ago this funny lad walked into me world, not a wand or school to him. Bit o’ fire in his palm. He was just dead clever with a stupid name,” said Kelly. Testing the waters. “Now he’s doin’ spells I never seen anyone try, and talks just like his new poshboy. S’a lot of change in just a year.”
“Firstly,” replied Remus, “Padfoot speaks like me just as much as I speak like him. We’re equally awful influences. And, second,” he continued, fluttering his eyes shut, “I think I might be uniquely gifted with taking spells apart, and, oh bugger, I think I follow your meaning now.”
“How ’bout puttin’ ’em back together?”
“S’pose we’ll see soon enough.”
The more wandless magic Remus did, the more he passively picked up on the magic around him: it was like his wand was a torch, illuminating whatever Remus pointed it at, but without a wand he was slowly learning to see things in the dark—a bigger picture. He could intuit the twists and circumstantial modifiers of Severus’s casting, almost, and account for them in his countercharm without having to write it out in his head longform. He was playing by ear. It was like reading a mystery novel and figuring out the twist before the big reveal. He twitched his wand. The sound of Terra’s tinny voice came through the Galleon again. Perhaps you couldn’t call him a virtuoso by any stretch, but he allowed himself one thought of self-congratulation. Perhaps, just perhaps, he was getting good at this magic business.
When the coin began to vibrate, however, and screeched like a yowling cat trapped between his fingers, the thought died on the vine and Remus’s mind went white with panic. The other coin was screaming too—a duet of pain and impending doom.
“What the—”
“—our conversation is no longer private,” drawled Snape. “Spies—”
“—traitorous half-breeds—”
“—magical cunts—”
“—enough! You all make a mockery of the Dark Lord—”
Silence.
Kelly had clamped his hands over the Galleon and Remus felt the receding ebb of something wild and unfiltered. Like a road flare had gone off in front of his eyes all at once. Magic. Instinctive magic. Except it wasn’t coming from him. His panic hadn’t done this. Kelly’s quick brown rabbity eyes flitted from the Galleon in their shared clutch and back to Remus again. It oughtn’t be possible. He was a Squib. Wasn’t he?
Kelly snatched the coin and hurled it to a deep velvet corner of the room before he threw open the door, dragging Remus out by the wrist. Perhaps on lupine instinct, Remus follow-the-leadered at full tilt, suddenly grateful for his many runs in the woods with Socrates.
Despite his smaller, frailer frame, Kelly braced a hand forwards on the banister and hauled himself clean over with a strong-thighed leap. Remus followed, landing hard on grey stone and wanging his knee unceremoniously against a heavy wood table, but Kelly hadn’t staggered and so while there came a scandalised murmur from the patrons of the Evening House and a terrified yelp from the sultry singer on stage, Remus was yanked up and they were already past the curtain, halfway out into the winter night before Malodora shouted for someone to stop them.
Adrenaline squeezed the breath from his lungs and panic held the door.
Remus felt the acrid sting coming, the hex sending vile vibrations on the spiderweb of magic around them, and so he threw up a shield behind them without a thought. The spell rebounded—something shattered—there came another scream. With another yank, Kelly bolted down the street for the nearest alleyway. Remus’s brain fumbled a moment before guiding his arm through the ‘panic and scatter’ gesture they’d set up for Sirius across the street.
Oh, Jesus. Sirius.
Two breaths later they turned a corner and Remus saw the sky above them was still clear. He tackled Kelly hard and then the pair of them were gelatine being squeezed through an icing tube onto a very London-shaped cake.
Outside The Leaky Cauldron he and Kelly pushed through crowds of disgruntled pubgoers, muggles shoulder-to-shoulder with their collars turned up against the wintry wind; from there, they ran another two alleys down and Remus jumped them to the Canal Street of Manchester; to Wales, just outside the wooded-off muggle sex caravan in Aberaeron; to the empty wharfs of Milford Haven; and then to a section of forest in Cornwall, where they remained a while longer perhaps because he’d never been with a certain shaggy black dog. The thin, tall, brushy trees sprang up around them like a pop-up book like misty green eyeteeth. The evening breathed chill humid air, like the fog on the outside of a fire-warmed window. Through the looking glass indeed. Far enough.
Each destination had a longer break between them, both because they needed to put distance between their arrivals and departures and because rapid successive Apparating had theretofore been a thing of pure theory to Remus. It was necessary. You didn’t need to be Benjy Fenwick to track someone’s movings. Half a brain would do. A well-trained dog could do it—Christ.
Remus splayed himself flat on the cold, dark forest floor of Cornwall and counted his toes and fingers and other dangly bits over and over with relief while Kelly emptied the contents of his stomach onto an unsuspecting tree. A pine, maybe.
“Where in the bloody fuck,” spat Kelly, “did you learn that shite?”
“We can’t go back.”
“Not an answer. Why not?”
“A few hours, at least, until they give up the trail.”
Kelly wiped his mouth off with his wrist.
Toes, fingers, teeth, tongue.
Was Sirius clear of it?
Toes, fingers, teeth, tongue.
Alive?
“Budge up, then,” said Kelly, quiet. He crept across the clearing on light feet and then lay down beside Remus, freckled face watching the dark stars above. “Got plenty o’ time to tell me the haps.”
A root dug into Remus’s hip. All the warmth in his body was being rapidly emptied into the entropic earth below. Good. Numbness was what he needed most of all in that moment and hypothermia would do in the absence of anything more fun.
“Not sure I’d like to,” murmured Remus. Arithmetic and breathing. “Your breath really is awful.”
***
They went back to the flat, his and Sirius’s flat, in the early morning. Nothing bad ever happened in the mornings—or, well, if it did, it was often a mild kind of bad, like waking with a stuffy nose or too early for one’s alarm but too late to fall back asleep or to find yourself hungover and naked in a bed with your once-best mate, uncertain if you’d actually shagged or not after nearly three years of radio silence, hurt, and nostalgic pining. Soho was yet stirring. Sirius’s bike wasn’t out front, nor was it in the alley. The flat was empty. Tea old and cold, a small tower of empty takeaway boxes still piled and leaning on the kitchen counter. Sirius’s socks weren’t scattered haphazard across the floor, which is how Remus usually knew he was home.
Kelly, self-evidently an expert at navigating the cupboards of unfamiliar flats, fixed him a mug of fresh tea and then shuffled Remus off to the shower with barely a suggestive sway to his hips.
“Go on, then,” he said. “Cup o’ tea and a wash to set you right. Ain’t nothin’ that can’t fix.”
It oughtn’t have been that way. The boy was younger—only a year or two, probably, although Kelly claimed he’d lost count a few wild summers ago—and smaller and in a much rougher spot than Remus. Putting the burden of care on him felt deeply wrong. Every moment that he wasn’t out looking for Sirius felt like a hard, steel-toed kick to the ribs. He hadn’t slept. Nor Kelly. He thought he was going to cry or vomit or put his fist through the bathroom mirror. By the afternoon their eyes were on hinges, threatening to drop like the blade of a guillotine. Remus’s knee was aching and a touch swollen. Sirius still wasn’t home. Kelly peeled him out of his clothes and rooted around in the mess of their drawers for sleepwear and threw balled-up garments at Remus until he picked something.
They slept together. Not in the sexual sense—not then—but Kelly shuffled up beside him and tucked Remus’s head, cropped shaggy hair and all, under his chin and whispered Gaelic nonsense. When he closed his eyes, he could mistake it for Welsh.
What a mess he was.
What a worse mess he became when they woke in the dark to the sound of the front door opening. Remus snatched up his wand, bolted through the bedroom door and collided, arms flailing and eyes bleary and chest heaving with violent, shuddering sobs of relief because he scented soap and sweat and motor oil, with Sirius, and stooped to knock their foreheads together.
“Shh, Moony,” crooned Sirius, his own voice shaking. “It’s all right.”
Remus whispered his name over and over until his sobbing turned to a mad kind of laughter, then pressed open-mouthed kisses to Sirius’s forehead and jaw and unshaven neck. Sirius ran with it, weaving his fingers in Remus’s hair, but his grey eyes, once glossed over with relief and longing, took on a curious and perplexed sheen. He was staring at something behind Remus.
“Is that…”
“Aye,” said Kelly. Remus heard a sip of tea. “Don’t let me stop ye.”
“Moony,” he murmured, arching a thin brow. Which werewolf exactly it was aimed at remained unclear. “I thought you’d have the decency to mourn for at least a full day before you took someone new to our bed.”
Remus gave a noise at that, half another gasped sob and half a laugh, and Sirius wormed a squidlike arm around his back to lead him over to the sofa where Kelly sat.
“Aye, it’s how we mourn, us wolves. Honour the dead by doin’ the thing they did best.”
“You know nothing about me,” replied Sirius, wry. He was taking this much more in stride than Remus, which ought surprise no one, actually. “How is it you think the thing I’m best at is shagging?”
“Wrong, am I?”
“No—yes—wait. Ah. I lose no matter what I say here, don’t I?”
“Correct, Padfoot.”
“Clever. Moony, can we keep him?”
“I warned you, Rabbit. Padfoot loves his strays.”
They were alive—all of them. Again. Again—he ought shout it from the rooftops once more, with feeling. They were alive! How did that bit go, again? Celebrate? Do a jig?
You could call what they did a jig, he supposed, though it was an odder one, involving three dance partners, two of which hadn’t had much more than tea and booze in their bellies for the better part of a day. The steps to it were complicated—three people required some coordination—and the metaphor fell apart because Remus’s brain was not properly equipped to handle a mangled metaphor and two dicks at the same time.
Not that it was the first thing they leapt to. It sort of happened slowly, like the tide coming in, because as all of Remus’s dread and adrenaline and crise d’angoisse-flavoured jitteriness flowed outwards, it took with it so much of every other worry he’d built up over the past several weeks. Yes, maybe they’d come back—certainly they’d come back, his brain was a bastard that way—but almost losing Sirius yet again put things into perspective.
Remus couldn’t sit there and watch him wandlessly levitate a teacup in a figure-eight pattern ’cos it gives the tea a circular flavour, you see and not feather kisses on his hollow neck and the corner of his lopsided lips or his protruding bony collarbone, nor could he sit still when Sirius hooked his ankle around Kelly’s across the sofa while his fingers tugged just so on the empty loops of Remus’s belt.
The two of them weren’t competing anymore either, whether over Remus’s virtue or not. Instead they swapped stories, some familiar to Remus and some not, of the hijinks Sirius and James had got up to in their later summers, venturing out to muggle cinemas and underground gigs in search of birds and/or their songs or something quite possibly approaching culture; of Kelly’s run-ins with wolves and how he’d got twisted up with Terra in the first place; and of their mutual hatred of Thatcher, which burned a warm, hateful hearth in Remus’s soul as it showed just how much of his political babbling Sirius actually absorbed.
After three hours and sixteen minutes of that, give or take a bottle of wine to toast their survival and a bottle of something stronger some time thereafter, you could hardly expect any of them to keep their trousers on, really. And, well, once you were three sorry queers laying about a sofa and then a mess of a bedroom in just your pants drinking cheap spirits, hands were bound to wander just as they had with Nathaniel North.
This time, though, it was different. Kelly had known scars. Remus could show his freely—the boy had seen them all already. Remus had seen his in return.
Sirius, however, had not, and so Remus’s heart did fluttering somersaults watching his crooked fingers trace the pale, silvery lines up Kelly’s calf and thigh and Sirius’s teeth dig into his lower lip. Lacing his own hand in with Sirius’s, he followed the map of scars too and Remus found himself in a familiar place with an unfamiliar perspective. Almost out-of-body. Sirius was the one who took lead on these things, usually, but in that tipsy night-morning he was bashful, stage-shy, unsure and yet insistent in his tumbling over with Remus in bed until Remus was pressed between the two of them with Sirius’s scraggly chest hair tickling his back and Kelly’s grinning lips meeting his own. Two pairs of eager hands bore over him. With his eyes shut, Remus lost track of himself.
He felt something like clay. Pliant. Short fingers, crooked fingers dragged along the shallow trenches and dark divots in his skin, building with sweat, heat, and salt, and Sirius’s tongue following those same paths smoothed him over like lapping waves from the sea. Kelly gave a lewd, laughing groan as Remus broke away to kiss at the large angry bitemark on his shoulder and the boy thrust his hand down the front of Remus’s pants in response, palming him hard.
Sirius pulled the things off him a moment later and, Jesus, if he wasn’t hard enough already—
‘Pliant’ maybe wasn’t the word after all. ‘Pliant’ lacked the agency—it belied the control you had to have in order to give it up. When Kelly shuffled up, his arched knee climbing Remus’s funny hip and his dick grinding needily against the soft fuzz of Remus’s belly, Remus let, active, the boy take his wrist from where it was wrapped in Sirius’s curls and press it to Kelly’s lips, wetting them, before he let, active, Kelly thread those same slippery fingers between his own legs and to his arse. His ragged breathy Gaelic and the way the werewolf pressed his smooth, stubbly cheek to the flat of Remus’s neck was almost its own reward. Almost.
With a load of fumbling and rearranging themselves and enough teasing well-lubricated fingers on both their parts to drive Remus raving mad, they ended up piled near the wobbly headboard, with Sirius behind him, long cool arms wrapped tight about his waist and hilted, hip to arse, deep in Remus, while Kelly’s slick fingers lined him up and the boy split himself open on Remus’s dick with a sharp breath. Sirius pressed him forwards, bearing his full weight down on Remus, slow, until they were both bottomed out and Remus was twitching with lust.
Lips kissed small circles on the nape of his neck while another pair did the hollow of his throat. Remus was dead. He’d died in the Evening House or done so many drugs he’d gone loopy.
He came quick. He didn’t count the seconds—that would’ve been pathetic, even for him—but once Kelly adjusted to his size and locked his thighs around Remus’s sides, he’d dropped all pretences of a slow intimate shag and fucked like he’d never get another chance, rapid as a rabbit, because while he’d been stretching Kelly out, Sirius had been grinding into him like the bastard of a tease he was and this was the only way to make Sirius fuck him just as hard.
For a moment he thought he might crush Kelly to death. All strength and tension left his body and Sirius shuddered a moan, hips slapping in slow rhythm as Remus’s muscles spasmed and he emptied, sweaty and breathless and overheating, into the werewolf beneath him.
Sirius wasn’t too far behind after that, but he also wasn’t behind Remus anymore. He’d pulled out. Remus whined. A lot. He whined less, however, when Sirius flipped Kelly over onto his belly—the boy gave a lusty, confused sound—and then pulled him back onto his knees, lined up, and pressed in with one smooth stroke. There was none of the hammering hips or hair-pulling Remus had come to expect. It might’ve been too much too quick for a first encounter, but his crooked fingers dug firm into Kelly’s narrower hips and he punctuated every slap of crotch against arse with a breathy curse.
He beckoned Remus up for a kiss and cupped the latter’s hand to his arse, throat making needy, honestly inhuman noises until Remus’s finger slipped in, which was about the same time Remus felt him cum. Sirius bit into his bottom lip and moaned into his mouth, hand laced in Remus’s shaggy hair to keep their faces together. He tasted blood. He couldn’t very well breathe. With a gentle tug, Sirius pulled Remus’s head back and then down at the same moment he pulled out of Kelly, and—oh. Oh.
Kelly’s Gaelic came out in short sputters—much like his dick a few breaths later, hands working eagerly between his legs—as Remus lapped at the other werewolf’s hole and tasted too much. Himself. Sirius. Sirius’s hands kept him there, nested in a tangle of hair, but it was a performative gesture, really.
The only people who argued that eating your best mate-stroke-boyfriend’s cum out of another friend’s arsehole was not a romantic gesture were people, Remus thought, that had never known true romance.
Sirius kissed him afterwards. They were both dogs, after all. They’d done much worse.
In the afterglow, Remus lay back across the bed and let the waves of heat and looseness and delicious, stretchy soreness wash over him. Clumps of sweaty hair clung to his forehead and tickled his ear. The smell was indescribable—or, no, the smell was lube and shagging and unwashed bodies. Stale laundry, a cum-stained flannel on the bedside table. Remus’s hands were on Sirius’s chest—he realised he was absently palming the barbed scar of his ribs and the tattoo overlaying them.
“Give me your hand,” said Sirius, and he held it outstretched, palm-open, until Remus followed instructions, though his other hand still traced the scar. “Good boy,” he murmured. “Was worth it, y’know.”
“Mm?”
“The scar.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t regret it. Was worth it to keep you safe.”
“Padfoot…”
“And it gives me more reasons to cover it over with some ink, yeah?”
“Pads?”
“Hiya.”
“Hullo,” murmured Remus, slow, staring at the ceiling. “You know there’s nothing you could ever do or say to make it okay for me to hurt you, right? Or to deserve getting hurt.”
Sirius fell silent for a long while, then, and Remus didn’t turn to watch him. He could have a little privacy. The spray of the shower—poor Kelly had been their load-bearing wall and so deserved a little respite from their abject horniness—kept the silence from overwhelming Remus. That and the endorphins, probably. And the lingering booze.
“Interesting you say that, Moony.”
“Mm?”
“Been a Hell of a week. I think we’re getting the hang of this spy business, don’t you?”
“I’m unsure, actually.”
“You and Kelly made quite a team.”
“Us too.”
“Us too,” replied Sirius. “Did you like it?”
“The shagging, or—”
“—not the shagging. I felt how much you loved that.”
“I think adrenaline and I oughtn’t meet as often as we do,” said Remus, wry. “But, yes, s’pose that the espionage has its appeal. There’s a certain something exhilarating about running about, reporting on people, narrowly escaping death every six months or so.”
“Hm. Question: which did you prefer? Spying on the Snydes and reporting their activities to Dumbledore,” began Sirius, “or doing the same with me?”
Remus ought’ve flinched.
He didn’t. The shower sprayed on.
“Sat on that one a while, did you.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Mm. Pads, how did you know that Kelly was there on a job?”
“I decline to answer.”
Remus blinked and sat up on his elbows, then, and cocked his head at Sirius, who met his eyes with steely grey ones. Something resolute had formed over them, then, even as his curls, still damp with sweat, splayed out like a dark halo across the sticky bedcovers.
“Pardon?”
“I decline to answer,” repeated Sirius. There was no anger to it—like he was saying something simple and obvious. Even his heartbeat was steady. “You stole my secrets, Remus, and you gave them away—without talking to me at all, mind you. And I don’t care,” he said, cutting off Remus’s reply, “why you did it. I know you’ve probably a thousand good reasons. I don’t care. If you trust me—”
“—I do, Pads, I do—”
“—then you’ll let this one alone. You don’t get to know. You get to trust me.”
Remus rolled his jaw a moment. It was a tough thing to swallow, and yet with considerable effort, Remus swallowed his pride and paranoia.
“I trust you, Pads,” he murmured.
Notes:
The Duchess of Richmond's Evening House is, of course, a reference to The MsScribe Story: An Unauthorised Fandom Biography, written by the pseudonymous Charlotte Lennox, Duchess of Richmond.
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, Assignment, Part II will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 09 May, a Friday. Being a 'part-of' chapter, this means I'll be posting every week until there's no more parts to post!
If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is Blood and Bones by lurikko, a R/S dark academia fic that's centred around power relations and ambiguity and an awful lot of blood. Give it a read! I really enjoyed it.
Chapter 19: Assignment, Part II
Notes:
or the one in which Remus answers the telephone.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Only once had Remus met Andromeda Tonks.
James’s parents hosted their extravagant Christmas do as usual and Sirius, unbeknownst to them, slipped her an invitation. Not that they would have minded, of course, what with Euphemia and Fleamont treating Sirius as kin well before they took him into their home, but Sirius was yet a very recent addition to the Potter family and so hadn’t broken his habits of sneaking around and plotting beneath everyone’s notice. Even if the matter were small or wholly positive, his family had stolen that trust from him. Or, almost. Not Andromeda.
Timing. Perhaps that was it. She’d looked cheerful, if sadly so, when first he saw her. A mess of sleek brown curls on her head and those same interesting Black-family lines on her face, the sort that carved out the rigid hollow of her cheekbones. A muggle band T-shirt under her cable-knit cardigan. Worse, he hadn’t recognised the band. She was a true convert. Effie clasped one of her slim, unmanacled wrist with both hands and brought her into her home unquestioned. It wasn’t that he envied per se the way the sound of Andromeda’s voice from the foyer smoked Sirius out of his new bedroom when none of Remus’s words could. He tried to like her. There were reasons to like her. Though Andromeda had helped turn Sirius onto muggle music in his early youth and thus was responsible in some indirect way for him and Remus bonding, Remus came to resent her for her role in Sirius’s suffering—his abuse, to put the correct word on it. He never understood what in her life could be so important it meant she couldn’t shelter Sirius from the ravages of their horrid family.
Each letter Sirius had written begging for her to let him stay had—showing Remus and sometimes James behind the ironclad red curtains of their dormitory bedrooms, but never Peter—had been met with reluctant rejection, and the ash of them had settled on Sirius. Season after season. Year after year. It seeped into him. Remus knew well enough, as a child, how quick you could believe that something inside you was the problem—that you weren’t good enough, that you lacked that je-ne-sais-quoi that made a person worthy of love.
Except the four Marauders had been deep in their cups that Christmas, or, well, as deep as fifteen- and sixteen-year-old wizards could be in a cup without dissolving, so Remus had swallowed his rage and teenage angst and a little bit of sick in his throat, too, with the chaser of cheap, burn-y alcohol and let Andromeda talk to Sirius about muggle records and her own toddler as though nothing were amiss. Perhaps if he’d done something, said something, they’d have got an answer. Not that there existed a combination of words to mend the trauma of childhood, but it might’ve been a start. Yet, as it so happened, Sirius and Remus would get their chance but four Christmases thereafter. Their long-sought answer too.
Three days after Christmas 1979, they were still stalking the Snyde family, and Kelly was still in their flat. Remus hadn’t given anyone much of a choice in the matter: they’d burned the boy’s bridges thoroughly with the stunts pulled at the Evening House and so there was no bloody way Remus was turning him out into the cold or throwing him to the wolves or any other strangely-apt idiom, actually. This wasn’t Pack. It wasn’t charity. This was simple streetwisdom.
Kelly watched them put up new wards and shields with an eager curiosity and fanned his fingers over the warm yellow wallpaper of the long outer wall nearest the street, which they had worked over using Sirius’s energy transmutation spell. With some luck, it’d keep their flat from lighting up to a detection charm unless that someone were looking from inside the building itself.
“Not bad for a poshboy and a thicko who never finished school,” said Kelly from his perch on the sofa. The floral mint-green drapes and heavy windowframe framed him fondly.
Sirius had had some misgivings on rolling the other werewolf fully into their operation, but Remus’s riposte of Trust me, Padfoot, all right? ended that duel before it picked up momentum. That was their new go-to for avoiding a fight.
Trust. Who’d have thought?
‘New’ was the new watchword. Before they left in the afternoon to go watch the Snydes do the boring things rich Death Eaters did when they weren’t murdering, torturing, or propagandising for fascistic powers—Jesus, Sirius would never let him live that down—Remus popped out the door only to rush back up the stairs and into the flat thirty seconds later. He dug around in long-neglected corner-cupboards in the kitchen while cursing under his breath. As an impromptu flatmate Kelly wasn’t awful, which was to say he’d done an awful lot of tidying up and so it was terribly inconvenient trying to hide things from him, and so Remus had resorted to extreme measures. Cold cold feet. Kelly canted his head at him like a confused puppy and his eyes went sharp with interest when Remus handed him a simply-wrapped box.
“I’d intended it as a Christmas gift,” explained Remus, “but I hadn’t the nerve to follow through.”
“Remus, nah, it—ye can’t be…” His voice trailed. The long thin wand of Lyall Lupin looked out of place in Kelly’s smaller hands, but Remus enjoyed the poetry of it. Legacies bloody indeed.
“Was wonderin’ what you’d done with the one from the pub,” he finally said.
“Mm. I have another one.”
Kelly turned Lyall’s wand over in his hand, tumbling it between his fingers with those demonstrably-dextrous hands. He did indeed look something of a child on Christmas morning, copper eyebrows high and arched with fascination.
“There’s a book of exercises I’d like you to try, tucked under the bed, if you like,” Remus continued. “Simple bits of Renaissance magic from Das Kloster. English translation, mind. I don’t—well, I haven’t much clue what I’m doing, or much clue what might come from this, but some clue is better than none, I reckon.”
“Y’know I’m a Squib, aye, Remus?”
“What does that mean?” replied Remus, quick and cryptic and doing his best impression of Socrates. The werewolf, not the philosopher. Even if it hadn’t yet technically been proven that they weren’t the same person.
“Oi, Moony, we gotta head out,” called Sirius. He’d been silently observing from his leanpost in the doorway, wearing a cheeky grin and flat, neutral eyes. His head was canted just so in a manner probably mirror-practiced, the more that Remus thought of it, to show off the safety pin stuck through his right ear.
“Right. Sorry.”
Remus pecked Kelly on the forehead and he fell backwards off his sofa perch, yelping.
Three minutes later, Remus was wrapped around Sirius for dear life because the terror of riding a motorbike through London traffic was one that never grew old. It aged like a horrifying wine, in fact. Perhaps, though, a horrifying wine was what he needed most. Not that it need be horrifying—Remus was no choosy beggar—but something, anything to take the edge off that dull guillotine, boredom, hacking its messy way through his neck would’ve been appreciated.
The Snydes had Apparated from the doorstop their London home to an old, overgrown church cemetery of Guildford about an hour’s ride from London, where they navigated several rough-looking topiary hedges and dark-soiled, earth-churned graves before Remus’s uncanny nose picked up their trail over the curious stench of rot and nesting rats. Said trail led them to a nearby large house, though ‘house’ was an ill-fitting word for a building possessed of an in-ground swimming pool, within spitting range of the cemetery and on the corner of two absurdly-named streets.
“WOSTHERCHILD LANE,” read one simple street-sign.
“BABBERING WAY, PRIVATE ROAD,” read the other annoying sign. “NO TURNING OR PARKING,” it added, equally as annoying.
“Wostherchild and Babbering?” muttered Sirius, incredulous. Wisps of frozen breath crept out his nostrils, giving away a silent snort, and his ears and cheeks were pinking up at the growing chill. He had his collar—coat, not dog, though he wore both—turned up against the winter wind and stared at Remus, eyebrows bewildered and begging for him to make sense of the world.
Please, Remus, whispered his eyebrows. We beg of you. Sirius will pluck us if you cannot entertain him, and we are already so few in number.
Probably. More of a maybe, really, as after so many years Remus still didn’t speak eyebrow and so instead Remus shrugged. Shoulders, he could do.
Posh people remain a mystery to us, replied Remus’s shoulders. They hoard their secrets just as they hoard the people’s wealth.
Which ought summarise the novel level of boredom they were experiencing, leaned like a pair of yobs on Sirius’s motorbike outside a ‘manor house’ even if Sirius argued it was neither manor nor house. Remus had stooped to anthropomorphising his and Sirius’s various bits, and not even the tasty ones. This kind of neighbourhood was the death of culture and brain cells.
Cars with fresh coats of shiny red paint and sleek wax and probably other luxurious finishes for which Remus lacked the palate crawled by them on occasion, drivers frowning, furrowing, and/or fuming at them from behind tinted windows. Someone was going to call the cops on them for loitering, whatever that meant. Sirius doubted it—as long as they were touching the bike, they oughtn’t look interesting enough to warrant it—but it meant that they were stuck to it, hip-to-hip, and Remus’s muscles were getting stiff. He hadn’t smoked anything unfun in months and now wanted nothing more than to be holding a burning fag and a bottle of spirits in one hand while flipping off the locals with the other. He’d love to take pictures of Sirius doing the same.
Instead, Sirius wobbled sidesaddle on the seat of his bike and nearly took them both down, given his arm was hooked about Remus’s frozen waist. For warmth, of course.
“Stop fidgeting.”
“Oi, fuck off, my leg fell asleep and I was doing the spell again. It’s about to—ah, perfect.”
A bushy hedge appeared before them. Or, well, technically it reappeared: Sirius had cast a spell—an obscure hex, technically, but here it had its practical uses—to render mundane greenery imperceptible to their eyes. In an instant he felt somewhat claustrophobic. It was as though he’d blinked his eyes and been thrust into a spotlight, a tall, silent crowd looming around him. The hedges stretched as far as he could see down either lane. Uneven gaps for private drives that tricked the eye. He felt spun about in a maze.
“Shut up.”
“Bite me.”
“Oh, just cast the spell, would you?”
“Dunno. Bite me and I might.”
“Cast the spell and I might,” murmured Remus. They probably couldn’t have a shag over the bike. Might overcome the disinteresting enchantments and it was far too cold regardless, even if Sirius’s mouth was a very warm place.
That, and they were supposed to be paying attention.
Diffuse shadows crept. The overcast sky darkened. Even the ever-steady stream of shiny red cars slowed to a trickle. Three hours. Three hours of pure, unadulterated fuck all went by and they were cold and miserable and debating which variation of the Bluebell Flame Charm was better, not that they could cast any of them anyway without blowing their cover, and, Jesus, they were awful. Boredom had made them awful.
The manor house wasn’t even an interesting one—that was an egregious part of posh people. Though they had incomprehensible wealth, they so scarcely did anything interesting with it.
They were a family of four: mum, dad, two children of indeterminate and unimportant gender, likely a dog in the garden and a few skeletons six feet beneath it. Through the invisible hedge, he and Sirius watched—like absolute creeps, mind you—as backlit curtained silhouettes sat on armchairs, slowly flipping through a book or magazine, while other shadows passed by great arching windows with painful infrequency and the dog gave an occasional listless yap. The only outside movement in that entire time consisted of exactly one brown rat crawling along an unoccupied flower windowbox. An exciting thirty seconds that’d been.
The Snydes had come here for whatever unfathomable reason. The trail led to the door, and no one had Disapparated from this location. He’d smell them on the wind the very moment they stepped outside again. The neighbourhood was too muggle for their scene, and yet there was no murdering or arson or torture going on. Remus hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the Snydes at all.
Yet another three hours went by.
Remus was starving. This was not a holiday; this was Hades. The sweat in his boots had turned to ooze and was attempting to churn out new life. Every muscle in his poor lycanthropic body ached no matter how much he stretched and leaned and generally bothered Sirius like an irritating tot. Unlike a tot, he needed a piss and a stiff drink and some proper fucking gloves, actually, was what he needed, because it was past eight o’clock, his fingers were about to fall off, and the muggle family inside had done exactly nothing of interest in just over six hours. The sun had set and with it the dark and cold were gnawing at his precious, delicious extremities. There were no streetlamps within sight—polluting the posh with sound and/or light was a crime, you see—and it left Remus’s hackles raised by every eerie wind that rustled towering invisible hedges.
“There,” said Sirius, abrupt. His brows were knit together in concentration and he had a studious clench to his jaw through which he spoke. “Moony, y’see it?”
Sirius pointed and no he did not see it.
“Use your words, like.”
“It’s a loop.”
“Pardon?”
“Like a muggle film reel? They—that one,” he said, pointing to a small frosted window up one floor with a shadow shambling within. “Light turned on. Using the loo, and, now, look,” he continued, crooked outstretched finger swiping down a floor to the curtained-off sitting room. “Shadow’s gonna cross in five, four, three, two…”
A smaller shadow flitted across the warm-lit curtain and the reading shadow snapped up, sudden, to follow it, before shaking their head and staring back down at their book and/or magazine.
“Happens every ninety minutes. Who uses the loo every ninety minutes?”
“Have I mentioned how much I love your mind?”
“Could stand to hear it more often,” replied Sirius, wry. “S’like lube, praise. Too much is almost enough.”
“Duly noted. Illusion?”
Sirius cocked his jaw. He audibly sucked in his cheek and tongue.
“Dunno. Could be, but I’d rather not take a look.”
“Lest it look back?”
“Lest it look back, Moony, with a knife and a keen interest in my kidneys, yeah.”
“Could it be something else?”
“See, that’s the problem,” muttered Sirius. “I reckon it ought to be something else. If they were this rum at illusions—”
“—no, yes, I follow. They’d have lost our tail long ago, and, being honest,” said Remus, willing his frozen brain back to life, “Malodora doesn’t seem the type. Unsubtle, that one. She commands a room. Like Emmeline,” he added, then frowned. “Or Ahmed. Not that Em is anything like the Snydes.”
“Ahmed, though?”
“Pads, she’s exactly the kind of person to do this shite. Illusion or otherwise.”
“Point taken.”
“Do we—we could call for backup,” said Remus, correcting himself. He suppressed a shiver and the urge to check his shoulders—it’d been something like an hour since he’d last seen a car come either way. “Get their help in investigating, whomever ‘them’ is in this scenario.”
“Think you might’ve swung too hard from reckless abandon towards caution, mate.”
“Learned my lesson.”
“I see.”
“That, and I’m an easy rebound.”
Sirius snorted. “Dumbledore said ‘deathly important,’ did he not?”
“He also said ‘immediate aid,’” countered Remus, “and that we were to under no circumstance charge in ourselves. Also, you’re about to freeze to death and take me with you, and we haven’t any indication that muggles actually live here, and it’s not as if we can—wait.”
“We can wait, it turns out—Oi! What’re you doing?”
“Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.”
“What the fuck are you on about.”
“Just help me wheel this fucking deathtrap of yours to the mailboxes we saw earlier, would you? By the cemetery? I don’t want to draw any bloody attention when I’m this close to a cogent thought.”
“Honestly, Moony,” tutted Sirius. “The mouth on you.”
***
Though the mailboxes were unlabelled aside from a number, one had a slip of paper creeping through the metal seams and so Sirius slipped his knife into the lock and twisted. It sprung open, spilling leaflets and letter and several dozen postcards addressed to their family—a family of five, it turned out. They had a somewhat estranged daughter who was backpacking through Europe instead of attending university. Remus flipped through them, reading dates, skimming, and generally ignoring the tickle of Sirius’s curls as he looked over Remus’s shoulder. Venice. Florence. Naples. He’d never been.
“That’s bloody brilliant, Moony,” muttered Sirius. He swivelled his head, looking for signs of life in the dark and was soon joined by Remus, but all the either of them could catch were distant looming gravestones and wind through shrubbery. “Proud of her, really. How’s this help us?”
“They haven’t taken their mail in nearly a month, Padfoot.”
“Ah. Ah, shite,” he said, voice falling low. He fished the mirror from his pocket, a frown splitting his thin lips and the fatigue draining from his alert grey eyes and readiness taking its place. “Phoenix phoenix phoenix,” he whispered. His enunciation was careful. “Corner of Wostherchild and Babbering, Guildford, Surrey.”
There came no reply from the mirror.
Sirius snapped it shut a minute later and they began to wheel the bike back down the lane, where Remus started and Sirius stifled a yelp, because the hedges popped back into existence around them in the dark and leaned over them conspiratorially, like closing claustrophobic walls. The deep-ocean sky was dry and devoid of night-clouds, and the waxing moon stared down at their lonely road with pale and baleful eye. They opted not to cast the hex again. Obscure hexes, jinxes, and curses often lacked counterparts for their dispel—that was the point of inventing new hexes, really, although given only so many thaumaturgical building blocks to rearrange for violent ends, it meant that the hexes grew as convoluted and circuitous as they did uncounterable. That, and the lethal ones tended not to leave witnesses. Survivorship bias, &c. &c. Bad thoughts. These were bad thoughts to think of as they waited on the narrow lane, and worse ones to be left with for a dragging half-hour.
“No one’s coming, are they,” whispered Sirius. Ominous. Remus shivered.
“Could try the mirror again. It’s not as though we were given an exact timeframe.”
“Counterpoint: we called for help,” replied Sirius. “Now we’re allowed to charge in.”
“Counter counterpoint: we’re still alone.”
“Counter counter—”
“—please stop—”
“—counterpoint: no we’re not, Moony. We’ve got the pair of us.”
“Touching, like.”
“I think you mean touché.”
“Got it right the first time,” whispered Remus. He peered down both sides of the lonely laneway and noted Sirius doing the same. “We’ll have a creep about to make sure they haven’t left us with our dicks in our hands,” said Remus, quiet, “but if we see them—”
“—we flee like giant cowards. Got it.”
“Giant, courageous, Gryffindor cowards.”
Left behind was their nondescript lighthouse of the motorbike. Remus crept up the hedged-off brown block-paved drive and stole between two large luxury vehicles like a bibliophile car thief. On his heels were Sirius’s light bootfalls. There had been some talk of him changing into Padfoot, but for now, clothes and a wand were likely of more value. Remus’s nose was a poor substitute for a dog’s, but versatility was key.
Versatility had let them disable the motion-activated floodlight by levitating a leaf overtop the sensor and sticking it there. Sirius palmed off the knife to him and waited between the cars, scanning the drive and the lane behind them, while Remus sneaked to the front door and began jimmying its lock with all the finesse of a common cat burglar. The lingering stench of rot and mould reeked in the air there and tickled the back of his throat like a centipede. It was like miasma. A resolute dread settled over his world. It crept up his ankles and tingled his skin. Remus wasn’t sure where it came from. Was he? A month without their mail did not bode well for the family whose house had become a Death Eater operation. Christ, he’d mocked them. Made fun of them while they were probably—
The door unlocked with a click and, by the impossible functions of magic, Remus heard a latch-lock and a deadbolt fly open near the top of the door. A quiet beeping for the alarm system also fell silent. Sirius’s knife was warm in his hands.
Casting a glance over his shoulder, Remus gestured Sirius forwards with his scruffy chin and stepped into the darkened mud room through the door. Sirius took his hand as he entered.
Sirius hadn’t yet got Nathaniel to do him the tattoo for lightless sight—the three of them had been looking to streamline it, first, as part of Nathaniel’s thesis research and to take up less skin—which meant Remus was alone in taking in the sights of their surroundings. A Light Charm was unsafe. The pair of them took in the awful reek, however. You needn’t a dog’s nose for it. A wet, fetid funk filled in the air, a fog for the nose, and Remus frowned while Sirius gagged. Earthy. Boot mud had been tracked unceremoniously through the mud room and into the foyer, where a wall scroll hung with several unrecognisable characters, and Remus felt, then, something caught between regret and shame.
What if it had been James? Euphemia and Fleamont? They were exactly this kind of family, or at least thereabouts—not white yet still über-wealthy, owning a substantial property, and being out-of-touch with those whose incomes weren’t entirely derived from equity. Even if this kind of wealth was untenable, Remus couldn’t help but stare at the dark paintings they passed on the walls, creeping through the house at a snail’s pace, without noting how much the muddy rugs and carved doorframes and utter sturdy silence of the floorboards reminded him of his holidays over at the Potter House. The Potters had done nice things. They’d helped Sirius where no one else would. They did not deserve this kind of fate.
Something was keening in him, then, like the quiet, tortured strings of violins, and competitive fear grew louder in him to outmatch it. This place wasn’t right. The landscape paintings were dark and gloomy and, Remus swore, changed sometimes when you looked back at them; the floor beneath them was deathly quiet; dust and eerie creaks came from the ceiling above, while scratching skittered like fleeing rats in the crawlspace below; every light was out despite them having watched them flick on and off for hours; and no soul, not a one, walked the halls but them. Curtains drawn. A distant dripping tap. Even the dining room was cool like a mortuary, condensing his air into a wisps of pale mist. Four spoiled half-eaten plates of food remained on the family’s fine porcelain in the dining room, stale and so rotted not even a fly would stoop to touch it. It was mummifying.
A door swung shut somewhere far behind them, loud and thunderous and Remus nearly pissed himself. Sirius gave a pathetic whimper. The pair of them whipped around, slamming hard into each other before they settled back-to-back and did slow circles around the cavernous sitting room that seemed to echo their own breathing back at them.
Not. Right.
Remus started again when a rattling ring cried out from a mahogany end table against the wall. A pale rotary phone sat there like a pile of bones and shook at him insistently. For some incomprehensible reason, Remus answered it.
“Hullo?” he whispered, and, hold on, why in God’s good fucking name was he doing that? Why were they still in the bloody house?
Heavy breathing was his only reply and Remus angrily set the phone back in the receiver.
“I’m unbelievably upset right now, Pads. I am gutted,” said Remus, loud. He fumbled a Light Charm—now that was embarrassing, he was trembling with so much anger and relief he couldn’t cast a first-year spell—and so he walked to the wall and slapped a light switch. The lamp in the dining room flickered on in dark crimson shades, sputtering, and never settled. Sirius frowned.
“No,” he whispered, aghast.
“We’ve been Genroofied,” growled Remus. Jesus. He wanted to kick a hole in the drywall. Almost did, in fact, except his nose picked out someone in the room that hadn’t been there before. Behind the dining table. He whirled, drawing his wand on a pair of faces in the dark.
His hand was empty before it reached eye level. Sirius was similarly disarmed, though his wand struggled mid-air between him, Benjy Fenwick, and the witch he remembered with the Banarasi dress and gajra hair piece.
“Hello,” said Dorcas Meadowes. She had her same calm, reserved tone, but wore simple black muggle trousers and a light coat, also black. Benjy wore much the same. It was the sort of functional nondescript wear you’d expect from your average burglar or anarchiste.
“Hullo,” said Remus dumbly. “I promise we didn’t…” he began, and then realised Dorcas and Benjy still had their wands aimed at him and Sirius. Benjy was also making a shushing gesture, finger to his boyish lips.
“How did Sirius black introduce you to me,” began Dorcas, “at the All Hallow’s Eve party of seventy-eight?”
“As a ‘bloody encyclopaedia,’” replied Remus. The flickering bloodlight prodded angrily at his eyes, demanding fear or some other reaction. “Introduced himself as ‘family disgrace.’”
Both she and Benjy relaxed, and soon all four of them had their own wands—though, not before Dorcas complimented Sirius’s attempt at a wandless wand retrieval. For some reason it gouged at him. There was no such thing as half a spell, and he’d been disarmed just the same, but of course Sirius could spin failure into praise. Top marks for charm.
“Someone call for backup?” said Benjy. He was casting a series of unfamiliar diagnostic spells.
“Half an hour ago, actually.”
“Your mate gives shit directions, like. ‘Wostherchild and Babbering?’” he repeated, chuckling. “S’not a real address.”
Perhaps they ought have figured that one out themselves.
“Right,” said Sirius, clearing his throat and looking away. “We tracked Malodora Snyde and her husband to the cemetery and followed their trail here.”
Dorcas canted her head to the side, intrigued.
“Physically, you mean? We’ve not found a scant trace of residue outside the graveyard—it’s why we struggled to find the address. If it weren’t for the minor jinxwork someone’s done in the laneway, I should think we wouldn’t have found you at all.” Her small, dark irises jittered between him and Sirius. Like a dog with a bone. It was odd how the detail snagged. “You physically tracked them? How on earth did you manage to that? Did one of you train as a forest warden?”
Sirius snorted and Remus tried to arrange his face in a way that might convey believability as he said, “Well. Something like that, I s’pose.”
“Always full of surprises, eh, Lupin?” said Benjy with a wink. A moment later, however, his dark and boy-next-door features grew serious. “They took a Vanishing Cabinet,” he announced.
He gave no explanation as to how he’d deduced such a thing, actually, and it was only because Remus and Sirius wore confused expressions that he elaborated at all.
“Stable magical portal between two locations in the handy shape of inconspicuous furniture. Tidy, like. Open the door, pop something in, shut it and the contents’ve already gone ’round to the next block or next country, like. Someone’s been making them—someones, plural, I gather, the things are too complex for the average witch or wizard to make alone, your present company excluded,” he added, tapping his own chest with his thumb twice. “Selling them to anyone who fancies a quick getaway from some unexpected houseguests. Guess the Snydes had one brought out here.”
“Why?” asked Sirius.
“Much, much harder to detect than Apparating. Easy magic, tracking that, like. Better than a Portkey if it’s for all kinds to use.” Useful for smuggling goods and for the wandless too, although Remus didn’t add to Benjy’s explanation. Jesus. Perhaps Terra’s operation was more sophisticated than he’d given credit. “If the spellwork’s tidy enough, you can go further, and you’re not half as likely to Splinch yourself.”
While Benjy and Sirius exchanged some quiet, animated discussion on dimensional maths, Dorcas, who Remus gathered was something of a quiet and underspoken woman despite her commanding gravity, circled the room with slow, careful steps and settled her eyes on an invisible spot on the ceiling. It creaked ominously.
“Something’s here,” she said. “The three of you will watch the stairs while I investigate.”
Remus had the distinct sense he was being given orders, and yet his brain was still too genre-poisoned to puzzle out why, exactly, these two were the ‘them’ on the other side of Dumbledore’s mirror.
The four of them shuffled to the staircase—a long, curving affair with a rich carpet and many other details that became lost on Remus once he heard something shuffling about and picked out the dusty mummified scent that was thick in the air, here. His chest tightened. The academic part of his brain knew what to expect, but even the cold scholar in him was chilled. This was old magic. Foul magic. Sirius met his wide-eyed stare with a grim grey one, and his lips moved silently.
Inferi, they said. Reanimated corpse-puppets that, according to the Ministry, hadn’t been created since the rise and fall of the dark wizard Ekrizdis, whose fortress became the now-prison of Azkaban.
Dorcas took a single step up the staircase and all Hell broke loose.
A hollow and rattling screech came from above, beyond the banisters. Dorcas fired off a red stunner on reflex even though the unfeeling corpse that hurled itself over the railing at her barely felt it. Before its dead, grasping, cat-face-jumpered arms could grab at her, however, a length of silver chain spat from her wand and flung it back hard against a wall, pinning it there. A moment later it burst into flames. It writhed, bellowing and shrieking in a horrible, stomach-turning clamour. Fire. Principal Exemptions. Dead flesh. He’d learned about this in school. Inferi were vulnerable to fire. Jesus Christ.
Remus blinked. Benjy had simply Apparated without a sound, vanishing from his spot ahead Remus and appearing atop the curved staircase like a continuity error in film, and it allowed him to narrowly avoid the corpse in a stained white nightie that impacted the ground wetly where he once stood. The Inferius hit the floorboards with such force Remus felt something aged and sticky spatter his face. He reeled, taken aback, but the corpse flailed and crawled towards him without hesitation, scrambling with a hungry arm outstretched desperately. The skin around its claw-like nails was paper thin and its fingers stained filthy brown-red. Incantation on his lips. A silvery bracelet dangled off the Inferius’s wrist and then fell off its new stump with a clatter. Remus had cast a Slicing Charm without thinking.
Freed of its arm and where decay’s splattering had glued its main body to the floor—another woof of flames igniting as its burning body flailed and curled like a dying insect—the hand scrabbled forwards like a giant five-legged spider and leapt at him in fury. Sirius grabbed him by the shoulder to yank him out the way while Remus, yob that he was, had spun his leg back for a kick. Perfect form. It ought’ve been beautiful. And for a moment it was: the heavy steel toes of his boot met palm cleanly, but all momentum was perverted. Instead of the dismembered hand flying across the room, he and Sirius were flying, whirling, spinning through a blur of colour and frayed interstitial space.
A fishhook was lodged in his soul. God was spinning him overhead like a sling. His eyes were streaming. He kicked his ankle hard again and the hand let go of his boot, shooting off into the blur around them like a macabre discus.
When all breath left him and he felt he was about to vomit, the world stilled and stretched out. He landed hard in a pile with Sirius. Something sharp and rocklike—probably a sharp rock—lodged itself against his back while he came down roughly on his dodgy hip and knee. His mouth filled with wet, frozen dirt. At least he’d broken Sirius’s fall with his entire fucking body.
As his vision slowly cleared and the nausea of Portkey travel left him, Remus saw that they had landed in sickly woodland. Dark hard-packed soil. Tangles of brambles. The trees were tall and narrow like a spider’s legs, with barbs of green-grey foliage. They were the colour of dark, dry, dead kelp. It was the sort of vivid shade you expected to see bundled around a beached, rotting whale—and, oh, wasn’t that awkward. Beyond the sparse, thin treetops of their unknown forest, the dark sky above him was no simple brewing storm. Even in the night he could see the shape of a glittering emerald skull in the clouds, and its tongue, a writhing snake. His ears were filled with an ear-bleeding shriek so high-pitched it set his teeth aching. They’d set off a Caterwauling Charm. A trap.
“Christ,” breathed Remus. The rain coming down was light but building, gathering its forces, and nevertheless it was as frigid as it was sharp, like a bucket of loose nails.
Neither he nor Sirius made it fully to their feet before another pair of bodies bowled them over in the cloud-covered moonlight, one cursing in a Welsh accent and the other smaller body remaining enduringly stoic as she clutched a severed finger.
“Bleeding amateurs,” spat Benjy, while Remus moaned in quiet agony. He wasn’t quite sure if Benjy meant the Portkey or the pair of them. Both he and Dorcas reeked of smoke.
A witch’s cry came, high and sing-song in the distance, and before Remus’s stomach could settle Sirius was pulling them all up by force or by magic. They had no north, no direction, but from the panicked breaths and endless stream of curses under Sirius’s breath, anywhere was better than here.
The things that frightened Sirius Black had always earned that fear.
***
Remus had seen a picture of Bellatrix Lestrange in the Prophet during his time in the Pyrenees. It was an old photo, submitted anonymously although Remus had known well enough whence it came, but even then, she’d unsettled him. A pile of deranged black curls sat atop her head, spiralling every which way like the toxic smoke of arson, while her gleeful hooded eyes were a sea of petrol. A witch with a spider’s smile. You knew in an instant she had hollowed herself of empathy and compassion to fill that space up instead with dark and eldritch lore. For her, humanity had been a stepping stone to power.
Yet the photo hadn’t done her justice. As Remus cast fleeting glances over his shoulder and every spell he could think of to hamper pursuit, she leapt over knee-high roots in the dark and flitted as an elegant shadow through rain-soaked underbrush and swung, childlike, around the trunks of thin trees, effortlessly keeping pace with the four of them and corralling them with playful abandon. That was what people were to her: playthings.
Remus was running for his life and Bellatrix was singing in the rain.
Sirius was half a step behind him and he wanted to scream, Shift, Padfoot, shift, but he could neither draw spare breath to speak nor would Sirius leave him behind. He wished he himself could transform—if only it’d been a full moon. A werewolf would turn the tide of things quick.
It was funny what came back to you when you were flailing through a forest in a storm and certain you were about to die. Perhaps growing up hadn’t meant putting away childish things—perhaps it meant you stopped calling them childish and accepted that they were still your things, even so many years later.
He recalled him and Sirius arguing over their marks for Charms, and when Remus had said Sirius was probably the cleverest wizard in his family, Sirius had replied that no, actually, that was his cousin Bellatrix. Everything that Orion and Walburga had thrown at him, Bellatrix had taken to lovingly. Not only had she been forged from an early age into an inventive-if-volatile weapon, Sirius had said, Bellatrix Lestrange-née-Black made him look like an infant with a stick.
It was not ha-ha funny.
Remus had spent a few weeks playing dress-up as a spy, imagining himself the roguish protagonist of a sleek drama, and discovered that everyone else was a protagonist, too, and much, much better at this whole War thing than him.
“Who’s that I see?” cried Bellatrix, and a section of wiry brambles ahead of them sprang into writhing, animate life, forcing them to cut left back towards the others. “Darling cousin! Don’t be rude! Come say hello!”
Dorcas had shouted for them to split up—four together were easy targets—and the Death Eaters were doing their best to herd them back together. This wasn’t a fight.
Sirius set the brambles alight while Remus, following his lead, rendered the pair of them impervious to fire. They charged through even though every human and animal instinct in him begged him not to run headlong into the flames. The heat of it tickled him. He coughed like his first bloody cigarette. He should’ve done a Bubble-Head Charm. Not only were they covered in soot, his lungs were full of acrid and herbaceous smoke. If they were toxic—
An explosion cut the thought short and stumbled Remus hard, though it hadn’t been aimed at them. He could see them now. Benjy running at steady jog, like a rain-soaked marathoner, working on a complex piece of sorcery, while Dorcas rode a bewitched floating boulder and was firing back at her attackers with her platform carried her forwards. Peter would’ve had a field day. Block, parry, riposte, he heard a tree being felled behind him and a roar of voices. Bellatrix’s relentless laughter. Fire licked its way along their path and ahead, lighting their way through the night. At once Benjy turned and his wand flared with colourless light. There came a great, sinewy susurrus, like a thousand hourglasses being turned over, as something swarmed the night air with a horrid buzz. He’d thought it was insects. The scent of it, however—Benjy had summoned probably every spruce needle in the area to one spot.
Jesus Christ, they were infants. Benjy was a master of his craft, and Dorcas Meadowes well on her way to being a legendary witch. Dumbledore had had no business bringing them into this War and Remus had had no business acquiescing.
They crossed paths. Dorcas cut ahead of their escape route and fired several jets of lethal-looking light towards Bellatrix, presumably, given the knife that shot straight past him and towards Dorcas’s small frame before circling around her like a harrier bird seeking a weak spot, jabbing and feinting. Remus didn’t look back. He couldn’t look back. Instead he yanked Sirius forwards by the arm, because even with a bum hip and leg one of them was a werewolf and the other a malnourished aristocrat ex-smoker. Sirius, evidently inspired by Dorcas, cast a charm to reduce his weight and then climbed up onto Remus’s back.
He’d been demoted to bewitched boulder and seeing-eye dog.
Such were the sorrows of lycanthropy.
With Dorcas having grabbed Bellatrix’s attention by proving to be an actual threat instead of several easily-shot fish in a woodland barrel, Remus thought maybe they could make it. You couldn’t Disapparate under a Dark Mark—there was functionality to their terror, an embedded Anti-Disapparition Jinx—but you could outrun it, even one as large and wide-cast as this, and Remus was good at running. It was the thing he did best. They were gaining distance.
Except the ‘you’ in ‘you couldn’t Disapparate’ referred specifically to the victims and unworthy. Remus learned that as a Death Eater, Mr. Snyde, thundered into existence ahead of them with a deafening crack. Without hesitation he fired off a curse. He wasn’t sure if it was him or Sirius who deflected it. Both, possibly—the curse rebounded and struck a tree, whose trunk burst like an overfilled balloon.
Remus tumbled over onto wet grass and Sirius leapt clear as several iron chains whipped through the space where their necks had once been. Remus rolled to his feet, sprang up, and flung all the common duelling spells he knew at Mr. Snyde. At his shield, rather—he’d put one up quick, which was a fair reminder to Remus that he ought do the bloody same.
Stunning red jets were deflected; his movement went unimpeded on Remus’s behalf even as Sirius cast something unidentifiable at him; blasts rebounded; frozen earth and clumps of muddy detritus scattered in the air; legs remained unjellied; and the moment Remus recognised the swift, lethal wand motions and Mr. Snyde’s unmasked lips forming the words, Remus’s eyes went wide and empty. Rushing—the sound of rushing, like blood through his ears.
His eyes remained wide and empty as he was tugged up by the ankle and into the air, that blinding green light flashing beneath his now upside-down head. He knew the spell well, even if it was purely nonverbal. Sirius had saved his life. He hadn’t even dropped a beat of his duel, cycling through his endless catalogue of obscure jinxes and hexes and curses to build deadly momentum.
Small, mud-formed wolves slurched up from the damp and frozen earth to rush at Mr. Snyde, nipping at his ankles and impacting like wet clay against his wards and shields. They detonated into fireworks a moment later, a spectacle to rival Peter, which then split and scattered like Snitches before diving back to blind and deafen Mr. Snyde, who, by the end of it, was reeling, unable and unwilling to take an aggressive stance against Sirius’s esoteric assault. He lifted old leaves from the ground and fired them like little telekinetic knives. Each bladed leaf lodged into Snyde’s shield. Where they failed to penetrate they accumulated, blocking his vision like pamphlets on a windscreen. Sirius pressed his free hand to his lips and yanked, hard, spewing something translucent forth from his mouth while the same happened to Mr. Snyde—breath. He’d stolen both of their capacity to breathe with a mutual curse.
It’d been five seconds, maybe, and once the blood stopped rushing to his head, Remus freed himself of the Dangling Jinx and used his brain. For once. He burned a circle of spitting flame behind Mr. Snyde, cutting off his retreat and forcing him to engage Sirius directly, at which point his breathless bug-eyes grew wide with disbelief. Mr. Snyde vanished with a crack.
Almost. He left behind an arm and, buggering fuck, Remus hadn’t ever wanted to know what another person’s marrow looked like. Nor the squidgy pink-red bit that might’ve been Splinched lung.
Now he had.
Jesus Christ.
There was no time to celebrate his first victorious duel that did not involve his yobbishness. Sirius gasped for breath, and, to let him breathe, Remus picked his weightless form up again and charged through the darkness of the trees.
They were running. He couldn’t quite catch his breath. He’d nearly died. Oh, Christ, that had been the Killing Curse, he’d nearly died. He’d nearly died. Death Eaters were certainly right behind them, even if Mr. Snyde wouldn’t return again, and Bellatrix was cackling like mad only a few dozen metres away. He couldn’t imagine what a three-way duel between her, Dorcas, and Benjy would look like. Perhaps that was why they hadn’t run into much resistance yet—that and they must’ve been hard to spot, running through the wet underbrush with no visible light in a gathering storm, he gathered—and the lesser players like them were staying thoroughly clear.
Clear.
Running. Running. Get clear.
A blast filled the air, rattling Remus’s eardrums and something less tangible in his bones explosive pressure. He had an area in his inner ear for detecting pressure, and an area, he’d just learned right then, in his gut for detecting dread. for Somewhere through the trembling thicket, Benjy Fenwick was making a noise. Not a scream. Not a shout. It was an ascending, pitchy noise, one of desperate terror and disbelief that got louder and yet smaller, more distant with each repetition and that burned itself deep into Remus’s brain. It amputated an innocent part of him and cauterised the stump.
Bellatrix shouted a gleeful curse and another explosion shook the woods. It was further back. Remus’s legs kept moving even as his brain ground to a halt and tried to stop time with it.
When the debris landed and the forest fell silent aside from their footfalls and the building downpour, he couldn’t hear Benjy anymore. Remus’s mouth felt thick with saliva. He choked back vomit. His automatic ankles snagged on a thick root and Sirius nearly yanked his arm off with the tug that pulled him back to his feet.
Though the forest had been hilly and possessed of some thick, sprawling underbrush that worked against their every progress, that proved to be their saving grace. They cut through an open clearing at the same time Dorcas, whose small, round face was awash with pain, and she spun in place, rolling through a complex casting that took thirty unnerving seconds until the air at the edge of the treeline wavered and cracked, spiderwebbing like a broken mirror until the entirety of the clearing was domed off and the rain ceased to fall.
Merely looking at it disturbed Remus’s inner chronology.
“That won’t stop them long,” she said, breathing heavy and hard. Lingering rain masked any tears. There was a knife buried to the hilt in her shoulder. “Dolohov’s here. He’ll figure it out,” she continued, and just who the fuck was Dolohov? The name sounded familiar. “They say you’re excellent with illusions, Black—I need you to hide us, and hide us well.”
Sirius’s face went blank and Remus realised he was wearing a similar expression. Benjy was dead. They’d spent—they hadn’t the time to think over it. Remus pointed at a tree that looked theoretically climbable and half-whispered, half-shouted for Padfoot to snap out of it while Remus tried to remember the things Socrates had taught him—how little verticality there’d once been to his world and how much he’d missed.
Not five minutes later, the three of them were twenty metres off the ground, crammed together in a tiny bubble of glamour and clutching the damp trunk of a spruce tree just below the border of the time-dome’s cracked shell. Sirius had rendered them invisible to everything outside the bubble—an elegant-if-complex perception filtering spell instead of a wonky light-bendy one—and then rendered the bubble itself invisible to every detection charm he knew. It would protect them as long as they were silent, and as long as Malodora Snyde and Bellatrix and Dolohov and whoever else was out to kill them was too proud and bigoted to bring along, say, a werewolf or a vampire or someone/something else that could detect them without sight or a charm. Foolproof. Mischief managed.
The cracks in the dome were fading. Smoothing over. Dorcas had done some highly-advanced magic, shifting them out-of-step with the rest of Time, and someone was working equally advanced magic to set the world right again.
Bellatrix Lestrange, her cohort of six masked Death Eaters, and an unmasked man with smooth dark hair and a prominent brow strode into the clearing, fanning out. Remus held his breath, and Sirius held Remus. Dorcas held the tree with one hand and her wand outstretched in the other. The implication was clear—if they were discovered, Dorcas Meadowes had no intent on being captured or going gently into that good night.
But it didn’t happen. They did not need to rage against the dying of the light because the eight figures exhausted their detection spells in under two minutes and likely grew sick of standing there in the night rain.
They paired off. Bellatrix and Dolohov—the other dark-haired one, he presumed—stayed solo. Each and every one advanced off into the dark.
“Yoo-hoo!” sang Bellatrix as the treeline swallowed her. “Sorry about the mess—I’m sure we can put the boy back together again if only you’d come out!”
It was maddening. He stifled a sob, a deep, guttural gasp that he couldn’t quite smother with grief or shock. Adrenaline was freezing over into hard chitinous despair. He’d thought her mad, Bellatrix, but her taunting voice stained every lobe of his brain, and this was what spiders did with their prey, wasn’t it, a bit of parlour and play? Maddening. Soon the sound of her was swallowed by rain and distance in the night. One slow minute crept by, chill and shivering in the dark. Water beaded off the tip of his nose. Another minute. When fifteen full minutes of cold, wet silence passed with neither hide nor hair of activity on the ground, he was on the verge of suggesting a tactical retreat until he felt the bridge of Sirius’s thumb on his chin. He let Sirius tilt his gaze up and across the clearing.
Bellatrix Lestrange stood with both arms wrapped around the trunk of a spruce tree yet higher than theirs, her black dress torn and dripping, each boot braced on a separate thickset branch. Her heavy-lidded eyes scanned the clearing below over and over. She was still as a hunter in a blind. He resisted the urge to swear. Sirius raised a questioning brow at him—ah, he hadn’t seen her, only suspected though being entirely honest he had no reference point for human nightvision. Remus nodded back.
Forty-five minutes later, Bellatrix dropped from the tree without a moment’s hesitation. She landed as though on feathers, silent and downy. This was not her first dog-and-zombie show. The part of Remus that had hoped she and the other Death Eaters would give up and go home had died earlier that night, and so he nursed his pain like a warm cocktail. He wouldn’t break. He thought of the hours of soreness and boredom he’d had with Sirius, sitting in ruddy cafés and on idle laneways. He’d never known sore. He fended off boredom by voraciously tracking the comings and goings of the Death Eaters in the dark.
He and Sirius still started at the sound of rustling bushes every time, and though Dorcas Meadowes’s intelligent eyes narrowed at him whenever Remus whispered what it was—a wet, shrieking fox in the night, a storm-laden Death Eater, a tiny rat scurrying through the rain-swollen underbrush—she did not press him for an explanation. You did not look a gift werewolf in the mouth. Not when there was a magic twitching knife still buried in your shoulder. Not particularly if you were unaware that your gift was a werewolf in the first place.
As the night stretched on and morale below flagged, they settled in for the long haul. No doubt the Death Eaters were doing the same. In their first true moment alone in the night and dark, Sirius pushed his bubble haven out, expanding it enough to give them breathing room and shielding them from sound, both ways, because both he and Remus were going to vomit if they had to hear her mock Benjy’s death a moment longer, while Dorcas cast a screen above that didn’t stop the rain but instead warmed it as it fell over them.
At least they wouldn’t freeze to death.
Remus split a half-melted lump of chocolate from his pocket three ways as the hours went on, though it did little to quell the growling hunger in their stomachs. To stop them falling asleep and thus out of the tree, Dorcas hooked herself over a thick branch as a sitting perch and told Remus and Sirius her tale.
***
Dorcas Meadowes and Antonin Dolohov had been colleagues at Hogwarts once. A pair of postgraduates not unlike Remus and Sirius, in fact. This was the lesser-told part of Dorcas’s story.
Beneath all the intrigue and mystery and unplumbed horror that surrounded her thesis defence had been something both simple and timeless: a budding star-crossed romance with a harsh and sobering end.
Dorcas and Dolohov were both fascinated with Time and its secretive magic.
“When one first meddles with Time,” she explained, “you make a choice to look forwards or back. Most will never do either, but no one person can do both.” Her black clothes were soaked against her skin and she’d let her functional bun down, revealing a surprising amount of wet dark hair. She looked resigned. Even the knife buried in her shoulder had ceased twitching. “I think sometimes I made my choice too hastily.”
She looked forward; Dolohov wound back the clock; together, they earned every single envious academic stare that came their way and sank into the Lotus-shaped grotto that often befell mutually-enamoured wizards and wizards of great magical prowess. In two years they’d become so intertwined, Dorcas had surrendered every kept thought to him, and Dolohov had done the same for her—every secret bared. Or so she’d thought. Her family had been the cost of their love. They didn’t approve, not of her studies and not of her paramour. Then Dolohov had thrown it in her face like an angry drink or a Molotov cocktail.
Dolohov declared war on magical Britain. He demanded she join the Dark Lord with him and cauterised two years of their life when she’d refused. The memories, every happy thought—Dolohov had done something, cursed the pair of them and excised that part of their lives together like a healthy organ suddenly declared tumescent.
He left mid-program. Not the sort of alumnus you advertised to prospective students. She’d finished. From the way Dorcas told it, she hadn’t known what else to do—the betrayal had put her in a kind of numb stasis and she only woke up years later when Albus Dumbledore first darkened her doorstep and asked, very politely, if she would help him possibly save all of Britain.
It wasn’t that she was nothing without Dolohov or that she mourned the loss of her family. Dorcas Meadowes was not a witch defined by others, let alone a sad, angry, fascistic man. Betrayal, however—and not the simple, stinging kind of infidelity or cruel words—deep betrayal had set her world off-kilter and tilted her perspective on everything. She’d helped him write many of the spells that Dolohov had since perverted for malicious purposes, and he’d aided her, too, in the research that amounted to her life’s work and enduring legacy. Throughout all of it, everything, Dorcas had missed it. ‘It’ being ‘every iota of evidence your lover was a vile and disgusting person.’
Her life had become hollow because of a man, yes, but not for the lack of one—for the lack of herself left behind. When you wrapped yourself up in someone so quick and for so long, there was no way to tear clean free from their barbed wire. Even after you did, sometimes you were like Devil’s Snare or treebark swallowing a road sign: you grew around the wire and so its barbs remained in you wherever you went. Scars were a kindness in comparison.
All this and more Dorcas shared with them as they huddled against the high trunk and stared down into the night storm through Sirius’s thin curtain of illusion, praying to all available powers that no bird or other animal happened upon them by accident and revealed their position.
Happenstance was a fool, but a fool with a loaded firearm and neither safety training nor mercy.
***
Remus’s eyes stung dry by morning light. Every other part of him by contrast was still wet and dripping although the rain had stopped a few hours ago, fingers pruned and skin growing splotchy and red in places where sopping cloth abraded skin. He’d probably develop some horrifying new disease or condition from this, which would be welcome, actually, because it’d mean he survived their plan.
Sirius would move the bubble.
It wasn’t the worst plan. The problem was, it was their only plan, as the Death Eaters hadn’t yet given up the hunt—Bellatrix and Dolohov being the purported geniuses they were had probably eliminated every possible avenue of escape, and so remained convinced they were still in the area. A few Death Eaters watched the clearing, still. No, not still. There were more now than before, and they were fresh while Remus was tired—but the two main threats were out searching the surroundings themselves. Dorcas said they were lucky that they hadn’t set the forest alight to draw them out yet, and Remus rather agreed. It was a matter of hours, if that, given the apparent building impatience that stacked like kindling in Bellatrix’s mannerisms. She was growing bored in the most dangerous way.
Descending the tree was the trickiest part, as, even with levitating themselves down, Sirius had to match the bubble to their movements while also not cooking them dead with the transmuted run-off that made them undetectable. Still, they managed it, settling at the base of the tree a moment. He stretched. His elbows gave a sickening pop, double-barrel gunshots, that would’ve given them away if not for the wealth of illusions protecting them. Dorcas herself was working a spell that, oddly enough, blurred her figure when she began to cast it—her Localised Temporal Compression Charm. The one the Unspeakables had bound her against sharing.
He turned away again to soothe his aching brain. Something about chronomancy upset his mind.
In the night, Dorcas had Remus run through only the mildest, most-efficient part of his Comprehensive Locator to draw them a rough map of the terrain. It’d scored itself in the tree and Dorcas spent an hour parsing it, her brain working through geography and tactics. Tactics, of course, was something Remus was utterly inept at and ill-fitted for handling. He would never get used to War and would die never getting used to it.
Benjy Fenwick was dead. Beyond taking an unknowable amount of perfected Portkey intricacies and summoning lore with him to the grave, he’d been uncommonly kind and sweet and funny and thus it felt deeply, terribly wrong that he was dead whereas Remus was alive. It felt even worse that no one yet knew he was dead. Mary didn’t know he was dead—Mary, who’d lost so much already. And if they didn’t make it out, all four of them would likely join the untold ‘missing.’
Dorcas thought they had a way out, however, or a decent shot at it. According to the map, there was a ridge nearby set into a hill that she thought would give them open ground across which to ditch the bubble and run. In theory it ought take them past the boundary of the Dark Mark. Failing that, she’d fired off some kind of bright, silvery, vaguely Patronus-y ball into the sky come first morning light, and indicated that they’d have allies covering their retreat if all Hell broke loose.
“On three, then, and together,” whispered Dorcas. “One, two—”
They were skirting a bare patch of treeline in Sirius’s glamour bubble when Remus saw it. Dead centre in the middle of the clearing, a pallid figure with empty eyes and the ghost of a smile levelled its arm at them like a pointing child. It was clad in a shapeless black cloak. Pale blonde hair spilling out from beneath its hood. He hissed a warning to the others. They’d brought a Kissed to suss them out. It was clever in the most terrifying way, and though some exhausted part of him wanted to lay down, yield, and give up, he ran.
The bubble popped around them.
Sirius ran with him, just as weary.
Dorcas, however, was as much a machine as Bellatrix, then—more, given she was moving and casting at one and a half time’s speed—and shouted at them to make for the ridge. Remus let himself crane his neck only long enough to watch her weave her wand with bizarre, hackle-raising speed and precision and a Death Eater further behind topple over wordlessly and vanish into the fieldgrass with no sound or sight of impact. He wasn’t certain there’d be a body to bury. He wasn’t certain he cared. The forest didn’t seem quite so dark or terrifying in the bright morning following a storm, and not two minutes of chest-burning strain later, Remus saw beams of daylight breaking the forest’s edge. This was the ridge. Excelsior.
A rumbling boulder was drawing near them, now. Dorcas was catching up. As they breached the wood, she shot out, curving past them, and dismounted her perch to throw up a bright, silvery Patronus that shone like a small pale sun despite the vicious knife buried between the bones of her offhand shoulder. Her elephant strode forwards and along the sloping hillside to meet a familiar sight—an equally silver lobster. Its master awaited. Two cloaked figures stood atop the hill. One of them, Remus recognised as he scrabbled up it, Sirius’s fingers locked around his wrist, because she was impossibly and unnervingly tall with smooth, hairless features and a crooked Hessian hat atop her head. Her too, it seemed—everyone in Remus’s life, apparently, was a part of this grand conspiracy.
Not that Remus would complain. The Defence professor was exactly the kind of witch you wanted on your side in a battle. It was perhaps the only time Remus was glad to encounter an Auror.
She lifted her wrist and with it, telekinetic force carried both him and Sirius over the top of the ridge and nudged them gently down behind its crest, like a commander tucking her bloodless trainees back in their trenches. The gruff man beside her—also an Auror, Remus reckoned, given his stance was steely albeit braced by a tall, gnarled staff, his face terribly scarred, and one of his eyes was bulbous and blue and spun wildly in its detached socket—barked orders at them to stay behind cover, while he, she, and Dorcas adopted a defensive position, equally spread apart. A triangle formation, the sort Peter might’ve recognised.
The Defence professor took point ahead of the other two—Mad-Eye, she called the man. Mad-Eye and Dorcas were deferring to her. As they stared at the carious kelp-green treeline and waited for foes to emerge, Remus quickly learned why.
She was the head of the spear. Mad-Eye’s staff and wand whirled to shield the Defence professor on one flank while Dorcas protected the other. The sheer volley of spells they unthreaded or redirected or negated or rendered inoperable charged the air as though with lightning. Open fields and the high ground were their boon. Though Remus was focused on survival—he flinched whenever a stray hex rebounded within a dozen metres of him and Sirius—and, indeed, though Remus wasn’t sure why they weren’t all running given they were outnumbered, the battle unfolding around was a clear indicator that this wasn’t uneven ground. Arcane power did not map easily onto a bell curve or linear graph. The same way Mr. Snyde had managed to fend off both him and Sirius for a not insignificant amount of time, their trio was a formidable one in battle, especially when the odds weren’t being evened by the Dark Lord’s lieutenants.
Dorcas had been wise to pick their retreat as a moment when both Bellatrix and Dolohov were absent. Mundane Death Eaters commanded power by sheer weight of numbers—a sound strategy, if one that only worked against a certain calibre of witch or wizard. The Defence professor was one, however, of the highest available.
They came all at once. The chorus of cries, the sound of rushing blood. A barrage of terrifying jets of deadly green energy streaked through the air towards her unblinking and smooth scarecrow form, and, though the Killing Curse penetrated every manner of Shield Charm, there were other ways to mitigate it.
While her wand hand fired off a rapid fanfire streak of curses back whence death came, her other hand worked like a puppeteer playing a marionette with intangible strings. Jagged clumps of earth-clad stone burst forth from the ground, throwing themselves like soldiers onto grenades to intercept the Killing Curses. Some exploded on impact, bursting into sprays of dirt and dust that clouded the air; others caught fire and fell to the ground in a searing blaze; one particularly stony chunk splintered like a detonated needle cushion, and those stone needles embedded themselves in the air mere inches from Remus’s nose. The sound was like a mortar. Beside him, Sirius stared wide-eyed at the rock shards, like he couldn’t believe his own Shield Charm had worked.
This was grand magic. This was—the Defence professor wasn’t a witch, she was a force of nature, something primordial and worthy of great fear. A semi-circle trench ripped open in the hillside around her as she called more earth up to shield her and left deep gouges in her wake.
The Death Eaters were flagging. Concealed as they were in the treeline at the base of the hill, he hadn’t seen them fall, but the chorus of murder and other dark curses was fading, and that gleeful rage replaced by frustration and mounting terror. Daylight had come. The onslaught of return fire was as relentless as it was efficient, all narrow jets and other stripped-down curses to compliment the Defence professor’s dramatic display. Jesus. She, Dorcas, and Mad-Eye were a lethal team.
Moving forwards from her chasm perch, rocks and hard dirt shot up to support the Defence professor’s feet like stepping stones on an invisible pond. She was advancing into the sky, merciless, seizing the high ground or manufacturing it where necessary, and there was a cry of retreat from someone mad and cackling in the trees.
“Fall back!”
She levelled her wand at the voice—its delightful devilry could only belong to Bellatrix Lestrange—but, curiously, the air around her began to vibrate. It shimmered like the haze above hot pavement at summer’s peak.
A thin line of that shimmering haze flowed towards the treeline where a Death Eater emerged. He stood nearly as tall as Remus though he looked small in the distance, and, unlike the others, he wore himself openly. No mask upon his face. Remus recognised him from earlier. Dolohov. The one Dorcas had pointed out, with his smooth black hair now wet from exertion, his strong, prominent brow furrowed in concentration, and absolute confidence steering his cold eyes. A small retinue including Bellatrix followed him, intercepting spells from Dorcas and Mad-Eye as he continued to incant, loud, in what Remus recognised as something angry and proto-Slavic. It was original work. Terrifying work.
Both Dorcas and Mad-Eye attempted alternating general counterspells to no avail while the other tried to pick off Dolohov’s sycophants and shield them from Bellatrix’s endless barrage of curses. Nothing was working. Then, Dorcas, still wounded, attempted something chronologically fucky—Remus parsed it perhaps as an attempt to fold the Defence professor forwards in time and thus slip her free of Dolohov’s Theorem—but nothing touched her. Nothing could touch Dolohov, either: the haze had strengthened around him, too, causing every incoming spell to rebound, and so the Death Eaters broke clear of his hazardous proximity.
Even as the Defence professor retreated, the haze followed and distorted her already strange figure. She didn’t look to be in agony or even worried at all, floating there on two levitated stones. Confusion—that was her expression. Remus wasn’t sure she could perceive at all what was happening.
He cried out and found his voice was gone, swallowed by the fricative syllables spilling from Dolohov’s callous mouth despite the distance. It was in his ears like a shout and a horrid, beautiful whisper. Mesmerising. Both of Dolohov’s hands, one with a wand and one without, worked the heat-haze that surrounded him, too, leaving iridescent trails in the air around him as he moved in his deadly ballet. They were inexorably tied together, now—whatever the spell, it would take one of them. Sirius gripped his wrist so tight he lost feeling in his fingers and Remus couldn’t look away, every detail and sound of the complex casting like a molten brand to the soft flesh of Remus’s brain.
There came a strange, childish noise, like Velcro ripping free, and then the Defence professor was gone. She’d been lifted like a sticker from the glossy paper of the world and the world had barely noticed. The stones once beneath her feet stayed there a moment. It was as macabre as it was cartoonish, like they’d walked off a cliff and forgotten gravity or at whose pleasure they floated.
Then they fell unceremoniously to bottom of their new pit.
Bellatrix in the distance cried out, cruel and ecstatic, at the mark of victory. A chorus of Death Eaters echoed her. Their rapid retreat—a true one, this time—saw them vanish like inkstains into the rubbers of the treeline while a madwoman cackled and jeered and taunted even as Mad-Eye fired Killing Curse after Killing Curse into the woods and Dorcas engulfed half a dozen trees in soundless indigo flame.
Bellatrix herself leapt, turned, and fell like a stagediving rockstar into the arms of her Death Eaters and, together, they all vanished with a sharp crack. A few more came shortly thereafter, one for each lieutenant, but each was further, quieter in succession until only wind blew in his ears.
The Dark Mark glowered down from the clouds above the overcast hillside and Remus heard someone weeping in the silence.
It was him.
Remus had never even learned her name.
***
Andromeda Tonks’s cottage house was a quaint place and ill-fitting place to host two funerals, and worse still for having a conspiracy revealed before you. Remus did not want to be there; he did not want to look at Dumbledore’s sad, wise, wrinkled face; nor did he want to think about anything at all and instead embrace the soft oblivion of sleep.
He had no choice in the matter, unfortunately.
“You’ve been exposed. Both you and Remus,” said Dumbledore, as grave as a wizard could be when sat in a living room with a duck-shaped tea-cosy on the coffee table before the sofa, “for they have seen your faces and know your ties to our ranks. I know you must have many questions—and I know, too, that you must blame me for what happened in those unfortunate woods last night.”
Remus felt both cowed and like screaming until his voice was raw that, yes, he was an irresponsible motherfucker and directly responsible for Fenwick’s death.
“You may do so,” he continued, eyes inscrutable behind those half-moon glasses. “I bear the weight of that decision and so many more. If I had known what would befall you…” He trailed off and let the words mature a moment. “Nevertheless, with your exposure comes a new choice. Should you wish to continue—”
“—not like we have much a choice, do we?” said Sirius, loud and flat. Dumbledore did not stare him down, but Sirius shrank in his even gaze nonetheless.
“You have a choice.”
Remus took a breath. “What are they?”
“You may leave Britain,” replied Dumbledore, “as some others have done. Or you may stay and join with us.”
“Who is ‘us?’”
“You know well enough already, Remus. Your choice?”
Remus felt something mad and deeply unhinged loosed in his throat. He looked to Sirius, and found much the same expression on his face.
“We’ll stay,” muttered Sirius. Dumbledore’s gaze fell over Remus, then.
“We’ll stay,” Remus echoed.
“I wish it were under better circumstances,” began Dumbledore, “but I welcome you, nevertheless, to the Order of the Phoenix. You will be briefed before night’s end, I’m afraid.”
By the hour’s end, a number of old and familiar faces filled the quaint cottage house, though others eluded Remus. Andromeda and her husband stole Sirius away to talk and for tea, but Remus remained behind and sought out old friends. Some were easily recognised—Emmeline’s shock of bright red hair had been cropped short, presumably for ease of flying, but she looked well otherwise, or as well as one could be at the funeral of one of your best mates. She and Benjy had been closer than most.
Not as close as Mary.
“Aye,” said Emmeline, aloof. “Not as close as Mary.”
Remus spotted Marlene hobbling in, her limp a touch more pronounced, but she vanished into one of the many small rooms of the cottage with a crowd of other Order members to whom they’d not been introduced and he wasn’t particularly keen chatting with her, given their last encounter. Frank Longbottom, a square-jawed, burly man who’d completed his Hogwarts prefecture years before Remus’s own impromptu departure, also gave his condolences. He’d married Alice Macmillan, as it turned out.
Not long after that, James and Peter arrived and Andromeda, a woman with rounder, softer features and messy brown curls in place of Sirius’s sleek black, returned him to Remus in time for the ceremony to begin.
“What’s that you’ve got there?” murmured Remus. His brain was filtering the background static of sombre chatter from his brain, though he kept his voice quiet. A raspy whisper.
Sirius was turning a wicked knife over in his hands restlessly, though he blinked down at it, once, and then once again at Remus, as though he hadn’t been aware of its presence or his actions. Very Lady Macbeth.
“Dorcas interrupted us at tea,” whispered Sirius. “Her shoulder’ll scar, but she says it was worth it to steal this away from—from her. Bellatrix,” he continued, voice dropping even lower. “Fancy a look? It’s Goblin-made,” he added as an afterthought.
The knife was a curious thing. It looked on its surface to be nothing more than a short, sturdy knife of silver—not true silver, not anymore, for it didn’t burn his skin—that tapered towards one end, and thus it was wicked because it had no clear use beyond being used to stab or punch. When Remus tilted it against the soft warm light of the cottage house, however, he caught dark, cobalt-coloured reflections along the spearhead-shaped blade that moved ever-so-slightly, like oil on the ocean, while the handle itself bore a smooth protruding design that was yet unnoticeable to the touch. Goblin metallurgy was often strange that way. Such metals never tarnished nor lost their wicked edge. The finest of them would only take in that which made them stronger.
Despite Sirius’s assurances that the knife had been thoroughly disenchanted, he nevertheless handed it back quick. He wasn’t eager to pick up a weapon. Not after all they’d been through.
“Goblins don’t make weapons for wizards,” whispered Remus unhelpfully. “Haven’t in centuries. Where’d she get it?”
“Dunno. Wedding gift?”
Remus shuddered. “You’re not going to keep it, are you?”
“Dorcas says it’ll take enchantments well. Amplify them. And my penknife does me well, but it’s been a few years, and the thing seems a bit amateur now. Was wondering if this might be put to good use unlocking things rather than hurting people. You’d get the old one,” he whispered with a noncommittal shrug.
Before Remus could reply, Sirius’s grey eyes flickered forwards as there came a gentle round of tutting ahead of them. Confusion in the crowd. The ceremony had stopped.
A number of witches and wizards stood for a moment before the hearth, saying nice things here and there about Benjy—he’d been a rum wizard, always a chipper and kind bloke, and other things that did not make him any less dead—and yet it was rippling, then, through the small crowding of Order members that none of them could do the same for the Defence professor. Remus wasn’t the only one who couldn’t recall her name, though he was almost certain he’d never learned it in the first place—it was gone. So were her features. No one could describe her the same way or recall, with any accuracy, any personal information about her whatsoever. Dolohov had stolen that from them, too.
By that point it was too much. He was shaking and Sirius deathly still, so James whispered something to Peter and then dragged them both by the arm up the stairs to a guest bedroom in the cottage where, presumably, he’d once visited with Sirius.
James kicked the door shut and then swung each of them around, hugging both him and Sirius with an arm around their necks despite the vary range of heights on Remus’s part. James had always been physically affectionate that way—as much as he’d seen the best in people, he’d always wanted others to see exactly who he was as well. That part of him hadn’t hardened when exposed to the War. Still golden-brown, that James Potter. Fully baked.
“I’d no idea either of you tossers were involved in this mess,” muttered James. Still he smelled of honey. Ish. That, too, hadn’t changed. “I’ve been a right git to both of you.”
Sirius sniffed into James’s shoulder. “Had no idea ourselves. They didn’t tell you?”
“Everything’s compartmentalised,” said James, voice muffled by their three-way embrace and Remus’s right tit. He pulled back. His round-framed glasses were off-kilter and the lenses thoroughly smudged. Even discussing dire matters, James Potter was all bright grins and winks and knocking elbows. “We hardly know the full Order roster, let alone what the other teams get up to. Keeps us safe in case—right. You catch my meaning.”
“Grim.”
“It’s the War, Pads.”
From there they diverted to other expository topics and James kept them, however begrudgingly, in their three-way mess of a hug despite Remus being dead on his feet and absolutely aching. He could’ve broken free, of course, being the strongest of them—Padfoot was certainly trying what with his squidlike wiggling and squirming—but James held fast and it felt nice to be held.
The Elemental Genre Mixture at the manor house was a recurring trend. Obscure potions and intoxicants became increasingly a part of Death Eater tactics, with emphasis on those that were not otherwise illegal to sell or transport. E.G.M. to panic, Polyjuice to impersonate, even the finnicky Draught of Lethe to wipe away memories beyond the retrieval of Legilimency, the art of mental magic. The Order feared they had a new expert on potions, but that was as much speculation as the rumours they had a Metamorphmagus, a vampire, two or three Veela, an honest-to-Merlin Elf, or a few unregistered Animagi—that last one, James mentioned with a sly smile. Aforementioned Vanishing Cabinets were cropping up here and there, though by silent, mutual agreement they aborted that line of conversation on the spot.
As for other matters that dovetailed into place, Euphemia hadn’t sold the old Potter home simply because it was too big without her late husband. The Potters had been funding the Order since the beginning. It’d been how Euphemia and Fleamont felt they could best contribute, being exceptional in very niche, non-combative and non-industrial schools of magic, and a few others had contributed their wealth as well. It was a less impressive number of Galleons given the sum total of their membership was less than thirty people.
“There once was more of us, but we’ve been losing more than we gain with time—a few dead, a handful injured, and more leaving the country,” James explained.
They’d finally broken apart, if only to let Remus slump against the door and pretend he didn’t desperately want to sit down and then collapse into unconsciousness.
“Prongs,” said Sirius, abrupt. “Dad—your dad—”
“—no, Pads, it really was Dragon Pox,” replied James, quiet. His myopic eyes looked far away a moment. “Been the weirdest part. Every time I visit mum, I expect to see him fuddling with the old record player you got him.”
“I know what you mean.” Sirius looked distant too, then, until panicked flickered over his eyes and yanked him back. “Not that—he was your dad, Prongs, I meant—”
“Oi, Pads,” muttered Remus, “shut up. He knows what you meant, like.”
“Rude.”
“Very rude, Moony, but also very true.”
“I don’t—”
“—you heard him. Shut up.”
Sirius scoffed and looked uncertain. They were almost there, bordering some kind of levity that wouldn’t feel perverse while a funeral/wake still unfolded downstairs for a kind Welsh boy who’d been wasted on a War and a witch no one could quite remember. So close to something normal. Something light. No one had ever laid out for Remus how much of a slog it was to live through war. In any other circumstance he would’ve grabbed Sirius to distract him—he liked to be chased and Remus liked to chase, as it so happened, though Sirius always ran away on instinct like a dog—but Remus was nursing a twisted ankle (surprise!) and a dodgy knee, so he remained leaned against the wall where he was.
“James, could you…?”
“Sure, Moony.”
With surprising ease, although not as surprising as Remus would’ve thought given James had got stockier since leaving Hogwarts while Padfoot oscillated between somewhat and very bony, James tackled and lifted Sirius with two thick arms around his ribs, then fell backwards onto the bed in a slow, incomplete wrestling manoeuvre. To his credit, Sirius didn’t squirm. The yelping was to be expected.
Envy met a quick death at the hands of warmth—warmth that spread from his chest outwards watching Sirius and James tumble around on the bed like it was still fifth year, cursing each other and knocking knees and elbows before settling into a slumped-over pile. James’s had a pensive look behind his glasses as he combed his fingers through Sirius’s dark curls, rubbing gentle circles on his scalp with a light scratchy noise. For the better part of a minute, no one spoke. Sirius’s eyes had lulled shut and Remus’s own vision was unfocused, too, fatigue catching up to him, but he caught James’s preparatory inhale.
“He was your dad too, Pads,” said James. Matter-of-fact, like. It was a very Boys’ Club approach despite their not-Boys’ Club arrangement. “I hope you know that much.”
Sirius shifted in place as though he could physically squirm his way out of emotional restraints and James dug an elbow at his ribs, which seemed highly inappropriate, really, but Sirius’s angry cursing broke him of whatever deep, anchoring thought was drowning him.
“Yeah.”
“‘Yeah’ what, you tosspot?”
“Shut up. Yeah, I know, you bloody sopping bird.”
“Good. Have to hex your bollocks off otherwise—and, Moony, you’re going to stand there? Genuinely?”
“Technically, I’m leaning.”
“Unbelievable.”
“All right, all right, give me a moment,” murmured Remus, the nostalgic warmth now reaching his cheeks and upturning his lips at the corners. He stopped a moment to hobble in place and yank his socks off, earning him a snort from Sirius, before half-sitting, half-falling onto the bed and into their reach. Lingering engine oil residue mixed with honey and excitement and the last dregs of fear that hadn’t quite washed out, the fear for their own lives, for not knowing if the others would be alive on the other side, in an odd melange of scents that didn’t strike him as disharmonious. He knocked shoulders with James while Sirius splayed across the pair of them. Heartbeats quickened, then began to slow. At ease, finally. At peace.
It was a thing they’d done infrequently at Hogwarts, though more often since becoming Animagi. Pile up like puppies. Only one and a half of them were blokes now, but they’d all been raised with an idea of what men ought be like, and huddling together for comfort and affection—even in a purely platonic, nonsexual manner, which was also no longer an accurate description—was Not On.
Supposedly.
Not that any of them cared. Neither Remus nor James nor Sirius flinched when the door cracked open and Peter’s appraising beady eyes stared at them in the dim light. They didn’t catch light, of course—he wasn’t Remus.
“Without me?” said Peter. He sold ‘mockingly-wounded’ well enough for someone with no theatrical training. Pale face aghast. Beady eyes uncommonly tired. “Have you no shame?”
“No.”
“’fraid not.”
“None whatsoever, mate.”
Peter snickered and closed the door behind him a moment later, surveying the scene from the half-empty bottle of medicinal firewhiskey to James’s filthy trousers stuck against a wall to Remus’s floorbound socks.
“Just like old times,” he said, and Sirius had only enough time to shout Oi watch Moony’s bum leg you cheeky fucker before Peter was flopping across the three of them like an uncoordinated diver into a lake and they, four grown adults in the middle of a bloody war, were giggling schoolchildren up past their bedtimes.
Notes:
Alas.
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, High Tea will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 23 May, a Friday.
If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is Highland Fling by picascribit, a classic R/S coming-of-age fic set in the Scottish Highlands. I read this fic for the first time ages ago and it was one of the first fics that turned me on to writing Wolfstar—so if by chance you haven't read it already, give it a go!
Chapter 20: High Tea
Chapter Text
Lily Evans hadn’t had an easy life.
At age thirteen, she told Remus—between the hushed, tearful sobs befitting a library in winter—that she and her sister had awful rows over magic and all of its intoxicating whimsy, although not in so many poncey words of course. Freckle-faced. Ruddy cheeks. Why she’d chosen him as a confidant, Remus knew not, but that remained their dynamic well into fifth year as things with her family and sister grew more volatile.
Petunia Evans never could make sense of why magic could or couldn’t do certain things, or why, after a childhood of what she now labelled ‘freakishness,’ Lily wasn’t allowed to do magic at home anymore. Nor did she understand why her wallflower sister no longer needed her; why their parents started fighting; mother, drinking; and why, when Lily woke up from the dream of her muggle life to find out she was a magic girl, Petunia had been left comatose. She knew magic was real and was nonetheless expected to grow up and become an accountant, or at the very least marry one. Lily was expected to grow up and do literal, actual magic.
Like so many other housewives of their time, the bed-burning ennui of her hausfrau mother was mollified by a cocktail of mood stabilisers, by uppers to lift her dampened spirits and tranquilisers to calm her frayed nerves. Lily’s mum hadn’t been allowed a career of her own. Her children had grown up—no longer needed her as much as she needed them. All of her friends were either getting pregnant again to pass the time, or else languished in blissless tranquillity. How many hours could you spend doing the washing up? Cooking dinner? How many hours did you need, really, to clean the house of a middle-income family of four?
As many, it turned out, as Lily’s dad could spend working late nights and making early meetings and travelling across or beyond England for the sacrosanctity of company business. Work expanded to fill the time available, and her mum’s liver expanded to process all intoxicants available.
By seventh year, Lily curtailed her own drinking—like mother unlike daughter, though there’d been too many moments where the resemblance was purportedly uncanny, or so said Mary, queen of gossip herself—and so it came as little surprise to Remus that Lily had given up all substances depressive or stimulating for her twentieth birthday. He did, however, consider it cruel and unusual punishment that their own usage would be curtailed as well.
“TO: PISSHEAD #1,” read the flowery stationary. “YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO HIGH TEA. THERE WILL BE NO DRINKING OR DRUG USE AT HIGH TEA. NONE. 0%. DO NOT BRING WINE; THIS WILL BE A SPLIFFLESS JOINT. INFORM PISSHEAD #2. FROM: LILY EVANS.”
Now, Remus hadn’t done it on purpose. Which, yes, sounded like the excuse of a bad friend who definitely had done it, whatever ‘it’ was, on purpose, but this had truly been an accident.
Denied every manner of social lubricant and not feeling the urge to indulge so soon after the grisly events of Christmas-and-after, Remus’s stress was rising to a steady, scalding, frothing boil as he juggled his sundry affairs: from his Book Boggarting in the library to his and Sirius’s thesis research to flight training to deciphering the headings of Gloria Ahmed’s treatise to wandless lessons and Marlene’s newly-assigned Order task of duelling Sirius for practice to the recent-but-fading brush with death that indeed left some of his colleagues—they hadn’t even been close, Remus was close with so few people—dead or somehow worse off. He tried to make an ordered list in his head. It was the strangest thing. He’d get to his mental review, that kopfkino of the end of term, his meeting with Dumbledore, and it was as though they’d only just returned from Wales—his attention span would unspool and he’d find himself staring off at a wall or back in his dormitory, less an hour for his efforts.
So, in the absence of a better option, his stiff drink of choice became tea.
The near month he gave himself and Sirius to reacclimatise their disastrous brain chemistries thoroughly exhausted Remus’s once-prodigious stores, however. He was out of chocolates within a week, and biscuits in two. When he ran out of black tea, he sought green and oolong and jasmine and sweet, fruity, sugary teas that had never met a real leaf in their lifetimes. All those fell before him as well. Sunset over Remus the Yob, resident Book Boggart. Rise instead, Remus the Teamonger.
The postgrad lounge was a barren grave of a battlefield. Cupboards were emptied. Elaborate minor illusions were placed over portraits and hideaways in the lounge and promptly forgotten. He tried to bargain and got word that there was a general shortage. Nothing they could do. Fresh out, alas, which might’ve convinced anyone with standard-issue olfactory perception. His friends were hoarding their loose-leaf. They were keeping it hidden from him. So too was Sirius, as he learned a few hours before Lily’s party by snooping through his ‘naughty’ trunk—for which, being fair, Sirius had given Remus permission in case he found something therewithin intriguing—and found several small grey sachets of an earthy-smelling tea.
Remus pilfered a few and set a kettle over the postgrad lounge hearth as he studied. It was coarsely ground, more the consistency of dry crumbs than any manner of leaf. Unfamiliar. He committed the regular sin of oversteeping his teas; this was no exception. He added fresh lemon, peeled ginger, and a few heaps of sugar to balance the bitterly strong savoury flavour, and thought nothing more of it until Sirius blew the postgraduate lounge door off its hinges for old time’s sake and plopped down beside him on the squat sofa.
“Where’d you get this brew, Moony?” asked Sirius, equal parts relief and fatigue in his voice. He rolled both of his bony shoulders to wring the soreness from them and melted back against the cushions.
“That’s neither here nor there.”
“You and your secrets,” he murmured. His fingers already crept for the low table before them. “Sharesies?”
“Don’t slobber on my mug.”
“Good boy,” he said. “And you should be so lucky.”
“I think that’s gnomes, actually.”
“What the fuck are you on about?” asked Sirius, though he fell quiet when Mary hurled a quill at him from across the room and Pascalle shushed them both. He sipped gingerly from Remus’s mug—which was proportionate, of course, to Remus’s hands and thus disproportionate to everyone else—and gave the rim of it a lewd, slobbery lick that twitched something needy in Remus. Something needy that went unexplored because Sirius frowned, sniffed at the tea, and then continued to frown as his pale grey eyes slowly grew wide with silent alarm. He’d been made. His cover was blown.
“Quite good, isn’t it?” said Remus, wry. “I’m on my second mug already.”
“Moony,” replied Sirius, low, “you really ought to tell me where you found this tea.”
Remus arched a fuzzy brow.
“If you must know, Pads,” he murmured, leaning in conspiratorially to Sirius’s ear so as to not alarm the other postgraduates, “I found your hidden stash. In your special trunk, I mean to say.”
Sirius’s thin lips audibly parted. No sound followed.
“Hullo?”
“All right so here’s the thing Moony—”
As it turned out, Remus was no longer Kelly McCallaghan’s only poshboy and/or posh-Ziggy penpal. Sirius wrote to the werewolf. Not frequently, of course, though when pressed he wasn’t able to articulate with any specificity the upper or lower ranges of frequency, say, once a month? Once a week? Padfoot, really, surely he could estimate, it hadn’t been that long since Christmas hols, and, oh, piss bugger, oh the duchess, how time flew and how late they were &c. &c. The details weren’t important. Much like Remus, Sirius occasionally received care packages with samplings of his latest inventory. Even shot of Terra and her growing pack, Kelly’s own loyal network still funnelled him some product to move. Most of it was industry-standard. Classic staples. On occasion, however, the Squib borderlands turned up interesting product. Product like the dried-mushroom tea in Sirius’s trunk for example. Something of a long-term project by a Squib botanist he’d convinced to work with him instead of Terra; something involving dissociative Doxy bites on niche hallucinogenic fungi.
Really, Remus should’ve cancelled—gone straight to Lily and confessed that, yes, purely by accident he’d violated the terms of their agreement and wouldn’t be in attendance. Except, as he recalled, Lily Evans only had so much saintly Engelsgeduld patience. Only so many apologies left to accept. And even if she believed his excuse, Remus cringed with his entire soul at the imagined look she’d give him—piercing green eyes and a sad, tired smile on her lips, all fuelled by a charity Remus neither wanted or deserved. He couldn’t remember when last she’d thought him worthy of her confidence.
More to the point it’d been an hour or so since his first mug and he felt little more than slightly off-kilter, as though Remus had stepped through a doorway and arrived in a parallel world rotated three degrees on an angle and with slightly more vibrant colours. By the time they reached the Come and Go Room and Remus filtered surreptitiously through its grand doors, the shapes of the world were still mostly intact. He was more conscious of the geometry—the ovals hidden in the legs of the posh wooden tables and their similarly posh wooden chairs, the oblong rectangles in Nathaniel’s jaw and fuzzy brows, and how freckles and vinyl records weren’t so different after all.
As their resident expert on manipulating the room’s sundry manifestations, Rucha Nagar had risen to the challenge. She eased up on the pub-y side of the room, though she kept the dancefloor and added a piano, and made it a smaller, cosier affair for their small lot. The high ceiling was disguised by a lower cover of thin, translucent tapestries and vaulting silk banners amid a thin, luminescent herd of floating wax candles.
The six conspirators, Lily, Pascalle, Sirius, Mary, Nathaniel, and Remus himself, likely in order of importance (plus Rucha, he supposed) made for a more intimate gathering. One that didn’t need several tables or a bar. All of their worlds were folding in on themselves, getting more compact as the War sprawled like a tumour and rooted itself in everything. Amir Maalouf hadn’t returned from winter break and the others, Remus realised, had simply thought him missing or dead, like Ahmed and like Benjy, until Lily learned that he’d withdrawn for undisclosed reasons.
Loss loomed over them like a rose-coloured cloud. It spilled into their music. Sirius put on Queen’s A Day at the Races and readied further records of a quieter, solemner nature than their usual fare. Tea was poured from a porcelain pot into porcelain cups on porcelain plates. Remus couldn’t touch his. Something about the room was turning his stomach. His eyes kept drifting up and his vision distant—he was losing track of conversation. There was talk about maybe doing something larger later, perhaps at Easter or over the summer. It’d been so long since any of them had had a proper night out with James, Peter, Emmeline, Marlene, everyone, really, though that talk was quickly subsumed into ribbing Lily over her newfound maturity and begging her to share some adult wisdom that would guide them through the new decade.
“C’mon, Lils,” joked Mary. She was sprawled over the closed back of the piano while Lily was seated on its bench, one leg arched over the other and arms folded curiously over her midsection. She had on a mossy green cable-knit jumper and a long grey pencil skirt that Sirius conspicuously identified as having a ‘kick pleat’, for which no one except Remus seemingly needed any explanation. “It’s the eighties. If you’re not gonna tell us anything, then at least play us something—something new. Something fresh.”
“I didn’t know you played piano!” said Remus slightly too loud and while rocking on his sturdy chair. Lily recoiled with a blink, lips pouted in half-asked question.
“Moony, I could charm it—”
“—no,” came all their voices in unison.
“I haven’t learned anything new in years,” giggled Lily. She’d let down her usual plait, spilling her sharp red hair like a short curtain behind her. “And Lily Evans does not sing.”
“I’ll sing,” drawled Mary.
“You can—”
“—I also do watercolours, Remus,” she added, flourishing a dramatic arm off the piano, “Pascalle dances, and both Lily and Rucha did gymnastics, even if I think wizards call it something different.”
“No, they just call it gymnastics.”
“Ah, well, cheers then, Rucha. Do a flip for us?”
“I like drawing,” said Nathaniel, injecting himself uncharacteristically into the conversation. He budged his chair forwards with a screech. “Not just tattoos. I like sacred geometry and surrealism.”
“Somehow,” murmured Sirius, who was on the floor, “that does not surprise me.”
“Oi, get a room. This is my party.”
“Get a window and watch, Evans. That’d be a Hell of a gift, wouldn’t it?”
“We’ll leave that one as an exercise to the reader,” replied Lily. “Now, speaking of gifts…”
Remus was managing fine. The Doxy venom was a poor addition—in place of compounding the effect, it was either stretching things out or competing for attention. Not that Remus was an expert on this particular branch of drug, but he did have some experience. So too did Sirius—James and Peter as well. The Animagus ritual had involved hallucinogenic fungi furnished from only the most authentic muggle hippy Remus had ever met, and although he hadn’t been able to accomplish much with it himself, Remus had come along for the ride, so to speak. The onset then had been quicker and grosser and the effect more dramatic, but here, Remus had only the vaguest upset sensation his stomach. His first time he'd cried for literally three consecutive hours. Now, granted, he’d fasted with the others before, and it had been a hot summer evening on a sun-baked heahland hillside near the Potter Estate whereas here they were in a hermetically-sealed magical chamber within an old draughty castle. The dams in his mind were holding.
It took effort. Considerable effort, if you twisted his arm about it. The details that shifted weren’t the ones that you’d expect: they were background fundamentals, his inner chronometer and compass. There was no other way to phrase it except that he couldn’t quite quite be certain, despite not having remembered moving, whether he was inside or outside, or whether it was day or night. He could put a name to a face and a face to a name but the world beyond his immediate body was dissolving. Fair was foul. Foul fair.
Piss. The effect was compounding. Doxy venom was doing work. The onset was so slow Remus hadn’t perceived the shift at all—it was like a dark planet, some unobserved celestial. You could only pick it out by having all other data in line, like assembling a picture puzzle to determine which piece was missing. He crossed a million inch-wide thresholds and found himself on the other end of the earth, which happened to be the small sofa-and-armchair-and-tigerskin-rug hideaway of the Come and Go Room, where, another doorway away, Lily and Pascalle chatted shite about Theory to the remainder of P.A., laughing.
Remus had quietly excused himself as suddenly poorly and went for a little lie down after treating Lily to her gift: a manual translation he’d done of a thin, sixty-page tome penned by French monks on heritable blood curses and other somesuch magic. Very Renaissance. Given the moon was in three days and the gift was quite involved, Lily hadn’t questioned his abrupt illness.
The sounds of heels on warm flagstones meant that Mary definitely had.
“Riddikulus,” she whispered, leaning both elbows on the spine of the hard sofa and staring down at Remus’s probably blown pupils. It made sense she was an artist, in hindsight: all that makeup had to have some serious transferable skills, or perhaps it was the other way around. “Oi oi, Book Boggart. What’re you on right now?”
A pause.
The hearth crackled with a gentle flame.
“It was an accident.”
“I’m sure.”
“It was. Please don’t tell Lily.”
“Those two phrases together inspire a lot of confidence,” mused Mary. “If it makes you feel any better,” she continued, painted lips parting to show a bright smile, “I didn’t notice until Nagar clued me in. She said your eyes were awfully strange, although I thought it was—well, your furry little problem.”
“Ugh,” said Remus, although what he meant was No, Mary, that doesn’t make me feel any better. I’m high and grieving and those two things rarely work well together.
“Lily’s not gonna be upset if this genuinely was a mistake.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“It is,” replied Mary, voice dropping low, “’cos I’m also not exactly sober right now. Not that I’m as legless as you, and not that anyone will notice but—you’re not on trial, Remus.”
Remus gave a throaty, strangled noise like gnnnhmmmm and his lips frowned of their own volition, because he was on trial. That much was clear to him as the waves of fungal dissolution continued to roll over him, shaking that inner-ear steadiness that now threatened to wobble him bodily overboard into those fathomless mycological depths.
Part of Mary understood that. Remus saw it. Her face, dark and painted and the picture of understated glamour, was dissolving at the edges—becoming simpler shapes, and the jewel-tone eyeshadows and blushes felt almost true of stones. He’d felt firsthand the cold pressure of her scathing disdain, that prickly, elegant armour of sangfroid that Mary wore, and had drawn a latitudinal line along his mental cartography from who she’d been in his fifth year to who she was now. He’d filled in all the gaps. What a cruel thing to do—add it to the charges. Had she always been this way? He couldn’t remember. Probably you were supposed to ask if you were a normal person instead of a tortured werewolf. It was the same bullshite he pulled with Lily: many vivid versions of her with differing responses to his accidental intoxication, yet coalescing behind one of two dominant scenarios. One cared; one didn’t. Remus wasn’t sure which he feared more.
“I’m gonna get you some water,” said Mary. Her voice was uncertain, now, thrown by whatever yawning void she’d seen in Remus’s eyes. “Maybe a doctor and-stroke-or Sirius, yeah?”
Remus groaned again as her heels faded. Everything had become vivid and simpler and this was not, actually, a good setting in which to experiment with Doxy-addled mushrooms, because the absence of a target to deconstruct meant he had only one person to pull apart, then.
They were sitting in that armchair right there.
“Mon Dieu,” said the werewolf in a beret. Their face was powder white with red spotted cheeks, and they wore black-and-white horizontal stripes drenched with blood. They held their entire body with a limpness that flowed from the wrist, which in turn held a lazy, slow-burning cigarette. Hand-rolled. Wisps of tobacco smoke curled out from it unnaturally and wrote letters into the air.
“OH LÀ-LÀ,” said the smoke.
“Pardon me,” whispered Remus, squinting upside-down at the werewolf that looked a lot like him, actually. “Who are you, again?”
“I am French Rebellion,” said French Rebellion, dry and with a thick accent, “and I am you. And you,” they continued, “are late. The worst client I have ever had, merde.”
“Late for what?”
“It is coming,” replied French Rebellion. “It is here.”
The hearth crackled again, this time with far too much violence and a sharp sting that lingered, vibrating, in Remus’s ears. His eyes swivelled in their sockets to watch something deep and ashen and still smouldering crawl free from the fireplace and stop an inch from the tigerskin rug with its follow-me eyes, claws leaving deep soot-stain scars on the flagstones before it. It stood, dusted itself off—casting more dust about the place than there was before, actually—and was wearing robes and a powdered wig. At least, that was what Remus read to the best of his ability. The dark, smoky haze and general blurriness of the figure made its details illegible, but he sensed a great and terrible weight on it.
“THE MAGISTRATE,” said THE MAGISTRATE, “HAS ARRIVED. THE DEFENCE?”
“Ici,” said French Rebellion. They shot a stare at Remus, whose eyes went wide. Oh, Jesus. It was like that nightmare where you forgot to write thirty-six inches on the use of Lacewings in non-transformative draughts and only remembered five minutes before the lesson began.
“Present,” whispered Remus. “For what, I’m unsure.”
“Motion to strike that from the record.”
“MOTION GRANTED,” said THE MAGISTRATE. It clambered unceremoniously onto the mantle above the hearth, leaving black streaks in the air, and produced a gavel of equally intangible nature from its billowing sleeve. “THE PROSECUTION?”
From the door, Remus heard frenetic footfalls and the unmistakeable sound of rubbery soles squeaking and slipping on smoothed stone.
“I’m here, of course!” called a mischievous voice. “Just a moment!”
The werewolf that turned the corner was young, dressed formally but not overly so and with that formality dampened by the loosened red tie around his neck, the wrinkles and untucked tails to his button-down shirt and the mismatched pearl buttons on his herringbone waistcoat. His pale, fuzzy-browed face and equally fuzzy jaw were flushed. His neck held several mouth-shaped bruises. His fly was undone, for Christ’s sake. This would be a slam drunk of a trial.
Dunk.
“Wait,” said Remus, his own fuzzy brows knitting together, “I recognise you. You’re—no, you’re not supposed to be a prosecutor,” he continued. “You’re a thief. A gentleman thief.”
“Glad to see my reputation precedes me. Arse Lupène, privates detective and procurer of rare objects,” he announced with a wink and a bow, “and motion to strike that from the record, your honour. He can’t prove that I’m a thief. It’s slander, actually.”
“MOTION GRANTED.”
“We can’t do this now. Mary’s going to be back any second—”
“Aha, you won’t escape justice so easily, Remus. Not even a creature as foxy as you.”
“Please, call me—wait, no, call me Mr. Lupin, or the Defendant,” he muttered, feeling a flush creep up into his cheeks. “Jesus, this is narcissistic.”
“Solipsistic, actually.”
“It is both,” said French Rebellion, bored. They took a drag from their cigarette. Held it. Breathed out softly. “Shall we begin?”
“I don’t even know the charges,” said Remus, loud, though they all ignored him.
“THE COURT SHALL PROCEED WITH OPENING STATEMENTS.”
“Thank you, your honour,” said Arse Lupène. He paraded himself around the entirely of the small nook, behind and around the sofas in a manner that forced Remus to hike himself up on his elbows to follow the dishevelled man. “What do we really know about Remus Lupin?
“Remus Lupin is a thief of the worst order. Certainly he’s no anthropomorphic Robin Hood of a curiously sexy nature we’ll leave unexplored for the purposes of this trial. He does not steal from the rich, nor is he in the business of redistributing wealth: Remus Lupin takes and takes and takes, whether from aspiring postgraduates, witches in the grave, or from his own host of supposed loved ones, and he manipulates them into accepting it—into loving the doing. A lying thief that teaches theft as love.
“But Remus Lupin is no mere liar. He is a cunning manipulator. Machiavellian. Having spent almost three quarters of his life in practice, half of it maiming himself, and the last five years running away from everything and anything that might give him one iota of happiness, Remus lies, people of the jury, just as you and I might draw breath. Even as he sits there right now, I guarantee he dreams of fleeing. And he lies so often to himself,” continued Arse, pacing with wide hands folded behind his back, “he can no longer tell the truth of others from fiction. Not of course, that Remus cares.
“‘Care’ knows Remus, but Remus has never known ‘care.’ He imperils the lives of his so-called loved ones regularly and without learning from his mistakes. Even where mortal peril is absent, he derails near every life he enters like an industrial magnet on a tramway. Countless scores of crimes have been committed on his behalf and all for his benefit. Bodies lie in his wake.
“But those are the lucky ones. Some are left with less—Remus’s careless greed is unending. His hunger, never sated. Remus Lupin,” announced Arse, “is guilty, and I intend to demonstrate that without a moonshadow of a doubt.”
“THE DEFENCE.”
“Mes chers amis,” called French Rebellion, sprawling further over both rests of the armchair like a cat or like Mary. The cigarette never left their bloodstained fingers, but nor did it meet their mime-painted lips. The untapped ash hung off it sadly. “Liberté. Égalité. Fraternité. Communisme—such are the things that Remus,” they said, enunciating the last syllable of his name strongly instead of the first, “in all his misguided love, loves. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles…”
While, yes, Remus appreciated where French Rebellion was trying to steer this, he couldn’t help but feel their back wasn’t in it. It was a bit mixed-message, what with the eighteenth century proto-socialist pulls and the nineteenth century hithertos and theretofores, decidedly inaccessible to the average layperson who lacked the necessary academic self-flagellation. He’d also heard it all before, of course, and so his lazy brain tuned instead to a curious clicking sound behind him.
Hooking his elbows over its spine as though he were a giant climbing a mountain, Remus clambered up to stare over the back of the sofa at a weasel-looking creature hopping frantically from key to key on an oversized novelty typewriter.
“Who are you?” whispered Remus under French Rebellion’s ranting.
“I’m your typist,” huffed the weasel. “Quiet, please, shorthand is quite quite difficult. I’m going to miss a word.”
Remus peered over at the typewriter and its long, endless page. He squinted. He frowned.
“But you’re not transcribing their opening arguments.”
“Of course not. I’m only moonlighting as a shorthand typist,” said the weasel Remus thought was actually quite quite handsome. Hop. Hop.
“I didn’t—oi!” whispered Remus. “When did I imply you were handsome?”
“Aren’t I?”
“You’re—this is dishonest.”
“Aren’t we all,” said the weasel. They gave no further comment and continued hopping over the keys, typeset thwacking loudly against thick paper.
Remus unhooked his elbows and fell back to the hard cushions below, watching French Rebellion end their opening statement.
“No, I haven’t!”
“Quiet!”
“THE PROSECUTION MAY NOW CALL THEIR FIRST WITNESS,” said THE MAGISTRATE, and Remus unhooked his elbows and dropped to the hard cushions below, and, wait, fuck you, weasel.
“Rude!” whispered the weasel.
“Our first witness will testify from behind a screen,” announced Arse Lupène. His ruddy flush had come back with a vengeance. Remus’s lips quirked, realising his fly was done up, now, but his jeans had come unbuttoned. Had—he’d had it off with someone during opening arguments, clearly. Cocky bastard.
A curtain beside the hearth came alive and alight, as though somewhere in the smooth stone of the walls behind it there was a hidden egress in which to hide both a backlight and witness.
“Fearing for her own safety and, as testimony will show, because Remus Lupin has made attempts against her very life, the witness will be neither identified, nor any identifying information given.”
The silhouette of a witch of modest build and nonspecific features appeared in profile on the curtain, dampening its light with a clean outline, and her voice was muffled by an unplaceable accent as she spoke. She felt familiar.
“I’m ready,” she said. “I’ve been waiting a long time to do this.”
“In your own words, miss, could you tell us what happened?”
“Remus Lupin tried to kill me,” said the witness.
There came a number of shocked gasps from the room—one from Arse, overperformed, of course, and more like the stuttered, eager breath of taking and/or giving a dick—but there also came one from the weasel typist and several that seemed to originate from Remus’s own hands. He frowned down at them.
“How did it happen?” asked Arse.
“He hired an assassin,” said the witness, voice trembling. “On the street, they go by the name ‘Happenstance.’ Murderous. Expensive and…thorough. But Remus didn’t just want me dead,” continued the witness, a sob escaping her, “academically speaking, I mean. He wanted my life. My academic life.”
Pardon.
“He stole my position—”
“—is that Emily Leach?” called Remus, loud and flat, and again his hands gasped. He ignored whatever the piss that was about, however, and pressed on. “It is, isn’t it?”
“Objection!” cried Arse, throwing his clammy hands up. “The witness’ identity is supposed to be under protection.”
“She identified herself. On your behalf, mind you.”
“OVERRULED.”
“Fine, shite. Your witness,” said Arse, slumping onto a separate hard sofa he stroked in an oddly seductive fashion before gesturing, of course, to lax French Rebellion. They stood, striding over the curtain with a mine-like swagger, and lit another cigarette.
“Madam Leach,” they began, taking a short drag, “are you not your own woman?”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you have your own agency?” continued French Rebellion. They exhaled a cloud of light smoke and the curtain coughed. “Your own raison d’être? A rich internal life of winelike complexity and deep olive roots that is not dependent on Remus’s own?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“And are you not, ma chérie, the daughter of a former Minister for Magic? Member of the aristocracy from which all corruption flows? You must have many enemies—are you certain Remus was the employer of this ‘Happenstance?’”
“‘Certain’ has a certain—”
“—so what is true, mon amie? Is Remus the reason you did not go to Hogwarts? Or did you and your own life steer you elsewhere?”
“I—I don’t know,” whispered the silhouette of Emily Leach. “I’m not even really here.”
“Aha!” cried French Rebellion, whirling around and striking a pointed finger in the air like a lit match. “Doubt! She is with us!”
A murmuring came again from the courtroom and from Remus’s hands. He turned them over and found, to his discomfort and dissatisfaction, that his fingernails were vibrating and rumbling and speaking with tiny little half-moon mouths where they met their cuticles. He swallowed a hard lump in his throat—if his fingernails were the jurors, they were thoroughly, messily fucked, and not in the fun hair-pulling way. He’d bitten the things down within an inch of their tiny lives every week since he was five.
Arse rolled his eyes and licked his own fingers.
“Are you quite finished?”
“Oui. No further questions.”
“CALL YOUR NEXT WITNESS.”
“The prosecution calls the Tattoo on Remus’s Thigh to the stand,” announced Arse.
“Objection!” shouted both Remus and French Rebellion simultaneously, although the latter did so Frenchly. Frenchish.
Maybe he ought to let them take the wheel on this one, particularly given that Remus had never once driven a car.
“C’est absurde. The Defendant cannot be compelled to testifying against himself or themselves.”
“True! However,” said Arse Lupène, grinning cheekily, “you’ll find the Tattoo is not on Remus—not currently. It seems someone misplaced it, which, ipso facto, actually, means it is not part of the Defendant.”
“OVERRULED.”
“Thank you, your honour,” said Arse. He fumbled with his belt, and Remus’s cheeks went aflame as he bunched one side of his trousers down around the thigh, exposing both his stolen tattoo and the fact that, as often was the case with Sirius, Arse was not wearing any pants.
“Where did you get that?!” cried Remus.
“A gentleman never tells.”
“You—you stole it!”
“You can’t prove that,” said Arse, “and I am not on trial here.”
“But—”
“OVERRULED.”
“I didn’t—”
“STILL OVERRULED.”
“This is no mere tattoo,” announced Arse, baring his naked, silver-scarred thigh to the room with confident nonchalance. “This, of course, is proof of both a guilty conscience and the crime it holds within. Not only did Remus Lupin rob, effectively, the grave of the most brilliant young witch he knew,” he continued, “he manipulated five other participants into unlocking his ill-gotten gains and forced them to brand themselves into secrecy.
“Tell me: if Remus truly thought he was doing a good and righteous thing, why shroud it in so much secrecy? And why brand himself in such an obvious place—one where he’d see it daily? Ladies and gentlemen and Ziggy Stardusts of the jury, this is the mark of a werewolf full of regret. Of guilt.
“Your witness.”
French Rebellion dragged themselves to Arse’s side and crouched, blank-faced, at crotch level to watch the tattoo on his thigh.
“Mon ami, you did not ask it any questions.”
“Well, it’s a fucking tattoo, so maybe I should’ve introduced it as evidence. An exhibit, I don’t know,” replied Arse, pale face flush and annoyed. “Did you want to grab a drink later?”
“—an overabundance of caution,” called French Rebellion, breathing hot cigarette smoke onto Arse’s thigh and oddly making Remus’s own thigh itch. “That is not the mark of regret; it is not the mark of guilt. Such caution, mes ami(e)s, is an awareness that we individuals see ourselves as the heroes of our own story. Le maître. But those with power often abuse it,” they continued, swivelling from Arse’s thigh to address the small, empty room directly. “The tattoo is evidence only to show Remus knows that—he has saved himself and others from the guillotine.
“A pity. I miss the beheadings very much,” they added offhandedly. “No further questions.”
“CALL YOUR NEXT WITNESS.”
Arse fumbled to yank up his trousers and redo his clinking belt, scanning the room, thoughtful. He tapped his weirdly-slick fingers to his scruffy lips and dragged his calm brown eyes over Remus a touch too sensually before settling his gays—gaze—there. On him.
“With the court’s permission,” began Arse, the conniving fucker, “the prosecution calls Remus Lupin, or the Broken Foot of Remus Lupin, actually, to the stand.”
“Oh, we’ve just been over this. Objection!” said Remus.
“OVERRULED.”
“It’s my foot.”
“IS YOUR FOOT BROKEN RIGHT NOW?” asked THE MAGISTRATE. “DO YOU HAVE A BROKEN FUCKING FOOT? NO? I DIDN’T THINK SO. OVERRULED.”
“It was your foot,” said Arse. “Being a foot, however, we’ve called upon someone else to translate. Call it two witnesses in one.”
“Who?”
“The Bleeding Fist of Remus Lupin!”
It was uncanny, really, watching Arse kick off an unlaced boot to reveal an angry swollen foot and then scribble with a marker on the side of his cut-up fist until his index finger bore two eyes with two fuzzy eyebrows and a scruffy moustache below.
“Remus has done bad things to me,” said Fist, its lips the gap between index finger and thumb. Arse’s lips quavered oh-so-slightly as Fist spoke. “With me, too.”
“Oh, do elaborate,” said Arse.
“Are you—pardon me,” murmured Remus. “Are you getting off on this?”
“He’s put me through drywall,” continued Fist, ignoring both Remus and Arse’s lewdly-waggling eyebrows. “Struck me against stone and guts and all manner of jaw. Punched me clean through a portrait—non-magical—and made me a weapon of war. But Foot, Foot’s had it worse. Foot can’t even speak anymore.”
“It’s a foot—”
“Quiet, Remus,” said Arse. “What did the Defendant do to Foot?”
“What hasn’t he? Remus runs around without shoes, kicks stone parapets when he’s angry, and uses Foot like an emotional emergency valve whenever he wants. Whether it’s mailboxes or old rotted fences or even more drywall, Foot broke them, yeah, but Remus was the ringleader. Not to mention all the sex stuff and groping under tables—we’d never have done it without him. Not without the threats.”
“Threats?” asked Arse, although his tone made it clear he knew exactly what he was asking. Damn, he’d rehearsed his witnesses well.
“Remus has an enforcer.”
“Is that enforcer in the room with us now?” asked Arse, and, slowly, Fist nodded its chin and/or thumb. It gestured with a finger at a corner of the room, where something feral sat snarling.
“That Snarling Thing in the Corner?” asked Arse gently.
Fist nodded again, while Foot sobbed.
“That’s them,” said Fist, quiet. “I don’t know which one of them is more violent or dangerous.”
“Your witness.”
French Rebellion moved from their stripey lean to pace around and examine That Snarling Thing in the Corner a moment, smoking unenthusiastically all the way.
“C’est magnifique.”
That Snarling Thing in the Corner snarled. Whether it was a good or bad snarl—whether they enjoyed praise or not—was deeply, unsettlingly unclear.
“Is violence always wrong, Monsieur Fist?” asked French Rebellion, swivelling again. Cigarette in mouth. “Are you not a propriétaire de violence yourself?”
Fist grimaced. “Never by choice.”
“So your and Foot’s violence is not wrong—not worthy of trial—because it is not your choice?”
“I’d say so.”
“SANG DANS LES RUES,” said the wispy cigarette smoke.
“Then why is it, mon ami, that you and Remus are held to different standards? Why is your violence not by choice—for he controls your body—when Remus’s is seen as his choice, even though forces beyond his control act on him as well?” spat French Rebellion. “If he is urged to violence, and resisting it requires violence also, then what are we to say? Remus is bad because he chooses a new path, but we are good because we choose nothing?
“No, this is a coward’s position, and I will not stand for it. This Fist and Foot should not stand either, if they do not want to end up like those purged by the aristocracy, or les aristocrates sous la guillotine—”
“Objection!” called Arse, loud, and Fist vanished as he splayed his hands in disbelief. “Threatening to murder the witnesses? Really?”
“SUSTAINED.”
“Thank you, your honour.”
“CALL YOUR NEXT WITNESS.”
“The prosecution calls an expert witness to the stand, actually,” explained Arse, staring over at French Rebellion nervously, who was in turn examining That Snarling Thing in the Corner again with amused curiosity. “An expert,” he clarified, “qualified to assess and analyse the mental ongoings of the Defendant. With a focus on anal—”
“Danke sehr,” murmured an aged German voice from beside Remus. It wasn’t the weasel, still hopping away on its typewriter, nor was it hands again, though his jury-member fingernails nevertheless rumbled and oohed and aahed with the dramatics of the court.
No, it was coming from the armchair. The creased seam between soft cushion and hard seat became her mouth, off-cream button-ended armrest ends her round eyeglasses, and the undercarriage a loose second chin.
“Doctor Kokain, I’m so glad you could make it,” began Arse. “What might you be able to tell us about Remus Lupin? Specifically, why don’t we begin with his drug use? Would you define it as problematic?”
“Ja, of course,” began the armchair with a languid and instructive tone. “It is clear from any rudimentary analysis that his use is problematic. Very so. Remus has repressed his unwanted thoughts and uses these drogen to cope with them and their resulting melancholia. He cannot handle his emotions,” continued Dr. Kokain, upholstered seat-lip gnashing in place, “in the same way he cannot handle the emotions of others. These drogen are his escape—how Remus engages and tames his Todestrieb. His death drive.”
“Fascinating,” said Arse. It was clear he did not find it at all fascinating. “What about his thought patterns? Why are they so unhealthy?”
“These are all leading questions,” muttered Remus. “Why aren’t you objecting?”
“Why are not you, mon ami?”
“Shut up.”
“Ah, ja, these are also his escape. You will notice that Remus is a creature of negation and interruption—a sure indication of psychosexual frustration,” explained Dr. Kokain. “He undercuts his own thoughts, favouring negative expressions: ‘not unlike,’ ‘not only,’ and other, subtler ones, of ‘well’ and ‘actually’ and also sometimes ‘of course.’ This too is a desire for flight. Being abandoned by his father and then his mother, Remus must abandon also his thoughts—and this is also where his misogyny originates. To embrace them would be to trust them: an impossible act, like ejaculation—”
“—I do not have a problem with—”
“—but it also provides him a schadenfreude. In enjoying nothing, in negating everything, he feels superior to the others around him who suffer in feeling. He cares about nothing and so he is above everything—and he cannot be hurt or left by his colleagues, because he will never let them be his friends.”
Remus worked his jaw silently and wondered whether his quasilegal position would be worse or better after setting the armchair on fire. She wasn’t even a very nice armchair, really.
“Intriguing. Your witness.”
French Rebellion strode over to the armchair and, with a crinkle of their powdered nose, leaned down to pinch something white and powdery that’d been stuck in the creases and cracks of its upholstery. They ground it between their fingers and touched it to their gums, smiling knowingly.
“Are all drugs bad, docteur?” they asked.
“Nein. You already know the answer to that question,” said Dr. Kokain, her armrest eyes growing glassy with boredom. “Perhaps we should explore your own Todestrieb—”
“How are you so certain that Remus’s substance use is self-destructive? Do you not use drugs yourself?”
“Ja, I am a doctor.”
“So when you use drugs to investigate and do mad science with theories you yourself created, docteur, even if those theories were created while high on morphine or cocaine or just while lazing in a bath,” began French Rebellion, sucking furiously on the end of their cigarette instead of taking breaths, “you are a genius. But when Remus does them, he is mad? Even when he uses them to stretch his boundaries, emotional or physical, without spurring the crises d’angoisse that have plagued him since childhood?”
“He is spiralling—”
“—he was circling the drain,” countered French Rebellion, throwing down their cigarette and stamping it beneath their bare, bloody heel. “The connotation that drugs are destructive cannot be taken as anything but a power structure imposed by the bourgeois ruling class, and his ‘negative’ thought pattern, docteur, is not always a sign of mental illness, non? Interrupting and interrogating his thoughts, actually, could be an internal dialectical—an act of self-reflection. Isn’t that true?”
“Perhaps—”
“Doubt!” spat French Rebellion.
“Oh, come on,” cried Arse, standing up from his own hard sofa. “They’re not a doctor!”
“How can you say you know Remus’s motives, his thoughts and feelings, if he himself, ce désastre, does not know? Even if you give away his paranoia and his cowardice,” they continued, leaning both arms on the doctor’s armrests/glasses, “you cannot say more that they are from a lack of care as from too much—that he may feel a burden of love, that he does not deserve them and so wishes them to be free of him? It matters not if it’s so. Is it not possible?”
“It is equally pathetic,” said Dr. Kokain thoughtfully. Her seam made a thin line like pursed, fabric-y lips. “Are you certain you are not a doctor yourself?”
“Fuck,” muttered Arse.
“Fuck,” muttered Remus.
“No further questions,” said French Rebellion. They flopped backwards onto the armchair, which once gain fell inanimate after a whispered auf wiedersehen.
“CALL YOUR NEXT WITNESS.”
“How many are there—”
“The prosecution would like to introduce into evidence,” interrupted Arse, who seemed to be reading off the palm of his hand, now, with squinted brown eyes and a furrowed fuzzy brow. “Er, shite. Give me a second. Oh, here it is: exhibit B. The Regal Stag, the Scarred Dog, and the Wiley Rat,” he continued, and snapped his fingers expectantly at the curtain by the hearth again.
As the flames flickered, the sprawling shadows reformed on the deep purple fabric, shaping themselves into the vague, loping figure of a wide-antlered stag, a limping dog, and a spiralling, scurrying rat. They all chased each other across the curtain’s faded embroidery like the lions on Sirius’s drapes.
“This is low, like,” whispered Remus. “Even for you, Arse.”
“Not only were these animals made illegal—permanently so, mind you, with a one-way ticket to Azkaban for their troubles—in order to help the Defendant escape his lycanthropic penance, each and each of them had their lives irrevocably shifted by Remus. Not just their minds, which grew muddled by the animals they became, but in the aftermath that followed: the Stag spurned the Dog and Rat in his absence; the Dog spurned himself; and the Rat grew callous in his abandonment.
“This was the reward Remus gave them,” said Arse, jovial attitude now muted and his pale face ashen. “Your witness. Or evidence, I suppose.”
“Waiting for Godot,” announced French Rebellion. They’d lit yet another fresh cigarette, which spun out light, swirling grey smoke like a floating ribbon. “That is the fate of James Potter and Sirius Black in a world without someone to catch their arms and twist them to the ground. Two bored aristocrats. Brilliant. Charming. Possessing a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. Great magical skill with no drive or ambition to hone them and give them focus.
“Whether Remus is right or not that they see him as charity, he did not force them to become illegal. He did not even ask,” continued French Rebellion, lazing. “Three young magical adepts of prodigious talents stood up and surpassed their own perceived limits—limits believed insurmountable by all other witches and wizards they knew—and did something helpful, something actually bloody helpful with magic for once, instead of letting it remain its useless, self-contained whimsy—narcissisme.
“In another world, this would be life-changing knowledge. Revolutionary. That an Animagus may calm a werewolf would shape the face of lycanthropy under another Ministry, or perhaps something more than a Ministry.
“Oui, they are all illegal. That is not their fault. We cannot take the illegality of a thing to mean that it is wrong, only that those with the power to discipline and punish believe it is wrong, and that we will suffer at their hands.”
“THAT'S HOW IT IS,” began the cigarette smoke, “ON THIS BITCH OF AN EARTH.”
“No further questions. Or comments.”
“This is a kangaroo court,” muttered Remus.
“That is not our fault, mon cher.”
“CALL YOUR FINAL WITNESS.”
“Wait, final—no,” began Remus, eyes widening. He clutched the hard sofa cushions for dear life. “No, I’m not sure I’m ready for this to end, actually. I’d like the kangarooing to continue.”
“EVERYTHING ENDS, REMUS.”
“No. You can’t prove that, like.”
“The prosecution calls their final witness to the stand,” announced Arse Lupène, face still ashen and pale and lined, suddenly, with age. The fuzz of his chins and brows was a slate grey, like the roots of his hair, now, although he could barely pass for forty. “The corpse of Benjamin ‘Benjy’ Fenwick.”
Remus screwed shut his eyes on reflex and tucked his head between his knees on the sofa. No. No, he wouldn’t see this. Jesus buggering Christ, he couldn’t see this.
“Oh. S’tidy, like, this,” said a hollow and familiar voice. “Being alive again, I mean. The room’s nice too.”
“You stole this,” whispered Remus.
“You thought it,” replied Arse, voice cold. “How many times, Benjamin—”
“—please, call me Benjy, like. Everyone did at my funeral.”
“—how many times, Benjy, has Remus thought about your death? The things he could’ve done to stop it, his role in it unfolding the way it did? And how many times,” continued Arse, pacing with heavy, booted footfalls booming like a church knell or woodland explosions in Remus’s ears, “has he wondered why he survived the battle—that slaughter, actually—and neither you nor the late Defence professor did?”
“Too many to count, I’d say,” mused Benjy. “Oi, Remus, love, aren’t you going to say hello? What, you’ll shag me and wax about me, but you can’t look me in the eye?”
Remus bit into his tongue hard.
“Just as well. Bits of me everywhere, y’see. Hard to look me in the eye when it’s on six different trees.”
Sick. He was going to be bloody sick.
“Elaborate, would you, Benjy?” said Arse, his own voice wobbly as well. “Who killed you?”
“That’s easy. Hubris,” he said, counting off audibly on wet, squishy fingers, “and lycanthropy, and indifference. All Remus’s.”
“His hubris?”
“Thinking he could play soldier-spy without cracking a few eggs like birdshite on the pavement, like. If the Snydes never learned he was on their trail—if he didn’t underestimate the fascist sods—I reckon I might have had a decent chance.”
“His lycanthropy?”
“Face it,” said Benjy, a hollow and biting laugh spilling out of him like lost air from a popped balloon. “If he wasn’t such a bloody feral yob, he wouldn’t have kicked that hand. Who does that, like? Second he called us in, though, he became my responsibility, so I had to follow him and his posh boyfriend through—fatal error, obviously.”
“And his indifference?”
“Well, he treated the whole thing a right lark, didn’t he?”
“Could you expand on that?”
“Running around the London underground or hopping on that bleeding bike, sitting in café windows and trusting every which werewolf that batted their eyes his way. Did you know he didn’t consider for a second this Kelly lad might’ve been working with Terra?” asked Benjy, incredulous. “Not a lick of sense in him. Never thought through a plan unless it had to do with his secret boyfriend. Never thought it was any worse than an exam or a game. He’s not the one who paid for it, though,” continued Benjy, a messy frown spilling into his voice. “Never is, his type. Always mine. World never was nice to a Black Welsh boy, no matter how boy-next-door he was.”
“Your witness.”
There came a long stretch of silence, then, punctuated only by the subdued thwacking of a large novelty typewriter and the crackling of hearth flame. Someone was breathing—all of them were, here, as one, French Rebellion and Arse Lupène and even That Snarling Thing in the Corner as well as Remus himself—and yet Remus felt, unerringly, that he could never have enough air. There was not enough air in Britain. It was all on fire, scalding his poor delicate bronchioles.
“Benjy,” whispered French Rebellion. “I don’t want to hurt you, mon ami.”
“S’alright, like. I’m dead, aren’t I?”
“You did not die for us. You did not die to teach us. Your death does not revolve around Remus’s life.”
“You tried this one on poor Emily Leach already, mate. I’m not buying it twice.”
“But that hubris which killed you,” continued French Rebellion, voice trembling first with anxiety and soon thereafter with a building, wildfire-like indignant rage, “it did not belong to Remus, did it? Remus did not set you or any schoolboy on the path of this War—you must know who it was. Albus Dumbledore.”
“Oh, so I’m my own man, am I, then I’m owned by some hundred-year-old tosser? Funny, that.”
“Mais non, Dumbledore’s hubris concerned Remus and Sirius. They did not have the training, the knowledge, the strength that you did—they were not masters of their craft. Dumbledore’s arrogance and, if I am to be bold, his desperation, drove him to cast them out into the cold, hoping they would come back stronger. If Remus pulled the trigger on hubris,” said French Rebellion, grim, “Albus Dumbledore put the gun in his hand.”
“Fancy that.”
“For lycanthropy,” they continued, momentum still building, “if Remus could transform at will, if he had not been disturbed in his education by monthly unnecessary maimings, he would have been stronger. A better wizard. But even so, his ‘yob’ reflex saved you once, did they not? So did his night eyes. Hogsmeade. You recall, oui?”
“Might do.”
“At great personal risk to Remus himself, no less. He could have died.”
“Might have.”
“And the urge of others, like Sirius, to protect Remus due to his lycanthropy, that cannot be held against him either. Sirius moved on instinct to protect him instead of attacking, and yet Remus may have made it out of that forest on his own, a werewolf in the woods. Or, he may have been the only casualty. But this,” added French Rebellion, dripping, dripping, “is a structural issue. Not an individual one.”
“Good for Remus,” said Benjy. “Bad for me. For the world, too. You ever wonder how much of my precious knowledge ended up spattered across a handful of blackberry bushes?”
“Indifference—that is also a structural issue. Whether you believe Remus cared or did not about the espionage, he cared about the War, the things he was doing. He agonised, mon ami, over the smallest details, while so many others could not be bothered to look at the problems burning their Paris to the ground. If indifference killed you—and, oui, I think it did—was it not the indifference of the wizarding world for not taking up arms against these aristocrates fascistes?”
“A real comfort, hearing that.”
“We are sorry, Benjy. You deserved so much more,” muttered French Rebellion. “You were owed so much more.”
Silence fell over the courtroom a moment, and Remus eventually cracked open an eye and pulled his head from between his knees.
Benjy was gone.
French Rebellion and Arse bowed their heads low, eyes shut for a minute of silence.
“THE COURT WILL NOW HEAR CLOSING ARGUMENTS.”
“Don’t,” rasped Remus. He sat up, smearing with the heels of his hands the fatigue and pricking tears in his eyes, the ones that blurred his vision more than booze and left him more morose. “I—no, stop talking. All of you. You’ve all had enough time. If anyone should have the right to give a closing argument,” Remus argued, “it should be me. I should have the last word at my own bloody trial, like.”
“Objection, your honour—”
“—oh, stop. Stop calling it ‘your honour,’ Jesus, you brown-nosing plod. It’s THE MAGISTRATE. It’s not even a judge.”
“It’s respectable.”
“Then so am I,” spat Remus. “It’s part of me, after all, isn’t it?”
“I—hey!” said Arse, pointing at French Rebellion. “Back me up here. I had a very swish closing argument prepared, and if he gets his way, neither of us, actually, will get to say our piece. Is that really what you want?”
They shrugged. Their mime face paint was running, now, leaving dark circles around their eyes and streaking down their fuzzy cheeks as they sucked on their cigarette. They flicked it wholesale for the hearth.
“LET THEM EAT CAKE,” said the cigarette smoke, tumbling through the air before being swallowed by flame.
“Fine,” said French Rebellion, rising from their catlike sprawl and leaving a deep crimson stain on the armchair. “Il faut interdire Remus de faire la plaidoirie. C’est une catastrophe, cette Guerre, mais la pire catastrophe, bien sûr, ça c’est Remus Lupin. Il est aussi génial que stupide; aussi osé que prudent. Jamais je n’ai connu un mec qui évite ses émotions profond si fortement et qui s’y jete de manière tout aussi fort. Mais, sous cette soupe de la nostalgie et de haine internalisée,” they continued, rapid fire, “on trouve un imbécile qui rêve d’une monde méritante ses fantaisies capricieuses. Une monde où nous y arrriverons sur un chémin d’un rouge sanglant, mouilé du sang de la bourgeoisie. En ayant—”
“Stop!” shouted Remus. “Tu peux pas do that—I mean, shite—merde—what I mean to say, your honour,” stuttered Remus, reeling, “is ‘Objection: prolonged bilingual aside in a primarily monolingual dialogue.’”
“SUSTAINED.”
“Fascistes,” whispered French Rebellion.
“You can’t be serious—” began Arse.
“—it’s my turn—”
“—I’m the prosecution, I ought to go first, not last—”
“SILENCE,” called THE MAGISTRATE, and there was silence once more. “HAS THE JURY ARRIVED AT A VERDICT?”
Remus turned over his hands, over and over and over, and found them quiet. His worn cuticles and chewed-off nail ends gave no hint to him, and so instead, he held his breath.
“GUILTY ON ALL CHARGES.”
His jaw slackened.
“That’s a load of shite—I still haven’t been informed of my supposed criminal activity!”
“THE SENTENCE IS AS FOLLOWS,” continued THE MAGISTRATE, ignoring him entirely. “RETURN TO THE MUNDANE WORLD. VIA OESOPHAGUS.”
Remus paled. “Wait, no—I’ll take a plea—”
“CASE DISMISSED.”
With a bang of its ashen gavel, Remus was hurtling forwards, shoulder hunching, mouth suddenly flooded with thick and viscous saliva. No. No, no no no not here—anywhere but here. A flurry of sound and motion followed him, the courtroom spinning back into its small, cosy, and dimly-lit affair while a rapid rush of clicking heels crossed the hot flagstones. Remus barely made it to the floor before him vomited. It pooled sadly and in a small, anticlimactic puddle, onto the tigerskin rug with follow-me eyes.
Being honest, at the moment they read more as kill-me eyes.
A gentle hand was on his back, rubbing a slow circle while another smoothed back bits where beading sweat had stuck Remus’s shorter shaggy hair to his brow.
“Whoa, hey,” hummed Mary, caught between soothing and alarmed, “it’s okay. Just—Jesus wept, Remus, that’s vile—just let it out.”
“That was the worst hour of my life, like,” muttered Remus between dry-heaves. Christ. He only hoped the others in the room next door hadn’t heard him—that’s the last thing Lily needed to see. Remus choking like a cat on a hairball on his hands and knees and sweating like stone in a thunderstorm.
“Remus,” said Mary, slowly, “I was gone for maybe a minute to fetch you water.”
“Fu-u-uck,” he groaned. “I can’t do this for another three hours.”
“Water. Have some water.”
Mary sat him back, then, healer eyes appraising him and tugging his eyelids apart while she trusted Remus to feed himself slow sips of glorious ice-cold water from an equally cold goblet. When he drained the thing a few minutes later, he pressed its frozen base to his forehead and moaned in relief. Whether she was concerned or amused or, in all likelihood, some combination of both, Remus realised Mary was not about to pry. Not after his last outburst at her. Which was wild, really, given he could barely change his own habits over the course of years and yet one small moment of his life had left a great impact on her conduct towards him—one, perhaps, he could change with another small moment. Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes and he sniffled like a bloody child. God, he was not going to cry in front of Mary Macdonald while she fussed over his arms and took his pulse.
“It was so vivid,” he whispered. “I can’t stop thinking about Benjy.”
Mary stilled like a cat having spotted something eerie and intangible in the dark. Closing her fingers around Remus’s wrist, she then budged, also much like a child, in beside him and tucked an arm over his shoulders until he was leaned up against her, both pairs of their knees high to their chests like a pillow fort to keep out evil. She feathered her fingers through his sweat-dampened hair and breathed out, long.
“Neither can I, Remus.”
When he stared up from his chin-shoulder perch at her, he realised his vision was blurry. He was crying. Yet, when he blinked away the tears, he saw that so too was Mary, although her makeup, that painted armour, did not run. Mary had lost the most of them, after all.
Time escaped Remus. He wasn’t sure how long they sat there at the foot of the sofa, beside that slowly-suffering and vomit-stained rug, listening to the embers crackle and the quiet laughter coming from the other room. It might’ve been a minute or a year or an entirely different lifetime where he and Mary were something that approached family—Remus might’ve liked having a sister, especially if she’d been anything like Mary—but she eventually coughed and dragged a knuckle under her eyes, brushing away tears.
“Come on, then. I’m gonna take you to Pomfrey.”
“No, I’m—I’m going to sit with the others,” murmured Remus, though he let her pull him up regardless. “It’s not so bad when I’m not alone.”
“You sure?”
“No,” replied Remus. “But I’d prefer it to yet another hospital visit this month,” he added, and then stared down at the sad, silently-suffering tigerskin rug a moment. “Give me a second, would you? Then we’ll rejoin them.”
He crouched at the tail of the rug, rolling its ancient and now crusty form into a tight tube until only the bulk of the head remained out, and then stared a while into its pleading eyes.
Release me from this suffering, said the tiger’s eyes. I have been here a thousand years.
With a sharp snap of his arm Remus flung the rug into the hearth and Mary gave a muffled What in the actual fuck, Lupin? except her words died on her lips because something curious happened, then. As greedy flames licked up the tigerskin with preternatural speed, its once-pleading eyes grew alight with joy, and Remus heard a low, mournful whisper.
“Everything ends,” it hissed.
Now, granted, Remus was on drugs of questionable potency and had just hallucinated a trial of his own making, but when he turned back to Mary, her brown eyes were wide and trembling with pure, abject horror.
Remus looked to the hearth.
Remus looked to Mary.
“Did you also—”
“—yeah, Lupin, I did,” she whispered. “What the fuck.”
***
“—Lily, you’re WHAT—”
***
“—I cannot believe her,” grumbled Sirius, stripping off his Quidditch instructor kit. “She—I can’t even say it!”
“Pregnant?”
“Pregnant!” said Sirius. He threw his hands and socks into the air, the latter travelling much further than the other. His trousers and pants followed soon thereafter. A scandal in Stuart tartan. “Gutted. That is so Not On.”
“She’s not exactly Boys’ Club, Padfoot.”
“She’s as good as, Moony. How could she do this to us?”
“Come here.”
“It’s a big change, Moony. Bigger than everything.”
“Come here—Jesus, you’re cold, like.”
“You’re warm,” murmured Sirius. He tucked his clammy nose in against Remus’s neck and snuffled. “Why are you not as upset as I am? She’s pregnant. Things are changing. Permanently.”
“That’s actually something I wanted to talk about—”
“—look, Moony, I’m happy to keep trying—overjoyed, y’know—but I don’t think it’s gonna happen for us.”
“Had your fun?”
“Depends on whether I can shag you silly right now.”
“In a bit.”
“Good boy. Consider my fun safely stowed. Also, you’re making me worried.”
“Socrates offered to teach me something,” Remus began, taking a deep, steadying breath. Their dormitory was still unusually vibrant and Sirius’s grey eyes so vivid, almost too real. “I’ve been thinking about it a while, but it—it’s a big change too, Pads.”
“Bigger—”
“—than pregnancy, probably, yes.”
To his credit, Sirius listened intently as he recounted Socrates’s story—the Bassarids/maenads, the second half of the aconite ritual, those loose, sandlike memories of the All Hallow’s Eve attack and the night-black wolf among them.
“I’m guessing they didn’t lay out an itemised list of changes,” said Sirius, quiet. “Did they?”
“I don’t think they’re a list person, Padfoot. Not sure they quite count as a person at all.”
“And you wanna—”
“—I know, I know, it’s stupid and hasty—”
“—the War won’t last forever—”
“—but our friends are going to keep dying, Pads,” finished Remus. “Them and others who have loved ones and friends like us. Things—they aren’t going well, are they? The Death Eaters have at least one wolf like Socrates on their side. More, maybe, and Jesus, I don’t—Greyback’s a bloody pissing enigma, but, thinking back, he’s done at least the first half already. To target kids like he has, I mean to say.”
Sirius tightened his wide bony grip around Remus’s chest and tousles his hair with his nose.
“I think that it won’t be a sudden change,” continued Remus. “That’s not how these things feel they ought work. They’re gradual. The person who starts the ritual isn’t the one who can finish it.”
“The werewolf makes the ritual,” murmured Sirius, “and the ritual makes the werewolf. You—Moony, that’s old magic. Quest magic of Albion and shit. Are you sure—”
“—no, I’m not. Not particularly because I’m worried it might cost me you and everyone else I love. I don’t—Socrates called it ‘wild magic,’” he stuttered. “I don’t know who or what I might be on the other side, Padfoot. If Socrates themselves is any indication, I don’t know if I’ll be capable of fitting in with other witches and wizards, let alone co-existing with them—and even if I was,” he continued, frowning, jaw churning grim milk, “I’m afraid they might not want me. I could tell something was different with Socrates from the moment I heard and saw them. I don’t think they can relate to non-wolves.”
“Not even to an Animagus?”
“I don’t know.”
Sirius blew a thin stream of air between his perfect teeth. “S’pose not. Socrates ran from us when they gathered I was with you that first night, yeah?” muttered Sirius. Except he wasn’t grumbling, wasn’t dragging his feet. His jaw worked something tough but with determination. This wasn’t a problem he couldn’t swallow. “Moony,” he continued, heartbeat picking up anticipatory speed, “hear me out a moment.”
Remus tilted his chin, so as to say, Well, have at it, then.
“What if,” began Sirius cautiously, “you made me a werewolf.”
“Have you lost your fucking—”
“—don’t yell. I’m gonna become a dog if you yell.”
It was not a threat most couples threw around when arguing.
“I don’t—Pads. Please. Please.”
“I know how you feel about—”
“—it’s a life-destroying curse, Padfoot. You can’t take it back, it’s not some bloody lark, and half the world—maybe more, probably more—will want you dead for it. I can’t believe I have to lay this out for you. You’ll be compelled to kill—”
“—that last one’s not true. Not anymore, Remus. It’s not true for you.”
Remus took another breath. He hadn’t broken anything, though, really, nothing was in reach. Sirius’s splayed fingers weighed on Remus’s belly, lifting and falling over his diaphragm, as if guiding his breaths in and out.
“I’m not saying we should do it,” said Sirius, quiet. “I’m not saying it’s a good idea. But I’m saying that if you’re gonna pass through some immanent threshold—”
“—then you’re going to follow me over that cliff,” finished Remus. A sharp laugh of disbelief crawled out him. “What a mess we are.”
“Rather be a gargantuan mess with you than a little flea’s one on my own.”
“Piss off.”
“Bite me—ah, that’s in poor taste, innit.”
Remus winced. “Jesus buggering Christ. Can we—can we take a minute. Fifteen, maybe? Not too long ago I was whirling about on a broom.”
“You’re completely mental for doing that while sozzled, mate.”
“And your blood probably hasn’t settled back in your head yet.”
“It’s settling somewhere.”
“Charming.”
“I could help you relax, y’know—”
“—you’re deadly serious, aren’t you?”
“About sucking you off? Yeah, why, did you want me to beg? I can beg, Moony.”
“About—I can’t even say it.”
“I promise this isn’t just me competing with Lily for attention. Solemnly swear.”
“You know how awful this is for me to think about, don’t you, Pads?”
“Pregnancy?”
“Stop making jokes.”
“Stop lashing and sit still. ’tchu sure you’re not bloody feral already?”
“Piss. Off.”
“I’m not about to go looking in the woods or mountains or maybe Cardiff for a werewolf to bite me, Moony,” he added, flitting in his usual way between maudlin and mockery. “I just—if the choice is leaving you behind or changing…”
Neither of them spoke for the rest of The Scream, a Siouxsie Sioux album that Sirius had been sad to learn two years ago was not sung by actual banshees. The distant haunting moodiness of it fit the room.
“I’ll do some research, Pads.”
“Love you, Moony.”
“Love you back, you plonker.”
Notes:
If you're a traumatised queer teenage Welsh werewolf and you're consuming multiple cups of hallucinogenic tea infused with faerie venom, your mushroom trip will be exactly like this. Otherwise, it's (probably) unlikely. I remind you, dear readers, that this is a work of fiction.
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, End of Year 2 will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 7 June, a Friday.
If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is Let Slip the Dogs of War by itallstartedwithdefenestration, a dark R/S first war AU which focuses on spy interplay and conflicting loyalties between our two lovers. Do mind the warnings—but don't let them scare you off, either!
Chapter 21: End of Year 2
Notes:
or the one in which Remus thinks about lesbians.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
For the first time in months, maybe years, Remus was looking towards the future instead of back at his past. And as it turned out, his future involved a lot of reading and a lot more fumbling around in the dark.
February saw him and Sirius laying low at Dumbledore’s behest. Finally having an excellent reason to never leave the castle grounds given their blown cover, they found themselves nevertheless going stir-crazy in the weeks since Christmas—Sirius more so, though Remus’s blood was almost as hot with agitation as well. Icicles formed like carious teeth on the overhang just outside their little bathroom dormitory window like bars on a gaol cell. Students fell hush in the corridors as they passed. Every ghost and even the poltergeist Peeves gave them a wide spectral berth, as if attuned to the tight-spring tension within them and fearful of all that coiled potential energy. He felt they were two dogs pacing their kennel. A cage of books.
Little could slake their agitation. Not even Slughorn’s Valentine’s do. The same ballroom with the same high ceiling; the same greedy-fingered wizard and the same old fishhook begging for Remus to run himself through. The dress was fancier. The wine flew freer. You could scarcely scent the War outside over the reek of ten thousand flayed roses. How many steelworkers were yet on strike? Was the strike still on? Who knew? The tablecloths were a scintillating white silk, spellwoven. They repelled stains and moisture. He couldn’t quite look at them for more than a minute without the urge to put out a fag on its shimmering threads. Wouldn’t that impress his suitors. By a tall white marble bust of Eros (Cupid, as the Romans called him), Mary and Lily, shocks in ruby red and lily white, vied for the attention of a Victorian-looking wizard who might’ve been a prominent figure at St. Mungo’s; where the smooth flagstones gave way to shifting stained-glass windows and tall viciously-trimmed rosebushes in Romanesque pots awaited his audience, tall and thin and fat and short and bespectacled and bearded and bald-headed. Far behind them was Sirius astride a balcony door. His hair was up. He made the smokey-smoke gesture. Irma Pince had repeatedly reminded Remus that there was someone here he ought to talk to regarding a fair price for his cartographical research. Something to that effect.
The wintry night air was soft and cool.
While Sirius and Remus were out on the snow-dusted balcony and the others—Pascalle, Lily, and even Nathaniel North principal among them—filtered the militaristic sponsors from the innocuous, no one noticed Rucha Nagar. She’d been an overlookable witch in all the months Remus had known her, and so she remained right up until the point that, mid-conversation, she slit Damocles Belby’s throat with an unknown curse.
No one told them exactly what happened. It’d taken a few seconds before someone screamed When he’d looked in through the fogged windows, all he’d seen were a sea of turned backs. Nothing could’ve compelled him to elbow his way to the front of the crowd. He smelled it over the roses. Fresh and hot and metallic. According to witnesses, her eyes were glazed over. Belby’s, by contrast, were frozen forever in shock.
Aurors were called in. The Headmaster held several mysterious meetings in his office to which Remus was not privy. Lily Evans, being their liaison to the postgraduate board and thus burdened with the task of convincing aspiring witches and wizards that they were unlikely to be murdered at school, had access to resources he didn’t. This was as far as she managed to put it together:
Since her arrival at the program Rucha Nagar had been courting all manner of investor for her post-postgraduate life. This was corroborated by the wealth of correspondence she’d sent over years. Lily herself had helped fine-tune some such letters. Damocles Belby was one of many potential benefactors, but at start of term, this past September, she began pursuing him specifically with a laser focus. It as an odd choice, what with Belby’s somewhat mad-genius hermit status among the Potioneer’s Guild, but people often did odd things in their final year of studies. Then again, the same could be said when under the iron influence of the Imperius Curse. While Lily hadn’t learned the nature of his most recent project, she suspected Rucha had, and in so doing passed that information unwittingly to the Death Eaters. From there, well.
Pascalle du Pont described it like a failed decapitation with a large invisible sword.
And so another one of their postgrad lot went away never to return.
It was another impossible straw on Remus’s already strained camelback. He was growing cooler, freezing with every tragedy and as he realised just how small he was in that already little magical world of Britain. Sirius, however, burned like phosphorous. That which had made them drunk had made him bold; what had quenched Remus had given Sirius fire. Immediately he named Severus as the culprit to anyone they trusted and had to be restrained, twice physically, from taking revenge into his own hands. That was who they were now—what Remus was. He was the werewolf who tackled Sirius to wrest the wand from his hand despite knowing in all likelihood he was dead on correct. Which was the problem with fascists like the Death Eaters. When they tried to murder you, some fucking idiot out there was always ready to arrest you if you dared try to murder them back.
His worlds were increasingly colliding. The shell game he played himself was flagging; he was losing track of which secret was where. Most mornings he and Sirius woke as students and went to bed soldiers. The Order of the Phoenix pressed its unflinching eye to his every west window at Hogwarts, demanding his attention. The War pressed its eye to the east.
Rucha Nagar’s sleeper-agent assassination heralded a larger overarching shift in Death Eater tactics.
On the 28th of February, twenty-eight half-bloods were discovered unconscious at once in an empty storefront on Diagon Alley. Not a one of them had any memory as to how they arrived there together, and each had been on the list of ‘missing’ witches and wizards, some dating back to before the official beginning of the War. A decade ago. Christ. It made the front page of the Prophet twice, once to note their return, and once when Minister Minchum decided to place them in quarantine until such time a Legilimens, a kind of witch or wizard trained in the art of mind reading and mental magic, and Auror team could investigate the circumstances of their reappearance. Outcry and outrage followed both articles, of course.
The position was an impossible one. With the murder of Damocles Belby still on everyone’s lips, it could only be assumed that each of the twenty-eight had also been subjected to the Imperius Curse or other, subtler means of conditioning. Some were proprietors; one was a guard at Gringotts; three had been Ministry clerks of varying seniorities; and many, many still had living friends and loved ones overjoyed to discover their lost companions alive against all odds. So, what to do with them? Remus had no idea. If it’d been his mum, or Sirius, Mary, Lily—what would he have done? How could he trust them, pretend everything was normal, and how could he not?
They were bad thoughts for a paranoiac werewolf and worse ones when Dumbledore informed him and Sirius they’d be returning to the field soon enough. After some instruction, of course.
Andromeda’s quaint little cottage house felt less little and more like a spacious, vacant tomb with only a handful of people therewithin. The hearth to him was like a sepulchre. A sepulchre with mallard tea cosies for gargoyles. He felt like a child seated next to Sirius on the sofa. Across the coffee table stood grey-and-glittering Albus P.W.B. Dumbledore, &c. &c., who was pleased to make introductions for Caradoc Dearborn, a wizard who once had his forefingers, to hear him tell it, on the pulse of magical Britain.
In 1968 he darkened Dumbledore’s doorstep in the dead of night one November to share a grave rumour about vagrants and travellers going missing all across the British Isles. There was a private event unfolding in an old dread manor in the British countryside that only twenty-seven people in the world were supposed to know about. A gruesome ball. Caradoc was the twenty-eighth; Dumbledore, twenty-ninth. Emergency measures had been taken. Favours long-owed were chased down and extracted with interest. He did not ask about what had transpired at that ball in 1968 and neither Dumbledore nor Caradoc Dearborn offered to explain. Once again he was sitting on tufted cushions in the shadows of giants. Remus wasn’t certain it was possible to accurately tabulate the number of lives saved, given two extra years to forestall the War.
Remus had been eight years old. Caradoc flinched when Remus verbalised that fact, his prickly jaw staying tight as they made their respective introductions and Caradoc laid out what would become a gruelling syllabus.
Training with Caradoc Dearborn was more agonising than any viva voce thesis review or half-hearted attempt at Parallel Sequencing—the latter Remus was still dreadful at, though Sirius claimed, between feathered kisses, he was being too hard on himself—and almost as annoying. Not only was Caradoc Welsher than Remus, he was twice as fit and flirted brazenly with Sirius, albeit never in the public eye. It was constant. Indiscriminate. It went on for days. They’d be tucked away in the guest room of a spartan McKinnon household, supposedly talking about how to infiltrate, spy, and hustle people, but in reality Caradoc and Sirius would spend the entire session eye-fucking one another. Apparently they were called the Order of the Phoenix because at least eighty percent of them were a bunch of flaming bloody queers.
Not that Remus would’ve minded—it made a certain sense, really, and he’d come to enjoy being a flaming bloody queer himself, particularly the parts where he came—but it was absurd. Caradoc was absurd. He was in his late forties, looked like a Welsh football player in his late thirties, and he dressed like James’s father, all oversized woolly jumpers and ancient patchy trousers albeit with added nicotine stains between his fingers and lighter ones on his teeth.
Unlike James’s late father, if Remus’s intuition and/or creepy nose were any indication, Caradoc was shagging more people than Sirius on the regular: another conniving thief-type in their unit by the name of Fletcher (who refused to elaborate on whether it was his first or last name), both red-headed and stocky Prewett twins (separately, and it became less impressive as Remus realised they had some sort of complex V-shaped hippy triad going on), any number of unnamed underworld contacts of his, and, of course, Sirius.
When Remus’s bare arse hit the sheets after a particularly nerve-wracking and exhilarating first excursion to the seedy underbelly of Knockturn Alley, he fumed over being counted in that number as well. Unknown quarry, unknown pursuers. Shades of Wales. He ought to blame it on the adrenaline. Or maybe it was the mockery. They’d both been piss drunk and Remus had been so very curious as to whether the man actually had a Welsh dragon tattoo on his navel, and then by all reports the loose headboard hammered hard enough it sounded like an actual Welsh fucking dragon had been tapdancing with a banshee behind the thin bedroom wall of their Soho flat. He couldn’t tell if Sirius was furiously horny or hornily amused, what with Remus wincing every time he sat down the morning after and the gravelly rawness of his voice.
“Piss drunk,” said Sirius, slow, jaw grit, upper lip peeling in a rictus, “and curious enough to clean your arse for half an hour?”
“Did you watch the clock, or…?”
“Did you use a condom, or…?”
Perhaps it was both.
As for Remus’s furry little problem, well. Caradoc wasn’t just good at scamming people. He was immaculate; a smooth operator. Sure, when he woke up, he looked like an unsheared sheep with ruddy cheeks, a hangover, and a gambling problem, but he had an uncanny way of finding your leverage, in bed and out. He’d pegged Remus’s envy almost as quick as he’d inferred that he and Sirius were together, and the discovery of Remus’s lycanthropy hadn’t been too far behind that either. It was somewhat inevitable, Remus reasoned, when you got into the habit of shedding your trousers around someone.
“Don’t worry, cariad,” he’d said with a dehydrated and bloodshot wink. “I’ll keep your secrets if you keep mine.”
He taught Remus how to case a room with one long glance—exits, unsuspecting marks, hiding spots, that sort of thing—and to how best to use his librarian moves while being a werewolf of Remus’s considerable height. Speed was key for him. If you couldn’t hide, the next best thing was getting in or out before anyone’s suspicious could be aroused. Or before they could catch you. Remus was a quick study at that, and after demonstrating the trick Kelly had pulled with ordinary reflective surfaces, Caradoc gave him praise and he basked in Sirius’s glower like it was delicious, photosynthesisable sunlight. He volunteered his mundane climbing abilities and Caradoc began incorporating rooftop surveillance into their routine while Sirius was relegated to ground patrol.
From there, it became a competition between the two of them. Again. They pushed each other just like any other academic pursuit, although this one had far deadlier consequences than poor marks and for once, Remus’s lycanthropy wasn’t a strict detriment. Caradoc like most others didn’t understand the full implications of what it meant to be werewolf. Nevertheless, he encouraged Remus to lean into rather than away from those advantages.
“Can’t tell you how much better I’d be at this gig with a rum nose or whatever you’ve got going on. Black’s got their own advantages—most Death Eaters will as well—so you’ve got to use every bit of what you’ve been dealt. Pride’s no good for the dead, son.”
Three weeks later it was the end of March and so too the end of their training.
One of Caradoc’s many sources caught wind of something brewing in the London Squib borderlands. A schism of sorts. Chips were up in the air like unmanned paper aeroplanes. No one was sure where they’d fall—that got less clear with every passing day, actually, what with the Ministry bracing for impact and the Death Eaters growing bolder and more overtly fascistic—and so some of those Squibs on the landing strip were getting cold feet, now, no longer sure whether their social positions would be better or worse in the fiery aftermath. Kelly had stopped writing both him and Sirius with no notice, Terra had gone even deeper underground with her new unholy union and swelling pack, while Amir Maalouf, the poor dragonologist-cum-werewolf-cum-dropout, was lost to the dark wind. Even Remus could feel something was brewing.
Which was the reason Caradoc requested him personally for this mission. He knew that Remus had been in the Squib borderlands more than once, and so that became his task again with Caradoc as his shadow. It was odd: he’d stepped into the War so late—an understudy with half-learned lines, the werewolf ingénue, lycanthrope à genoux—and so he hadn’t realised that he might yet be an expert on a subject, let alone compared to a veteran like Caradoc Dearborn.
That helped him focus. It gave him a set of parameters to navigate, and within narrow parameters had always been where Remus worked best. Moreover, it allowed him time and reason to investigate many of the unanswered questions he’d stumbled over in his groping travels with Socrates and towards the Order.
No Squib in London had ever met a muggle werewolf, nor anyone in their contact network either—one that appeared to span all of Britain and further with deep, knobbly roots. An unlicensed healer specialising in magical care for muggles confessed, a hundred Galleons richer, that she’d treated a few bitten muggles years ago only for them to worsen and die of fever in a manner of days. The wounds wouldn’t take silver or dittany.
Lycanthropy was invariably fatal to muggles. Who knew?
Not wizards, apparently.
Other faces returned. With significant preparation, Remus in turn shadowed Caradoc, who posed as a haggard bloodboy sycophant until the vampire Remus recognised from his time at the all-nighters took their bait and tried to feed from him in an unwashed Brixton alleyway. Dull midnight music thumped from the basement doors not twelve steps away.
While the lore on werewolves often (incorrectly) said they were nigh indestructible save for wolfsbane, silver, fire, and beheading, that was actually true of vampires, swapping the silver and aconite for sunlight and, to a lesser degree, staking, which more incapacitated them than killed them outright. You couldn’t stun or bleed them—couldn’t do much at all to them, really, which was why they spawned so few progeny—and so a vampire with a wand, like this one, was a fearsome threat. Less so without a wand. That was the problem with magic: you forgot how to solve things without it, and few, even the immortal dead, could be bothered with the hard labour of wandless thaumaturgy. He came at her from the rooftop.
She was faster and stronger than Remus, but she was also more audacious and possessed of much more hubris than him as well. Not to mention that Caradoc had Occlumency barriers and, apparently, that an undisciplined vampire around exposed blood was like Remus around Sirius. The ambush lasted less than a few breaths and ended with a stake pressed between her ribs while Remus’s own heart beat uncontrollably quick.
Now that was schadenfreude—Remus had suffered many a humiliating defeat because or in spite of his lycanthropy and so it’d made him painfully aware of his differences. Loss inured him to some maladaptive instincts. Scar tissue in the psyche. She, on the other hand, had been rewarded for them and grown reliant on vampirism for success. In a moment of hot blood, Remus thought the vampire barely deserved to call herself a creature at all. Beneath her cold dead flesh and mesmerising red eyes, she was just as human as the rest of them. Fallible.
Yet victorious satisfaction lasted about thirty seconds, at which point she drained all blood from Remus by spilling the red kidney beans they’d been seeking: word on the undead circuit was, as Caradoc feared, the Death Eaters were courting one of the big vampire names in Britain. Antonin Dolohov had petitioned for transformation. Ascension, they called it.
When they turned the vampire loose—what, were they supposed to kill her? Was that who Remus was?—his heart nearly stopped outright. She’d grown her fanclub since the prior summer. It now held a painted face familiar even in a Brixton alley’s streetlamp shadows. Strife, one of the street youths he’d met, was taller and thicker than before. Well-fed, if emptier in the eyes. Trouble was nowhere to be seen.
The grim poetry of one blood-sucking monster, Thatcher, driving them into the arms of another was unfortunately not lost on Remus. Nor was the way that third monster of the Dark Lord divided him from his old world.
Field work with Caradoc split him necessarily from Sirius. Given his talent for detection charms and illusions, not to mention the clever work on his knife, Sirius was assigned as to apprentice under the more technical spellcasters in Caradoc’s cohort. With Fletcher he surveilled black markets for dark artefacts of note and cased houses and did other secretive things that Sirius didn’t always want to talk about. When he wasn’t working with Fletcher, Caradoc directed him to study with Dedalus Diggle, whom Remus only briefly encountered while passing through various safehouses across magical Britain on weekends and holidays.
Which, when you said it aloud like that, made it sound like Remus and Sirius were on holiday or impassioned hobbyists of a niche interest area instead of, say, antifascist operatives engaged in a War so guerrilla, most of the world had no idea it was happening.
Diggle stood at a very average height with a plain face and distinctly something features. He was always a little blurry, actually, and Remus felt slightly stoned looking at him—once you looked away, however, you could scarcely remember anything exact about what he looked like or sometimes even what he’d said. Being, of course, the Order’s resident master illusionist, Diggle’s imperceptibility was either by design or the inevitable byproduct of casting so many glamours.
Illusions were a curious art according to Sirius. Beyond the basics of turning invisible, they were hard to study because, as it turned out, illusionists rarely wrote down their spells and when they did, they usually concealed them with, yes, more illusions. This was partly in the magical tradition of tests—witches and wizards as far back as Merlin so loved their tests—but it was also because illusionists tended to be very paranoid people. The easiest way to pierce an illusion was to know which spell you were looking at, so the best illusionwork was always thus original. Moreover, as Remus had learned helping with Sirius’s bike, illusions were not a game of power. It was considered gauche among illusionists to use anything more than the barest amount required. Efficiency was key, and so it followed that as of late, apparently West German witches and wizards were dominating the illusion scene—though no one actually knew who they were or whether they were actually German.
The best defence against prying eyes was to not draw in the first place, it seemed, or failing that to misdirect them elsewhere. Diggle himself was a testament to this fact, being German despite the Greek name. He’d changed it.
Always tricky, those illusionists.
Fletcher by contrast was a handsome-until-he-spoke kind of wizard and was always sneaking around behind the illusionist, blockish and short and with fingers so sticky they caught your eyes if you were one to recognise that kind of thing. With his long, ginger-ish hair, he could’ve been taken for a Prewett. He wasn’t, however—he was openly half-blooded and lived as much in the muggle underworld as much as his magical one. He was an outsider. Remus felt a kinship with that, even if Fletcher was, apparently, also a conman and a thief, according to reputable and disreputable sources alike as well as the general mishmash of mismatched jewellery around his neck and on his fingers.
Remus wasn’t one to judge. He’d had his own long cons and filched enough wine to thoroughly shrink his high-horse.
By this point it was more of a spliff pony than ketamine Clydesdale, really.
Except that drug mule was galloping, careering off at breakneck pace on an express road to the future, because it’d been months and yet felt like breaths. Time in its eternal paradox was accelerating, hitting and then surpassing terminal velocity while each bleak moment dragged, stretching itself like a child in tantrum and clinging to every passing doorframe with desperate fingers. Every time Remus looked up from his mundane books in the library at the end of the week—every time he dragged himself back into their unlaundered Soho bed too late on a Sunday night, unslept, unshowered, having spent twelve hours on rooftops for the Order, staring down the barrel of Monday and five shite hours of sleep and library work and an advisor meeting in the afternoon he hadn’t prepared for, so of course he always did the sensible thing, which was to say he shook Sirius awake and wanked him off onto his chin—he had the distinct sense he’d blinked and missed his entire life. Sometimes he felt like a spectre looming over his own point-of-view, watching his tragedy unfold with little at all to do about it.
There were bright moments, however, albeit far and few between in memory, those little supermassive stars with time-dilating gravity wells of their own that yet were mere pinpricks in the mess of his and Sirius’s dark tapestry. When Remus—not Sirius, not Mary, take that and stick it up your Practical Applications—when Remus helped Nathaniel North write the beginnings of a predictive compression matrixing spell that intuited new possible arcane formulae for tattoos, they celebrated a month thereafter by tattooing Sirius with one such generated design. What once required a third of a sleeve just to see half-decent in the dark now needed only a sequence of runes about a foot long and an inch wide.
Sheer grit and probably a light sprinkling of mad science took them, because Sirius had Nathaniel ink it in—as well as a large bold symbol of alchemical Amalgamation dead centre on his chest—using their dormitory as a tattoo parlour with only alcohol and half a Pain-Away Potion to ease him through the process, and yet all Remus could think about was what other enchantments might be useful to keep active on one’s body at all times. He and Sirius got into an argument over it before Nathaniel looked up from his artistry to remind them it was his thesis and his predictive charm, thank you very much, so he would decide what to do with it himself. If they needed something, they could take a number and bloody well ask him.
The boy was growing a backbone and Remus couldn’t be prouder.
Demonstrating that pride was as simple as dragging Nathaniel into the wandless training room one spring afternoon and sucking him off—he’d been curious, and he and Sirius liked to compete—but not before securing a breathless promise to investigate his own line of permanently-inked charms, of course. He had some ideas.
Mad science and conspiracies and library work and spontaneous, possibly-unwise sexual encounters and yet more events still stretched Remus thinner than he’d ever been before and carried them hurtling like an unsuspecting young girl down a very long April-shaped rabbithole until Easter break, where, in the gruelling endurance marathon of their existence, Remus made time in his bursting postgrad-cum-war operative-cum-assistant librarian schedule to take a long breath and make good on his promised research.
Above everything, he would always keep his promises to Sirius, or suffer in the trying.
***
The Forbidden Forest was not empty when Remus crossed its threshold in search of Socrates, Waldeinsamkeit be damned. It was teeming—a rocking flat party well into its midnight hours, and Remus, the sober gatecrasher. April’s impending full moon had brought with it both strong tides and the entire kitchen sink.
Beyond the usual scuttling rats and hundred tiny spring birds and fleeing bunnies, Remus was accosted by crepuscular four-winged faeries pestering him for a crisp packet or loose thread or anything else exotic to forests with which to furnish their nests; dire crooning Auguries, a curious bird of deathlike green-black feathers and a vulture beak, sang their ominous warning songs down at him from high branches and followed him in low flight a while before diving to snatch fat nightbugs from the air; in those thick curtains of hanging mosses swelled by spring rain, Remus spied little beady eyes belonging to a magical kind of insect whose name, frustratingly, danced on the tip of his tongue with eight spindly legs; and though he hadn’t seen one in person, the far-between trunks of the canopy above him bore the telltale thick strands of Acromantula silk, which itself bore tiny envenomed barbs to carry paralysing venom to prey.
Even the Dementors patrolling the castle boundaries appeared more excitable, though as Remus recalled Dementors, like the Kissed, did not have emotions, and certainly not positive ones. He kept his Patronus bright well into the thicket just to be safe. Things were so rarely as he’d read in his textbooks. Indeed his translucent silvery wolf glowed with the same eerie brightness as a full moon.
While Remus felt much more exposed than was comfortable, the light of the Patronus had its own attracting effect. Everything in the Forbidden Forest turned him an appraising eye—including, somehow, the things that did not have eyes.
A sightless hare upon a rooted ridge stood with its large grey ears on end and stared dead at him from behind smooth empty sockets a long minute before bolting right, where Remus’s eyes fell upon the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen.
Unicorns and rainbows had a long-shared history and finally Remus understood why. Her long, majestic, horsey mane was shimmering in the night. Iridescent, but not like oil—like some of the garish and gay clothing he’d seen in a few seedy London clubs with Kelly. The rest of her fur was a dark, moonlit black, like the sea at dusk, because evidently Unicorns were black by nature, not ivory white as appeared on most tapestries. An earthy black, too—the colour of rich and fertile soil, which was a colour befitting it because grass and wildflowers literally sprang up and grew wildly wherever its hooves met the ground. The Unicorn beheld someone with all-knowing equine eyes—staring into their soul, reading it, weighing it and judging the contents of their heart like Anubis’s scale. But that someone was not Remus.
A Centaur held the Unicorn in an equally sylvan and therefore incomprehensible gaze, giving the impression of a powerful and intimate weight resting on both of them. She—the Centaur—wore an open-fronted robe of moss that bore living roses and other flower bulbs where ought be buttons, while intricate roots wove and occasionally writhed at the seams. You could say it ended at the torso, except ‘torso’ was not a word that mapped well onto the hexapodal anatomy of a Centaur, and in any case she’d left the rest of her horse chassis unadorned. If anything, she was underdressed for the occasion.
And, not that Remus was a discerning judge of these things—arguably he was one of the worst available, behind almost everyone else in the postgraduate program and only just clearing the low, low bar ahead of every heterosexual man in existence—but he was fairly certain the Centaur was a lesbian.
He had a feeling.
There was just this certain je-ne-sais-quoi going on between her and the Unicorn.
It gave Remus the sense he was a little bit of a voyeur, actually, come to think of it—her tits were out, for Christ’s sake—and he had more than enough on his plate already, so he planned a quiet retreat. Let the Centaur and Unicorn duke it out without his meddling. Which was of course when one of the Auguries flew behind him and squawked, the bloody snitch.
Both heads snapped towards him. The Unicorn’s gaze burrowed into his soul while the Centaur kicked up a long wooden spear that oozed enchantment with her hind legs and then caught it in her hand, powerful and muscly shoulder poised for a deadly throw. Remus froze. He scarcely had time to freeze. No follow-through. She looked to the Unicorn again, bronzed features peeling into a frown. She sighed. It was audible all the way across the clearing. Wherever her lungs were—and however many pairs she had—they were as robust as her throwing arm.
“Approach, little wizard.” Her voice rang out with as much disappointment as it had imperiousness. The Unicorn by contrast bowed her head, horn and all, and then retreated back to her unknowable Unicorn life.
Remus approached.
“I’m sorry,” he called dumbly. “I didn’t mean to interrupt—well, er, that, whatever that was.”
“What are you doing here?”
Remus closed distance very slowly and waffled over whether he ought dismiss his Patronus. He wanted to raise a flat palm—a gesture to mean, I’m unarmed, other than with the wand currently maintaining a beyond NEWT-level charm—except his other hand held a loosely-wrapped box of chocolates leftover from Christmas. Sirius had remembered he was easily plied with socks and cheap sweets, which had been the sum total of things he was allowed to wear in the flat that day.
“I was looking for Socrates,” replied Remus, and, oh, Jesus, what had he done.
“The Greek philosopher?”
“You know who—actually, never mind what I was about to ask there. It’s both unimportantly and probably would’ve been insulting,” he added, voice trailing off quieter and quieter as he rambled. “Socrates is a friend of mine—colleague—tutor. Ish. And I have a gift, also, for you.”
“A gift?” asked the Centaur. She gently inclined her strong jaw and, with an agonisingly awkward slowness, he held the box of sweets out to her. She had to stoop to retrieve it, because it turned out Centaurs were fucking massive. She was taller than him by a half. It was like having a conversation with a lorry. No wonder they were all so ripped—moving must have taken an inordinate amount of energy given their titanic weight.
She stared down at the rewrapped ribbon with an unamused look on her face. Her hind leg stamped absently. “What is this?”
“It’s, well—it’s chocolate.”
“I know what chocolate is,” she muttered. “I don’t recognise their origin. These are not from Honeydukes,” she continued, lifting the box to her nose and sniffing. Her cool dark eyes—which held that perturbing oblong rectangle of a pupil common to equines in her otherwise humanoid features—flitted down to Remus a moment. To the spectral silver wolf loping through the air behind him. “I don’t recognise yours, either. You are not a little wizard, little wolf.”
“Is that better or worse?”
“Better,” she mused, picking out a chocolate and licking at it, “and worse.”
“Have you—sorry, I think I must’ve got turned around at some point. Do you know which direction might bring me to the aconite glade?”
The Centaur stared down at him a moment and actually craned her whole torso like an inflexible neck to examine him closer. Her leaf-robe rustled open and she smelled, Remus realised, like open sky.
“You look curious.”
“I’ve been known to be, yes,” said Remus, face flush, “but I’ve been told that peppering strangers with questions is often rude at best.”
“Then I will ask a question of you instead,” replied the Centaur. “Why do you seek the glade?”
“My friend—colleague, mentor, somewhere in that area—is there.”
“This ‘Socrates’ you spoke of.”
“Well, I never learned their name for reasons that are probably too convoluted to get into here, but, yes, I do call them ‘Socrates’.”
“Did you not ask?”
Remus opened his mouth but there came a long few painful seconds of silence before he could find words to follow it. “That—okay, it sounds simple when you put it as such, but it’s truly not,” he said. “They only give me so many questions before they vanish into the woods again for a whole month, and they’re not exactly forthcoming when they do answer, being an ancient and mysterious werewolf and what have you.”
“They do not trust you.”
“Probably not.”
“Maybe because you are using this ‘Socrates.’”
“Pardon?”
“You could not spare a single question for a name?” asked the Centaur, who reminded Remus somewhat of Professor McGonagall with her tone, actually, although being lambasted by McGonagall in her nightie with her tits out would’ve been a far more disturbing experience. “I would not trust you either, little wolf,” she continued. “I would know you would leave once you had all your questions answered. Even if this ‘Socrates,’ I suspect, has done much for you without your appreciation.”
“Are you—well. This is going to sound silly.”
She inclined her head again with another bow as if to say, I am a Centaur probably lesbian on a moonlit night, seeking Unicorns, and you are a little wolf wizard with no trainers on. We could not be any sillier if we tried. Or something approaching that. Remus was not adept at reading human body language, let alone a horse’s.
“Are you Socrates?” he asked. “Are you a shapechanger? Because—”
“No, and no,” said the Centaur.
“Oh. And, what did you suspect—wait, well, perhaps I might put this together myself. Has Socrates been doing something to ward away other Beings and creatures during my visits? Or, I s’pose I know the answer to that already, too, more or less, so can I ask how they manage that? Commanding an entire forest like this one?”
“The forest does not answer to us, little wolf, or anyone, or anything. That does not mean you cannot ask.”
“But why would they ask on my behalf?”
The Centaur shrugged her shoulders. Both sets, which was uncanny to watch.
“I cannot know, but if this ‘Socrates’ is the one I suspect, then you may ask Them directly,” she replied. The pronoun carried a deep reverence.
“‘Them?’”
“Yes, Them,” repeated the Centaur. She frowned. “How is it you call Them friend and do not know this? What is your name, little wolf?”
“Remus. Remus Lupin.”
The Centaur’s bronze face cracked with delight, then, and she let out an obnoxious braying laugh that seemed to be echoed by nightbirds in the forest. She actually doubled over—her top half, anyway—and slapped one of her horsey knees to punctuate the apparent hilarity.
“Wonderful,” she mused, wiping a tear from her eye—oh, Jesus Christ, her fingers had no nails and ended instead with tiny little callouses reminiscent of hooves—and caught her breath. “Simply wonderful. The stars had told me I would find great joy in these woods tonight, and, as ever, they did not lie. To think, a creature of great power like Them would be reduced to caring for a little wolf all because of a name and nostalgia. Curious, is it not?”
Remus cleared his throat. “I’m not sure I follow.”
She sighed and stared longingly whence the Unicorn departed.
“This has been fun,” said the Centaur, “but all things must end. Thank you for the gift, little wolf.”
Remus followed her horizontal prey pupils to the ridgeline and frowned. He needed something to catch her attention—something to swivel heads as he’d often done before—and a burning, primordial thought rumbled inside him like the precursor to a volcanic eruption, eager to meet the task.
“Were you trying to shag that Unicorn?” he blurted, and indeed the Centaur’s head snapped back to him. Which had been the goal, yes, but her expression was one of pained regret rather than the anger or disbelief Remus was more equipped to manipulate.
“Yes,” she said ruefully, “I was.”
Not only were Unicorns highly-intelligent creatures with access to a narrow but profound school of magic, they were, of course, telepaths of the highest order and known to most witches and wizards as the Mentors of Merlin. They’d evolved beyond spoken language to a method of mental communication that one recent muggleborn author described as having one’s psyche defragmented, where all the loose, scattered bits and bobs of your life were reorganised, start-to-finish, into a single coherent line, which then the Unicorn encouraged you to snort. Unicorns were benevolent that way, and with all that considered more than capable of giving enthusiastic consent.
Remus valued his life and so said none of this, instead nodding as reassuringly as he could manage.
“Not everyone I know approves,” she continued, horse eyes gleaming with tears. “It is very taboo among our kind.”
“Being—do you mean because you’re lesbian?”
“I am not from Lesbos,” said the Centaur with an annoyed sniff. “They are the demigods of our world, Unicorns. To love one is seen as an act of vanity.”
“Does this one love you back?”
“I do not know,” said the Centaur, quiet. “I wish it to be true, but the stars are withholding.”
“You could ask her.”
“And what would I be left with if her answer was, ‘No,’ little wolf? I have spilled more than enough tears of joy and sadness for her already, and that is not the kind of wetness I seek.”
Oh, okay, well. “I think—good luck with that,” said Remus, whose brain worked through the logistics of Centaur-Unicorn lesbian sex with surprising haste. “Do—did you have directions to the glade, or…?”
“Travel moonwise,” murmured the Centaur. “You will find it if They truly await you, though I fear it will not be true for long.”
“For long? Why?”
Over the ridge, Remus caught the faintest sparkle of iridescent light, and so too lit up the Centaur’s eyes. She smiled softly.
“I may answer that, little wolf,” she replied, “or I may tell you Their name. Only you may choose.”
Her hoof kicked eagerly and Remus realised he had only a breath to decide or else he’d get neither.
“Give me Their name.”
“Romulus,” said the Centaur. She broke off into a strong and horny gallop over the ridge, leaving Remus alone in the dark with only her echoing hoofbeats and his silver wolf of a Patronus as company.
***
Remus found Them in the glade, and the glade unfamiliar. Sharp-thorned briars overrun. Blood in the air. Powerful and overwhelming. Though its rim still bore the sun-bleached and unrotting fallen logs and springing purple aconite beside said logs, the earth had been churned here, kicked up, and clumps of grass torn out while deep claw gouges marked their way up and across the once-smooth faces of the boulder. A wide, dark, clotting red waterfall crept down its side, following the contusions of the rock face and pooling black at the boulder’s overgrown foot. They were fresh ivies with heart-shaped leaves bearing round crimson fruits like pomegranates, except, no, pomegranates were tree fruit. It wasn’t bloody important. He circled to the boulder’s rear. Spatter and spray were undiscriminating artists. A few fresh red handprints lead to the boulder’s top where lay resting a small, heaving, bloodsoaked figure. Their long hair was shorn haphazardly short in some places while the rest remained long, and Their face half-swollen by an angry black wound.
“Are you all right?” called Remus, approaching with yet more caution. “I haven’t brought a gift this time,” he continued, “but I’d like to help you if I’m able.”
“Go away, magic boy.”
“Do you really mean that?”
A long pause.
“No,” replied Socrates. “Yes. It is not safe here. You should not be here. Choose at your peril.”
Remus swallowed hard then clambered up the rock with much more skill than—but an equivalent amount of grace as—the first he’d ever done so here.
War wounds. Socrates had been to battle and not with a stag, no. A blow to the face blinded one eye. Their limbs wept small gashes. That, he could handle. Their side was laid open. Flaps of flesh were torn away, angry, ragged peels left dangling between three grievous gashes. Right. It explained the river. Socrates held tight against them as though to seal them shut. Even still they welled with deep ruby-red blood, vivid and dark and worryingly, startlingly endless. It was a staggering amount of blood loss, dyeing Their hip and legs a slick, glistening red. No mortal would be alive, let alone conscious. It was a malicious, festering, lycanthropic injury. Their skin struggled to meld back together. What They wore was little more than shreds, and from the harsh, stuttering sound of Their breaths, Remus wondered if They had shifted recently—to hasten the healing process? Was that another advantage of completing the second half of Their ritual?
“Do not look at me like I am a dying fawn,” said Socrates, annoyed and wincing. “If I were dying, I would not lie here. I would hunt every last one of my enemies down before permitting them to live beyond me.”
“I’m sorry,” said Remus. He realised he was looking back at his own twisted reflection. “I know you’re not made of glass.”
“Oh, but they would be.”
“I didn’t think there were other werewolves in the Forbidden Forest.”
“There were not. There are not, as long as I am here.”
“But you’re not going to be here much longer.”
“No.”
“Why did you come here?” asked Remus gently. Socrates had several large leaves with some kind of herbal pulp pressed against Their angry wounds and Remus thought better than to try his own unpractised healing charms on what might be an ancient primordial being. “And how long ago?”
“Wolves do not count time, magic boy.”
“Do wolves have siblings?”
Their childish face flickered. Their wild eyes slowly shut. “Sometimes. You knew this—why waste a question?”
“They’re my questions to waste, so I’ll do what I like with them. Do you have any siblings?”
“You do not care,” announced Socrates, voice strained. “You are here for the ritual. You wish to learn both halves.”
The Bassarids, the cults of Bacchus—even that They didn’t know the name ‘Socrates.’ If Remus was to believe a lesbian Centaur, it all fit together nicely in a tinfoil conspiracy kind of way.
“Did you once have a younger brother who shares my name?” asked Remus.
The glade was not silent, not with the presence of so many owls and birds and other bump-in-the-night things, but it did fall quieter with the question. Socrates gave no reply for a long while, although They did eventually speak.
“Not a brother. A sibling, once.”
“Me as well, once. I didn’t get to know them very well,” Remus began, and he lay down beside Them on the uncomfortable slick boulder to watch the nights sky slowly turn above them both. There would be bloodstains in his clothes. Christ, how little that mattered. “Or at all, really. They died when I was very young and when they were younger still. I never really knew they existed until after they were gone. It still hurt when I found out,” he added, “for whatever reason, but I knew it was nothing compared to what my parents must have felt, so I s’pose I never really looked into those feelings very deeply at all. Didn’t have the right, like.”
“No one can give or take your right to feel something.”
“I know that now.”
“You are not Them,” said Socrates. “Do not confuse yourself. There—”
“—I know, there’s nothing divine in my blood, or in anyone’s. It’s just a name and a bite and happenstance. But, if it’s worth anything,” he continued, peering up for the stars he knew well, “I think I finally found a way to classify how I’ve felt about our dynamic. You’re not a friend to me, not a colleague, and not really a mentor, either, like. You annoy me a lot, sometimes, while I annoy you back, and at other times I feel so desperate to impress you I end up doing the exact opposite.”
“Is this word ‘sibling?’”
“If that’s okay with you,” said Remus, quiet, “then yes.”
Socrates thought it over a moment, humming to Themselves in another childlike moment. “Older sibling,” said Socrates.
“Of course. You’re, what, thousands of years old—oh, don’t answer that. ‘Wolves do not count time,’ I know,” he muttered. “Did you want me to keep calling you Socrates still?”
“I have not had a name for a long time.”
“Not since Chima?”
“Chimamanda, yes,” They replied. “That too was long ago.”
“What did she call you, then?”
“Mother. Father. Friend. Elder,” said Socrates, counting off bloody fingers. “I found her when she was very young and very alone. She has grown so much since then, so pretty and so strong, and I have not grown at all,” They continued, wistfulness edging into Their voice. “I was drawn to her. Sought her out. Like mother, like child.”
“Did you seek me out?”
“I knew you were out there, as I know of most wolves, but to know something exists is not to say you can find it easily. And now that I have,” added Socrates, dragging a small hand to press against one of Their leaf-wrapped wounds, “I must leave you soon.”
“How soon?”
“I do not know. I am old and not wise; too cowardly to live, too frightened to die. I will leave this place before summer’s end, and sooner if these new wolves see fit to drive me out and claim this world for their own, as it is not my place to stop them. But, before I go,” They added, cracking an eye open to stare aside at Remus and then return to the night’s sky, “I will teach you these rituals if you are willing to learn. The first you know much of already and may pass to others—”
“—but if I learn the second,” finished Remus, “I’ll have to learn it by doing, won’t I?”
“There is no other way.”
“That you know of.”
“That I know of. Look,” said Socrates, outstretching Their hand, bloody, dirty cracked nails and all, at the cluster of stars Remus’s unfocused eyes had been seeking. “Canis Major.”
“I wish we had more time.”
“All do, Remus. Everything ends. Will you learn?”
Remus took a deep breath. He’d have to talk it over with Sirius—they’d take this plunge together or not at all—but Remus knew what his answer would in all likelihood be.
“I will,” murmured Remus. “Tell me where to start.”
“Will you remember?”
“Not eidetically, no, but for the first half I needn’t take any notes.”
“Then we will begin with a glade of wolfsbane like this very one, and a stone altar at its centre…”
***
Everything was beginning at once. On May first, Lily and Pascalle du Pont sent word that they’d developed a longform spell to crack the elaborate encryption of Ahmed’s thesis and, in the span of a few hours, slipped them each a plain manila folder containing notes on how to cast it. It was brute force Arithmancy. Crude, but effective.
Later, at a short in-person meeting that barely fit into their overwhelmed schedules, Pascalle swept back her long braids and explained they each had a month to learn it. Alone it would take her five days of continuous casting to decode Ahmed’s whole thesis, and it was an all-or-nothing deal. With five assistants of their sorcerous proficiency, however, she was confident they could barrel their way through it in about four hours.
Of course, one of them dropping even a single stitch would double that time, and so forth with each subsequent failure. Worse, being a kludged-together toilet wine kind of spell, trying to pull out mid-casting would likely reduce them and everything else within a few dozen meters to ash. And that was if they were lucky—this kind of advanced magic could do cruel and whimsical things to those who erred.
Which afforded them another problem. No faculty in the right mind or most unsound ones would let them attempt the spell on school grounds, even if they knew the importance of it or that they were possibly the sole possessors of Ahmed’s thesis. It was unsafe. It was irresponsible. Having a four-hour casting time and the requirement of their collective cooperation, they couldn’t just run Sirius’s energy transmutation spell to cover their tracks either—and not that it would matter. According to the metathaumaturgical maths, they’d devastate all local weather patterns by converting the run-off to heat and be visible from orbit if they chose light. Sound was right out; the results would be messy. To their credit, none of them suggested it was worth the risk. Perhaps their ethics could be saved after all.
Sirius and Mary proposed a solution after a week of brainstorming, albeit one that gave a very narrow window to work within and a new set of problems once more.
The thesis defence rooms were the perfect candidates for elaborate magic. While none of them knew exactly how they worked, Mary made it clear that the chambers were separated somehow from the greater world around them, and that looking in was as difficult as looking out. She—being, apparently, something of a secret expert on ghosts and amortal creatures—argued with surprising coherence that no ghost nor even Peeves ought be able to detect their grand spellwork despite being better-attuned to magic than most, as while they feared the clocktower, the thesis defence rooms were beyond opaque to them, across a border they couldn’t perceive, let alone cross. The casting ought even be a touch easier given the lack of background interference from ambient magic and other lingering spells. Probably. Mary was not always a fount of confidence when it came to her own magical practice, brilliant as she was.
And, as Sirius pointed out, both Rucha and Amir Maalouf’s withdrawal left them not one but two open timeslots during which a room would be empty and the faculty would be otherwise occupied. A window and a backup. Being until recently a postgrad finalist, Rucha’s thesis defence would’ve warranted two days of examination on her own. Forty-eight hours. All of them were thus available at that time.
There was a growing, terrifying possibility, Remus realised, that they might pull this off.
Nathaniel was the best at runes and inscriptions—stone and skin weren’t so different if you thought about it, he’d said, and then immediately apologised for how creepy it sounded aloud—so, with Remus’s librarian guidance, they would be in charge of tricking whatever identification system the chambers used to separate out postgraduates from one another.
Polyjuice might have worked, except it could do funny things to your casting, and Remus cringed at the idea of reverting back mid-spell because one of them mistimed a sip by a minute. Not to mention Polyjuice took a month to brew and they had mere weeks.
Not to mention further that Remus was both pants at potions and wasn’t at all sure Polyjuice worked on werewolves. Being an Animagus was similarly blocked off from him, and both arts hailed from the forbidden school of Human Transfiguration. This was not an opportune moment for Remus to reveal his secret. Even if only Pascalle and Nathaniel weren’t in the know, come to think of it.
Instead they would use one of the platonic idealisation spells Remus had learned in his quest to recreate and improve upon the Marauder’s map. If it could name a beetle or misidentify a rose for a peony, perhaps it could similarly misidentify them to any spell who went looking for Rucha. On some level it was humiliating in that he was weaponising his research failures. If nothing else, it gave Remus a lengthy excuse to shag Nathaniel at length, with his length if you caught his drift, wink, wink, &c., but again, the more they worked together, the more he believed it was possible. Each of them was contributing something.
And, yes, if they pulled it off all that would remain would be passing their end-of-year reviews, surviving another summer of War, and then finding whatever grain of knowledge in Ahmed’s grand thesis might be relevant to curing or reversing the Kiss or ending the War or both. Once you were there, it was just a hop, skip, and a hubristic jump to actually curing every Kissed across Britain and dismantling the system in which they were industrially produced as well as the underlying ideologies that advocated for the establishment of such a system.
As one did. Of course.
The easy part, like.
But Remus let himself forget that. He forgot often, whether by locking in a tangle of limbs with Sirius; while pressing Nathaniel face-down into his and Sirius’s shared sheets and marvelling at the way his back tattoos shook with each thrust; reshelving lonely books; when four foreheads were pressed together between him, Sirius, Mary, and Nathaniel as they toiled in the library, suffering silently together; with Lily and Mary painting his and Sirius’s toes black with polish in the lounge, and both of them trying to tempt Remus into letting them paint his fingernails, too, which he always shied away from even as Sirius eagerly accepted; on the Pitch; at night in bed; alone on small waddling summer walks beside Lily, who was now visibly pregnant and hopeful her parents might live to see her baby born; with Pascalle and sometimes others in inconspicuous places on inconspicuous blankets drinking wine too early into the afternoon, commiserating over Remus’s awful French accent and Pascalle’s own French-isms in English; and more times, countable yet uncounted, because he could let himself celebrate the small victories.
Remus would overlook the rot and gloom and metaphorical carcinogenic asbestos looming over them for just a moment. Just a breath.
It was what carried him to the exam chamber that fateful night, where he met his other five conspirators awaiting him already. Every single one of them had arrived early and anxious.
“Hullo.”
“Hiya, Moony.”
“Oi oi.”
“Oi oi, pisshead.”
“Hi.”
“Bonsoir. I hope you are all ready, no?”
“No, actually, not particularly.”
“Bricking it.”
“Oh, you as well, Black?”
“My water’s broke.”
“I, um, well I think we can do it,” said Nathaniel. He fished through his pocket for a stack of predecorated post-its and, with some hesitation, began sticking them to each of their foreheads, though it took some amused leaning on his and Mary’s behalf for the boy to reach. “We should only need these to get in,” he explained, slapping one to his own freckled face, “but you never know, so maybe don’t take them off until I say so.”
“Excellent work as always, Nate. Five points and all that,” said Sirius with a lopsided grin. He looked at home with the marigold-yellow post-it stuck to him, a certain office chic that complemented the tarnished safety pin earring that occasionally peeked through his dark curls. Ridiculousness was his natural terrain. “Shall we?”
“For Ahmed,” said Mary, solemn.
“For Ahmed,” echoed Lily, “and for everyone else. Lead us on, Black?”
Sirius stared at the rune-lined archway that McGonagall had once led them through almost exactly twelve months ago and rested his hand a moment on the doorknob, fiddling in his own slim pockets to produce a knife. His knife. He slipped it between the hewn stone frame and the heavy chamber door.
Click.
“I was expecting a little resistance,” he muttered. Disappointment washed over his angled features, which then disappeared, harsh angles and all, as he crossed the threshold—like he’d been ice sublimating upon entry to a hot, magical oven.
Remus followed right after him and had the most curious sensation of stumbling, as though your brain had forgotten, in all its automatic daydreaming, whether or not there was one last step atop the staircase. Sirius caught his arm, however, before he could fall, and as the others filed in behind them, they took a moment to stare at the high domed ceiling, the flat hewn bricks around them, and the impossible, sconceless light that filled the examination chamber. The air stunk of sterility.
Sirius wrinkled his nose and sneezed.
“Foul,” he muttered, absently using Remus’s sleeve to wipe off his fuzzy lip. He ought give more protest to that, really, but it was Sirius. “Who do you think built these chambers? Bet it was Ravenclaw. Paranoid bird.”
“None of them,” replied Pascalle, brushing past them with a little too much force on Remus’s side and a little too much seduction on Sirius’s.
“Care to elaborate, love?”
“Giving credit to those who founded something, c’est l’histoire,” she spat. Literally spat on the ground before tying back her braids and setting down her overstuffed pack. “Even if it takes from the credit of others.”
“Even if no one built it at all,” added Mary. “Maybe they built the castle around these rooms—or maybe they exploited some natural property of the area. Maybe, maybe. We’ll probably never know.”
Sirius stared at Remus, wounded, as if he’d personally denied him the opportunity of knowing, but Remus only shrugged as if to say, She’s right. Both of them, actually. All that remains for us are stories, and historians are not, unfortunately, the most reliable narrators. Sometimes they’re just the ones that survived.
Once their anthropomorphic aside was over, the six of them quickly set to work chalking diagrams onto the smooth beige bricks underfoot while Pascalle laid out each polaroid of Ahmed’s encoded thesis within its arcane and complicated boundaries. She bore, curiously, a pair of half-moon reading glasses with a librarian chain to keep it round her neck. Perhaps she was farsighted; perhaps the glasses were bewitched.
Remus thought little more of it. Instead he took position opposite Pascalle on the decorated hexagram that gradually took shape—staring at Sirius’s beautiful grinning face for five minutes wreaked regular havoc on Remus’s spellwork already, and he thought it best not to find out what might happen after four hours of it—and waited patiently. Nervously. His fingers were trembling; his heart rate, pulsing.
They were seven days well removed from the full moon, of course, so he couldn’t blame that. Socrates had instructed Remus to meet Them that night, presumably for some preparation ahead of the three-day window before and after as per the first ritual half, which, yes, made his night busier and more stressful than he’d like, but the truth was, Remus was on edge for purely human reasons.
It was funny—not ha-ha funny, it never was, was it—but as he stood there after six months of schemes and miserable research, the end to his tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow come, watching Lily kick off her shoes and refasten her plait, Sirius looking bored and yet fidgeting like a young puppy learning to sit still for the first time, Mary doing calisthenics, and both Nathaniel and Pascalle sharing a last cheeky cigarette together, the Torchlusspanik struck, the city gates were closing and he was outside the walls in the dark, and Remus realised he wasn’t sure he wanted to do this.
Any of this, come to think of it.
He and Sirius could run. Leave Britain—France was nice, they both knew the language—or go to Greece or the Americas, maybe even Australia if they could figure out a way to tolerate the heat and deadly fauna.
They could stay and go back to being postgrads a while longer. Forget Ahmed’s research. Forget the aconite ritual and Socrates and becoming a creature of wild magic for the War effort. Not a single part of Remus craved the sheer arcane power locked within the thesis and it hadn’t even been his idea to begin with, though he’d been the one to set everything in motion. This could not be the only possible way to end the problem of the Kissed. Of Azkaban. If they exploded, if someone cocked up this spell, at least one of them would be dead and once again it would unequivocally be Remus’s fault. All great Neptune’s ocean would not clean the blood from his hands.
This. This was what he wanted. Being one of six unimportant people living heretofore unimportant lives together. He wanted to go back and undo all the wasted time, have a proper Valentine’s February with Sirius and get absolutely pissed with everyone, James and Peter included, in March for his own barely-registered twentieth birthday, where like a medieval bride he’d be gifted some fraction of his weight in spliff, or better yet, cocaine; to spend Easter break on holiday and ignoring their respective theses only to scramble and pull it all together at the last minute with Mary leading the charge; to smoking on the bank of a lake, book in hand; to read a non-academic book for a change; to waste his last few weeks of studies planning a summer trip back to France with Mean Marlene the Maimed and go skinny dipping to show the others he wasn’t afraid of his body and so none of them ought to be, either; and above all else Remus did not want to make history, nor some grand discovery into the fundament of reality that would define his life forevermore.
Who, really, ended up with a chapter about them in a history book and enjoyed the tales told about them? Who was ever happy with their legacy?
Not Oppenheimer, not Nobel, nor the Wrights nor Arthur Galston nor probably even Gloria Ahmed, who hadn’t survived to see hers unfold. Would Nicolas Flamel have spent the last two centuries in banal isolation if immortality suited him—or did he fear becoming another Dark Lord, a Grindelwald, an Ekrizdis? Would Albus Dumbledore spend so much time standing in castle corridors yet lost in his head, worried over his last bequests, if he was happy at all with what he’d done in life? Was there indeed a single great witch or wizard out there who hadn’t regretted the moment they became great?
Would Remus, in this moment, make Benjy Fenwick proud?
All he’d have to do is cross the hexagram and whisper, You know, Padfoot, we don’t have to do this. I don’t want to do this—I’m afraid, and, though there’d be unimaginable pain in his gloomy grey eyes, he’d reply, Okay. I trust you, Moony. Y’know I love you. We’ll find another way to help Reg.
Except there was no other way that Remus could see and he was a giant soggy coward regardless, so instead he canted his head to Sirius and murmured, “See you on the other side, Pads.”
“Onwards.”
“Upwards.”
“All together, then,” called Lily, voice commanding. Excelsior. “Three, two, one—”
Though Pascalle took lead and Lily acted as her second, each of them gave equal contributions to what would be Remus’s third and greatest act of grand magic yet—acts, he realised, that were an intoxicating drug unto their own. One of a new class. Designer. Although you didn’t ‘use’ or ‘use up’ magic—it wasn’t oxygen to his flame or propane or any other combustible allegory—magic, in a way, used you. It was all around them. Always. Permeating everything and every moment until, with their silly little thoughts and sillier little wands, they pulled it through them like a dozen loose power cords through the eye of a needle, tied off and ready to weave.
When Remus had been little, the feeling was electric, like a static shock from a doorknob. By the end of fifth year, he’d felt something of a fuse, regulating useful fluctuating power for some interesting and potentially dangerous ends.
With the six postgraduates in concert, however, chanting in awful booming voices that carried across the entire room and that shook something inside him deeper than mere flesh or bone, Remus was not static, not a fuse—he was sheer current, a lightning bolt called from the heavens and given purpose. He was the thing Prometheus stole. Every organ, every cell of his body was aflame and orgasmic and conducting pure, unadulterated magic, drawing more with endless greed and channelling it for one unerring purpose.
Even as a phantom wind grew around them in their windowless space and Remus realised his breathing was growing laboured—not that it mattered, most of the incantation was mental, none of them could have managed four hours it aloud—and even, indeed, as Remus realised the six of them were being lifted bodily from the ground, no power of this world or another could convince Remus to let go. Let him be the puppet on magic’s strings. Their clothes billowed in an intangible breeze. One of his trainers slipped off and hit the floor. His hair ruffled wildly and stood on end, the air charged, lightning about to strike. He smelled ozone. And it wasn’t just him. The others were live writhing wires crackling with power.
Lily’s plait split and floated free in a red halo as though she were lying back on the Côte d’Argent, while Nathaniel’s many tattoos had liberated themselves from the confines of his forearms and thighs and other hidden-away places only he and Sirius knew, swimming about the boy like dogs, stags, and rats giving chase; Pascalle’s bold discerning eyes became yawning white voids and burned Remus’s own to behold; Mary blurred in his vision, like an oil painting spilling out its frame; and Remus became sure he was hallucinating when he saw Sirius was a dog, somehow, massive and shaggy and black with a glowing circular tattoo on his canine ribs, yet somehow still operating his wand between his teeth. Remus’s own tattoo seared. Delicious agony branded his thigh. He felt naked, reborn by the licking flames of magic. Everything but them was fading away.
One by one, polaroids lifted from the chalk hexagram now far below them and flitted into a six-sided column, building, brick by brick, until they polaroids began circling them like vultures. They rose higher still—how far could the domed ceiling be?—and there were clouds in the room to meet them, weather, a torrential rainstorm matching the winds complete with rumbling, cackling thunder so great and terrible it could only belong to Gloria Ahmed herself. When Remus craned back his neck and breached the cloud cover face-first, his world went white.
“Hush, cariad,” crooned his mum. The air was wet, here. Calm. His clothes were damp and his hip, aching. Both it and his eyes burned, the latter with tears, while fresh-cut grass stung his nose and so too curiously did the thick tang of iron. “Hush, hush. You’ll be okay. I’ll find a way for you.”
The morning sky was brightening, though the full moon’s lightening imprint sat clear, still, against the sky. Remus stayed there a long while and cried brazenly as he’d learned only a child could do.
When the tears became too much and he blinked them from his eyes, Pascalle was staring through him a thousand miles away with a gaze as hot as the sun. They’d flown closer together, swarmed and pressed in by the circling wolves of polaroids.
Her face was wet too. Where had she been? Where had it taken her?
Where was Remus taking her now?
And, Sirius—
A grip as firm as iron closed around his free wrist, then, and though Remus cried out Mum! his words were swallowed whole by that whirling, gaping maelstrom around them. The fingers didn’t belong to his mum—they belonged to Mary. He wriggled in her grip until their hands were clasped together and saw that the others, Sirius and Lily, Pascalle and Nathaniel, had done the same, wands outstretched together and cutting clean paths through the heat-haze around them with indigo trails left in their wake. Their brows and stupid sticky-notes were drenched in sweat and their clothes fraying in the storm. Lily mouthed something both soft and inaudible at him or the world, whichever, really, and heralded the spell’s end.
Thousands of inked characters tore free from their polaroid paper, struggling like black insects seeking a new, winged skin, and swarmed through and around their hexagram formation.
“…NOT ONLY AN EXAMINATION OF THE KISSED…”
“…DISTURBING PROPERTIES MAY BE A SYMPTOM OF LARGER…”
“…BORN FROM THE KISS OF ANOTHER…”
“…THUS MUST BE EXTRAPLANAR IN ORGIN…”
“…PROPOSAL THEREWITHIN: A COMPREHENSIVE UNIFIED THEORY OF MAGIC—”
“—DEMENTORS—”
“—WEREWOLVES,
“VAMPIRES,
“HAGS—
“—EVEN THOSE FUNNY LITTLE ELVES OF LEGEND—”
“IN THIS WORK I SO SET OUT TO ACCOMPLISH ONE THING ABOVE ALL OTHERS…”
“…THAT NONE MAY EVER FORGET THE NAME GLORIA AHMED.”
Remus snapped like a rubberband stretched far beyond its limit and stumbled, scrabbling across the bricks underfoot on his hands and knees and scratching raw the former in so doing. He never regained his balance. Sirius collided with him a moment later, ever the graceful bowling ball to Remus’s beanstalk pins, and they collapsed together as a pair of breathless, sweat-drenched postgrads.
A familiar lighthouse, at least.
When Remus lifted his head from their heap a moment or four hours thereafter, he saw the others were in similar exhausted, twitching states, and beyond them that a neat stack of pages almost as tall as Lily sat neatly in the centre of their chalk hexagram, waiting to be read.
***
Remus’s head still swam as he wandered, weaving through the Forbidden Forest in a pre-dawn stupor. He felt drunk. And stoned. And freshly, filthily shagged in the best possible way.
Not that he could tell it from the artifice of the spell, but he was fairly sure that some shagging had gone on in those minutes after they scattered from the exam chamber like conspiratorial cockroaches, leaving Lily and Pascalle the trunk. They couldn’t read it—not there, they had neither the time nor wherewithal—but they did have enough time for Remus to drag someone, probably Sirius, into the nearest alcove and tug the pair of them off after a minute of frantic needy kisses. The reek of it on his belly was real enough.
So elated was the mood that the eerie morning fog creeping through the wood failed to daunt Remus. He felt nigh invincible—you couldn’t channel that much energy and come through the end the same as you began. If magic was indeed the sound and Remus both piano and pianist, as the Defence professor had once told him, then Remus had just played his first concerto in public concert. It was a transformation of its own.
Funny, that.
He broke into a jog—hey, soon he’d be an entirely unclassified class of Being and pull Sirius headlong over that threshold with him, so why not enjoy his last few days of human fatigue?—crested the Unicorn-Centaur lesbian ridge, and swung, childlike, around the fat trunk of a tree only to collide full-body with Socrates.
“Oh hullo,” said Remus mirthfully. They hadn’t staggered with the impact despite Their smaller size and unmending wounds, but Remus had nearly fallen clean over. “Sorry I’m late—”
“You are too late,” hissed Socrates.
“Pardon? I didn’t—we’re not at all near the full moon. Not for another three days.”
“The ritual takes seven days before the moon,” spat Socrates. They yanked him back to his feet with one strong bloody hand while the other clutched to their side. “Seven days after. You have squandered our time.”
Remus blinked, sobriety teasing into him. His cheeks flushed. An indignant or perhaps petulant tut slipped out of him.
“You could’ve said—”
“—do not blame me. I told you to come on the seventh night, and you did not. It is the morning of a new day already.”
“If you’d said—”
“Was your other task so important it could not wait another day? Hours?” asked Socrates, and though Remus’s brain reached for a quick response—it had been, actually, with a similar unfair window—They looked back over Their shoulder with a wild glance whence They came, shaking Their small head. “It does not matter. You have chosen,” continued Socrates, pushing back hard on his chest. Remus staggered once more. “Now you must run. Do not return to this forest, Remus. Not ever, and not ever alone. I will not be here. You will not like what you find here. Run.”
Remus stood there a moment, eyes wide and jaw slack. Was this another test?
“If there was only one day—”
“Run!” growled Socrates. They pulled at something animal inside him just as They pushed him once last time, tripping Remus over a root as Their skin split open and raw angry muscle burst forth in lupine coils before a layer of clay-coloured fur closed overtop it. Bones snapped. Remus’s stomach turned. So too did his head. He couldn’t watch. A farawy reckoning howl ripped through the woods and his skull, loud like a train horn seconds before impact. Not Socrates. That, too, touched Remus’s animal heart, though it only gave him the gift of fear. He was up and sprinting back the way he came at full tilt.
His ears caught the sound of something heavy loping away from him.
Only once he crossed back through a low thicket and found himself staring, breathless, at the rickety wooden bridge that led to the castle proper did he look back, which he accomplished by falling flat on his arse and wheezing until the fire in his anxious ex-smoker’s lungs diminished to a mere smoulder.
The sun was rising over the forest, castle, and old covered bridge. At this time of morning birds ought be singing, crepuscular creatures stirring from their arboreal nooks and crannies, but the Forbidden Forest was deathly quiet, then, not unlike a funeral parade, and its trees stared down, Remus thought, at his cowardice with knotted eyes. Whatever high he’d carried since the decryption was gone and replaced by a splitting, aching hangover. It bypassed his orbital bones and sunk deep into his chest. Twisted in his guts.
Inside him, immense relief melted together with a strange juvenile sense that he’d been cheated. This was not how a hero’s story ought go. A childish sob lodged in his throat.
Remus slunk back to his dormitory and slept for sixteen hours, awaking no happier and to find that not one part of it had been a terrible dream. Yet the nightmare continued: when he stirred in bed, sticky and dehydrated and bleary-eyed beneath their sheets, Sirius sat at the foot of the bed with his unwashed hair draped over his face. His still palm rested on Remus’s ankle. He had to say his name twice to get his attention. Sirius’s face was wan and illegible.
Mary Macdonald, he explained in a detached voice, had been expelled from the postgraduate program. No one was quite sure why. He’d chased her to the winged-boar gates, Sirius, the only one of a small crowd of voyeurs to follow her out the castle bounds and down the dirt path, yet she’d given only a blithe shrug in reply. She wouldn’t explain herself. It sounded, he said, like she didn’t care. Her research would be destroyed in its entirety, being a technically untested prototype with no pilot to drive it. It didn’t matter. She gave him the number of her Brixton flat and told him to call when he was off for the summer. She left.
Notes:
Classic university hijinks!
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, Practical Applications, Part I will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 20 June, a Friday.
If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is 160 Acres in Ojai by MSAlexWP (WIP warning!), who needs no introduction! It's an American AU R/S fic with a sharp eye for otherwise uninterrogated romcom dynamics, and the dynamic between Remus and Sirius is as delightful as it is fascinating. Give it a read!
Chapter 22: Practical Applications, Part I
Chapter Text
Two days after Remus passed his end-of-year review and the morning after the late May full moon, Remus’s lie/shag-in with Sirius was interrupted by a painful knock at the door. Both of them exchanged quizzical and somewhat accusing looks.
Did you? mouthed Remus.
Did you? replied Sirius, although he used his eyebrows. His lips were otherwise occupied. Passing his review and the shock of survival—and, more to the point, being Sirius, who had a fair few wires crossed himself, mind you—had roused him from his ennui. They’d done worse after worse. After Wales.
“Remus!” called Lily through the door. She’d passed as well, of course. “Dumbledore wants you in his office.”
“When?” Remus’s voice was groggy and unstable for multiple reasons. He and Sirius needed to stop doing this, really. It was somehow becoming a habit.
“An hour ago.”
Well, if he was already late.
Sirius was the only thing that carried him through the rest of the morning. As of recently, ‘reporting to the Headmaster’s Office’ meant using the Floo therewithin to travel to one safehouse or another, from which he’d take a Portkey, &c. &c., and then arrive in a quaint cottage somewhere in the English countryside that belonged to a Longbottom, a Potter, Andromeda-stroke-Ted Tonks, or one of the many McKinnons or Prewetts in their respective sprawling family trees. The Bones’s estates had once been safehouses too, though with their deaths—he’d never met Edgar Bones, but by all reports he’d been a good if gruff wizard—the lands had been thrust into wizarding legal limbo. Funny how disputed property still mattered a great deal in matters of magic and warfare.
Remus had taken to not eating beforehand. It often ended poorly, and his fatigue and the lingering moon worsened matters further. Losing Benjy had made the quality of Order transport unpredictable.
Once inside what turned out to be yet another spartan McKinnon household—it was furnished for soldiers, what with its purely functional furniture, bland colours, and no aesthetic sensibility whatsoever beyond the necessities of a safehouse-cum-barracks—he would be expected to sit in the sitting room or perhaps the dining room and await for someone to debrief him. Caradoc was most common, though sometimes Dumbledore himself bothered to show up.
What Remus needed was a cup of hot tea and a few drags off a spliff, really, to dull the aches in his recently-transformed bones—Sirius had taken to coffee as of late and was trying to turn Remus onto it as well, likely with the hopes of getting a machine for it in their flat and thus Remus to fetch him a fresh brew without having to leave bed himself—but he did not get a cup of hot tea, and the spliff was right out. Instead, when he pulled open the clean grey door, Remus blinked and received an ambush. The small, emptied dining room was packed to capacity and its inhabitants spilled into the equally compact and unfurnished kitchen nearby, sanitised within an inch of its shiny white tiles. A dozen Order members fixed their gaze on him at once in total silence.
At the head of the table sat Albus Dumbledore, Order of Merlin, &c. &c., whose wise and wizened features weighed heavier with the tolls of war every time Remus saw them, though this time regret could not fully escape his eyes. The wizard was old and no longer so indecipherable to him, now. Once he looked at the figures flanking him, Remus needed little else to know why Dumbledore bore such remorse.
To his credit, Caradoc met his gaze without flinching. He was unsheared, fresh back from some adventure, most likely, and haggard by the trip like he hadn’t slept. His jumper was torn and stiff, while his lips formed a silent apology. The others were not so respectful. Marlene beside Dumbledore was stoic and hid mixed feelings in her quick brown foxy eyes. She’d pulled her auburn hair back into a functional ponytail to show off the burn scar that ran angry across her cheek and up into her ruffled scalp. A challenge.
I bore my scars openly, Lupin, said the scar that ran down her chin and vanished under her functional black robes. The least you could’ve done was trust me.
By contrast, Emmeline twirled her wand between deft fingers expertly and absently, eyeing him and up and down as though seeing him for the first time. One leg hooked over the armrest of her chair. Her shock of red hair was even shorter, now, just a buzz and a whisper and the rest sacrificed for aerodynamics. A twig of a man stood behind her. Sturgis Podmore, a wizard of such little mass it made him a prime flyer, deferred to her and imitated her uncaring, flippant I’m-not-upset, I-feel-no-betrayal attitude. At least Emmeline was getting her way.
The Prewett twins sat middle on either side of the table with their ginger hair and stocky, freckled frames and regarded Remus with obvious apprehension. He’d never been able to tell Gideon and Fabian apart and now would likely never need to—despite the Prewetts being a family that fostered creativity among their many children, it’d only inured them to some prejudices. Apparently not enough. Blokes shagging blokes and birds birds was fine, but if anyone involved happened to turn into a monster once a month, that, it seemed, was a lycanthropic bridge too far. And it was odd. Remus hadn’t known the Prewetts well. They were on logistics, rum at charms and also fair duellists as well which landed them in Marlene’s camp as muscle and backup when they weren’t setting up safehouses. Wizarding twins were rumoured to be mutually telepathic, but the truth was being so close to a person long enough gave you intuitive telepathy. Such had been the case with Sirius and James, after all.
Remus nevertheless wished Gideon and Fabian could read his mind and know he was the same swot as he’d ever been. He wished they all could—this was not how he wanted to tell people. Yet everyone present was searching him for signs, seeking hints they’d missed. Fletcher at the table’s foot stared at Remus’s wrist-rolled sleeves, bloodshot eyes scanning for scars, while Dorcas Meadowes adjusted yet another one of her pearlescent gajras and pretended she hadn’t been watching his gait as he entered. If that all wasn’t enough, the small host of ex-Aurors aside in the kitchen were each on edge. Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody, as Remus had learned his full name was, had his electric blue eye centred dead on him, giving him the oddest sensation of being naked. Frank and Alice Longbottom, the latter apparently well-pregnant, stared at him with anticipation.
Fascists. All of them were at least as dangerous as Remus if not more—they’d bloody well signed up to be state soldiers and only quit when it was no longer someone else’s skin on the line. Remus had been turned at age five and been flailing in the dark ever since.
“I take it everyone knows, like?” said Remus as casually as he could muster.
It came out bitter instead. He was trying with no little desperation to arrange his face in a way that conveyed mirth, but he must’ve looked unhinged, what with his rapid chestfalls, flaring nostrils and arched fuzzy brows, and fists clench-unclenching at his sides—except, no, actually, he was beyond unhinged. Remus was an entire collapsing doorframe in a massive mansion of cards he and his best mates had spent fifteen careful years arranging.
“Was it you?” he said—shouted—and twisted his scruffy chin towards Caradoc. He didn’t trust himself to point without throwing a punch.
“Remus—”
“—oh, cheers for the confirmation, like, but I’m not,” he spat, balling his fists so tight he thought his nails might draw blood in his palms, “definitely not interested in an explanation, you—”
“Remus,” said Dumbledore. “Sit down.”
There was not enough arithmetic in the world.
Remus yanked back his chair with such force Fletcher flinched and nearly overturned his own seat. From the corner of his eye, he saw Alice hover a hand over her wand.
She relaxed when he sat as directed.
“We have an opportunity, Remus,” began Dumbledore. “One that only you, among all of us, may seize. Caradoc, if you would?”
Remus was not going to leap over the table and punch Caradoc or Dumbledore in the face.
Remus was not going to leap over the table and punch Caradoc or Dumbledore in the face.
Remus was not going to leap over the bloody table and punch Caradoc or Dumbledore in the face, no matter how much both the sods deserved it. No matter how good it would feel having his fist connect and break their noses. He couldn’t even imagine Dumbledore being punched, let alone the ancient man having a bloody nose.
Even if it looked as though it’d been broken once before.
Probably for a good reason too.
“One of my agents—”
The crack of Remus’s fist slamming into the dining table rang out like a gunshot and was followed shortly thereafter by a slow, splintering sound as a once-sturdy table leg began to crumple, while its surface slanted diagonally towards Remus until it rested heavy on his thigh. Half his fist was numb and his wrist was pricking where splinters had found a new forceful home. Remus had broken all the good will he might’ve still had with anyone in the room along with a perfectly good table and probably his little finger as well from the way it stung.
“Sorry,” murmured Remus, not meeting anyone’s eyes in the stunned silence. “Continue?”
Except his brain wasn’t fully following Caradoc’s debriefing. Not that he was sure any part of his brain was working at all, given he was behaving like a wild animal at the worst possible time, but the alternative was worse. Paranoia, his oldest friend, had returned from holiday with a healthy glow and an army of fears both fresh and old to exploit.
There was a reason Sirius hadn’t been told to come with him that morning. It was the same one that explained why neither James nor Peter nor even Lily, all also Order members, were in attendance. Why the Order felt they needed to separate Remus from anyone who might support him was unclear. Paranoia was still percolating—still gathering intelligence on that front—but the reasons were becoming clearer to his tinfoil mind.
Caradoc explained that schisms were building everywhere, not just in the Squib borderlands. A lieutenant of Greyback’s pack, likely this unknown Nykt from the Evening House, had been feeding Dragon’s Blood (an alleged narcotic with unspecified effects, Remus wasn’t quite sure and was not in the mood to ask) to his packs and recent converts to both ensure their loyalty and strengthen them. Both Caradoc and Marlene agreed that a combination of Legilimency, political radicalisation, and mood-destabilising substances were being used to turn them into fearsome shocktroopers in anticipation of an all-out ground war. The thought was horrifying.
Except, according to Fletcher, someone—not him, definitely not him this time—had intercepted the most recent smuggled shipment of blood from Bulgaria and stolen it, leading to strict rationing among the two packs, Greyback’s and Terra’s, but in so doing the thief also made a grab for power—offering something to take the edge off withdrawals. Scouting by air had confirmed that the dragonologist Amir Maalouf was no longer among either pack’s ranks. Emmeline had taken point and Sturgis Podmore confirmed. It was the beginnings of a power play and so, it seemed, without involving Remus whatsoever, the Order had backed the new player.
It’d worked. The packs were split: half of Terra’s pack and a third of Greyback’s had gone with their new leader, another half and third had taken off with Terra herself, leaving Greyback and Nykt alone with only a miniscule fraction of their original force. Which begged the question, of course, as to why they needed Remus here at all, though Caradoc got around to that too soon enough.
“The Order’s willing to sponsor them—”
“—us,” said Remus, sharp. “Werewolf’s out of the bag, like. Sponsor us. You want me to babysit them.”
Marlene grimaced. “Many of them are new werewolves. Freshly infected. They need a leader.”
“And we need someone we can trust, Remus,” added Caradoc, though there came a derisive snort from the ex-Auror kitchen.
Oh. Oh, joy, that’s what this was—a veritable tour de force. Remus tried and failed to keep his brows from ascending to ludicrous heights and his eyes widened with similar silly proportions. He pinned a mad laugh into his tongue with his teeth, letting out only a choked noise. Paranoia whispered like French rebellion in his hear to line it all up nicely.
The Order had their own pet werewolf to take control of the other wolves, yes, but having finally positioned themselves to do so, they realised they’d have to let said pet off his leash a little bit. Just a touch. Just for a while. Except, when Caradoc said schisms were building everywhere, that wasn’t solely on the sides of Squibs and Death Eaters: the Order of the Phoenix, it seemed, was just as volatile as any other organisation and thought Remus the obvious powder keg. Necessary. Untrustworthy. Dumbledore had cultivated Remus as an asset for all these years, yes, but only so he could pass the baton at the right moment: earn the pack’s trust and then hand them over to the Order for safekeeping, don’t worry your pretty little lycanthropic head about it. If Remus was lucky, he’d get a pat on said head and a nice bone for his troubles.
And if he misbehaved, well, that was what the three ex-Aurors were for, not to mention Mean Marlene and her Blood! Blood! Blood!; or Emmeline Vance, the only witch Remus knew who could duel from broomback with pinpoint accuracy; the Prewett twins and their double-barrelled fighting style; the legendary Time-witch Dorcas Meadowes; and after all that would be Albus Dumble&c. himself, ready to take back the life and luxuries he’d so generously gifted to Remus so many years ago.
That all sounded about right, Remus reckoned. Fit the puzzle pieces together quite quite nicely, didn’t it? What a piece of work was man indeed, how noble, how infinite, et fucking cetera.
“Remus?” said Caradoc as softly as an unsheared Welshman could manage. It occurred to Remus that he’d been quiet and stewing a long while. Perhaps they’d even asked him a question. “Most of it’s already underway,” he continued, and, oh, that was comforting, they hadn’t bothered to wait, “and the Prewetts, bless ’em, set up a basecamp for your lot with most of the essentials. Long-term hot showers might take some time, but everything else—”
“No,” said Remus.
“Sorry?” asked Caradoc. At the very same moment, Dumbledore leaned intently forwards and caught Remus’s stare, and he felt a heat behind those eyes—behind his orbital bone, too, like a dull ache. Jesus, he oughtn’t be doing this with so little sleep. Caradoc coughed and, perhaps noticing his fatigue, added, “Clarify for us, would you?”
“If you want me to do this, I’m picking the spot,” said Remus. He frowned and scratched at his eye, willing the pain away. “My people, my village, my decisions. They’ll smell you lot all over otherwise,” he continued. Breaking eye contact with Dumbledore and channelling his best steely Sirius gaze at everyone in the room, he hoped to convey some kind of conviction. “And if somehow that stench’s not enough to scatter them and send them running back to Greyback, I think it’s abundantly clear that the prejudice in this room would.”
“Sir.” Mad-Eye Moody rapped his gnarled staff once on the kitchen tile to draw the room’s attention, though his own stare—one eye of it, anyway—was directed at Dumbledore. “You can’t entertain this kind of flagrant insubordination.”
“I agree,” said Alice, who Remus decided henceforth to never describe, nor her husband either in any more detail. They looked like Aurors, quacked like Aurors, and even if they’d left the service, they could bloody well die as Aurors for all he cared. “It’s too dangerous, and not just for Lupin,” she continued, and, piss, okay, maybe he’d have to give her a little credit. There was a kindness beneath her stern voice. “Without a support team—”
“I’ll put one together myself. People I trust.”
“Werewolves?” asked Frank.
“Well, Frank,” he replied, tone acidic, trying not to snarl if only because the optics would be awful, “werewolves are people, so yes, there’ll probably be some among my team.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Then you can bloody well deal with this new leader of theirs yourselves and leave me out of it.”
Marlene rolled her eyes. “He’s unregistered—”
“Oi!” called Fletcher. “He deserves a fair shot—”
“—funny,” began Gideon, or maybe Fabian.
“—real funny,” continued Fabian, or maybe Gideon, “coming from you, Fletcher. How many ‘fair shots’ you been given so far?”
Dorcas lifted a hand to draw the room’s attention—she was small otherwise.
“Regardless of how we feel, we can’t ignore that Remus is a mere postgraduate. And we’ve invested so much already—”
“Aye,” said Emmeline. Podmore nodded behind her for emphasis, the sycophant. “No way he pulls this off on his own. He’s not got the ambition for it.”
“Too much ambition is my worry.”
“Aye, but you worry about everything, Alastor—”
“—lycanthropy is no laughing matter—”
“—the boy is basically a child. If I hadn’t been there, we wouldn’t have only lost Fenwick—”
“—I was a professional flyer at his age—”
“—he’s unregistered and he’s been lying to us for a year, for Merlin’s sake, I don’t want him anywhere near this—”
“—give him a chance, like—”
“—Why? You fancy him, Caradoc?”
“Go drown in piss, Longbottom—”
“—don’t you speak to him that way—”
“Enough,” said Dumbledore, and the room fell quiet. A great weight settled behind his half-moon glasses, heavier, it felt, than two half-moons themselves. “Remus,” he continued. Grave. Ominous. “Are you certain this is the path you wish to take?”
Remus ought push back from the chair, stand, pace—something to command the room like Dorcas often did, seeing as he looked a child in detention sat alone at the end of the long dining table—but in all honestly he didn’t trust his legs. His fingers were trembling.
“I am not a piece on a gameboard for people to push around as they please,” growled Remus, “and none of you know anything about how to care for werewolves, let alone how to live as one. The terrain is specific—it needs to be close to a town or city so we can fetch supplies, co-exist, and more importantly so the people, yes, people don’t feel like they’re in prison. Which,” he continued, staring from Marlene to Dorcas to even Alastor Moody, though his voice too began to tremble, “I should hope this is not.”
It was not the rousing speech Remus ought give. Sirius would know better what to say—Lily, James, probably not Peter—and even he’d do better if they’d let him sleep. Half of them had to know the moon had been only last night.
“Then it is settled,” said Dumbledore. “Your terms are accepted, Remus,” he announced, and he could feel let alone hear the teeth gritting in the kitchen while Remus’s own jaw unclenched. Oh, he hadn’t—
“You leave at once,” continued Dumbledore, standing and sweeping his grand grey robes in so doing. He was taller, suddenly. Titanic. “Caradoc, assist him, would you?”
“Right away.”
All tension flooded out of the room in a deluge of people watching Remus with anger, betrayal, and a hint of awe. Oh, Jesus Christ. What he had he done with his temper now?
***
Fletcher caught his arm on the cottage veranda as Remus left for the Portkey. The bloke was too short and blocky for a thief, but strength had its advantages too.
“Did wrong by you, they did,” muttered Fletcher under his breath. He offered Remus a puff of his cigarette—straight tobacco, unfortunately, and skinned up like a bloody cigar—which he nevertheless took. “’Doc as well, bleedin’ bellend.”
“Cheers.”
“I’ll knock some sense into him, yeah?”
Remus shook himself free and yet lingered a moment longer and began, “Hey, could you—”
“—wossa message, mate? I’ll make sure Black gets it, I will.”
“You’re a saint.”
“You owe me.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
After the Portkey, Remus Apparated to London—he’d leave Sirius a note for redundancy, given Order members were dropping like flies, these days, and they’d had go-bags on the ready since Winter holidays—then travelled that squishy silicone straw of Apparition once more to a burned-out home now fenced off and being reclaimed by nature in Port Talbot, Wales. From there he caught a long and boring cab ride to Aberystwyth on the off chance someone, Death Eater or Order, intended to follow his trail, and swapped cabs one last time to take him back southeast to Tregaron—a small market town his mother had taken him through before a hike into the nearby mountains years ago.
If Remus was making good with paranoia he might as well go all the way, after all. He wasn’t sure he could handle another loss. This wasn’t some lark.
Though three weeks alone in mid-Welsh Cambrian Mountains was perhaps exactly what he needed, though some part, most parts, actually, would’ve appreciated having Sirius there with him if nothing else so he’d have someone to retreat to when the weight of literally everything became too much. Along the circuitous and convoluted route from the Pyrenees to present day, Sirius Black had once again become Remus’s safe place, squidlike bones and all.
And three weeks—that was his upper limit of time, at which point he and the Order had to meet with the new mysterious pack leader, as a week thereafter would be the full moon.
Three weeks to set up the infrastructure for an entire village on his lonesome.
How was that for ambition, Vance?
Yet if ambition was an unfamiliar instrument to Remus, who had until recently spent most of his life under the presumption that it would be a short and painful one, then that instrument was not a violin but a hammer—a tool whose use Remus would learn by repeated forceful effort, just as he’d learned most things. So little had come to him easily. He wasn’t James. Remus hadn’t been born to that Sleekeazy fortune even before lycanthropy had thrown his family back from homeowner to indebted renter, and while it made life hard, it gave him focus and perspective as a firm alloy anvil for ambition.
Scarcity—starvation, really—had left marks he’d likely carry for many years after the War, but Remus had adapted to it over the years. Become efficient. He’d learned to do much with mere scraps in his hunger, and yet at some point Remus had passed an intangible threshold and emerged an accomplished wizard-werewolf.
It—magic—was the opposite of ‘scraps.’
Sure, Sirius was a creative and burgeoning duellist with a mental catalogue of hexes to rival the dark wizard Ekrizdis, but Remus knew half a dozen heretofore useless architectural enchantments that’d been buried in the appendices of a tome on Slavic lake-castles; for every prank James had masterminded or flying trick he’d invented, Remus knew at least vaguely something about aqueous reservoirs or ancient hearth-heating systems, and always the title of the book he’d read it in; Mary’s aborted thesis had been the end-all of protection charms, yes; Diggle was an unparalleled illusionist; even Peter’s gift of total recall separated him invariably from Remus in matters of strategy and chess; and yet Remus knew enough about wards, enough about illusions and strategy to muddle his way through. He’d lived in the Pyrenees Village and could at least guess at Chima’s methods and planning.
So instead of succumbing to paralysis in the first week, Remus did his best. Following the four-hour mountain hike from Tregaron he commandeered a dead-end dirt road with a Muggle-Repelling Charm and put up a minor glamour to hide away said road’s existence from the unobservant eye. He didn’t need to be a master, here: beyond a few old bothies, no one was likely to stumble through his random section of the Cambrian Mountains. The English called it the Desert of Wales; they, the Welsh of which he was at least in name apart of, called it the Elenydd. The upland moors, a patchwork quilt of dull green grasses and purple heather and replanted, monocultural forests. Acid soil. Rivers were born and poisoned here. Most of the mines had long since closed. He’d have more trouble keeping werewolves in than visitors out.
Remus cleared room enough in the larch trees, sessile oaks, and damp mossy underbrush for a few small structures with crude Severing Charms then began the painstaking work of raising a cabin or a half-dozen. It took him several frustrating tries and two full nights, but Remus was no stranger to frustration. It was as old a friend to him as paranoia.
Sometimes, Remus mused, he probably relished its company.
The cabins would hold a few months on their own. Long enough for him to get his hands on some proper reading material to shore up the foundations and thoroughly weatherproof the thatching, at least, and so Remus deployed the superpower of good enough and moved on to the other essentials. Plumbing, heating, a cookhouse, storage, celebration—the more he worked, the more he thought about what to add next, and the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to work.
Remus began to spend all his meal breaks drawing and plotting out little hamlet planning maps by his campfire pit and took endless notes into the night, curled in his tent, that both grew with and fed his ambition, like an inky goldfish finally freed from its glass bowl prison.
He knew an ancient excavation charm that was allegedly used for cairn tombs across the isles and so used it to dig earth cellars; one such cellar he filled as a cistern with a spell to summon layers of increasingly-fine gravel and another to draw water uphill, which he realised later would also provide natural pressure; leaves he transfigured into jars and stuffed Bluebell Flames within; he rigged rainstills with filtration enchantments; he rigged a regular still with a fermenting one; he spent a day wandering beyond the boundaries of his enchantments, reconnoitring the terrain and recalling tales of druidic forest gardens that need not be tilled and that might pass as natural symbiosis to outsiders, which he marked for seeding with little painted symbols of his own devising, pawprints and pictogram wolves; while out, he uprooted a single cheeky herb from a bothy garden weed patch for their own cultivation; he made a trip into town for a record player and some Bowie; and, with the end of that first week, he stuck with Sirius-like permanence a muggle poster of Freddie Mercury in painfully, delightfully tight white shorts right above his own transfigured bed into which he collapsed and slept only six hours because he hadn’t done up curtains yet and the early Welsh sun was an unforgiving taskmistress.
Magic. Remus had magic, literal, actual magic, and perhaps for the first time in his life an opportunity to use rather than just perform it.
Now, the Elenydd village—the Elenydd hamlet, really, but village-hopeful, village-understudy—was not perfect. Far from it, and, being honest, a bootleg hand-me-down version of the one in the Pyrenees, one that could’ve used the infrastructural aid of the Prewett twins given the number of useful spells that required at least one casting partner, but it was nevertheless Remus’s oeuvre.
Which became more of a problem as he worked at it. By the end of the second week, he’d erected a sum total of six tree-ensconced cabins outside werewolf earshot of one another and linked them to the central area with little dirt tracks and swaying paper lanterns Nathaniel had taught him to fold one tired winter evening, and each cabin of increasing internal volume as his Undetectable Extension Charm improved in quality with every new casting. He’d only performed the charm once before on a flask for Sirius that Christmas, and it’d taken half a dozen tries—now he’d cast it half a dozen times for strangers he’d yet to meet.
Strangers whose housing and environment he was unilaterally dictating. Yes, the hamlet was a sizeable undertaking, a mosaic of everyone Remus had ever met and admired, even for a short while, and that was the issue. This was Remus’s oeuvre and yet it oughtn’t be. Take for example the sleeping arrangements. There wasn’t enough room for their twenty-some lot to live separate, as Remus had done in the Pyrenees, so he’d piled a square four beds within each spacious cabin and resolved to sort out any problems later. But Terra’s pack had at some point lived in one flat together according to Kelly. What if the werewolves would’ve preferred a single main lodge with all their beds in one place? What if they were all city wolves and didn’t want to live in the mountains, let alone tend forest gardens or hunt game?
What if, God forbid, none of them liked David Bowie?
Sure, the aesthetic spells he’d nicked from Lily—the falling-leaf trick and a few others she’d deployed at parties—were whimsical and at times truly touching, but Remus couldn’t keep running away with himself. The saying went that it took a village to raise a child, but the lesser-said phrase was that it took, as it turned out, a village to raise a bloody village.
So with a week to spare, Remus fiddled one last time with his wards—they were middling things, designed to delay and confuse intruders more than anything else and disguised as lesser versions of themselves that would poke back, violently albeit nonlethally, if you tried to take too direct a look under the thaumaturgical bonnet—and added in an alarm system that both excited and gave him slight pause.
Severus had been the ill inspiration for the last bit. Once Remus had heard the hypothesis that Severus had concocted a poison specifically to affect Remus by way of his lycanthropy and thus no one else, he’d begun tinkering with spells such that they might only affect hybrids or other creatures, and also set Nathaniel down that road to cover his bases. There was likely an entire new class of spellwork out there made possibly only by their cursed physiology, and So Remus opted to try his hand at a practical example. If he’d done it right, the wards would alert him when anyone not werewolf crossed the threshold.
If, if.
He couldn’t stall any longer. As the sun set over the Welsh midlands, Remus rolled up his sleeves, planted a bare foot on the knot of the thickest, tallest larch tree he could find, and began to climb, higher and higher, until he felt a curious icy sensation not unlike putting your face through a pool of water on a hot summer’s day. He was past his own wards.
With some laboured breaths and further laboured limbs, Remus reached the wobbly top of his tree and folded back bristly branches to stare in wonder at the mountainous valley around him.
Summer in Wales was often mild, rainy, and sweltering in its humidity at the coast, but here in the middle-lands of the Cambrian Mountains the air was crisp. Almost alpine. The view as idyllic as it was painterly. Wide stretches of brushy trees all thin-trunked and their foliage the colour of rich, deep moss lined the rolling hills while barer slopes lay like massive heaps of gold fresh-harvested straw. Low red-clay bushes and clumps of dry, hardy wildgrasses filled the ground between forest clusters, pockmarked by pale lavender heathers and sturdy bracken fronds. In the clefts between hills, some beset with pale, weather-worn and sun-bleached stone tors, he watched a pack of what looked to be roe deer gather by the snaking creek for a drink.
The sun crept lower and lower from the wispy gossamer cirrus clouds towards the heathland horizon. A candle burning down. Remus sat there, timeless, until eventually the sunset was eclipsed by something owl-shaped.
Likely an owl.
It was an owl. A familiar one, and one he’d been expecting, as the third spell Remus had cast after the Muggle-Repelling Charm and glamour was one to shield the Elenydd hamlet against the minor Divination magic that owls could be trained in. No one had yet incorporated the birds into warfare, perhaps realising the mutually-assured destruction that awaited them and perhaps the rest of the magical world if they did, but Remus had needed time away to himself.
The letter was penned in fine calligraphy and smelled, Remus realised, of salt, motor oil, and faint weedsmoke. It twitched something in his heart and something firming between his legs. Two weeks alone had him going through withdrawals.
“DEAREST YOB STOP,” began the letter, “HEARD YOU WERE DRAFTED STOP A REAL SHAME STOP BUT TO BE EXPECTED, REALLY, IT HAS A CERTAIN DRAMATIC FLOW TO IT DOES IT NOT STOP IN ANY CASE IT MAY PLEASE YOU TO KNOW I WAS ALSO DRAFTED STOP AND IF SO THAT IS BECAUSE YOU ARE CRUEL OF HEART AND CRUELLER OF LOIN, SIR YOB STOP DO NOT RELISH IN MY SUFFERING STOP IT IS UNBECOMING AND I MISSED A VERY ON END-OF-TERM PARTY FOR IT STOP,” it continued, and Remus realised there was a literal tearstain punctuating the otherwise unpunctuated page. He wondered how long it must’ve taken Sirius to manage it only a moment before reading on. “as for the thing, much was learned although much much more went over my pretty little head stop my brain was fried years ago and we both knew this already stop.
“CANNOT DISCUSS FOR IT IS TOO SAUCY STOP PASSED THE PERTINENT TO THE SEXY MULLET STOP DO NOT MAKE THAT FACE SIR YOB STOP IT IS NOT A KIND FACE STOP NOT TO THE MULLET NOR YOUR OWN FINE FACIAL FEATURES WHICH I MISS VERY MUCH STOP XOXO AND A VERY SWEET, SLOPPY BUGGERING TOO STOP LOVE LADY PADFOOT STOP.”
The owl stared at him with expectant owlish eyes and further owlish displeasure, so Remus looked around the treetop only a moment before grabbing what he thought might be a large invasive beetle and offering it up. Not in his palm, of course.
His gift accepted, Remus took a moment to appreciate how far he’d come, even if he wasn’t sure he’d advanced in the correct direction. He was after all an unknown number of metres from the ground. He was sitting in a larch tree. Utterly bereft of shoes. He was handling insects as one might handle a sausage.
Before the moment passed and the owl returned to sender, he tied a small scrap of parchment to its leg. It wasn’t addressed to Sirius—if he’d really been drafted, it wouldn’t find him anyway, given his veils and nondetection spells were an order of magnitude better than Remus’s—but instead to Fletcher’s codename.
“GOODFELLOW—TELL WELSH DRAGON TO ARRANGE MEETING AT HE-KNOWS-WHERE,” said his own note. “DO NOT BRING OTHERS. DO NOT TELL OTHERS ACTUALLY COME TO THINK OF IT. WILL SCARE VIPS. LOVE WILD THING.”
***
Deep navy skies. Quiet alleyways and scummy algae slicking bricks. Emptied as it was of its buzzing all-nighter inhabitants, the Docklands felt like the shed skin of a large primordial serpent, and Remus the intruder. City lights—London was too light-polluted for starlight even on the Isle of Dogs—crept through the corroded holes in the roof while rusted metal rafters ached, gentle, high above him, and a salty mildew stench pervaded the cool and humid air.
That and the scent of wolves, of course. Enough of them together and enough of different origin to confuse Remus’s untrained nose, though on some level he was still confused as to how, exactly, scents were ‘inherited’ through the bite. It troubled him deeply. If Remus still smelled of Greyback, then would he, too, pass that trait onto anyone he bit?
Not that it mattered much anymore. With Socrates’s disappearance had also gone all plans of turning Sirius, which, privately, gave Remus no small sense of relief, although something sat in the unplumbed corner of his mind felt equal disappointment. And he couldn’t be sure—Sirius was the only book Remus had never quite grasped, whose lines he could never quite read between—but from the way his slender shoulders had gone slack and his sharp jaw tightened upon hearing that Socrates had fled, Remus thought Sirius might’ve been disappointed on some level as well. Sirius had even suggested they repeat their summer excursion and use Remus’s old-but-improved Comprehensive Locator to track the other werewolf down. Being drafted had put that idea on pause, of course. For the moment.
He was being rather insistent about it all.
At the sound of Fletcher’s wolf-whistle, Remus’s head snapped up to watch the thick sheet of corrugated metal from which muggles had fashioned a door for the warehouse. It slid open with a metallic groan though no one was there to pull it open from the inside. Caradoc was hidden somewhere within line of sight in case matters went poorly, albeit the three of them against a pack of werewolves wasn’t likely to be a fair fight.
Four figures entered all side-by-side, and Remus’s jaw went slack against all of his training. Two of them he recognised. Amir Maalouf’s lopsided gait was unmistakeable even when deprived of his signature tweed-handled cane. Greyer than before, the man himself was beaten now by fresh silver scars as well as the weather. And as for the camp and curly-haired Scot beside him, well, Remus ought to know that rabbity energy at first glance given how well-acquainted they’d become with one another’s bodies. Of course Kelly would be the one to nick wolves from Terra and Greyback. The boy—the man, Remus corrected himself—had as much ambition and hubris as he had bounce in his hips or his mop of coppery curls.
Except, shite, this was bad, wasn’t it? For purely technical and okay perhaps dignity-preserving reasons he’d left all specific mention of ‘Kelly McCallaghan’ out of his reports to Dumbledore and the rest of the Order, but if Caradoc gave word to the others that Remus not only knew their third-party power-player but knew him well—biblically, in fact, which Caradoc would no doubt ascertain the moment Kelly sneaked him a cheeky kiss and cheekier grope of the arse—and had concealed that knowledge, his burgeoning lycanthropic utopia would go up in flames faster than the Pyrenees during an unseasonably-hot summer.
The Order hadn’t even known Maalouf would be here. His presence alone might’ve been a dealbreaker because of the amount of cards in Remus and Kelly’s the-better-to-hold-you-with claws. They’d have the dragonologist, the unregistered Squibs, a fortified and self-sustaining compound in an undisclosed location doing Christ knew what with unattributable Order funds, and likely the largest unaffiliated pack of werewolves in all the British Isles. Once again Remus had got in over his head. Once again he’d be the least to suffer if he pissed it all up.
“Rabbit?”
“Blow me down,” breathed Kelly. He broke ahead of the other three and Remus crouched on reflex so the shorter man could get his arms over Remus’s shoulders for an embrace. “How’s it always ye, dead clever?”
“Happenstance,” murmured Remus. He squeezed Kelly tight, but his eyes dragged past the curls to Amir behind him and the two other werewolves beside him. Remus wasn’t particularly worried about Maalouf. He had a warm, amused look in his tired eyes watching the exchange, which made Remus wonder if the man hadn’t somehow figured out Remus had been flirting with him the entirety of his short time at Hogwarts, but he had no pre-existing relationship with either other wolf, and both of them watched him warily.
“Lupin,” said Amir cordially while Kelly pulled himself free. “Nice to see a familiar face.”
“Likewise. And your two colleagues are…?”
“Siobhan,” said one of the wolves. She was tall and stick-like and spoke with a thick Irish accent, the kind suggesting with grim determination that she knew how to make a petrol bomb. Dressed in sleek black—it matched her hair—she went sleeveless, presumably to show off the Chinese characters inked along her strong bicep, which was what most caught Remus’s eye as she waited for him to shake her hand.
Jesus Christ oh God her grip was strong.
Another woman, also Asian, crossed to meet Remus as well and introduced herself as Octavia Fong. Londoner. Her name didn’t ring a bell and for one obvious reason: there was a wand tucked in her boot. Not in a haphazard manner, either: she had the fanciest pair of boots among them all, one with a tight pocket for her wand where it wouldn’t jostle or be crushed. Caradoc had taught him the common spots for hidden wands, but in truth he could tell from her dominant hand. Her wider fingers were far too toned and limber for her to be anything other than classically-trained. Perhaps fitting for someone who was more witch than wolf, Octavia was plumper and jollier than the rest of them—those being traits that gave Remus pause because the last time he’d made such an assessment, Malodora Snyde had turned out to be a plump-and-jolly necromancer.
By the grace of their pre-existing connections, the conversation that followed involved significantly less circle-and-sniffing than Remus thought might be warranted by five werewolves learning to cooperate with if not trust one another. And while he remained cognizant that Caradoc and Fletcher were watching, he nevertheless answered all of their questions with as much honesty as Kelly’s blush-inducing words could extract from him: the size of the compound, its facilities, location, and so forth, ending with Remus’s admission that he wanted the four of them—as well as the other wolves—to give their own input as how to go forwards with the village.
“Well, we’ll have to nick a car, aye?” said Kelly offhandedly. “Few of our lot got in their heads they wanna go to school. Keep ’em out o’ trouble at least.”
“Siobhan’s got her youngling too,” added Octavia, elbowing the tall Irish werewolf in her side.
Remus blinked. Siobhan, Siobhan—wait, that Siobhan?
“I thought—pardon me,” he began, glancing with fuzzy and furrowed brows from Kelly to Siobhan and back again. “I thought she was the one you said went missing, and the one that was presume dead?”
“‘She’ can speak for herself, thanks,” said Siobhan. Her muscled arms were crossed and her set just as tight.
“Apologies. Do go on.”
“Bloody polite, this one, eh, boyo?” she muttered, quirking a dark brow at Kelly. “I was T’s left hand before all this shite started to come down on us. Knew there were too many cooks with too many damn gambits of their own,” she explained, “so when T stopped asking for advice and I caught wind Greyback was keen on us, I knew it was time to leg it. Fabricated an attack—divided and conquered. Everyone assumed someone else had come after me first.”
The thought stuck. Impressive, and yet…
“We gots our own dead clever right here, aye, Remus? She’ll give you a run for your coin.”
“Mm. And your child in Dublin—”
“The bairn’s fine,” replied Kelly, grin lopsided. He’d chipped another tooth since last Remus saw him and had, he realised, a new scar from a badly-healed split lip at the corner of his mouth. “Eatin’ us out o’ house and home, but fine.”
“They’re werewolf, then?”
“She is, my Maggie,” replied Siobhan. “Youngest of all us, but it was the only way to keep her safe. Alive. No one touches this pitch and comes ’way clean.”
“How old?”
“Seven, when they turned her.”
“Jesus. Poor child.”
“They would’ve topped her otherwise,” added Octavia, grimacing. She was well put-together and dressed fancy, yes, but Remus had the distinct sense she was clinging to old comforts instead of living la vie bohème as a kind of lark. “Greyback’s not one to tolerate connections outside the wolves.”
“Remus here was turned at five—”
“—Kelly—”
“—by Greyback himself, yes, we’ve heard the stories. Not that we believed them,” she added, peering up at Remus as though she needed better light in the darkened warehouse. “And not that we knew you were going to be here. You’re not at all what I imagined, however—I thought you’d be taller.”
It was the first time Remus had heard that one. “You were from Greyback’s pack, then? Did you know a wolf by the name of Nykt? And, oh, where’s Apollo? Not dead, I hope—”
“—asks a lot of bloody questions, this one,” muttered Siobhan. Her fingers were paling in her fists.
“Aye, he does,” replied Kelly, turning with no little swagger to stand beside Remus,” and even if he’s as clever as he is mad—’
“—I told you, we’ve heard the stories—”
“—I reckon he’s our best shot o’ gettin’ clear of this whole mess, ’specially since I ken he’s not one to do exactly as he’s told. Always stickin’ his nose in trouble and his neck out for poor saps like us—ain’t that right, Remus?”
“With one or two notable exceptions.”
Kelly laughed, high and rabbity at that and clapped him on the shoulder as if to indicate by some unspoken means that the time for sniffing each other’s arses was over. From there, they moved to boring subjects, logistics and the like, as well as a list of requests to which all four of them contributed, albeit Octavia the most and Amir very little. He hadn’t said much at all. Likely he was still shell-shocked by being turned and then used as a pawn for someone else’s machinations. Remus could hardly blame him, seeing as he was still shell-shocked himself.
Except that wasn’t fully true. Once again, Remus felt himself pulling away, floating above the fray and watching the spectre of his own life instead of living it—funny, that, given he was living a dream and a hope and now that his utopia was finally within grasp, Remus no longer felt the urgent need to reach for it—because something Siobhan had said was still niggling at the insistent, paranoia-oriented parts of his half-wolven, half-wizard, all-unforgiving brain. Siobhan had been caught between who knew how many sides from Terra’s scheming to Greyback’s forced unity to Apollo’s apparently-possessive nature to the Ministry and to the War. Not an enviable position. Yet she’d simply buggered off and left everyone else to make assumptions of the mess and bloodstains. It was a dead clever move. Very clever indeed. One so clever, it reminded him of a few other women he’d known.
Remus had never thought much about it, embroiled in the grief of his friends and his own funeral for innocence as he’d been at the time, but as Kelly recounted the events of winter-spring-summer and Amir laid out his intimate knowledge of the Squib trafficking networks across Britain, Remus reconsidered what he knew, actually, about Gloria Ahmed’s disappearance.
Only those with insight as to the true nature of her thesis research could’ve been motivated to take her. Dumbledore was right out; so too were the Ministry and DMLE, who could’ve denied her research enquiries instead of accepting them and then going through all the work of vanishing her immediately thereafter; and the Death Eaters already had access to the Kissed somehow, never minding the question of how they would’ve accessed her research at Hogwarts when it’d taken Remus a year and a team to figure it out. Even the Defence professor was dead or beyond dead.
Other than Mary who would be forever in mourning, Gloria Ahmed had no friends. No known family. Not a single true confidant in her life. Who was to say anyone knew where she’d been going the night of her disappearance, let alone enough to plan ahead for an ambush? Had there been an investigation? And why would Ahmed have taken all her research material with her to, say, Azkaban or some other presumably secure location where prisoners might undergo the Kiss, knowing she’d have to likely surrender all brought equipment at the door or what have you?
If Remus’s own mother could disappear for months as a muggle and remain alive, why couldn’t the same be said of the last great witch upon whom Remus would ever lay eyes, &c. &c.?
Perhaps noticing the thoughts darkening Remus’s eyes after the meeting—Kelly, Siobhan, Octavia, and Amir would have to float the idea to their pack before making any formal decisions, though three and a half of them reasoned the pack would prefer literally anything to sharing an old barn between twenty-something wolves of varying ages, cultural backgrounds, and sexual orientations—Caradoc clapped him on the shoulder and in so doing yanked Remus back to his body in the material world.
“Don’t look so grim, cariad—”
“Don’t—Jesus, don’t call me that!” growled Remus, pulling free. “You have no right.”
“Did you think they weren’t gonna figure it out? Honestly?” replied Caradoc, scratching at own his chin and neck with the back of his hand. “Look, Remus, I’m sorry about how it went down, I am, but you weren’t about to get two dozen wolves handed to you without someone asking questions.”
“You had no right—”
“—you got what you wanted, didn’t you? Your own village, your own people, your own bloody decisions?”
Remus blinked. “Do you mean to say,” he began slowly, drawing a deep breath, “you purposefully spilled my darkest secret in an attempt to make me upset, hoping I’d use that anger to—no,” he continued with a frown, “I don’t believe you. I refuse to entertain the very idea because that’s not leverage or cleverness or quick thinking, it’s wild guesses and—and—it’s instinctual—”
“It’s called reading and watching, Remus. You never asked me for anything, not once in the months I’ve known you. Never seen you ask anyone—and y’only take what you want,” he continued, nonchalant in a manner reminiscent of Sirius, “when you’ve got something strong in your blood, be it booze or a drug more primal.”
Remus’s lips parted in reply and yet all that came to him were images, scents, tastes, not words, flashing in a stucco beat as he recalled himself pushing Caradoc hard against the wall outside their flat and thrusting his hands under the man’s dirty shirt, then later and inside, doing the same with Caradoc’s trousers—
“—wasn’t a certain thing, ’course not, like,” he continued, “but people were putting your secret together whether I intervened or not, and at least I thought you might get something out of it, this way. Perils of being around geniuses and prodigies like them. And, speaking of…” He plucked a folded piece of parchment from his back pocket and frowned down at it when Remus took it, as if he’d expected something significant to occur and found he turned up to the matinee on the wrong date. “Gift from your boyfriend,” he explained. Paused. “Is that right? Given—”
“‘Your Ziggy Stardust’ doesn’t quite roll off the tongue,” replied Remus with a shrug. “Nor does it convey the same meaning. I hope this isn’t a problem.”
“Tell me now, you know I’m twice your age, Lupin?” said Caradoc, creasing up his forehead with raised brows. “Met every kind of queen there is from Dublin to Cardiff to London Town herself, and I reckon if you ask the right ones, they’ll tell you someone with my face’s been seen once or twice scamping about in a dress and heels. So mind your chopsing, like, ’cos I’m only trying to get it right with the both of you.”
Remus snorted at that. It was a bit rich given how fast and loose the man had played with one of his secrets already, but that he knew at all meant Sirius trusted him on some level.
“Boyfriend’s fine,” said Remus. “He’s a bit of a bloke and a bit of a bird—y’know, bisexual,” he added offhandedly. “Everything all at once. S’part of why I love him, like.”
“And you’re…?”
“A werewolf.”
Caradoc threw back his head and laughed a braying, sheep-like laugh.
“That’s a new one.”
“It’s the eighties, like.”
“Don’t remind me. Now,” continued Caradoc with a chuckle, “about this note from—”
“—my Padfoot.”
“Your ‘Padfoot.’ I figure it isn’t really blank, like, but I also figured I owed you one.”
“More than one—how is he?”
“They’re fine,” he replied, though Caradoc quickly fanned out both hands in defence when he saw Remus planned to press him further. “You know I can’t share any details.”
“I hate this,” growled Remus. His disdain for the Order’s secrecy was real and helped masked Remus’s underlying surprise and confusion, because the parchment he unfolded in his hand was not blank. Far from it, though the warmth blooming on his upper thigh told him why Caradoc saw it as such.
“ACCORDING TO AHMED WE HAVE IT ALL WRONG,” began the folded note. “THE KISSED—SOMETHING OF A MISNOMER, REALLY, THEY SHOULD BE CALLED THE ‘MOSTLY-KISSED’—RENDERS THEM MAGICALLY INERT, BUT THAT FUNDAMENTAL ALTERATION SHOULD NOT IMPACT THEIR INTELLIGENCE OR AUTONOMY STOP I REPEAT: THE KISSED SHOULD NOT BE AS THEY ARE STOP THEY ARE INCONSISTENT WITH THE RULES THAT OUGHT GOVERN THEM AND THE OTHERS SPENT WEEKS CONFIRMING THIS TO BE TRUE STOP WHAT THE FUCK, RIGHT? STOP XOXO LADY PADFOOT STOP.”
When Caradoc gave no comment as to Remus’s face having read the note, he wondered just how effective, really, Nathaniel’s sigil was in concealing their conspiracy.
“When did Sirius—”
“You’ll see them soon enough, I gather,” said Caradoc cryptically. “Now, let’s get the Hell out of dodge, like. This warehouse smells worse than Wales.”
“What do you mean—oh, bugger, I’m still supposed to be cross with you, aren’t I?”
Caradoc shrugged with his whole body, sort of in the same way he fucked, and, shite, bugger. He needed to meet Sirius or Kelly or maybe Nathaniel North alone for more than a few reasons.
“Make your choice, Remus. Cross or curious?”
Which was always Remus’s dilemma, wasn’t it.
Notes:
Summer at last! For anyone playing the home game, inflation in the UK is over 20%. Industry strikes are ending; hunger strikes are about to begin. Unemployment is high. Thatcherism is failing. Who could have seen this coming? It's the eighties, dear readers.
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, Practical Applications, Part II will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 25 June, a Wednesday.
If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is and only felt good while moving by aeridi0nis, a non-magical AU told in a series of summer vignettes. It's lovely and delicate and painfully raw.
Chapter 23: Practical Applications, Part II
Chapter Text
When Remus came back from summer break for third year, James caught him on the train platform in what would soon become one of his characteristic big, bearlike, heart-on-sleeve hugs.
It did something curious to make Remus’s eyes prick with tears. Rather than the shoulder-bump quick embraces to which he’d grown accustomed, James had unbeknownst to him become something of a hugger, and so when a thirteen-year-old Remus tried to pull back, James had kept firm grip and yanked him straight back for another long few seconds with an almost derisive snort and arms tightening around the crest of his back. Grey British September, a red steam engine and a crowded lain-brick train platform and two lonely months in sterile sunbleached Wales behind him. It would take years still before Remus understood why he’d nearly burst into tears.
Being James, he of course noticed Remus’s sniffling and watery eyes and thus promptly called him a sopping bird once it was over. One hard chuck to the shoulder. He never said another word about it aloud, actually, but thereafter following every holiday, school break, and on the scant few occasions where James was left alone to manage Remus’s latest crise d’angoisse, the boy who became a man would hug him again like that. Each time Remus would linger a little longer. For the first time in fifth year, it’d been James’s turn to pull away too soon and Remus’s to tug him back. It made a certain sense that James would be the one to crack his yobbish exterior.
Much the same reluctance, suspicion, and desire Remus recognised in the shabby werewolves who’d come to his remote mountain hamlet. Including their four co-leaders, the pack numbered nineteen members, now, with some five others deciding to go their own way. It about doubled the sum total of werewolves he’d ever known, and never mind the ones to whom he’d ever personally spoken. It was remarkable, how well they might’ve blended into the general public, magical or otherwise. They wore threadbare jeans and they wore hunted deerhide; they were as chatty (or worse) than rabbity Kelly or as silent and brooding as Octavia Fong; they were oddly tall and far too tiny; fat and thin; grey-haired and bald and tattooed and scarred and pretty and smooth and acidly abrasive. While each of the nineteen was unique, they also all had a number of shared features from the traumas of unwilling transformation to the use of eclectic substances to the paranoia and touch-starvation that came with being unable to fully relate to ordinary people. Remus made it his duty to remedy that wherever needed. More importantly, however, he restrained that duty to wherever it was desired and asked for.
Those younger wolves—the ones with bad box-dye jobs, rebel clothing ill-oriented for the mountains of the Welsh midlands, and the politics that inspired Remus most—they were the easiest to win over. He can’t have imagined where they stood in any prior pack’s pecking order. Once they realised as many had in his life that Remus was something of a great looming pushover, a tall scruffy carpet prone to apology when stepped on, actually, by tortured souls &c., they no longer watched him so warily. Instead they made a game of challenging him. The head of their clique, a young girl of no more than fifteen or sixteen and of dark braids variegated by the occasional long neon pink, deep, blue, or bleach-yellow strand, stamped over to his cabin veranda at least once daily to make demands on behalf of the young werewolves. In so doing she always stuck out her broad chin, daring him to defy her.
Remus never did. It wasn’t his job to defy these people, his people, or wrangle them—excepting on the moons, of course, which frustrated Kelly’s curiosity to no end and piqued sharp interest from both Amir and Octavia Fong. Christ, the list of things, this endless task of utopia was evergrowing. Nor, however, was Remus in the business of personally satisfying their every whim or being marched out from his tea/research/glade-construction to fix a simple door hinge. He had other designs to that end.
That unfunny circus of War had alleviated many a Death Eater of their wands. The Order had little use for them beyond cataloguing their history of spells and investigating those novel or unfamiliar. No simple task: though by some margin adept in deconstructing spellcasting in its circumstantial variations, the art of both recovering spells and deducing their function was utterly lost on him. Some of the theory Lily threw around like casual vocabulary—in any case, afterwards, the wands collected dust within various unmarked boxes in various unmarked Order safehouses. He’d scarcely needed to ask Fletcher. According to him, the wands were asking, begging, actually, to be stolen. If the thief was to be believed, one such box had in fact unlocked itself.
So when Boxdye and her crew asked him to levitate a braided chain they’d woven from vines and branches—ingenious little buggers, these kids—over a high thick tree branch unreachable by climbing so they could set a tyre swing below it, Remus had finished his tea, ventured into his own cabin, and tugged open the drawer. The eager wand leapt into his hand although Boxdye was not nearly as keen. Her look of mixed indignation, shock, wonder, and even a little seething rage that he’d dare pull such a stunt was as familiar to Remus as it was hilarious. More enjoyable was the string of inventive curses Boxdye had hurled at him when he explained that she and her friends were a clever lot and could probably figure it out on their own, but he would be here if they needed further instruction, of course. Sirius would’ve had a field day.
Professor Yob. Schoolmaster Moony. Exit Book Boggart, thy time be done; we welcome thee new, Remus Lupin, the Titless Tutor, just as we mourn thy tits, flat and perkless they might have been.
The older crowd possessed of more magical instruction would take longer and yet be easier. Time was what they needed—time to melt that frosty lupine armour built up like thick calluses over years of inevitable betrayals. Amir and Siobhan had inroads with them as well, and their temperaments had been thoroughly tempered by years of quiet suffering. Once the world had disabused you of your worth, it took more than one nice person to make you believe otherwise, if that belief ever returned at all.
Remus thought it might. Some of them grew bored of stewing and withdrawals, instead involving themselves in the lives of the two young children present: one was Siobhan’s daughter Maggie, and the other, a young girl of similar age who’d been orphaned in her attack. Perhaps the older wolves had made peace with the pains of their own lives, yes, but they could live vicariously through the youth and shield them as much as possible from the same fate. A small number received wands from Remus as well—none had asked, and he hadn’t secreted away enough to furnish the entire hamlet, not yet—but a few still had their original wands despite the illegality of possessing them as werewolves. Perhaps he could make rebels of them yet.
The problem with rebellion was, however, that at some point you had to dive in head- or both-feet-first and release your anxious grasp on whatever dying corpse of a thing to which you yet clung, and both Remus and the pack were overeager flirts who’d turn up to their tryst with cold, unplungeable feet. Having only spent two weeks together and most of it in the lingering thralls of Dragon’s Blood, they lived still in the honeymoon phase. Why take any plunge when you were finally away from the War after so many years of struggle? Or at the very least, why leap so soon? They weren’t drowning. Not yet. That bloated corpse had some buoyancy to it still.
Nor was Remus blameless in that complacency either. The wolves knew he was not as all-in as he let on, what with his secret projects and even more secretive trips away from the Elenydd hamlet two or three times each week. Some of that he would reveal soon, first to Kelly and then the other leadership thereafter.
Up a semi-treacherous snaking mountain path—one that was mostly scree and weathered mossy tors and other sheer rock detritus, though a quant grove of Sitka spruce gave its plateau ample cover and thus decent firm soil—the view overlooking the Elenydd was picturesque, though the one that warmed Remus’s heart most was the hidden-away glade within the Sitkas where he’d felled several logs and sewn seeds of aconite. Time and a few potions procured by Fletcher had done work. The glade’s edge reminded him of Socrates’s with its vibrant purple wolfsbane and slow-paling logs upon which he’d cast some preservation enchantments to assure they’d petrify in the sun rather than rot. Young lurid green ivies crept up trunks, beginning their long climb, while others were yet nesting themselves among bushes and shrubs.
As for the boulder in the glade’s meadow centre, well, that was a thing of Remus’s own doing. The Welsh summit lacked stones of a workable size and flatness for the ritualistic plinth Socrates had described, being a place of large, sheet-like protrusions of hard grey dolerite and other monolithic stone teeth, and so Remus had called—a nonspecific summoning guided more by the groping fingers of emotion than typical exacting science—it forth from beyond the mountains. The boulder was flat, yes, but its surface was both silky smooth and yet perforated with many small uneven holes, while its base was encrusted with the near-fossilised remnants of barnacles.
Though he was no geologist, Remus knew it was a volcanic kind of stone. You didn’t get those spongey holes any other way that from the cooling of lava bubbles. It gave the unnerving impression that the boulder was soft to the touch, like a soda bread or a mess of cobwebs. Remus thought it fitting—of Welsh sea and salt, smoothed by waves and fire-hardened. If nothing else, the boulder would baffle scholars who found it atop the mountain however many years after Remus and the hamlet were gone. A stone with a legacy.
Except that legacy was becoming clearer, closer, and thus so much more terrifyingly real as Remus finished cultivating the glade. Everything was in place according to Socrates’s teachings, more or less, which meant he could help Kelly through the first half the ritual as soon as the next full moon providing Kelly caught on to Remus’s secrets. Not that Remus knew, of course, how to do this part—suggest without telling, pique interest but let the werewolf seek it out on his own—but he had ideas, plans, and the wherewithal to adapt them. He knew how he’d been taught, and he knew how he’d want to have been taught, if he’d had a say in anything. He ought be able to close that gap. Yet as Kelly drew closer to the truth with his broken-toothed grins and soft, interrogative hands, the urge to flee became overwhelming.
He had simply no idea what he was doing.
“I have simply no idea what I’m doing, Pads,” groaned Remus. He twisted his torso over on the creaky, spring-bottomed fold-out bed, fumbling with an outstretched arm from for water while Sirius trailed his fingertips in unhelpful circles over his hips, then pinned them in place. “I’m going to get them all murdered. Or incarcerated. Or I’ll find them bored and then my commune’ll dissolve before it’s even been born.”
This was his other secret project. Not Sirius—Kelly already knew well enough about and biblically, actually, his boyfriend, so he’d made no effort to conceal it from the others, but beyond sneaking out to the wooded-off muggle sex caravan in Aberaeron for a spliff, a shag, and loving affection &c. &c. as soon as Sirius’s Order assignments allowed, he was still doing research over the summer. One with grim specificity.
Sirius’s folded note had contained such unwelcome information—learning that the Kissed oughtn’t, according to Ahmed, be emotionless automatons was something of a world-derailing revelation—but it hadn’t stopped there.
It hadn’t stopped, full stop. Being well-pregnant, Lily was barred from the field as an Order member, and so she was evidently devouring Ahmed’s unfinished treatise with the voracious appetite of anaemic sharks in otherwise bloody and academic waters. She drew up cliff notes, flow charts, even a few colour-coded nonrepresentational images to help convey some of the abstract concepts that required a brain thinking in four dimensions, then passed the works of Evans et al. (1980) by various means to Mary, who, having been summarily and unceremoniously expelled seemed to have vast swaths of free time the rest of them lacked. Mary in turn passed them to Sirius. In that game of telephone, of course, Remus was the loser.
Well, loser in some aspects. In others…
“Moony. Moony, love,” murmured Sirius. Staring up past his thin brows at Remus with lustful and murderous eyes, dark curls spilling around him and over Remus’s stocky thighs in a sweaty, tangled storm, Remus felt either terrified arousal or aroused terror. Probably both. “Could you not, perhaps, prognosticate the death of utopia while I’m sucking your cock? Just this once? Pretty please?”
“You could try something else.”
“Part of me misses when you squirmed over these wires being crossed,” grumbled Sirius. “Budge up, then, and on your side. Good boy.”
“Consider me thoroughly rewired.”
“Petard, hoisted, et cetera et cetera. James isn’t gonna recognise you.”
Remus blinked and relaxed as Sirius wound one long gangly arm around his belly. Took a deep breath. He could feel Sirius’s heartbeat against his back and between his thighs, elevated. Excited. “Likely not, no, but I’m also not likely to see him soon, am I? And not in this arrangement, like. Lily would murder me.”
A pause. Clumsy gears were turning in Sirius’s head, caught between two different schools of thought and much, much more interested in the rift between them.
“Moony.”
“Padfoot.”
“Have you not been taking any owls in The Land That Wales Forgot?”
“You know I don’t read fantasy, Padfoot.”
“I explained this one to you, as I recall,” replied Sirius, working something slick and squelchy with one hand. He probably had—early on Sirius had taken to reading aloud to him whenever he was stuck in the Hospital Wing, though Remus had never quite been fit to listen, then. “But I believe this one’s science fiction. You do pay attention when I summarise them for you, don’t you? Or is that why you didn’t understand my allegory of Nathaniel North as the ringbearer?”
“Had enough fun with whimsical magic growing up, thanks, no need to read about it, and so I’m afraid all explanations tend to blend together, much as I might enjoy your dulcet tones.”
“Have or haven’t you?”
“What?”
“Been taking owls—”
“—oh, well, no,” replied Remus, sheepish. He lifted Sirius’s hand to his collarbones and hooked a finger of his under a light chain, eyeing the flecking black polish thereupon his nails with mixed intrigue and suspicion. “S’pose I took a page out of Hope’s strategy. Enchanted this with everything I could think of to ward off detection,” he explained, “though I know it’s not airtight, nor is it enchanted with everything you could think of. Keeps the owls away, however.”
“Ah. Was wondering why you were wearing a cross.”
“Mm?”
“Thought you might’ve finally accepted this ‘Jesus’ character into your heart or somesuch. Even if,” he continued, “I still refuse to believe that’s a real thing.”
“It’s upside-down, Padfoot.”
“This ‘Satan’ fellow, then, or Hades. Whoever into your heart—I don’t judge.”
Remus snorted. “Cheers, but the only thing I’ll accept is your dick into my arse.”
“Patience, Moony.”
“It’s been a while.”
“Ah, I’m sure the six hours it’s likely been since you shagged Kelly hard enough into the mountain you encountered a civilisation of dwarves has been very difficult for you,” said Sirius, wry and nipping at his ear. Remus shuddered. “Unless—wait, you are shagging him, aren’t you?”
“Not particularly with the impending power balance-stroke-mentorship position I’m about to take, no, and could we please perhaps focus?”
“On your not receiving owls?”
“No—”
“—on my fingers in your arse, then—”
“—Padfoot—”
“—Moony, I love you, but A) there’s at least three different lines of conversation co-occurring right now, B) my blood’s definitely not in my brain right now—”
“—four, and I can feel as much, thanks—”
“—shut it, yours’s neither,” he murmured, “and C) I’m about thirty seconds from sticking my cock in you and losing my mind, so maybe get out with it, yeah?”
“Suddenly I’ve forgotten.”
“You bloody brat,” growled Sirius. Splayed out on their sides as they were, he hooked one ankle on Remus’s to lift his thigh while his well-lubricated hand worked between his legs. Lined up, and Jesus Christ, this angle was good. Remus let out a breathy moan and yet something rebellious too brewed inside him.
“So,” he grunted, waiting for Sirius to bottom out and hook his arm around his belly again, “about Ahmed—”
“I’m gonna bury you.”
“Bite me, Pad—oh!—foot,” he said between grit teeth. “If she might be alive, if she pulled a Hope—”
“—why are we talking about your mother—”
“—a Siobhan, then, and we could be looking for her. We might be able to find her. If so—oh my good fucking Lord—we might not have to do any further original research of our own. Beyond the pertinent searching, of course.”
“We could be looking for Socrates. We had a plan, yeah?”
“We’ve half a dozen spinning plates, Pads, so I think They can wait.”
“Then Ahmed can wait,” murmured Sirius, gritting his teeth and breathing hot on Remus’s neck. It wasn’t lost on him that somewhere along their way, they’d swapped priorities. “All of this can wait until we get our ends away, yeah?”
“I’m not sure about that,” said Remus, bracing his elbow forward. “Would you mind—Christ—giving me the rundown on Ahmed’s notes?”
“Sodding tits, Remus.”
“Is that a no?”
“No. Not ‘no,’ in the sense of ‘no,’ it’s—Christ. My brief is gonna be rubbish, you know. Hardly postgraduate-quality material.”
“I’m genuinely surprised you’re still hard, if m’honest. If I didn’t know better,” he continued, voice teasing, “I’d think you were enjoying this.”
“Shut up. Christ,” he muttered. “Do you understand how hard it is to talk and thrust at the same time? I’ve got smoker’s lungs, Moony.”
“You’ve been off the fags a year, you said.”
“I have an aristocratic constitution.”
“Give it your best go, then—oh, fuck.”
“The noises are helping, however.”
“Mm.”
“So,” began Sirius, cheek flush to Remus’s neck and safety pin earring cool against Remus’s hot skin, “whenever Ahmed went off on one her many trips into the field, it turns out she wasn’t off watching people get their immortal soul-cum-consciousness-cum-élan vital as you once put it getting sucked out of them in some grim grotto at the bottom of Azkaban or what have you, and Christ, this might be the worst thing I’ve ever talked about while shagging someone. Or, ah, no, second worst, never mind me. Dementors being the subject of discussion both times, oddly enough. Don’t ask.
“Anyways, Ahmed was off travelling, as it so happens, the many British Isles that don’t often appear on any atlas or map not owned by sailors due to being uninhabited or tiny or only an isle when there’s not a storm, and, being Britain, there’s a storm eight months out the year. Did you know that there’s some six thousand isles, Moony? I did. I only mention it ’cos it shows how barking mad Ahmed must’ve been and ’cos it’s the same number of thrusts it’s gonna take me to finish if you insist on having me recall this while fucking you. Qualms? No? Okay. Onwards and upwards—Christ.
“Ahmed didn’t just want to know about the Kissed—she wanted to know their origins, and to do that, she needed to know about Dementors. And with Azkaban off-limits, she went looking for traces of the person who created it before the Ministry took over. Ekrizdis. Necromancer; binder of the Dementors; inspiration for my mother, and, hm, let’s not pursue that line of inquiry now, shall we? Ekrizdis was long dead, obviously, but Ahmed speculated that if he was anything like a serial killer, there might be smaller islands out there with his first kills and fifteenth-century dark laboratories—the small ponds and lesser-known works to his abominable masterpiece of Azkaban. She was half-right.
I’m—sodding Christ, can I stop? Even I’m not this much of a masochist and, wait, Jesus, is this how you felt the week of my birthday? Fuck—okay,” he continued, catching his breath. “In those submerged grottos and wet caverns and ruins of weathered cyclopean stone, she found evidence to contradict the proposed history that Ekrizdis worked and died alone. She thought he might’ve come from a cult-like society well-acquainted with Dementors in the same way krill are well-acquainted with whales, and so the man that would become—fuck—a dark wizard went looking for ways to command them. Dark powers, necromancy, infernal deals, and, holy shite, Moony, you’re merciless. How aren’t you sore?
“Where was I? Oh, right. The Dementors.
“She—Ahmed never finished this bit, but according to Lily, Ahmed had a pet theory that in the time right before Ekrizdis, Dementors swept in south from the North Sea and along the coast like a wave of magic-immune locusts to precipitate the cult and might’ve migrated down from Greenland. Whether they originated there was unclear, being honest, but she was really worried about what might happen if the ice sheet started melting too much. Could you imagine? Dementors on ice? Horrifying thought. But whatever their origin and regardless if there’s a mess of them somewhere underneath the Greenland ice sheet or, Christ, the Antarctic one, Dementors existed in non-written lore. There was history on those isles.
“Most of that history was pretty fucking tragic, as it turned out, what with Dementors harvesting the souls of the cult people in order to propagate themselves and the cult people turning death-stroke-the-genesis-of-a-new-Dementor into a quasi-religious experience, but oddly enough, the remnants—sculptures and old paintings as aided by restorative magic and a psychometric spell Ahmed wrote ‘she would copy down later because the margins were too small’—suggested that sometimes the Kiss went wrong. Or right, I s’pose. Such are the small ironies, yeah?
“Sometimes the witch or wizard didn’t die. They came out the other side different, yeah, but they were technically soulless and still very much alive. Except the paradigm-shattering part was, they weren’t servants or slaves like they are now.
“They were worshipped. Leaders. Priest-queens and priest-kings, apparently, with minds of their own and untouched by our magic. Ah, fuck.
“This is all the abridged abridged version, doubly so, and, ah, I’m about to be quite abridged myself soon enough, but, yeah, the Kissed were at some point intelligent enough to lead this cult that Ekrizdis either surpassed or left behind. Ahmed had some other theories about that—if he was looking to streamline the process, maybe his people weren’t so happy about their religion becoming an industry as the Ministry has done, or maybe he just wasn’t so happy himself living under someone priest’s thumb—but she never finished them. Didn’t get the chance. The last bits of her outline had to do with the Kiss process itself and studying their physiology, but as we know she never got that far, and—ah, Jesus, Moony, you’re fucking twisted, you—I’m shutting up now,” breathed Sirius. “Fucking kiss me.”
Perhaps it was the weirdest sex Remus had yet had, which, bearing in mind he’d once been shagged by Padfoot as a werewolf, was saying something, and it was among the swottiest, but more than anything Remus was simply glad it was Sirius. Was the subject matter grim? Yes. Were they in a muggle sex caravan of unknown origin and regular occupants, decorated by fairy lights and other disco-inspired mood lighting? Of course, where else would they be? And would they be travelling a paranoia path home in only a few hours, with Remus away back to the mountains and Sirius back to his field-operative tasks? Nothing was more certain except the dread soon to follow.
As Sirius twitched with electric pleasure and squeezed a tight arm around his chest, however, grinding his hips needily with equal parts fatigue and dogged insistence, and indeed as Remus’s own orgasm began to rock through him while they kissed furiously and Sirius stroked him off even more so, Remus realised just how desperately he’d missed Sirius. Sure, perhaps Sirius was a drug, perhaps Remus was drowning himself in Sirius, but drugs could both be recreational and medicinal, and no one was campaigning to ban potable water though it drowned hundreds, maybe thousands each year. And Remus liked drugs. If Remus was dependent, good. You needed to depend on people whether in a War or without. This was his car, his body, and he’d bloody well crash it if he saw fit to do so.
“Christ, I need a spliff—ah, you’re a fucking saint, Moony, you know that?” said Sirius, panting. He plucked the proffered smoke from Remus’s lazy fingers, skinned up fresh just seconds ago, lit it with a snap, then stretched like a well-run dog over the squeaking, sweat-stained mattress. Sirius took a drag and tugged Remus up by the nape of the neck to shotgun him. Smoke clouded the fairy lights. “I don’t care what Lily says—I’m not spending an entire bloody wedding sober. Cruel and unusual punishment in these hard times, yeah?”
Remus blinked.
Turned over fully.
Stared, deep, into Sirius’s pale grey eyes with intense scrutiny.
“Wedding?”
***
To what extent Remus loathed the idea of this wedding beyond the more general, abstract concept of holy state-sanctioned matrimony was yet unclear in much the same manner unprocessed butter did not clarify until after a lengthy heating process. Remus was simmering, of course, as he often did in these trying times, but it was not a clarifying process. Bubbles brewed rancid and popped. His bottom layer was burnt and crusty. Every metaphor was a shambles—a thoroughly mangled corpse, in fact, and Remus deprived of the one person he knew would fetch him a tarpaulin and bleach to clean the scene.
Remus could hardly be blamed. He was sitting, boiling, actually, in a muggle car for the first time in God knew how long, emergency chocolate already well-melted in his pocket, packed in with an anxious bride-to-be and the mum of not only his erstwhile best mate but his boyfriend as well. Being the only one among them who could drive a van, Caradoc Dearborn was sat beside him in the driver’s seat. His dry elbow dangled out the window as he drove one-handed, nicked-up knuckles drumming on the wheel. The driver window was broken and would never roll up. Remus’s passenger side wouldn’t roll down. ‘Clown car’ didn’t even come close.
All four were sweating in the early July summer haze, Caradoc most and Euphemia least. It beaded on his temple and dampened the rim of his forehead. His palms were sticky. The van’s interior reeked still of petrol and the nondescript city-scent of outer Sheffield whence they’d come via Floo. Apparition was contraindicated for the pregnant, elderly, and ailing much like Portkeys—between Lily and Euphemia Potter they had all three within a single vehicle—so it’d been decided that someone would drive them up to the ceremony spot in the early hours of the morning. That ‘someone’ had been Caradoc Dearborn because fate was a harlot.
Mary was the best driver of their lot, yes, but James and Lily had restricted wedding attendance to Order members and Order allies only for security purposes. As neither, Mary was once again left out in the cold. Or, well, the cruel summer heat. Not that she cared: her characteristic sangfroid had long inured her equally to slight social indignities and against bombastic, institutional embarrassment. See: her sudden unexplained expulsion. Other examples were available. Not that any of that made it easier for Lily, who was openly crushed to lose her ideal maid of honour, though Remus privately thought Mary was wise to have kept herself out of the Order’s affairs. More than her own survival, she was assuring her family’s—the Death Eaters likely had their addresses by means of the stolen post from Hogsmeade. If ever she were discovered to be an active aid…
Yet her wisdom left Remus as the neglected pet werewolf in a literal hot car. One rolled-down window on Caradoc’s ratty van—Remus knew nothing of cars, but Sirius had offhandedly mentioned the thing was manufactured during the second war and smelled to Padfoot of hippy—were little comfort under the torrid British sun. Perhaps that was because he hadn’t seen Euphemia since Christmas of fifth year and so knew nothing of her life, her late husband, nor the tales James had spun her about Remus’s disappearance. Perhaps Caradoc’s cheeky fucking smiles and dreadful sunglasses were getting on his nerves. Or, most likely, perhaps Remus was burning up with all of that and more—because hosting a wedding at the ever-rising height of a War was, being honest, a bloody stupid thing to do.
Wasn’t it?
After all, the only reason Remus was cooking in the car was that Lily knew he was rum at Apparition in a pinch and James knew his accuracy was dead-on. And, while Apparating was contraindicated for the pregnant &c., nine out of ten medi-witches and wizards agreed that death was far, far more contraindicated.
Except death oughtn’t be a worry at a wedding. Full stop. Weather ought, yes; canapés and catering; fretting over picturesque public vistas and wedding crashers and rude relatives speaking up at inopportune moments due to an overindulgence in bubbly, taste-of-nothing champagne, all just fine; but if the weather forecast in the papers foretold a chance of scattered showers and/or possible mass murder as perpetrated by blood-obsessed fascists, you did not, generally speaking, let your guest know they should bring a brolly as well as brush up on improvising a field tourniquet.
No, because that would be stupid. You cancelled the bloody wedding instead.
None of which Remus could say aloud, of course. He wasn’t about to spoil their magical, lovely, celebratory day. Consider his contentions swallowed. Being a good friend, it was his job to be happy for them if something of a menace to James’s honour, so he kept his gay mouth firmly shut, and, oh, that was another fucking thing, wasn’t it?
Remus did not want to marry Sirius. In all likelihood he knew he would never want to marry anyone even if, if the option ever became available to him. Aside from the tax benefits and inheritances—two things he cared so little about given his mostly-ghost status with both the Ministry and British government, no hospitals or licenses or fixed addresses—there was no point to it, no parents to embarrass and no out-of-wedlock child to fuss over, not that he could ever see himself raising a child. And if anyone ever tried to keep him out of a hospital room, well, he was a wizard-werewolf secret spy. He was two-thirds of his way through a postgraduate program while juggling a War, for Christ’s sake—had stared down Dumbledore and the entire Order. He’d like to see someone try. Or, no, he wouldn’t, but inevitably they would.
Which came back to the whole ‘coming-out’ process that’d been giving Remus so much trouble. Over and over he’d told himself it wasn’t the time, there was a War, and other matters were more pressing, but on some level Remus knew what troubled him was the endlessness of it. You couldn’t press a button and have the whole world know—not if he didn’t want to rearrange his wardrobe and be cold all the time, in any case. The idea had crossed his mind: drunk and weepy in the loo at one in the morning, a jug of bleach, a paint brush, the maroon flight jacket’s awaiting leather; the bleach-white words WEREWOLF FAGGOT begging to be born across its back. Denim for the summers. Insanity. How could those be his only options? If Remus came out now, he’d have to do it again with every friend, colleague, acquaintance, and when a fight inevitably broke out, everyone would say that Remus stole the wedding and made another one of Lily and James’s special days about himself.
So he hadn’t. Lily and James told him he’d be shipping up two VIPs to the bridal party and accompany them as muscle/getaway driver. He didn’t argue; bit his gay tongue in lieu of explaining he wanted to find and snog Sirius, whom he hadn’t seen in a week, and pretend that he was unbothered while Sirius whined at him and tested his patience and showed off whatever inappropriate place he’d probably had pierced because Remus hadn’t been there to stop him. When Euphemia prodded him gently about his life after Hogwarts, Remus clenched his gay jaw and relayed all the cresting joys and valley sorrows with insufficient depth because he couldn’t explain the role Sirius or the other friend-loves of his life had played in all that.
The world had been vivid in the hamlet and now he was back, sober, staring glumly through a dirty van window at the Sheffield countryside. Despite its bright summer sky and pleasant rolling hills, he felt everything was painted a stark grey. Drab. Which, yes, were the normal descriptors for anything Sheffield-adjacent under Thatcher’s reign of austerity, but Remus did not enjoy living in an angsty noir film while Lily was about to pastiche Wuthering Heights albeit with less incest and death and rather more overt feminism. He and Sirius were in the homoerotic trenches, ever-vigilant, while she and James lived fantasy.
As the path beneath them rumbled, for Caradoc had turned off from the high road a while ago and left its smooth pavement behind with all of Remus’s charitable thoughts, Remus surveyed the scattered coppices of short crooked trees, stunted once by drought, and the hill-horizon for threats. Caradoc was doing much the same with more scrutiny and yet more subtlety. His ruddy cheeks and prickled chin remained still while his eyes no doubt flickered about beneath his sunglasses. This place reminded Remus too much of the hill on which the Defence professor had been lost.
While Lily waved off his attempt to help her from the van—she looked no less fierce than ever, red hair long and loose so as not to crease it before the wedding and swollen ankles packed into hiking boots for the short trip uphill—by contrast Euphemia, lived of a full life and thus possessing no hubris, acquiesced.
In five years Euphemia Potter had grown old. Joy creased her eyes just as age lined her features—features Remus had no doubt once thought birdlike in his youth, but if Euphemia were a bird, she was a regal one, owlish, with large dark eyes, strong eyebrows, and an expressive roundness to her whole head from cheeks to ears to chin, and all set behind a pair of wide-lensed, round-framed spectacles that sat round her neck on a chain. Her hair had once been dark and now was greying, and he could still see the faded scars where illness had split her deep brown skin. She smelled like morning cardamom and sandalwood. Five years and still she never went anywhere without a cup of chai first. Though she didn’t share James’s myopia, being farsighted and a notorious bibliophile, just as James’s shortsightedness had let him see the best and most immediate parts of people, Euphemia saw your worth and value in the distance even when you yourself could not. She’d given birth to James and fostered Sirius, yes, but Euphemia was mum to them all.
It gave Remus equal parts pain and hope as he helped her along the decorated hillside path. She was an institution: as much a part of the landscape as the passing mossy boulders or the weathered slope beneath their feet. Dragon Pox had taken Fleamont and twenty years of youth from the once-spry witch, but she’d made it through the fevers and might yet continue out the woods of lingering illness. Her pneumonia had gone; she was eating; there was a chance for her yet, and that was something worth celebrating.
“Thank you, dear,” said Euphemia. Her voice was even and her words always chosen with utmost care. “Monty and I loved a good hike, but my old bones need a while longer to recover, I’m afraid.”
“It’s no bother,” replied Remus. “You’ve done much the same for me and more. Patching us up after our scraps, my—well, my moments—and, oh, do you recall the time when James and Sirius fancied a broom race around that pond in Cornwall? We had to fish them out—”
“—and you as well after them,” she said mirthfully. Though she’d hooked an arm around Remus’s crooked elbow, her other managed a hiking pole of sorts, and she grunted with no small effort as they took a higher dirt step. “You dived in very heroically after they hit the water, if I remember. A strong swimmer you were.”
“Pity they didn’t need my rescuing after all. Though, I like to think Sirius appreciated the drama of it all.”
“Again with Sirius,” said Euphemia. “You two are as inseparable as he and James, are you?”
“Oh, well—”
“—that’s about right,” called Lily over her shoulder. The dirt path was widening now and grew shallower in incline, so she and Caradoc paused to let the four of them catch up with one another. “And just as poorly behaved as well,” she continued, sticking her tongue out at Remus’s underhanded bird. “You should see them when they’re not at research, Effie. The sheer amount of drink they can put away together—”
“—Lils!”
Euphemia chuckled slow and brought a merciful knuckle up to her lips to stifle the rest of her laugh. “Monty and I had our own time as well.”
“Effie,” said Caradoc. The scandal was mocking. “My poor ears. You’re a saint.”
“Ever polite as always, Caradoc. How you haven’t found a nice woman to settle down with, I’ll never know,” said Euphemia.
“I’m a wild horse, like,” replied Caradoc. His expression remained wry—something unspoken passed between the two of them, then, and for a moment Remus wondered if she knew Caradoc was bent or if she only knew the rumours about his, well, wide menu for a lack of a better term. Though there was no shortage of queer folk in the Order, Remus hadn’t once heard it spoken aloud. A secret club of sorts.
“And what about you, Remus?” she said, watching him with kind and inquisitive eyes. She was a witch of about James’s height, and yet something about the way she lifted her head to meet his eyes made Remus feel very small.
“Mm? Pardon?”
“Have you found someone special?”
Remus blinked. Choked, actually, but the blinking was external and thus it was the only thing Lily and Caradoc’s eyes could rib him for, though they did so for differing reasons. “Oh, I—between my studies and, well, the Order,” he began lamely, “I don’t—I share a flat with Padfoot—Sirius, I mean to say, so…”
“So there isn’t?” asked Euphemia, gentle. “Or there is?”
Remus swallowed. “There might be.”
“Oh, you must—”
“—hold on, what?” asked Lily, incredulous. She did that thing—it was terrifying and nonmagical, but somehow she’d teleported across the path from Caradoc’s far side to Remus’s other arm, hooking round it because he was apparently a steadying beanstalk on the tube or a hand railing more than he was an autonomous wizard, and continued, “Remus. Remus. We’re best mates, aren’t we? How haven’t you told me about your secret girlfriend?”
“I might’ve dropped a few hints.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No,” said Lily.
“Yes,” replied Remus. His face was going to cause a brushfire so he squinted up at the sun and blew a thin stream of air between his teeth. “We’re not going for another round of repetition here. Moreover,” he continued, “it’s your wedding, I’m told, so let’s focus on that for the moment, shall we? You can torture me for all the details later, I think.”
“Tell us one thing: is it serious, like?” asked Caradoc. Remus was going to fucking throttle him. Maybe shag him.
Jury was out, really.
“All questions referred to my solicitor, cheers, Dearborn.”
“How’s Black taking it? Or, hold on,” began Lily, and, Christ, he could see her mind racing in all directions. “No—you aren’t both dating the same bird, are you? Is that why he was on about hippies and triads?”
“Could we not?” replied Remus, exasperated. “I hardly think this is appropriate discussion in front of your soon-to-be-mother-in-law and one of the most respectable witches I’ve ever known.”
“I’m afraid this isn’t far from the usual gossip at bridge. I’m interested to hear the answer myself—you youth can be so wild, sometimes.”
“See, that’s far, far more interesting a topic, like,” said Caradoc, equal parts devil and saviour. Prospero. “How are the bridge girls, Effie? Gladys ever get back at her husband for the gnomes he ‘accidentally’ unleashed on her rose garden?”
“Oh, heavens, it was far worse than that. You see, she went out in search of some faeries…”
***
Where the heathland and high, flat ridges were coated with rust-coloured and other sunset-shades of dry springy shrubs and the stone tor outcroppings themselves blackened by rich soil, they found their party—their friends, their colleagues, some perched by the nearby treeline and other lone tree outcroppings casting enchantments decorative and defensive. A flock of of pale pink sun umbrellas formed a tall canopy against the sun. Twin banquet tables, lily-white tablecloths, pleasant wicker chairs which pulled themselves out for you. With a begrudging bitterness, Remus had to admit it was a beautiful place to have a wedding, pure picturesque idyll and the best of bad circumstances—not unlike a bank where the while thyme blew, where oxlips and the nodding violet grew, &c. &c. He would not, however, "be lulled in these flowers with dances and delight. Remus was a moody fucking werewolf like that.
Remus broke quick away from Euphemia, Lily, and Caradoc, then made himself scarce for the few hours preceding the ceremony itself. No one was about to cause him trouble—he was feral, you see—but Remus had little interest brooding in plain view where the Order could gawk and whisper about him like an exotic if uncooperative zoo animal, so he found a lower outcropping hidden away from the others and a flat surface on which to skin up. An hour later, he was much more relaxed. Still worried, yes, full of chocolate, and ever the paranoiac, but—
At the sound of a bush rustling Remus cursed and flicked his spliff for the ground, yet as he lifted his boot to stamp it out, he found the skin curiously frozen mid-air. It floated up and over to the wide tree trunk behind which lay the path back up to the others. Remus’s eyes followed it.
“Oh, Padfoot, it’s—what the fuck are you wearing?” he asked. Not that it was an uncommon question for Sirius, but Remus felt somewhat justified in asking, seeing as, well.
Sirius stared down at himself. “They call it the ‘suit,’ Moony. Latest fashion trend. Don’t think they’ll catch on.”
“Quite finished?”
“Heart’s not in it, if m’honest. Sharesies?”
“You look like you need it,” said Remus, quiet. While Sirius’s suit was well-fitted and snug in all the right places with an ash-grey colour to match his red-rimmed eyes, for the first time in Remus’s recollection, the clothes were wearing Sirius instead of the other way around. His charm was off—curtain pulled back like his long dark curls for all to see the one behind. Even the safety pin dangling from his earlobe shone duller than Remus remembered.
After plucking the spliff from the air, Sirius budged up beside him and leaned against the moss with a groan. He took a drag and held it long. Snagged a last square of gooey chocolate for himself. Worryingly long. Eventually he breathed out a cloud of dense pale smoke.
“Prongs, then?” he asked, nonchalant.
Sirius exhaled. “Yeah.”
“He has no right,” growled Remus. “Jesus Christ, it’s the eighties. Not to mention I spent three hours enchanting that dress, and don’t get me started on the heels. A medieval knight would struggle to find better armour.”
“Unmentioned and unstarted. Considering a change in thesis, are we?”
“Mary’d have my head for encroaching on her territory,” said Remus. She likely would, and would just as likely preserve it like a French aristocrat in amber. “And then the Board would have my head for following in her footsteps. Y’know, Pads, she still hasn’t said what happened, but, er, piss, I’m digressing, like. Did you want to—”
“—not really, no,” said Sirius. He deflated against Remus’s side and the dry moss. “Though I s’pose I should, yeah?”
“Only if you like.”
“Really?”
“Really. I could go break his nose again instead.”
“Moony.”
“Padfoot.”
“I’m not ruining his wedding. Even if he’s being a prick,” muttered Sirius. “Eventually he’d get used to the broken noses. Expect it, y’know, if you did it every time you saw him. You’ll lose your touch.”
“It’s not every time,” replied Remus, “and I’d be the one ruining the wedding, not you. My name’s pondscum with the Order regardless.”
“The tale’s grander every time I hear it told. According to Longbottom—”
“—which one?”
“Frank.”
“Fascist.”
“What were you gonna call Alice?”
“Probably still a fascist. What did Frank say?”
“That you threatened a coup.”
“I did. Broke every nose in the room, as it happens. My calling card.”
“Pity I missed it.”
“Might give that one a return,” he grumbled, lifting Sirius’s crooked fingers to his own lips for another long drag. “Christ,” he breathed. Held his chest tight a moment. Exhaled. “You want to know what I think?”
“Always.”
“Fuck James. Put the bloody thing on and we’ll walk in after the ceremony’s begun—or, actually, hold on, I’ve an even better idea. Help me with my trousers, would you? This belt’s a nightmare.”
“Lucky I’m worse,” replied Sirius cheekily. A ghost of a grin returned to his smoothed-over marble face, and though his grey eyes were still red at the rims, in the centre they were once again alive with mischief. “Y’sure we have time? Should be kicking off any minute, I think.”
“I’m a quick study, like. And have you any cosmetics in your pocket? I don’t fancy our chances without…”
***
Though they couldn’t be seen from a distance what with the web of illusions, someone had conjured up a few sets of wide round tables set on the blackened ridge with lily-white lace cloths and great pink sun umbrellas like heather to shield them from above, and a number of humble willow-wicker chairs to seat them upon the rusty heathland. Emmeline, Marlene, and Alice sat at one head table together clad in matching pale blue dresses to match the dimming summer sky.
Laughter—Alice had made an inaudible joke with a wry, knowing smile and set them into fits of giggling like, well, like ex-schoolgirls finally able to catch their collective breath. Sparkling champagne had come out after the ceremony albeit in small, non-Remus sized amounts. As maid-of-honour, of course, Marlene had snatched an entire bottle for their use, though she made a face every time it bubbled over her tongue. Still not a fan of the wines, apparently. Hell of a speech-giver though.
Caradoc’s crew of ne’er-do-wells and miscreants—block-headed Fletcher and the blurry, nonspecific form of Dedalus Diggle—had joined tables further back with a few older figures. A wide-eyed woman of middling age that Remus likened to a hare stroked a Kneazle in her lap amidst her reminiscing with Caradoc about something mischievous. Arabella Figg was her name. She was one of the Order’s muggle family watchers and, if rumours were to believed, an upcoming queenpin in the Squib pet trafficking network that spanned Great Britain.
Beside Figg were another pair of older wizards, one with a gruff expression permanently set into his face that Remus recognised as the nameless proprietor of the Hog’s Head, and the other a frail-looking wizard of squat, well-lived stature and ancient dress robes. Elphias Doge was no combatant at nearly a hundred years old, not a spy, but he was something of a long-time confidant and advisor to Dumbledore himself, &c. &c., and so Remus kept his distance. He was in no desperate need of advice; had nothing to give in confidence.
There were others—Alastor Moody, Sturgis Podmore, both stocky and now snappily-dressed Prewett twins and, of course, the legendary Time-witch Dorcas Meadowes—but with the ceremony finished, they lingered back from the tables and festivities even as they associated among themselves. They were on guard, watching. Constant vigilance.
A wise move given that, when you thought about it, this was an opportune moment for an attack. Ideal, actually, because one well-placed Blasting Curse was not unlikely to wipe out a handful of Order members at once. Presuming any Death Eater could get past their defences while still maintaining the element of surprise, of course. While Remus’s paranoia worked the idea in the back of his mind like a cow chewing cud, it only spat out hypothetical avenues of attack that required them to already have a hook within their protective boundaries. Unpicking wards and shields set in times of War was a treacherous affair from the outside, but much, much more manageable if you could sneak your way in. Which meant, thankfully, that they were safe for the moment. For now. Their scenic outcropping had been swept a hundred times over before the ceremony and not a single cursed object to lower their wards remotely had been found.
Not that it gave Remus’s paranoia any rest. With the threat of imminent death set aside awhile, he could only focus harder on the other head table where sat James, Lily, Sirius, Peter, and square-jawed Frank Longbottom—the latter three being James’s groomsmen of choice. Lily wore a beautiful if simplified white wedding dress with much flowy netting and dozens of possibly-alive wildflowers decorating her deep red hair, all Queen Anne’s Lace, honeysuckle, Welsh poppy, and lily-of-the valley, while James wore a wizard-style suit, much more garish and colourful—the tie was paisley, he thought—than the muggle sort and possessed of absurd long tailcoats reminiscent of robes.
Frank and Peter wore a similar, albeit with grey suitjackets and mauve shirts rather than the reverse of James’s attire. If anything, Sirius was a perfect match in his leggy grey dress. The mauve ascot had been Remus’s idea. It added a certain je-ne-sais-quoi, if ‘je-ne-sais-quoi’ meant ‘collar aesthetic.’
No one was arguing, not exactly, and yet the fevered whispers and furtive expressions gave Remus significant pause, particularly because it seemed at a distance that Sirius and Peter were in the middle of things. That did not bode well. Although Sirius had said otherwise, Remus knew well enough that James’s choosing Peter as best man, yes, despite the small irony of the title, had left his ego bruised and more so with the one-two punch of the dress code.
When he and Sirius had summited the hill in their matching grey dresses and hastily made-up faces—what wonders magic could work in so little time, and what wonders indeed kept the hem of Remus’s skirt from billowing beyond his knobbly knees in the wind—there’d been little fanfare and barely a roll of the eyes though his cheeks were aflame, which had been the plan. Even if those familiar with the Marauders’ dynamic assumed that their appearances were a private gag and/or a light-hearted prank between friends, it meant Sirius got to wear the bloody thing without issue. Even if Remus nearly twisted his bloody ankle because they were wearing heels, albeit low, in untrodden British heathland.
The joke was on all of them: Sirius was sex on long legs in the dress. By the time Peter was rambling through his speech, the only second looks paid to Sirius were ones that lingered on said long, long legs.
Except the problem was that the conversation unfolding in the distance couldn’t just be about a dress and some perhaps excessive eyeliner. You scarcely needed five people for that kind of discussion, and the expressions were far too secretive and grave. There were too many knowing glances. Before he could investigate, however, a gentle and kind and, oh Jesus, mortifying voice called him to attention.
“Remus?” asked Euphemia. He near overturned his chair whipping round to face her, though by the grace of her manners she did not giggle. “Might I sit with you a while?”
“Of course,” replied Remus.
He cleared his throat and willed his cheeks to calm, and, a moment later he rose to tug out her chair opposite him. For that she said Hope had raised a very polite young man, but, being a keen witch and seasoned mother, Euphemia picked up on his reluctance to engage with his own family as a subject. That was not to say she let the conversation move away from it—Euphemia had taught James to face problems if not head-on then to face them at least eventually—and instead directed it back with gentle tact.
Much like James, she was picking at the scabs of others. Perhaps it was rude, and, Jesus, Remus had bodily thrown the boy across their dormitory more than once over the years for prying too deep too quick, but Euphemia was practiced in the art and in so doing slipped beneath the ugly scars to the soft tissue beneath, laying him bare without needing to expose those raw bits to abrasive public air.
Remus hadn’t known that Euphemia and Hope knew each other well. It made sense, of course, given their children were away at the same school nine months out the year and had been inseparable since second year, although when you were little it was easy to forget the adults in your life had lives outside of yours. They took tea often; swapped stories; Euphemia was endlessly fascinated by the travails of being a woman welder while Hope asked often about the odd cottage-industry production cycle of the magical world and her travels to Bombay and beyond; and as it so happened, years of friendship made Euphemia a bottomless well of sweet, thirst-quenching knowledge as to who Remus’s mum had been when she wasn’t a mum.
It was almost cruel. No wonder James was such a loving person—how could you be anything else with someone like Euphemia to raise you?
From there, she got Remus talking—gushing, really, about Sirius, his position of wandless lead in the postgraduate program, his bike and their terrifying, exhilarating flights together, their shared flat and dormitory and sometimes clothes, at which point he began to clam up again, becoming that bookended mollusc with its papery shell because the conversation had gone something like this:
“I’m just chuffed he wore the dress after all,” said Remus offhandedly. “Even if the thing looks much better on him than me. I spent hours charming it—which, yes, I s’pose is a touch paranoid, but aren’t we all?—and it’s the eighties, so James can’t well live the rest of his life afraid of everything vaguely queer—or, er, well, not that he—we—oh, bugger—”
“You care a lot for Sirius,” said Euphemia, quiet, “don’t you, Remus?”
“Well. In a manner of speaking.”
Which brought them to here.
“I’m—we’re together, yes,” whispered Remus. He couldn’t meet her eyes. “I know it’s probably odd. I know you might not approve, but…”
Euphemia reached over the table gently as though she were picking up a baby bird in her own unsteady hands. She folded Remus’s palm into hers as she spoke to silence him. Her fingers were cool despite the summer heat, dark and lined by age, and yet unmistakeably the ones of a deft witch.
“Why I love your generation so much, Remus, is that you refuse to let yourselves be alone in our world. It gives me hope, and makes me wish that I could have been braver when I was your age,” she said softly. Her eyes—so reminiscent of James, although, Remus knew, in truth he was reminiscent of her—were warm and far away. “I too loved a witch very dearly once. Years ago. Years before I met Monty, but that was…well, I suppose it was not how we were told we ought do things, then, and I did not have her courage. I hope,” she continued, squeezing his hand, “that you might have enough for the both of us.”
They sat there a while longer, palm-in-palm, while Remus’s breathing evened and the light milling of the wedding party about them continued unabated. Euphemia was the eye of a very mild storm.
“Is she still alive?” asked Remus. “This witch, I mean to say.”
“She is,” replied Euphemia. She bowed her head and her weathered eyelids slipped shut a long moment. “I have thought of her too, Remus, but we are very different people from who we once were. I hardly recognised her at Monty’s funeral, and James—Monty—”
“—James is a grown man, and I don’t think Monty would want you to be unhappy. Forgive me for saying so when I’m only so young, but I don’t think that’s what love is, is it?”
Euphemia sighed. Being a mother, the gesture instilled instinctive panic in Remus because he couldn’t read the emotion therewithin, and yet she smiled at him, sweet.
“James might surprise you,” he added, and, well, Jesus, could he really say that from his own position? “If nothing else,” he continued, “it could be nice to reconnect with an old friend.”
“How kind you are,” replied Euphemia. “Would you help me up, dear? I think it’s a bit too warm here for my old bones. I’ll take a walk through the fields.”
“I could accompany you.”
“No, no, Remus, you’ve done enough. But if you could find James for me, I think perhaps there are some things I should tell him before it is too late.”
“Courage.”
“Courage,” said Euphemia.
***
Remus was not a hypocrite, so after Euphemia graced James’s table and the pair departed, he made more than rote effort to check in with the others. He had nothing to prove—how they felt about werewolves had nothing to do with how he held or comported himself, though perhaps the dress, he thought, might remind them he was just as much the silly bookish-and-perhaps-camp swot as he’d been before—and so he gave Marlene a soft shrug.
“I’m not sorry,” he said. It was not a lie.
Marlene replied with a small shrug of her own and Alice scoffed beside her, unamused. The way they held themselves guarded like warriors and watched him with equal measure gave them the appearance of sisters. Not twins, no, but there was the kind of family resemblance beyond the neat auburn hair, a resemblance that only settled with the scars of constant vigilance and infrequent battle, whether they manifested physically as burns or whatever more severe wounds Alice must’ve carried on the inside, what with the distance in her expression. Marlene was at least present. Hurt was hidden in her eyes, but you glimpse its shadow in the quick brown foxiness of them, while Alice—she wasn’t there, not all of her. Some part of her had retreated behind a wall of unknowable height and sealed the path behind it with dynamite.
With nothing else to say and the silence lingering long past dramatic and into the realm of awkwardness, Remus turned on a (literal) heel for Lily’s table, though a strong hand caught his arm. Emmeline. Her shock of red hair wasn’t cut shorter since last time, but that was hardly possible given how close it was to her scalp. She watched him with mixed apprehension and regret. A rare expression for her.
“What you did for Black—for Sirius,” she began, letting his arm go, “I ken how hard it is to do something bold like that. You’re a good friend to him.”
“Hardest part was standing next to him, if m’honest. Not exactly kind to the ego.”
“Aye,” she said with a snort. “He’s a right bonnie lad.”
“I know you must be hurt that I didn’t trust you—“ he began, abrupt, even though he’d promised himself he wouldn’t make any attempt at an apology, but Emmeline held a hand flat to quiet him.
“Don’t, Lupin,” she replied. Her vicious eyebrows returned to their normal slanted arch, and the ice over her reformed with it. “Trust’s in short supply, these days, and I think the forgiveness, if there’s any to be had, is due after the War. All I can say is I hope you know what you’re doing, with those werewolves of yours and those funds you’re pulling from the Order,” she continued, tone even, “and I hope you and your lot take care of each other.”
He canted his scruffy chin over to Alice and Marlene behind her. Half-defiant, half-blokey. Very Sirius. The small supply of wands he’d nicked from the Order itched in the back of his mind for the first time.
“You as well, Em.”
“Cheers, aye?”
“Cheers.”
It wasn’t the tearful reunion he—well, that he hadn’t been hoping for, he wasn’t so naïve, and with the amount of eyeliner Sirius had put on him he’d resemble a fucking badger after any number of tears—but it was better than he’d left things off. The dress was doing work even if it failed to flatter his figure.
At Lily’s table, he caught her, Sirius, and Peter mid-conversation, though from Lily’s sombre green eyes and the rueful looks on others’ faces, it was more a beleaguered explanation than dialogue.
“—and even though they’ve been in hospital so long,” said Lily, quiet, “they don’t—it’s not one thing that’s wrong with them. Problems keep springing up and they keep falling ill with one thing after the other, like their immune systems are shot. Pneumonia twice—‘opportunistic infections’ I gather they’re called at least from what the nurses were saying, though I couldn’t ask after them obviously. Petunia never would’ve let them come here regardless. I don’t know if they would’ve if I’d been able to ask.
“They’re fighting, too, mum and dad. Don’t know what changed, but he’s worse off now despite her being the drinker. He might’ve got sick first, they said, and I think she might blame him, which is a bit rich, I guess, given the doctors still don’t have a name for whatever they’ve got, but they’re in separate rooms when they weren’t before.”
“Christ,” muttered Sirius. “I’m so sorry, Lils.”
“Ghastly,” said Peter.
“It is—awful, just awful,” Lily continued. Remus, eager to not eavesdrop, pulled back, gentle, on a wicker chair beside her and sat before fitting one of his large weathered hands over her smaller, equally-weathered ones. “They’ve got them in these tiny matchboxes with plastic curtains and they put on these gowns and masks and—everything goes in a bin—sodding Hell,” she muttered, coughing into her fist and using a napkin to dab the corner of her eye. “They won’t bring the food in half the time. Won’t touch them. They’re so, so alone and angry and I can’t help them, not even with magic. I can’t even talk to them without getting thrown out. But there’s something else, Sirius…”
“What is it, Lils?” asked Sirius.
Her pale green eyes flitted to Peter, then to Remus. “It’s something I overheard from the doctors. Something private, I guess, that might be uncomfortable—”
“—is it a—”
“—yes, it’s a that.”
Sirius blinked. His narrow lips parted a long moment before words followed while Peter, bless him, looked very confused a moment, like they’d suddenly switched to a foreign language.
“How?”
“I’m not a doctor,” said Lily, sniffing, “and it’s not just that. They said something was going around with folk who shared needles—that sort of thing—but they didn’t elaborate and mentioned—look, Mary might know more. She could use the company too.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Peter.
Remus cleared his throat.
“I believe she’s saying it’s a, well, a queer thing,” he said, his own brows furrowed. “Though I don’t quite understand how myself.”
“Padfoot’s not contagious, is he?”
“Shut the fuck up, Wormtail,” growled Sirius. “Christ. Listen to yourself.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“—let’s move on,” said Lily, sharp. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. Not now. Remus, Peter, could one of you do the instruments? I think some music’s in order.”
“Oi, I can—” began Sirius.
“No,” said the three of them in unison.
Peter was the one to stand and say he’d handle the instruments, frog included, through a grumble, though he got no further than watching his chair slide back into perfect position before frowning up at the sky. His pale features at once grew more wan than usual. Remus followed his gaze up and couldn’t see anything amiss—the sun would set soon and a few clouds were rolling in from the horizon—until he realised it was in fact growing darker. A bubbly kind of foam was blooming in the sky, expanding, hungry, until it crumpled into brooding clouds beset with the shape a yawning emerald skull. Pressure settled on his skin. Jesus. Peter’s instincts were even sharper than Remus’s paranoia. The boy had become something of a badarse on his adventures with James, evidently.
A cry of alarm came from the treeline—two cries, one from each Prewett twin—and the entire Order was on their feet with wands out in less than three seconds, which is when they heard the first dreadful cracks in the distance. Remus, Lily, Sirius, and Peter all spun outwards like the cardinal directions of a compass while the others, whether Alice, Marlene, and Emmeline or Caradoc and Fletcher—Dedalus had already vanished—adopted a similar formation. They were ready for a fight. They had the high ground. Even though it oughtn’t be possible, not with the amount of security on the scene, Remus thought this might be, actually, a tactical error on the part of the Death Eaters, because five full minutes went by without anyone or anything emerging from the treeline. All surprise was wasted.
Even the time of day was wrong. With the sun still up and full moon removed, there could be no werewolves; no diva vampire; Hags, too, scorned sunlight; and while the Kissed could themselves ignore most every illusion, it wasn’t as though the Death Eaters could Apparate with them, nor did they number high enough to warrant using them as an antimagical shield when charms did about the same. Perhaps that was why they were hesitating—hoping fear would rock them like a startled herd of cows and send them stampeding over a cliff’s edge to a foolish and untimely end.
In theory the Order was somewhat penned in on the outcropping of high heathland, but as twenty-something witches, wizards, and Squibs of great acumen, five minutes of preparation time might as well have been five years.
Barricades were assembled and bewitched. Strategies drawn. The Prewetts were working in tandem to build a clean path down from the ridge so they might retreat out of the Dark Mark’s range, and soon, too, if the Death Eaters didn’t advance. They must’ve been waiting for som
***
“Moony?” asked Sirius. He leaned over the blanket on his elbow perch and rapped, gentle, on Remus’s forehead and then budged up to rest against Remus’s shoulder. “Oi, give him back, you. You’re supposed to be on holiday.”
“Sorry,” murmured Remus. “Lost in thought.”
“They’ll be here any—ah, there they are. Prongs!” called Sirius, and Remus followed his gaze to the clearing’s edge, decorated with aconite and pale, sun-bleached logs as it was. “Lils! Over here, we’ve found the perfect spot.”
“Perfect, is it?”
“Shut up, you plonker. You’re here, aren’t you.”
“Be still my beating heart.”
“Cruelty.”
“What are you two whispering about, then?” asked James, smile wide and golden-brown. He popped a full picnic hamper down on the blanket beside them and squatted a moment to watch them behind his round-framed glasses, shaking his head a moment. “Merlin’s bollocks. I don’t know how I missed it.”
“Plain sight,” replied Lily. She crouched and kissed him on the cheek before settling on her knees.
“We only tried to tell you a dozen times, didn’t we, Pads?”
“More than a dozen,” replied Remus. “Er—Lily, are you all right?”
Lily frowned. Dabbed at her eye with a handkerchief—hold on, where’d she produced that from? Her dress had no pockets—and frowned at the splotch of red that came away with it. Her face was sprouting sores.
“What in the—James!” she cried.
Remus’s head whipped round and, oh, there—they’d moved. All of them. Heavy iron chains wrapped around the base of a thick, lonely pine tree on the stony lip of a high ridge. Its bark oozed sap from a set of deep claw gouges in the trunk. James Potter was bound sitting against the pine. So too was Lily. Sirius. Each of them held hands, smiling with lifeless eyes up at him, their disembowelled entrails hot and fresh and flyridden on the rooted earth around them. Remus’s hands were bloody. Something caught in Remus’s throat just as he heard a sound—a scoff from behind. A low, clever laugh.
Remus whirled round and was loping, leaping through the underbrush and bushes while something warm and chaseable fled, arms windmilling and feet stumbling over roots in the dark, not knowing that to run was only to encourage him. He could’ve caught up easily, but the chase—chasing things was half the fun, although the thing was breathless and sobbing, now, pathetic, and so he sprinted up beside it and pounced. He landed, hard, tumbling over himself in wet grass as Sirius rolled away from him. Though when Sirius ought spring to his feet, he instead stumbled and across the clearing, Bellatrix levelled her wand at him, eyes alight with malice and her wand moving through the unmistakeable movements of a Blasting Charm.
Remus threw out a hand, a fist, and clocked James hard in the chin, but he crumpled into the sand rather than staggering because it turned out that sometimes a single bad hit was all it took. Remus was shirtless and scarred and covered in sweat and sand. Treesap in his hair, trousers bunched down around his thighs. Lily watched, green eyes horrified and disbelieving. Dropped to her knees—Peter rushed over, too—while Sirius gaped at him. Pressed her fingers to his pulse.
She spun and whirled and levelled her wand at him and he closed his eyes to let it happen.
Rusty heathland sprang back to him, hurtling Remus to the ground like a discarded beer bottle half-full of piss and he landed hard on his back. It took the breath from him—as though he’d been whirled by a Portkey albeit through a much more cerebral space and summarily kicked off midway through, his rabbithole ending in an upside-down world. How, he wasn’t sure.
He wasn’t even sure this was real.
Three rapid blinks later, he’d at least parsed the dreamlike logic of his world. Even upside-down Lily Evans was unmistakeable in her righteous flaming fury, bare-footed and well-pregnant and her loose, wildflower-dressed red hair floating free on end at the charge of lightning within her. The ground around her was smouldering, sizzling with diffused acid and scorched clean by fire and the soil frozen solid, but a sheer translucent bubble not unlike an unfolded lotus held fast around her. Marlene and Dorcas gave her cover, too: a screen of now-tattered pale, lacy tablecloths and deployed pink sun umbrellas floated at the ready to intercept curses from the retinue of skull-masked Death Eaters cutting them off from the distant treeline—just as they’d learned from the Defence professor. Cover was key.
Lily had just come off casting something big—something maximal and complex, really, from the heavy rise and fall of her chest. Just ahead of her near the treeline stood an ordinary-looking man of short grey-brown hair, tall, thin stature, and undistinguished features. Age and charisma lined his face, though it was one of cold and inhumane detachment. Reptilian. Whereas Bellatrix beside him, tattered and decorated, had emptied herself of humanity and filled those places with dark and volatile arcane lore, the man had no traces of human architecture left to be found within him, and that void had a draw to it. An allure. It called to you.
Though there was an ongoing battle around him of multicoloured light-jets, bursts of flame, bolts of electricity, iron tanging the air, woodsmoke, earthy heath and detonations and eerie fogs and the sky set to open above them, the Dark Lord Voldemort lowered the hood of his cloak, deep black and with a snakeskin sheen to it, with both hands.
He regarded Lily with a delighted interest—his pet parrot or a random wild gnat had alighted, it seemed, on his fingertips and began to recite Shakespeare. How quaint. Lily Evans-Potter had made herself amusing and so the Dark Lord had taken notice.
He inclined his wand, playful and without a word as if to say, Encore. Le roi s’amuse.
Spells did not cease to fly—Mad-Eye and both Longbottoms were carving a path towards the Prewetts and thus their retreat—but there came an immediate change in the host of uncountable Death Eaters that had arrived in the attack. Not only had however many of the Order’s numbers been abruptly freed from what Remus only now processed as a titanic demonstration of Legilimency, but the Death Eaters understood in a way the Order couldn’t that this was somehow personal. Auspicious. The Dark Lord did not single out witches without good cause.
Pale and dripping with sweat, Lily faltered only a moment before she began again the lengthy casting she’d completed only moments ago. She was dauntless. Even as Dorcas and Marlene were being peeled away from her by force—by mad Bellatrix, the stoic and pale Dolohov, and the sundry other Death Eaters who yet concealed their identities with dark robes and snake-eyed skull masks.
The odds were against the Order by sheer weight of volume, and none here could claim the acumen of the Defence professor—not even Marlene, who in her aggressive combat style twisted, hard, to avoid an unfamiliar jet of translucent light that slipped clean through her shield. She was half a breath too late, her leg too slow, and yet the impact of it did nothing. Her face twisted in confusion a moment though she hardly broke pace. Fired back, unfaltering.
Marlene was a warrior; Dorcas could probably erase half the Death Eaters here from Time itself if given half the chance and a fair opening; even Lily stood there defiant before the Dark Lord while Remus lay on the ground with a few scrapes and a bloody nose. Feigning death. He wasn’t sure he’d make it to his feet before someone dropped him for good and yet he still felt like a giant fucking coward, actually. He watched and waited for a proper opening. A cry went out across both battle lines. It came preceded by a hot, scalding wind: a gout of flame taller than Remus and twice as wide tore across their no-man’s land. Burning heathland sent up horrid grey whorls of smoke. The battle did not halt. Discipline was breaking down. Targets were being picked indiscriminately, or so it seemed to Remus, who almost stood before a hurricane yawp of wind cleared their field of smoke once more.
Breaking through the wall of onslaught came James first, untamed hair slick with his own blood from an oozing cut on his forehead and one sleeve of his suit burned clean off. His every hemline was singed: had it been him who’d conjured that flame? He’d come far. Sirius hurtled in after him and deflected a curse alongside Dorcas in so doing, which then careered as a jet of scarlet energy rapid and of its own volition between the impromptu shields of four Death Eaters and detonating thereafter as a harmless-if-blinding firework for a moment before someone dispelled it. From there he flung a knife—not a mundane one, no, one enchanted with a wicked seeking spell he’d been forced to learn from Bellatrix as a child, which begged the question of when he’d relearned it, let alone why he carried one on him—that had been tucked high up on his thigh.
The flat knife blitzed forward with imperceptible speed, like an afterburner kicking in, and pierced clean through a Death Eater’s shield to lodge in his cheek. The man went down screaming while Bellatrix scowled in indignation.
“That was my spell, dear cousin!” she called, lifting a similar flat knife from her boot with burning petrol in her eyes. “But where, oh where, is my knife? You haven’t lost it, have you? Here,” she added, wrist flashing forwards, “have another!”
At the same moment she flung it at Sirius, James swung quick around him—with a neat flourish, the knife’s blade inflated while the handle split open and blew a raspberry of air like a loosed balloon, flying off to the side, and, God, thank God it hadn’t been Goblin-made or else it might’ve found its target—and Sirius then around James, the pair of them spinning against the world as they continued to make a slow path to Lily.
Jesus. Lily.
Her casting was not a thing of beauty. Artwork, yes, but of dark and despaired origin, The Scream, and more than an advanced curse: something ritualistic and uncharacteristically plagued by errors. The left sleeve her now soot-stained and ripped-at-the-knee wedding dress blooming red, an iron tang filled the air, reaching Remus only a few meters away. He was close—closer than Sirius and James. He should stand, help her, but how? What was he supposed to do, draw a bloody map? Her veins were pulsing, throbbing under her fair skin. Heart hammering. Her eyes were out of sight, from here, but he wondered what might be in them—fear? Acceptance? Grim determination?
Lily Evans must’ve known she was about to die. And if the titanic dispelling she’d struck him with hadn’t done more than get the Dark Lord’s attention the first time, then her last few moments on this earth or anywhere, actually, would be a futile act of resistance. A tragic end to her fantasy tale. James and Sirius were almost upon her, but that, too, would seal her fate. Theirs as well.
Being Lily Evans, however, she was not one to let others tell her story or seal her fate for her. Something had been strange about her casting—elements that did not belong, trip-ups and errors that, while, yes, were understandable in the face of mortal peril, were also ones Remus had never known Lily to make in over seven years. Going gentle into that good night was not in Lily’s poetic vocabulary.
So when she thrust her wand skyward and dropped half her wild, erroneous, quasi-Viking casting, three things happened at once. First, the brewing storm did not clear above them, though the emerald skull-and-tongue clouds watching them like ants beneath a looking glass on a hot summer day evaporated and became but only rain. Second was the shockwave that came from her abandoned spell. It rocked out for a moment like an intangible wind over the rusty heathland grass and throwing up a cloud of choking black dust in its wake. Third, Remus squeezed his eyes shut. He emptied his brain of all things other than three words: destination, deliberation, motherfucking determination.
The short-distance Apparition was simple enough, even as it involved reorienting himself relative to the ground. His fingers snapped shut like a beartrap around James and Lily’s wrists while his jaw, alas, did the same to Sirius’s poor pale shoulder. He didn’t think. Remus was well aware he might kill them all, although he nevertheless Disapparated for the second time in under a second, blood rich in his teeth and boiling in his veins.
At least all of his practice in running away was good for something.
Maybe that was what guided him. He’d had a firm destination in mind the first go around—the perfect position between the three of them, which was tricker than it looked and about a thousand times as deadly—but the second jump had been instinctual, almost reflexive, and brought them to an open, wildgrass-filled green field with a lone olive tree beside a set of rickety wood fences. Everyone had landed on their feet except Remus. He realised, bubbling with a mad laugh, that he’d in essence skipped them like stones several meters apart, leaving them standing in even intervals in an open, empty wheat field gone to seed, while Remus arrived flat on his arse albeit with soft ground to break his fall.
A range of high looming mountain-shadows clouded by evening mist and distant clouds watched them like Giants in the distance. Trees crept up their sides, although one patch was barer than the rest, new growth taking over the ashy remains of old.
“We can’t stay here long,” called Remus, pausing only to spit blood, “though I reckon anyone barking enough to try and follow us isn’t the kind to abandon an ongoing battle.”
“Where are we?” called James. Lily was yet breathless.
“Guess,” replied Sirius between curses. “Jesus Christ, Moony, my fucking shoulder—thought I was Splinched for a ’mo. Are those the bloody Pyrenees?”
“France?”
Remus slumped back against the spongey wildgrass and gave no reply to James’s incredulity. He needed a moment. Or, no, he needed a moment, a fag, a wank, a spliff, and a drink. Not that he ought if he wanted to get them home, and, Jesus Christ, he was still half-bloody stoned, wasn’t he? What had he been thinking?
“I need one of you to say something,” called Remus a while later. Their breaths were as caught as much they could be, not knowing if their closest friends and allies were alive or not. He cracked an eye open and winced—he was yelling and they were already around him, shading themselves from the sunset in the shadow of the olive tree. “Something,” he continued, “to prove this is real. I can’t—I don’t know if this is real. He was—”
“—got in my sodding head too, mate,” muttered James. “Thought I was the only one.”
“Did anyone go down?” asked Lily. “I was sort of focused—”
“—on duelling and defying the Dark Lord himself,” said Sirius, a familiar mad noise caught in his throat. At least he and Remus shared that trait. “That’s Tuesday for you, innit?”
“My God.”
“Prefer to call you ‘Lily,’ if that’s all right.”
“Can you—”
“—no, humour’s a defence mechanism. Are you okay?”
“She’s bloody brilliant is what,” said James, voice low and impressed and hopefully, Remus thought, not aroused. “Third time staring down the epitome of evil, absolutely fearless, and this time doing bloody combat with the bastard. She’s our own Dumbledore at this point—and did you see her dismiss an entire sodding Dark Mark on her own?”
“Oi, we were there, Prongs.”
“Remarkable,” continued James, shaking his head. “Just extraordinary. And France, Moony? France!”
“Could one of you please answer my question?”
“Marlene was tagged by something,” replied Remus from the ground. He turned his head, blood-smeared cheek braced against the wildgrass, and squinted at Lily. “Cloudy and translucent, sort of like tapwater ice. Didn’t see anyone fall proper, though, except a few Death Eaters, and none of those were lethal I reckon. Stalemate?”
“Caught a few nasty injuries,” added James, “but it was much the same our side. I got mum clear and ran clear across the field. Everyone was alive and kicking last I saw them.”
“Hopeful, like.”
“Shite. Moony, I saw the same thing happen with Caradoc. Spell cut clean through his shield. But—”
“—nothing happened, Pads?”
“Yeah. Ah, you were—something to prove this is real, yeah?” murmured Sirius. He crouched, knees-first and ladylike until his forehead was perched over Remus’s and his dark curls were spilling around them.
If snogging Sirius was part of the torture via Legilimency, it was not very effective.
“Oh, Merlin’s shits,” muttered James. He threw his hands up in equal part frustrated amusement and amused frustration when they finally broke apart, though Sirius fixed a hand in his hair to go again quick. Levity—something approaching levity. His smile was wide and embarrassed and delicately, unbearably earnest. “Is there anyone else waiting to spring a bloody queer revelation on me today? Lily? We’re married—I gather, at least—so now would be the time.”
“Don’t look at me,” replied Lily with a shrug. She too looked deranged, what with her ripped-at-the-knees wedding dress, free-flying wildflower hair, and well-pregnant belly. “I tried that once and it wasn’t much my thing.”
“You tried—”
“—didn’t you?”
The sun continued to set in the distance unabated by the silence.
“Well, sort of,” mumbled James, embarrassed, “but we were posh boarding school lads. That’s to be expected.” A moment later, he squinted behind his round-framed glasses. “Isn’t it? It’s not like everyone wants to, you know, by default—that’d be—never mind that,” continued James, inadvertently summarising several decades of theorising in one short rambling denial.
“Let’s put a pin in this.”
“Let’s. Are you two done snogging yet—ah, Merlin, wow, huh, they’re still—that’s—did you two want the room, or…?”
“First, it’s a field,” said Sirius, knocking his forehead against Remus’s and grinning wide enough it threatened to spill over onto Remus’s lips as well. His makeup was a mess. So too probably was Remus’s. “Second, I’m sorry, mate, but we needed to convince you this wasn’t an elaborate prank. I’ll forgive you two if you want to do the same,” he added, grinning wider, “seeing as your—ah, wow, Christ, go for it why don’t you, Lils?”
They were teenagers again and frozen in time. Afternoon sun, lazy snogging, roughed up and impassioned and having defied death when it felt so easy to do so. Remus rolled Sirius in the fieldgrass while he caught glimpses of Lily pressing James up against the tree until they all eventually broke apart again.
“You know, Pads, you could’ve told me.”
“Us,” added Lily.
“Us. I’m only your best mate. Sort of gutted you didn’t.”
“We did. You in particular, Lily,” murmured Remus. “It’s hardly our fault you took it all as a joke. But you can’t tell anyone else—”
“—not until after the War,” added Sirius. “They’ll split us up in the Order, and Remus is the only one I trust—present company excluded.”
“You’re right to do that, I think.” James slumped, his singed suit and burned-off sleeve fraying further as it scraped the dry-yet-sappy bark of the olive tree. “There’s been talk—and I don’t know how true it is, but Marlene’s been coming around to it and I trust her instincts more than anyone—about a spy in the Order. Not a Metamorphmagus,” he added, intercepting their questions, “not someone using Polyjuice. A traitor. Or maybe someone who’s been turned by the Imperius Curse or Legilimency or what have you.”
The idea sat with them a long while in the field, as fetid and easily-ignored as a hot, rotting cow carcass after a long day in the country sun.
“Christ,” breathed Remus.
“It’s the four of us against the world, then?” said Sirius, looking up at James.
“Five: us and Wormtail. Only ones we can trust anymore.”
***
The shellshock never came. Within an hour they’d found a main road and hitchhiked in the bed of a weathered, open-backed Land Rover looking the part of a very haggard wedding party. Crowded together, knees knocking, Lily’s head tucked on one of James’s shoulders, Remus’s on the other, they rattled towards the sunset horizon with a wondrous, childlike mirth on their faces—they were alive, impossibly, electrically alive, and getting quite quite good at this whole ‘avoiding certain death’ thing—after Sirius’s quick thinking spun the muggles an explanatory tale. The older French couple, accustomed to farm life and not the Brits, heard his story of too much wine on the mountainside and gave the four of them sympathetic if judgemental nods as they disembarked. The dresses had become something of an impediment.
Once far removed from their landing site, they watched the Land Rover vanish into the evening and stamped behind an old barn to join hands.
“Sure you don’t want another bite?”
“Pads, I am so sorry—”
“—shut up, you plonker.”
Remus dropped Lily and James not too far from the old Potter estate and palmed off enough of Sirius’s muggle money to the former for a boarding room, a meal, and a cab ride. They were grown adults. Experienced agents. Lily and James would find their own way to a safehouse and buckle down while the Order regrouped, though Remus kept reminding Lily, probably annoyingly so, to check in with a healer as soon as possible. Two rapid long-distance Apparitions was stressful enough on the body even in the best of circumstances.
“Sorry about your wedding,” said Sirius. He and James clasped each other high on the wrist, exchanging something beyond words by means of telepathy as they spoke.
“Sorry about—okay,” began James, “Being honest, I’m not entirely sure what the deal was with the dress,” he continued, “but it’s clear it wasn’t some stupid lark, so I’m sorry for that.”
“Sorry for your sorry apology.”
“Sorry you’re a tosser.”
“Wanker.”
“Git,” muttered James. “You two get safe as quick as you can, yeah?”
Lily in the meanwhile threw her arms high around Remus’s neck—she had to stand on the tips of her raw and scratched-up bare feet to do so, which was probably not ideal—and squeezed tight.
“Incorrigible, aren’t they?” she said.
“Padfoot has that effect.”
Not a few seconds later, Lily pulled back—tried to, at least, and then sniffled conspicuously when Remus held firm just a few breaths longer. He did, however, have the decency to crouch.
“You realise,” murmured Remus in her ear, “if we win this bloody thing, it’ll be because you saved the entire Order?”
“We’ll make sure your name’s included in the footnotes.”
“Mm. I always thought it might end that way—not a yob and not a Boggart, but the getaway driver.”
“Don’t get murdered.”
“You as well, darling.”
They swapped. Sirius took Lily, while James crushed Remus against his chest and snorted once into the side of his hair, murmuring something about sodding France and Remus being unbelievable. He kissed Remus on the cheek, both sides, very French, actually, and shook his head ruefully. Bashfully even.
Then Remus and Sirius were gone, vanishing from one abandoned dirt road and appearing aside another on the outskirts of Aberystwyth. From there they caught a cab, and—well, the song repeated itself to the tune of, Constant vigilance!
Unless, of course, Mad-Eye was dead. And that was the problem. You couldn’t be constantly vigilant, not for the whole duration of a long, wobbly hike up the mountains with your best mate and certainly not for years on end without vigilance terraforming your world and leaving in its wake the perfect seeding ground for paranoia, but paranoia, too, had not risk to the task at hand. How funny was that? Even while running the scenarios in his head as to how the wedding might go wrong, Remus had pulled his punches and sabotaged his own maths. A drunk could see it—Remus saw it better, in fact, with the goggles firmly on.
A spy in the Order.
There’d been no one else, after all, and what were the odds a Death Eater had been escorting one or two Kissed through the Sheffield-adjacent woods and heathland, only for the Kissed to haphazardly spot the wedding party and recognised, what, their wedding party as distinctly Order-y? Was he supposed to believe they tracked a random muggle van? That it was all happenstance? No, the simplest, cruellest explanation was that Marlene and James had been dead-on. If Remus’s years had taught him anything, it was that the simplest and cruellest explanations were also the likeliest to be true, and much, much more so when pertaining to fascists. But who? Who?
Who not? Dorcas Meadowes had an ex-lover on the other side, after all, and she would not be the first star-crossed academic to go dark; if nothing else, Fletcher was a survivor and thus a possible rat; there was self-serving Caradoc; the Prewetts were pureblood and had once been vaunted as members of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, hadn’t they?; the half-Giant; ambition was Emmeline’s eternal virtue and vice; yet Remus’s mind ran wilder still given the sundry blank spots around the Order members he knew so little about.
The spy could be bloody Arabella Figg—it wouldn’t be the first time a Squib of unassuming circumstance surprised him, nor the first plot by one that’d got the better of those with literal, actual magic. James was right. The circle had to tighten. Every unknown had become a potential enemy, a knife in the dark.
Which, it dawned on him like sunrise at midnight, was likely to make Remus a prime suspect. Never minding everything with the Elenydd hamlet and the werewolves, Marlene had already caught him snooping twice well before that—or, well, shit, maybe she thought it was Sirius, given his meetings on the sly with Regulus? Not that it made any sense, of course, and Remus knew why he’d done things in secret although it’d been a long while, come to think of it, since last he’d heard anything about Sirius’s brother—
“Moony,” said Sirius, stopping abruptly in the woods. His eyes were half-lidded by drink and fatigue, but a pensive kind of curiosity struck him—as though his hackles had gone up and his tail still. Sirius was becoming more doglike by the year. “Do you feel that?”
“Was wondering if it was just me, like,” replied Remus. “Don’t,” he added, snatching Sirius’s wrist before he could cast anything. “It’s my wards.”
“Y’mean you can—”
“Sometimes, yes. S’pose I’ve always been able to sense it around me when the magic’s thick, but now, it’s—well.”
“You can touch it. Don’t simply know it’s there, you have to know. Like seeing the wind.”
“Poetic.”
“Leave off, I’m tipsy.”
“I like it when you wax poetic, Padfoot,” murmured Remus. “Narrowly escaping doom gives it a certain je-ne-sais-quoi.”
“And I you,” replied Sirius. “Give it a go, would you?”
“Pardon?”
“A quotation.”
Remus thought only a moment, looking about the forest of night before smiling softly and tugging Sirius’s wrist. “O come, dearest Padfoot,” he quoted, voice a whisper, cheeks aflame, “the rose is full blown…”
Crossing the threshold gave Sirius a shiver and, of course, the right to mock Remus for whatever flaw in his casting it was that conferred the wards an icy sensation not unlike stepping into a walk-in cooler, though it was less perceptible in the already-chill mountain air. Remus mocked back that it was clearly a trap for clever clogs like Sirius: to catch out those with the knowledge to perceive a flawed ward, but with not enough wisdom to realise something nasty might be waiting for them under the bonnet. You could almost believe Remus had done it intentionally. At least his fiddly addition had worked: a mental ping rang clear in his head as Sirius, non-werewolf, entered the bounds.
That unearned confidence drained from however, as in the night forest Remus lead Sirius on a snaking path to show off his many cabins, each perched on a small outcropping foundation. One of them was curiously dark. While it was late, yes, the veranda lanterns were often left on, and many of the werewolves were afterdark creatures regardless.
“Moony?” whispered Sirius.
Remus lifted a single finger to his lips in silent reply. Hush, it said.
A few weeks had passed since Remus first established the Elenydd compound and since he’d brought with it a number of if not impressive then large-scale enchantments. As it turned out, it wasn’t something you could do in a haphazard manner—magic altered the environment like anything else. Along with the nocturnal hunting polecats, the trilling nightjars and occasional terrifying, murderous shriek of a red fox, the wise owl hoots and screams, insects buzzing, moths trailing through beams of moonlight only to vanish—along with all of that shit, really, had come magic.
A few pairs of vulture-beaked green-black Auguries with their warning cries of impending doom and/or rain had moved in and settled over Remus’s cabin on a low branch; a colony of Doxies had inexplicably found their hamlet high in the mountains, leaving two werewolves bitten and hallucinating and Remus with his nose to the dirt because the clever pests buried their bloody eggs; Maggie claimed to have seen a Kelpie by the river, much to everyone’s horror; a handful of giant glowing snails; strange flowers; faeries within them; there were a few inert yet magical lichens of wild colour sprouting up on every old boulder, and, if Kelly was to be believed, adding the right ones to spliff would prolong the effect considerably. All of this and more made night in the Cambrian Mountains alive. Not quiet. Something or other was always rustling a bush or balancing on a branch or crying out, as all of nature’s creatures did, for a good lay. You could sneak up on someone in the woods when needed so long as you figured out how to walk the terrain.
‘Someone’ in this case was lying very still atop the thick wooden railing of the veranda. Very little light was allowed through the low tree canopy above them by design—Remus had been worried about broomback reconnaissance—but his eyesight was fair even in the dark. The figure was short. Half-dressed for the weather, actually, and a dim orange ember burned by his mouth in the dark with about the same colour Remus remembered in his coppery curls.
“Hullo, Rabbit,” murmured Remus. Finally, a friendly face. “Hope we’re not late for the duchess.”
Kelly’s bright iris flickered to the corner of his eye to watch them approach, though in moonlight they were all painted in shades of grey. He lacked the reflective layer to them—tapetum lucidum. Remus wondered if he had it himself.
“The fuck are ye wearin’?” he asked, tone flat. “And where did ye get wine at this hour?”
“Dresses,” said Sirius.
“Off-license,” said Remus. “Did you trade cabins with—er, what was it?”
“Suez,” replied Kelly. He didn’t so much as sit up from his lazy recline on the railing, though in a moment of drama he took a hot drag off his cigarette and blew it skyward. “They’re gone, them. Suez and his lot.”
Remus blinked. “Pardon?” he asked. “It’s a touch late to go out to town, I think. Are they—”
“Gone gone, Remus,” muttered Kelly. “I’d say fuck ’em, but the truth is I can’t blame ’em, aye? Not with their denmother always runnin’ off doin’ who kens what.”
“Oh—look, Christ, I can’t do this right now,” said Remus, rubbing his face as if to scrub the rapid onset of fatigue from it. “We have wine and an explanation. That is, if you’re willing to give us one in return.”
“And a fag,” added Sirius.
“Padfoot.”
“We were nearly murdered, Moony.”
That caught Kelly’s attention. If he’d been a rabbit true, one of his ears would’ve shot up rigid, but his eyebrow perking and the slight turn of his round face against the banister was enough.
“You stopped off for wine after a murder attempt, aye?” said Kelly. He sat upright and shook his head slow while Remus and Sirius clambered—with some mild struggling given the dresses—atop the railing on either side of him. “Maybe ‘dead clever’ ain’t a good fit. And ain’t the off-license closed?”
“I have larcenous impulse I’m still working through,” said Remus offhandedly. “Would you like to go first? How many did we lose?”
“Think I’ll be hearin’ your side first, actually.”
Kelly was being cordial. Very much so for a werewolf used to talking your ear off and, as Remus had learned, who was very, very adept at using other ruder methods to get what he wanted out of you. Still, the underlying edge to his lyrical voice bothered Remus.
“What is it,” began Remus, annoyed, “that you think I do, exactly, when I leave this compound.”
“If you’re gonna talk like that—”
“—Christ, this is—”
“Moony,” said Sirius. “Let him speak his piece, yeah?”
“Oh, cheers for the defence, Pads.”
“Not a clue,” said Kelly. It was abrupt and drew their attention, though he spoke forward into the night and treeline rather than look at Remus directly. “Not a one o’ us has a clue what ye get up to when you’re off runnin’ around doin’ your wizard shit. Not even me. Weren’t much to the rules ye set,” he continued, “but we were told not to bring any guests back ’cos it weren’t safe. Here ye are, though—comin’ and goin’ two or three times a week. This time with a bit o’ drink and now a poshboy on your hip, but the next time? Who knows. Can’t be blamed for us not trustin’ ye if ye ain’t one to trust us neither.”
Remus opened his mouth and, yes, in the dark of night his lips parting did sound like hypocrisy, but only from a very narrow point of view. One occupied by ten to twenty werewolves, perhaps, on the middling slopes of the Cambrian Mountains.
“That’s not entirely fair.”
“Enlighten us, aye?”
“Hold on—two to three times a week?” asked Sirius. To his credit, he wasn’t accusatory, not exactly, but his thin brows were knit together in thought. “I haven’t seen you in much longer than that.”
“I may or may not have been looking for someone,” replied Remus. It did not aid the confusion.
Socrates? mouthed Sirius. Remus shook his head, and again something unplaceable smoothed over Sirius’s already smooth features. How odd it was that the pair of them sought the other’s quarry—a witch and a wolf, both great and terrible.
“Another secret, aye.”
“We’ve a lot to get through. Get comfortable, like.”
Though he was in places snappish and otherwise curt, Remus set about the task of explaining himself to Kelly, who, sensing weakness, argued that he ought explain himself to everyone instead of just the Scot, but Remus countered in saying Kelly could share what he saw fit with the other werewolves. Perhaps they’d trust Kelly’s secrecy more; perhaps, as an added benefit, it meant that Remus wouldn’t inadvertently stumble into a phrase that itched the tattoo on his thigh in front of nearly twenty werewolves.
The effect was somewhat disconcerting according to Kelly.
“Blow me down,” muttered Kelly. He rubbed at his eyes and examined Remus’s jaw from all angles as though it were a trick painting. “Your face went—dunno if I ken the words to explain it. Weren’t blurry. And your lips—”
If nothing else, it gave credence to Remus’s claims that not every secret was his to share, nor the conditions of those secrets open to be reneged upon. Kelly knew already the idea of the Order inasmuch as he grasped they were a resistance group of sorts unaffiliated with the Ministry or Death Eaters, so Remus and Sirius elaborated—not much, although with the entire Order being exposed at the wedding, the tattered remains of its secrecy likely had less value than before—and fielded questions with middling finesse. From there, Remus explained his own designs: their private werewolf utopia; investigating lycanthropy in earnest; with some hesitation, he side-eyed Sirius and mumbled through a half-baked pet theory as to why Squibs were being left off the Werewolf Register and why, exactly, he’d gifted Kelly his late father’s wand last Christmas.
“Ah, Moony, I think I follow,” said Sirius. He stretched wide with a yawn and wrinkled his nose. Fatigue was weighing on them all. “If muggles can’t become werewolves, then all of the ‘Squibs’ on the list must’ve been late bloomers, yeah?”
Kelly canted his head to the side. “Nineteen’s a fair bit later than ‘late,’ I reckon. Still never managed any bit o’ spell.”
“Not exactly,” replied Remus. “It’s—well, it’s a bit mad, really, but do you recall the moment from the Evening House when that alarm spell was going off? You clasped your hands around the coin, Kelly,” he continued, “and by what I believe to be instinctive means shut it off. Even I couldn’t have managed that. Or, rather, I should say I couldn’t have because I was formally trained.”
“That weren’t ye?” asked Kelly, lips pouted. “But I can’t do spells, Remus, and it ain’t for a lack of tryin’ neither. Poor little Kels was crushed as a wee bairn.”
“You haven’t tried the exercises I assigned you—oh, don’t make that face, Padfoot. We’re both professors to some degree already—have you?”
“Nah,” said Kelly. “No point. Settled that part o’ my life before I fell in with wolves.”
“When were you turned, Kelly? S’pose I never asked.”
“No bother. Don’t mind talkin’ about it,” replied Kelly. “Twelve, I reckon—don’t ken my birthday, so I always counted it by Old Year’s Day—or might be thirteen. Why’s it matter?”
Remus took a steadying breath and said, “I think—and, yes, this is still in the realm of total conjecture, so you’re free to laugh and-stroke-or point—that perhaps there might be an odd interaction with Squibs and the bite. That,” he continued, slow, thinking of Socrates’s cryptic words long since passed, “it could be that whenever a Squib undergoes some sort of transformation, be it lycanthropic or vampiric or what have you, it might let them touch magic as a consequence.”
“Moony—”
“—if it were the other way around, Pads, we’d have a suspicious number of dead Squibs. If true Squibs couldn’t become werewolves, I mean to say.”
“Moony—”
“—I know, it’s total rubbish—”
“—Christ, let me get a word in edgewise, would you?” muttered Sirius. “What I was attempting to say was, ‘Moony, you realise that that has implications both grave and grand for the status of Squibs if true, given it directly contradicts the pureblood stance and indicates that they aren’t simply muggles born from witches and wizards, you brilliant, sexy werewolf, you?’ or something to that effect.”
“You could still give it a go.”
“’fraid the moment’s passed.”
“Drat.”
“Ye two need a minute?” asked Kelly, wry. “Or can we get back to the—”
“Oi, Moony. Are all werewolves this impatient or do I just have exquisite taste?”
The rest of the explanation took them into (as Kelly put it) the wee hours of the morning, brightening sky peeking through the canopy above them and distant cabin-milling sounds piercing through the dawn-woken birds and other crepuscular creatures. Kelly could and would inevitably ask more at his own leisure, but by then he saw that Remus and Sirius were dead on their feet and arses and likely some sorer places they’d discover when they woke up to the aftermath of battle, long-distance Apparition, and wine. The boy was not without mercy.
“Away with ye,” said Kelly, waving a short pale hand at them, and off indeed they went.
Once at the veranda of his own cabin, Remus leaned his forehead gentle against the mountain-damp wood of the door and let his eyes fall shut.
“I hate what I’m about to say, Pads.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I loathe where this conversation is going.”
“As do I,” muttered Remus, “but I’ve come to a frustrating realisation. A number of them, actually, and principally among them that I once again need your help in a way that isn’t going to be very kind to either of us.”
“Moony. Moony, love.”
“Mm?”
“Could this possibly wait until morning?”
“I’m not kicking you out, Pads. But, no, it really oughtn’t wait.”
“Fuck.”
“You have to look for her. Ahmed, I mean to say,” said Remus. He turned around and collided with Sirius, who, it appeared, was about to press up behind him in an attempt to distract him from the topic at hand. Sirius wobbled and Remus wrapped both arms around his slender-if-bony shoulders.
“Ah. Is that all?”
“You have to look for her, Padfoot,” repeated Remus. “I think I have to stay here. Divide and conquer—I’m the only one of us who can parse through the lycanthropic shite, and I can’t do both while taking care of this place.”
Sirius knocked his face against Remus’s sternum and gave a sharp if muffled exhale. The sound of his jaw clenching, teeth gritting was about as clear, too.
“I’m sorry—”
“—I loathe, loathe that you’re likely in the right. It’s—Christ, I sound like a fucking child again, but it’s really not fair, is it? This could well be the last summer we have together before one or both of us gets offed. It’s certainly the last summer before our final postgrad year—ah, funny, I haven’t thought about that in weeks, now, and my research is undoubtedly a shambles for the umpteenth time, so much so that I don’t even wanna consider the state of yours—”
“—rude, Padfoot, rude—”
“—We finally told our best mates about us. We’re finally in a place where we don’t have to sneak around in broom cupboards or dormitories or secret passageways. Where I don’t have to pull away whenever I hear footsteps,” he continued, frustrating oozing from his pores although perhaps that was the lingering alcohol. “We should be going out to pubs with Mary and the girls. Flying around with James. We should be bloody back in France, screaming and shrieking like banshees in the Côte d’Argent, gaggle of fools that we are, and getting back at the newlyweds for audibly shagging by making them overhear us in the throes of wet passion—don’t make a face, you love me—and we’re about to do none of that.
“Not one fucking thing of that. It’s not fair.”
“It’s not forever, Padfoot.”
“Sure feels like it.”
“And it’s not goodbye,” murmured Remus, sliding his arms down to hold Sirius’s wrists in a loose grip. Lowered his head much the same until their foreheads were touching. “A summer break, just as we’ve always had. Except—”
“—instead of summering with James at the Potter house, I’ll be stalking Death Eaters and tracking cursed objects through the black market while also trying to locate a witch who’s been missing over a year and wanted by presumably three other factions.”
“Mm.”
“Could you perhaps once ask me for something simple?” replied Sirius, quiet. “A back massage, maybe? Some nice socks?”
“You don’t have to leave now. We ought to lie low a few days until the Order regroups regardless.”
“And then—”
“—the next full, if I’m lucky, and if not, I’ve got the one in August.”
“That’s nearly two months. Two months, Moony. Two weeks was Hell enough already.”
“We’ll have to make our time last, then,” replied Remus. He slipped a hand back, groping for the handle to the cabin door, then tugged it open and Sirius forwards in one smooth motion. “C’mon in. I’ll fix you a cuppa,” he continued, wry, as Sirius fell into him and insistent, pushy hands swept over Remus. “I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning.”
“Have ever more romantic words been spoken?”
“Shut up.”
“Make me—mmph.”
Two days later it was still only the first week of July. Sirius donned one of the packs left behind by Suez’s crew and hiked with Remus to the wardline, hesitating in the moment he ought cross it. He spun on his heels (figurative, given his hiking boots) and wrapped round Remus in a strangling hug a moment. Hearts pounding. Sirius kissed him, wet, on both cheeks, and then gave a further cheeky bark—one with disturbing accuracy to Padfoot’s—in his ear. Neither one wanted to be the first to pull back, and yet too soon Sirius was disappearing among the stretches of thin-trunked trees, shrubs, vines, and mountainous mosses.
Both of them knew well what would happen if Sirius looked back, although many, many years later, Remus would wonder what might’ve been different if he had—if he’d cast a glance over his shoulder, one that would send Remus running after him and Sirius running away because they were mischievous dogs at their cores, loving only to chase and be chased and utterly unbothered by matters of War, intrigue, and postgraduate study. But Sirius did not look back. Sirius vanished instead into the trees like a ghost, and Remus would not hear from him or indeed anyone else in the Order for nearly two months.
The War, a building storm long over ten years, had finally arrived in earnest.
Notes:
Who doesn't love a wedding?
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, Summer 1980, Part I will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 11 July, a Friday.
If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is Enigma Variations by Coriaria, a R/S non-magical AU set during WWII which entangles romance, espionage, and codebreaking.
Chapter 24: Summer 1980, Part I
Chapter Text
Nearly eight weeks without word from the Order, from Sirius, James, Lily, Caradoc, even Mary or the rest of the unexpelled postgrad lot, had shrunk Remus’s entire world to one mountain range, one Welsh valley, and one midlands town.
The townsfolk of Tregaron knew of him more than they knew Remus proper, and he’d kept it that way. Word was spreading about the yobs, punks, and elder misfits that came from the Elenydd and the mountain slopes, sometimes on foot and sometimes packed like sardines into one shitty compact town car. They had something of a reputation given the inevitable trysts of bored werewolves and the hijinks of lycanthropic living. A bawdy one. Raucous. Keen intuitions honed by secrets visitors oughtn’t know. Most of them were über-paranoid and curiously uncomfortable with footwear, as though boots and trainers were an inconvenience or an unfamiliar necktie. As long as the money spent fine, however, Tregaron was happy to gawk at them like zoo animals. Remus was happy to remain otherwise unknowable.
Ducking behind the off-license with a half-dozen clinking bottles in his grip and a fresh pack of fags tucked between his teeth, Remus set the whole lot on the damp, moss-encroached cobbles underfoot, snarled, sudden, at the trio of hungry brown rats approaching from beneath a nearby overflowing skip bin to scatter them—fucking rats, their numbers swelling in town in Thatcher’s wake—and began packing away everything into his sack with care despite the light rain. He ought’ve brought an umbrella. Everything he’d bought on the supply run would fit. His Undetectable Extension Charms were fine art, actually, by this point, but too many cars climbed the mountain in summer, even so late in the day, and the last thing he needed was Aurors sniffing around about his flagrant uses of magic, and for another thing he’d be well fucked before he bought yet another fucking umbrella he’d never remember to bring. So he resigned himself both to being rained on and a slow wet journey home.
It was wiser than rushing. Washing out an imperceptible extradimensional space was, as it turned out, something of a nightmare, and it wasn’t as though he had anything important to do the following day.
Or the day after that.
Or the day after that.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Two months had made him lazy. Arrogant. Foolish, and yet, with nightfall creeping over his dozy Welsh world and naught but a few pissed women and stray dogs stumbling back through the rainy grey streets he’d left behind, Remus felt a pricking up his neck. Hackles raising. The ancient wrought-iron gate hadn’t swung quite shut. Rusty. Ajar. Werewolves didn’t have a sixth sense, no, but years of paranoia made a potent and explosive cocktail under the effects of solitary pressure. Unease was a malaise in the mountains, these days—a malaise he could smell even here. A malaise that smelled of magic and wet dog.
Remus whirled. The alleyway yet a blur around him, he cast out a hand, not bothering with his tucked-away wand and instead summoning forth the lid of a nearby rubbish bin like a deadly pinwheel towards the scent. With a horrid metallic groan it careered off something sleek and invisible mid-air. Of course. They were Death Eaters, not seventh-years or Ministry cogs, a Shield Charm was basic bloody tactics, but that hadn’t been point. By the time of impact Remus had already kicked off the rainslick weatherworn brick like a swimmer into a dive and Apparated only a few metres with an indiscreet crack. Preserved momentum flattened him and his would-be assailant hard against a rusted skip bin with an equally indiscreet clang and several muffled curse words. Remus pressed the flat of his forearm against their throat. He held it there only a moment longer before recognition seized the reins from paranoia. Relief, even.
“Padfoot?”
“Y’know, Moony,” gasped Sirius, going limp in his grip, “if I wanted to ambush you, I wouldn’t have waited for you to finish mucking around with those spirits.”
“Mm. I’m sure.”
“Ah, go on. Ask your favourite embarrassing questions.”
“What did Remus Lupin—”
“—could we please dispense with the third person—”
“—give Sirius Black for his twentieth birthday?”
“Sentimental, are we?” murmured Sirius, wheezing. “You know how I feel about that. Bad omens, Moony.”
“Answer.”
“A collar that will always fit me,” replied Sirius. He rolled his mischievous grey eyes, giving off airs of boredom although Remus felt his tail wagging—an impressive feat, he realised, given how awful Sirius looked. Part of that was the choking. Probably. Remus muttered an apology and dropped his arm, pulling back only enough that he could give Sirius the once-over yet in so doing still pressing their thighs together.
While physically Sirius has put on some welcome weight, his skin was pale and clammy and wet by the light rain, giving it an almost translucent quality like fabric stretched too tight over a mannequin. Dark bags bruising beneath his eyes. Not ones produced by the punk-ish makeup he’d taken to wearing, no, these were genuine bags of sleeplessness and other unspecified hauntings. Indeed his eyes were slightly sunken as if having retreated from some witnessed horror. There was a new tattoo where his collarbone met neck—more below it, because of course Sirius had worn no shirt under his coat in the rain. His grin was a touch too crooked, off-kilter, even, and his dark curls were greasy. Tangled. And the smell of him, Christ.
“How long,” began Remus, quiet over the rain, “have you been living as Padfoot?”
Sirius gave a noncommittal shrug.
“How long has your face been fucked up like that?” he countered, reaching up to paw at the bridge of Remus’s nose with cracked nails and flecking black polish. Remus brushed his hand away—he was still getting used to it himself—but folded their fingers together instead.
“Let’s get you some tea. Should still be a little pub still open—barmaid likes me, or the money I spend, I s’pose—for us to dry off in. If they can stand the stench of you, like,” he added with a grin.
“You’re no blooming lily yourself,” muttered Sirius. He hooked his arm round Remus’s waist and nuzzled his cheek across Remus’s jacketed shoulder, affectionate and raw. Strands of hair caught in his mouth, nose, eyes, and it was clear beyond all measure that Sirius could not give less of a shit.
Remus snorted at the sight of it. He hoped, of course, it would continue despite the strange stares they’d no doubt earn. Sirius had always been worth the trouble, that way.
***
“You must be wondering what trouble I found myself in to end up in such a state,” began Sirius. Remus had dragged him into the pub bathroom for a quick wash—his fingernails had been filthy and from the way he was handling the rim of his tea mug, he would’ve thoroughly contaminated the thing with worms or whatnot. Not that he was drinking it. Sirius’s long crooked fingers were absorbing its warmth more than anything else, and his eyes slid up from the table to meet Remus’s, suddenly unsure. “Aren’t you?”
“Oh, are you in a state right now?” replied Remus offhandedly. One corner of Sirius’s pale lips twitched upwards, and so he continued, “Perhaps. Just a smidgen curious.”
“A tad.”
“Mm.”
“You first.”
“I am not in ‘a state.’”
“Nevertheless.”
“Beauty before age, like,” muttered Remus. A skirmish of wit between them, it was. He leaned back into the plastic cushions of the pub as, despite being spies or agents or whatever, they’d collectively shied away from the ostentatious window booth in favour of the one furthest from the front door and thus closest the back exit.
“Is that what you’re calling it?” mused Sirius, gesturing to his nose again. Remus forgot there was a jagged scar streaking across it, pinkish despite his best efforts. Sometimes it still stung. That was usually about when he remembered it. “It’s a sort of beauty, I s’pose,” continued Sirius, wry. “Finally reflects the beast within.”
“Perhaps.”
“Where’d you like me to start, Pads?”
Sirius shrugged again. Grey eyes flicked across the mostly-empty pub, anxious. His leg was tapping incessantly under the table which, yes, bothered Remus, but something was bothering Sirius more and so he let the tapping dog tap.
“The beginning,” mumbled Sirius. “Helps me build a timeline.”
“A timeline? Whatever for?”
“Later, Moony. Just—anything. Talk. The alleycats were terrible conversationalists and I can already tell my vocabulary has degraded to an egregious degree.”
“It shows. Well,” began Remus, brows furrowed. Muffling Charms were second nature to him by this point and he managed one wandlessly, earning an eyebrow-quirk from Sirius. “I did what I said I would. Chased Socrates, I mean to say, or perhaps it’d be more accurate to say I chased Their ideas, but more than that I settled into life, Padfoot. Two months is a long time on a mountain.
“I was still trying to lead Kelly through the first ritual, and, well, as students came—Jesus, were—he was neither my best nor worst, but he was certainly the most frustrating. Insistent. Curious in a manner too familiar, then, though with you lost to the winds of War and the Order gone to ground, I s’pose I welcomed it. We fell into patterns, him, me, everyone else. An ebb and flow. Very moon-like, like.”
“Classic.”
“Kelly appointed himself liaison to ‘Denmother Remus’—yes, a sure step up from Book Boggart, I’m sure—and so trailed after me most days. It mattered little what I was doing: inking down notes in some journals I pinched from you—”
“—I was wondering where all my spares had gone, y’know—”
“—for the progress of our forest gardens and our little vegetable patches, or tracking game, entertaining the younger wolves and commiserating with the old, et cetera. Once, he even corrected my maths on a plot of land we’d measured out in case we needed to raise another structure. I was thinking a smokehouse—summer wouldn’t last forever, you know, and minding a hamlet of starving werewolves was not my idea of a good time.”
“Odd. It’s rather mine.”
“And, you know, Kelly asked how I knew all this off-the-land shite, but I was honest and told him that most of it I knew nothing about. Looking it up as I go,” he added with a shrug. “Told him he could help and he just said, ‘Nah, I’d slow you down, never finished my lessons, y’ken,’ and I just sat there a moment until he told me to change my face before he kissed it because his maths had been better than mine. Told him as much, and he sort of mumbled, ‘Aye, well, that’s just business’—”
“—your accents are awful.”
“Probably, yes. In any case we didn’t pair together every day. Kelly has a bend for herbology and the plants must know it—every time I left him to tend that little weed patch I nicked from a bothy, the things ended up an inch or two taller by sunset. Brilliant. I knew he had magic, even if he allegedly couldn’t make Lyall’s wand work for him. Not that I ever saw him practice with the thing.”
“Hm.”
“Something to add?”
“No, no, continue.”
“The others came around too when they realised I wasn’t about to disappear on them again. Boxdye—girl with colourful braids who you’d love to meet, I think, given you and her would’ve been best friends if you’d shared a year—she was one of them. Insisted, or demanded, actually, that I set aside time to teach her at least one new spell every day. She said she had dreams. Plans for this place, and that she’d be fucked if a little stick got the better of her like it had Kelly. He took that well, obviously.
“And, well, it was arguably one of the more compelling reasons for magical pedagogy I’d ever heard expressed by a student. And funny, that—right I’d bet my dukedom that, as we speak, there’s at least two dozen Hogwarts students staring at September as though it was the distant-but-closing barrel of a rifle, dreading their return to school, while Boxdye and co. would’ve probably stabbed someone for the opportunity to attend even at the rebellious age of sixteen.”
“I’ve been worse, myself,” said Sirius fondly. “You recall Christmas, fifth year?” he asked, and smiled, soft, at Remus’s nod. “At the time I think I’d have given anything to have our little stay at the Potters’ last forever.”
“Missed James that much, did you?”
“All of you, you plonker. You, James—even Wormtail, bless him. Liberty was a sweet taste to a sixteen-year-old Sirius.”
“Pity his older version took to talking about himself in the third person.”
“Pity indeed. Where were we?”
“Oh, right. So—just like you and James, as it so happens—Boxdye would take the spells she’d learned and then immediately stomp over to her mates for a bit of showing-off complete with a cocky fuck-off grin. Sometimes I even caught her putting the wolves with their own wands through their paces—a clever tactic, really, and one that I’ve been known to use. Teaching is an effective way to check your own understanding. Who knew? Other than me, of course.
“Not that there weren’t moments of headbutting—beyond being wolves, they were teenagers, so I had to disarm them at least twice a week when there was a spat over this or that or whoever was fucking whoever’s boy-girl-wolffriends—and not that there was no frustration following that because a few of the ingenious buggers took to attempting wandless bloody magic if disarmed too long, never minding how dangerous and unpredictable it could be. One girl—she’s a mousey kind of punk who you can hear coming across the forest with the chains she dangles of her belt—she blew her eyebrows clean off trying to unlock her cabin door with a snap.
“Amateurs. Irresponsible amateurs, the lot of them, and, oh, Jesus Christ, I’m Professor fucking McGonagall, aren’t I? Except—”
“—with less power and a much less intimidating accent,” finished Sirius, “albeit much, much sexier.”
“Right. Well, after two weeks of that nonsense I put my foot down—”
“—your firm, the-better-to-kick-your-arses-with foot down—”
“—naturally, and I wouldn’t teach them a new spell until they could run through all of the previous ones without error.”
“Cruel.”
“Effective. If they used magic against each other in any manner resulting in lasting injury—see, I learned something from our time pulling pranks—then I cut them off. No new spells until further notice. Boxdye put an end to the infighting right quick after that. Only on the magical end of things, of course. Apparently an essential part of lycanthropy is learning when and how to throw a good, nasty punch. Most of them were already postgraduates in a brawl.
“Whenever pressing matters prevented me from entertaining Boxdye or Chains or any other of the youths, each one with a delightful and ridiculous name—or, being honest, when I just couldn’t be bothered seeing as I was starting to feel like Madam Pince in the bloody library—wolves young and old bothered Octavia Fong. Octavia was the only other classically-trained werewolf at the Elenydd hamlet.
“She took it as a personal slight. S’pose I’d gathered she didn’t share Siobhan’s maternal interests nor instincts, and nor could I blame her, actually, given my own distinct lack of maternity. Nevertheless, she indulged, as many skilled witches and wizards who will go unnamed for the purposes of this conversation do, in showing off her magical acumen: blooming flowers, animating these little twig-wolves, that sort of thing, although from what Kelly’s rumourmongering told me, Octavia’s true talents lied with mental magic. Legilimency.
“He—Kelly, I mean to say—said it doesn’t work right on us. Sort of shrugged. ‘Guess it takes a wolf to know a wolf,’ he said all cryptic-like, and that was that.
“I hadn’t asked after her time with Greyback and she’d volunteered little. Part of the clean slate deal. If she was finding peace there, a path forwards—sifting through the thoughts of others on behalf of someone as vile as Greyback was probably as unkind to her as it’d been to his victims—and if entertaining werewolves with little party tricks of magic brought her that peace, well, then good for her. Sometimes she even taught them a spell or two. I didn’t mind. Why not let her be their aspiration? Show them there was a way to move past it all.
“Except in the end I s’pose there wasn’t, actually, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Oh, you must’ve been curious about Amir Maalouf, the—”
“—the dragonologist whose trousers we both tried to get into,” murmured Sirius airily, “yes, I’m aware of his name, if only in passing. What about him?”
Remus sipped at his tea with imitated nonchalance.
“You didn’t.”
“Mm.”
“Moony.”
“Something of a tawdry affair. I’m not sure what struck me, if m’honest, but I’d be picking his brain over something or other—he’s a wonder at Care of Creatures—and we’d be hiking, and then, well, I’d be dragging my tongue up the side of his neck because I’m a literal bloody dog, apparently, and because it made him shiver no matter how hot or cool the air was. And it kept his hands still, too, which—er, well, I don’t have to go on in detail, I s’pose.”
Sirius tapped a broken fingernail to his teacup’s rim and stared hard at Remus, teeth working on his lips. Invisible tail wagging. Under the booth table his worn boots tapped the side of Remus’s bare foot.
“Could stand to hear a bit more.”
“You’ll like this bit.”
“Ah, will I?”
“So wherever it is we ended up, I usually had his belt undone and him pinned shortly thereafter—”
“—who uses the phrase ‘shortly thereafter’ in an erotic story?”
“Shut up. Shortly thereafter,” Remus continued, bumping Sirius’s ankle under the table. “I’d have him pinned back against a tree or a boulder or the cabin wall by means of gagging on his dick, but, again, being honest, I think it was you that urged me on. Missing you had that effect—an itch in my throat I couldn’t quite scratch no matter how many times I tried.”
“Moony.”
“Yes, darling.”
“That is the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me. That anyone has ever said to me, come to think of it.”
“That’s alarming.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“—not that I was about to stop trying, of course. And not that it wasn’t good, but I couldn’t tell any longer if the thing that got me off was, well, the press of my nose into his crotch—he’s got this coarse dark hair and it does something to the smell of him, which might be a werewolf thing—or those weatherbeaten hands burying themselves in my hair, or the scandal of it, what with the short trousers bunched ’round my knees in the earth and hands slick between my own legs, or—and I thought this might be it for a long, long while—the outrage in your eyes if-stroke-stroke-stroke-when you learned that I’d beaten you to the dragonologist.
“Sort of like the look you’re giving me now, albeit I’d imagined less smoulder.
“Either way, I got off, and depending on the day it was two minutes or two seconds before Amir did, too. Sometimes it was weird—he’d always say something to the effect of, ‘You’re half my age,’ but my hair’s greying at the same rate as his—”
“—I wasn’t gonna mention it—”
“—and I was technically his superior, so I called the power dynamics even. Which, as you know—”
“—is not how you like it, I’m aware.”
“Told him to turn me around next time if he’d prefer it unbalanced, like, and then we went back to looking for pixies. Detail enough for you?”
“I’ll ask again later. When—”
“—when we’re not in a pub, yes,” murmured Remus, “I gathered as much. I could tell you about Kelly, too.”
“I thought you weren’t shagging him?”
“Mm. I wasn’t. Though I spent a lot of clothing-optional evenings with him, and, well, you know how my mind tends to wander, so he’d make some rude comment about my dick and then I’d be staring at his and it made the whole ‘ritual preparation’ thing a nightmare, though I did my best to not stare. Put that on the record—I might’ve been gagging for it, yes, but I do have some semblance of ethical propriety and shagging one’s pupils is right out. Even if they’re only a year or so younger than you and not an actual student, and even if you’re not an actual teacher. That, and boulders—we spent a lot of time sitting naked on that boulder together, Christ—boulders are not prime shagging spots. You hobble away with scraped knees and a knackered back at best and no one’s likely to get off. Not that I know from experience, like.”
“Right,” said Sirius. He’d leaned an elbow forwards on the table and was gnawing absently on his knuckle, lips split into a half-grin. Mind obviously elsewhere—probably running the scenarios. How long had it been for Sirius?
“Right. So I’d be telling him to focus, and if he was bored of trying to get me to shag him, he’d say that I hadn’t told him what to focus on, and from there I’d have the hooks in him. All I had to say was, ‘Haven’t I?’ or something equally cryptic, very Socrates-like, and follow it with a, ‘You’re not confused, you’re conflicted,’ and we’d get the ball rolling even if it was a shot in the dark. Which is, as it happens, how that conversation went the night of the July full moon. He said, ‘Reckon I can be both,’—both conflicted and confused, I mean to say—and then asked if I was going to stay with him through the full moon, to which I obviously replied by asking if werewolves could choose where they go—”
“—ah, very slick—”
“—and to which he replied that I was ‘Fucking killing him.’ Thought I lost him for a moment—and, believe me, I felt bloody stupid sitting on that rock, eyes shut, brows quirked and, as you recall, absolutely starkers, but all I had to do was wait and then it dawned on him like sunrise at midnight.”
“Editorialising, are we?”
“It’s my story.”
“Forgive me.”
“Always,” murmured Remus. “He put all the pieces together, then. Why all the werewolves woke up together in the same clearing the moon prior—something that apparently never happens, they always end up scattered and spend the mornings regrouping—why we’d spent three days in the glade together, how I’d managed to do all my ‘lone wolf shite’ as he’d called it without a pack for years, et cetera et cetera, and do you know what he said?”
“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“He said, ‘You figured out a way to cheat the moon, didn’t you, dead clever?’”
“Did he say it with a Welsh accent?”
“Rude, like.”
“Bite me.”
“If you behave. As for Kelly, though, I asked if he was asking—another line I’d lifted wholesale from Socrates—and he said he’d had his suspicions a while, but wanted confirmation. He also wanted to know why I didn’t just tell him—”
“—why couldn’t you, again?”
“Oh, I’ll get to that. Patience. Which is what I told him, actually, because we were both getting that feeling. The itch beneath our skin, bones aching to become liquid, you get the gist.”
“Christ.”
“He made a crack about ‘focusing on himself’ meaning having a righteous wank before the moon or, better yet, a filthy shag—no, I did not indulge him—but by then it felt like someone’d slipped hot embers or molten silver rolling around beneath my skin so I wasn’t much of a conversationalist. And, being honest, the mere idea of mixing sex with the transformation was enough to make my stomach turn, even if it was empty. I—well, I s’pose years ago I’d though I’d never grow accustomed to that weird twilight between moonrise and moonset, how inhuman it makes you feel, and yet—well.
“I don’t know. There up on that boulder and beneath the mountain sky, along with the sting of fire in my flesh and the fragility of my bones was something new, like. Something electric. A few well-intentioned nerves lighting up with this nervous-if-pleasurable kind of sensation, and by then, they’d caused a ripple, a wave that washed over me and the dread to smooth everything down. The pain wasn’t going away, of course—it’d never go away—and nor would the screams and shrieks, but, still, some part of my brain got rebellious, releasing adrenaline as normal but adding in its own addled mix of miscellaneous neurochemicals to produce excitement, anticipation, and—this last one I think can be blamed on Kelly, really, as much as my own errant mind—a touch, a smidgen, perhaps, of overactive libido.
“However twisted it is, in that moment I s’pose I both dreaded and desired the transformation. And the moon didn’t disappoint.”
***
No matter how much he’d have liked to stay with Kelly in the aconite glade, Remus couldn’t. Only one moon had passed since the pack’s new home was established and so the others were still new, exploring, acclimatising themselves to the mountains. Sloping, ever-damp earth, the cool air; night-trills; phosphorescent magical moths and swooping birds that so narrowly avoided their lupine jaws and the countless scents all sweetbitter and earthy and sharply strong in their keen noses. The wolves were curious. For a cat, it heralded doom, yes, but among wolves curiosity was a tool of danger. Murder. The bothies of the mountains—their name escaped Remus under the moon, as mountains did not have names, they had scents and tastes and rabbits he so desperately wanted to chase—were not popular with most humans. Often he’d kept count of hikers while pretending to be one. Sometimes he watched them from low perches in the clustered trees. Humans so seldom looked up.
There were humans on the opposite side of the valley.
If even one wolf scented them, there’d be a hunt.
Last moon had been simple. Remus’s howl drew them all like a clarion in the deeps, but here, doing so would also pull Kelly from the summit. It’d ruin his plans. Nights of preparation, wasted. They’d have to start all over again and wolves, as it turned out, were not known as patient creatures. More than that, if Remus couldn’t help one, how was he supposed to help them all?
The rust and cream-coloured werewolf atop the summit seemed content to linger there albeit saddened by Remus’s departure. His wide ears were splayed. Tail tucked. He lounged with as much sass as an anthropomorphic lupine horror might manage across the volcanic boulder like a fainting Victorian lady, albeit one whose smile earned comments of ‘My, what big teeth you have!’ of course. Only a few laboured breaths of play, chasing, tumbling together Remus had allowed before slinking down the winding mountain path to the hollow hamlet proper in hopes of catching his pack’s trail.
His pack, her pack, their pack—there was, as it turned out, no such thing as an ‘alpha’ in werewolf dynamics despite all the available literature claiming otherwise, but what had they expected when they studied werewolves in lock-up? Outside captivity, wild packs were family, not hierarchy. A dysfunctional family, sure, and one Remus had known too little to feel entirely comfortable with the label, but inasmuch as Remus cared for their safety, happiness, and well-being, there was no other word, was there?
There was no one else to care if they didn’t care for each other—what else could you call that, if not family? Solidarity? Collective struggle? They were the same scent by another name, trees distinguished from one another by some strange human science despite living together in the same forest, and names were unimportant to Remus as of moonrise. The bushes through which he rushed only mattered in whether they would part before him or catch in his fur like brambles; the trees in whether they’d bear his weight; rabbits were not mountainous or plains-borne or valley-divided or even separate from hares—they were either easy to catch or wily enough to make Remus snarl at the sky with frustration. The scents on the wind were mysteries, strangers, questions and answers. Friends.
Foes. Remus’s ears shot up and he snuffled his snout at a high overlook, canine eyes adjusting to distance. In the far, far clusters of brush-shaped trees with thin trunks, orange, a sunset-like light flickered on the foliage. The wind carried hard through a clear line in the ascending canopy before Remus and with it, the scents of smoke, forest, and werewolves.
Time together had familiarised Remus to the pack’s various scents. Many smelled much alike one another, but there were subtle differences, ones you could distinguish with practice. Werewolves were winelike that way, and their noses not unlike sommeliers. Boxdye had a chemical twist to her, like turpentine, while Chains was metallic, and Kelly, of course, had the underlying twist of skunk-reeking herbs. Not that Remus would ever mention it to him.
All those who’d been turned by the same wolf shared the same base scent, but the further they lived from that moment and the more they indeed lived, full stop, the more it changed. You evolved. Remus took some pride in that although he knew not his own scent, but there, sniffing wind atop the ridge, it gave him pause. There was a scent both strange and familiar on the air. Too familiar. Too raw, too fresh, like the memory it evoked. It wasn’t a scent. It was the Odour.
He leapt clean over the scree lip of the ridge and scrambled down through dry roots, loose rocks, low straggly shrubs and thorny grey bushes on all four limbs, pebbles flying loose, then bolted off in pursuit of the scent like a bloodhound. No. Not here—how? The question was ill-suited for his half-wolfen brain, one that, like Dorcas Meadowes, looked forwards and not back. Yet still the answer came easy enough: how not?
Suez (a middle-aged werewolf named, as Kelly had explained, for the relative narrowness of his passage in comparison to the significant global traffic it allegedly received) had taken two other werewolves with him in his departure, and another unknown four had left before Remus ever met them. Then there was the alleged spy in the Order, of course, but of them, not even Caradoc or Fletcher knew the hamlet’s location. Lily, James, and Peter knew the mountain range, and Sirius had been to the compound, yes, but any of them being the spy wasn’t bloody likely, now, was it?
Maybe the Death Eaters had simply tracked him. There were only so many large forests in all the Isles, after all, and of those, many were seeded and sown on private patrolled lands after centuries of logging. Or it could’ve been another spy. Homegrown. Octavia Fong had served Greyback once, hadn’t she? Perhaps Siobhan had made another one of her plays to safeguard her daughter above all others, or perhaps it was Kelly—turning on former allies for personal gain was something of a special skill of his.
Each paranoid thought fed his strength and desperation. Furry chest heaving, ears swivelling for the slightest sound of conflict, Remus pounded through the mountain paths and kicked up clumps of dark, dampened loam in his wake. Neither track diverged: the reek of woodsmoke and Odour grew stronger in his lupine nose until it was nauseating. The moon would only be high so long. You could only stalk your prey so long.
If Remus was quick and lucky and clever enough, he could get ahead of the pack—there were only a few passages in and out of the mountains and fewer still to the humans across the valley—and intercept them, drive them back to the hamlet and hopefully drive off the Odour before she whipped his pack into a frenzy or spilled blood on his utopia. He bounded over the banks of a gurgling brook, water blackened and reflecting stars, in one smooth leap without breaking stride. His muscles were alive—powerful, electric. Reflexes keen. Maybe Remus had come far enough to best her in a fight, though in truth he’d settle for a stalemate.
And indeed maybe he had, though as Remus breached a shrub-laden treeline and disappeared into another stretch of woods, he realised he would never know for certain because she was not alone, and nor was she still here. She’d brought allies. Packmates. Two of them, exactly. One smelled suspiciously of Amir, albeit with more mulch to it, more dirt. The other—well, the other scent reminded him of bruised grasses in a back garden and of a Welsh voice crooning to him overhead. Familiar. So familiar, in fact, his nose had learned to tune it out because you didn’t generally speaking need to pick up on your own scent all the time.
Fenrir Greyback.
For years upon years Remus did not know for certain what he would do if ever, whenever he found Fenrir Greyback. He knew invariably it would end with one of them dead. Remus would kill him. Remus would strike that mortal blow or die trying. Too many years he’d spent in the throes of nightmares and too many sleepless nights wishing he instead were Greyback’s nightmare to do anything else. He thought about it too often; not enough; he buried it in the corner with every other inactionable desire and displayed a neat little name over it so it would never touch the parts of his mundane life not belonging to it. Nothing less than that would give him closure.
His revenge fantasies were something of a timeline, really, of Remus’s whole life. When he was still at school, he lay at night watching shadows on the gold-trim bedcurtains and pretended they were the four of them, Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs doing battle like the Four Founders against that Fenrir Greyback, with Remus delivering that final heroic strike. The Marauders had been the first to convince him there could be a life for Remus after Hogwarts, after all—how couldn’t they be there? The idea was unthinkable until there’d come The Prank, and by the time it and Remus had gone away, so with it had the idea.
As he matured, or, well, at least grew older, he thought of striking out on his own, integrating himself into that lycanthropic underbelly of their world, of earning a name for himself, Greyback’s trust, and then earning Greyback’s carotid between his teeth. For a time in the Pyrenees he’d only fantasised of killing Greyback during a transformation. The poetry if not the practicality was fitting, he’d thought.
Sometimes strange things crept in. Sometimes—and, being fair, Remus blamed much of this on his proclivity for braincell-destroying drugs or otherwise mind-numbing herbs from fifth year onwards—he dreamed of finding Greyback in a pub or a muggle café where the werewolf somehow wouldn’t recognise him. Of sitting down, entertaining his curiosity as a stranger. Studying him. Who Greyback was beneath all the child-predation and monstrousness was still something of a mystery to him. Perhaps Greyback would let something slip. A clue, a hint. He’d let slip a sly comment about children and when he popped off for the loo, Remus would find him there and paint the wall tiles bright red.
Perhaps, and again, perhaps this was the drugs, but perhaps Remus would find nothing but a sad, lifeless man on the bad end of a bottle. Skin pale and clammy, eyes bloodshot, malodorous presence peeling the paint from the walls. In those fantasies, Greyback was filthy with fleas. Better yet, abandoned by all: his kin, his Dark Lord, the few wretched souls to ever tolerate his presence out of anything than overwhelming dread. Remus would watch him awhile, pour another drink so he might drown himself, and leave him at the pub in exile both physically alive and mentally dead. Greyback beat him to it in that scenario.
He’d find him on trial for Azkaban and slip him hemlock before he was shipped off for the Dementors as a last mercy never afforded to Remus; he’d steal his pack and let them amok his viscera; he’d banish him to a cave just as Albus Dumbledore had done with Grindelwald and Nuremgard, frozen forever like a dragonfly in amber and just as easily forgotten; he’d take his memories; he’d kick the shit out of him; he’d steal all his teeth and spit in his face to take away forever the one thing his memory always lorded above Remus.
Then the fantasies took another turn with his return to Hogwarts. His violence evolved. Before Sirius had become his Padfoot, Remus would toss and turn in his own bed, early on, like his skin was aflame until the thoughts finally took shape before him. In those fantasies, Remus found Greyback as a tramp again, but there, he’d house Greyback, clean him up, show him another way of life. Earn his love and then cast him back into the cold with a shattered heart. He’d learn in confidence all the things that had happened to Greyback, his life’s story—what drove a werewolf to target children? Was he a paedophile? Did he fuck his pack?—and public the exposé, a Greyback A to Z and bask in the humiliation, the ridicule.
There was more, too. Things that turned Remus’s stomach to think about and he wouldn’t dare discuss with Sirius. With anyone—speaking it aloud was profane and unwise, like an open and uncontained flame in dangerous desire of being fed new air. The words alone were traitorous. Vile. Even if Sirius understood, and he might, being one of a few people Remus knew was at least as much a mess as him, he did not want Sirius to understand, to know. Remus did not want to understand or know it himself. It was verboten. There were appropriate and inappropriate ways of exorcising one’s daemons, he’d been told. To kill, never murder, one’s attacker, one’s monstrous shadow, well that was only natural. It was understood. To do more, however…
The aftermaths there still ended with death, whether literal or in metaphor. That was the uniting factor, the only reason he didn’t banish them from record. Underlying every emotion was the singular desire to destroy Greyback once and for all. Yet, with the scents of Greyback and the Odour growing stronger as he stalked through the woods at a slow and lupine creep, a wet, metallic stench crept into his snout and over his tongue. It set his teeth on edge and his mouth salivating, though he tried to supress those reflexive instincts as much as possible. His ears flicked to catch the distant-yet-closing crackle of flames and snapping embers—each one like fragile twig underfoot and, like Remus’s sense of ease, easily broken.
A pair of vivid orange-blue nylon tents with useless and shredded grey rain-slicks above them were scattered between the thin tree trunks and nestled between wet clumps of earth-clad roots. Concurrent jagged lines marred the large one, vivid, flapping like loose flayed flesh. Horror. Almost camp, actually, if not for the arterial spray painting black splotches onto its tarpaulin-blue exterior in the firelight. A trench-green pack spilled out the front flap of the tent, itself wide open like a broken jaw. Someone’s unclothed leg lay still beside it, also poking out of the flap. Their white sock was similarly bloodsoaked.
Remus looked no further. He did not want to know if the leg still belonged to a body.
Fresh death in all its malodour lingered over the campsite. An overturned cooler spilled slow-melting ice into the earth while nocturnal ants swarmed, uncaring, over the burst cans of sweetened nothings that’d come rolling free; the fire was fed by wet wood and so threw up much smoke, thickening the air with sickly spruce; iron and blood; piss, both distantly treebound and much nearer; crumbs of something meat-and-pastry; human sweat; and, as Remus crept among the strung-up clotheslines, ripped hammocks, and scattered hiking boots, something sharp and antiseptic. Something alive. Something desperately clinging to it.
He rounded back around the second smaller tent and caught sight of a human splayed still over the damp loam, but even over the fire and wind and night-rustlings around them, Remus could hear their breath go still. Holding it. As Remus had learned, the freshly dead were not just limp, they were loose—like all their marionette strings had been snipped. The man on the ground before him was rigid. Playing dead. Dead clever, if they’d been animals. A werewolf could tell, however—so how was he still alive?
Taking advantage of the man’s stillness and shut eyes, Remus did his best impression of a curious creature and examined his wound surreptitiously. A nasty bite had torn into the side of his calve and left an all-too-familiar crescent wound on either side, and, yes, the wound would slow its bleed but not stop weeping without silver and dittany to seal it, but the man was otherwise in decent shape. Cuts, bruises, and a few abrasions from where he’d fallen or been dragged across the forest floor, but this wound would kill in days, maybe a week or two, not minutes or hours. Which, Remus gathered, was the point of it. The man smelled faintly of petrol and barely twitched at Remus’s insistent sniffing. Anyone with this much gear out in the mountains would have a car, and with his apparent steely survival instincts, Remus had little doubt he would make it back to said car and find his way to a hospital.
Not that it would save his life—the odds were very, very high that he was a muggle and not a Squib—but, before fever took him, he’d tell the authorities. There were no wolves in the British Isles, not anymore. No bears. All of them had been hunted to extinction, and yet the wound would be undeniably strange. Newspapers would run headlines on page four or five, muggles would question if someone rich and powerful had a private zoo or cannibal cult, and all that terrible speculation would drive hosts of unsuspecting humans into his mountains. Aurors would soon follow. Once again, they’d be on the run, utopia smothered in its crib.
This was a test. Another bloody, bloody test, and of all the ones foisted upon Remus without his asking or consent, this turned his stomach the most. Not only did it come at the cost of human life, the creature, the vile, evil thing examining him was the werewolf that had irreversibly altered his life’s course and whom Remus had decided, many years ago, that he would one day kill.
The man twitched in pain. His tense muscles were unable to keep still for such a long time. Remus heard a quiet, choked sound in his throat. A prayer, perhaps. Christ.
Greyback wanted him to kill the man to protect his pack. He’d even made the job easy for Remus: this muggle was a dead man walking. Nothing, not even the greatest healers in Britain, could save him from that fate. Fever. Pain. Delusions. Death. It wouldn’t be a kill, not in truth—it’d be mercy. Remus had killed before. Greyback wasn’t privy to that fact, but he’d done it, and while ripping out the throat of an armed combatant was a long way’s away from doing the same to an otherwise innocent muggle, well, at least it’d be over quick. Except then he’d be doing what Greyback wanted. Except then, of course, he’d be committing a murder out of convenience instead of, say, mortal peril. Right out.
What were the alternatives left to him, however? Remus could track down the muggle’s car and sabotage it, move it, but that would a crueller kind of death and far slower too. He wouldn’t make it out of the valley on that leg. Probably. And if he did, well, shit, then what? He’d have tortured a man for nothing and left him with the irrefutable evidence of werewolves. They’d think he was barking mad, but these were strange times. A group of muggles hunting for the existence of magic was the last thing he needed his wolves to run into on a full moon, particularly when the cultural zeitgeist was correct about silver and wolfsbane.
Remus couldn’t kill him. Couldn’t leave him. Couldn’t bloody well cure him.
He lifted his head a moment to scan the treeline, watching for eyes, thinking that perhaps Greyback or one of his lieutenants was watching him even then. At that moment the man bolted upright. His limbs scrambled for purchase in the dirt. Remus’s jaws snapped forward on instinct. Caught by the hood, the man choked and fell back hard into the dirt with an undignified scream. He beat at Remus’s thighs with his fists, cursing him out—Jesus, his will to live was something else—and then fell still when Remus scooped his paws under the man’s legs to lift him bodily. Remus held the dazed and wounded man bridal-style. His dirtied face went slack and his eyes wide at the sight of Remus’s moonlit snout and likely too-aware eyes, and then, like the corpses around him, he went limp, nearly slipping clean out of Remus’s grip. His heart still pounded strong in his chest. Alive. The man had only fainted.
Progress back to the hamlet was slow-going on two feet instead of four, but Remus minded little. His mind was little. He needed no more time for quiet contemplation—he had that in excess, thank you very much—but the emptiness in his head was at least soothing. Witches, wizards, werewolves. All a big fan of tests, and the subjects not as much. If the question was whether Remus would kill or leave the muggle, then the answer was obvious, wasn’t it?
Neither. He’d chosen neither, and fuck you for trying, Greyback. Fuck you and fuck your tests.
In the distance came a high, feral howl, one marking a successful bloodhunt and eager for seconds. It twitched something in Remus only a breath before that same cool, moon-like mystery washed back over him. He stared up at it, up at Her in the sky, and reared back his own snout to let loose a keening and mournful cry. One to drown out the further one, to summon his family for a funeral and a lesson. Remus could only hope they’d choose correctly.
Half a valley later he was crossing the brook on two legs, waters washing his furred legs clean and the air chilling them thereafter, and he heard the first of them like a rhythmic avalanche. Thumping like a heartbeat almost two-dozen strong. Yipping. Snarling. Eager and worried and above all hungry, for they must’ve scented the human in his arms, but Remus was not bringing them dinner.
***
Eight days later the man died in Suez’s old cabin.
His name had been Georgie. The woman’s had been Antonia, and her boyfriend’s Pierre.
He did not die alone and afraid as they had. Not everyone was in attendance—Remus wouldn’t force that on them, knowing that a fair share had seen deaths more violent and yet somehow less gruelling than this—but Amir, Siobhan, and Kelly had helped keep the man comfortable, while Boxdye and Chains had tried to lift his falling spirits for nearly a week. He’d told them in the beginning that Georgie would invariably die even if he’d privately hoped that happenstance had made the man a Squib. It hadn’t stopped them. Perhaps the youth would save them after all, even if Remus ought probably count himself as youth. He was only twenty.
There were others too. Siobhan brought her daughter Maggie and the other young girl, one that reminded Remus too much of Mary, because she thought they were both young and old enough to need to confront death. One of the older wolves, a greying woman in her fifties that Remus often found knitting and thus was named Needles, admitted that she’d been a hospice nurse in her own time and so took to easing his pain in the final moments. Kelly’s pharmaceutical entrepreneurship was a blessing, there. It might’ve been the Cambrian Mountains, but they had everything from amphetamines to Valium and probably something non-recreational that began with a ‘Z’ as well. Georgie did not unduly suffer.
A graveyard was not among the things Remus thought he’d have to add to the hamlet, and certainly not so soon. They couldn’t afford the space or the incriminating markers. If ever a member of the Order came sniffing, they couldn’t know someone had died, for they’d never believe it hadn’t been his pack to kill. Fire was all that was left.
They burned all three on a massive bonfire and Remus cobbled together a spell from the bits and pieces he’d seen—Sirius’s illusions, the screen Dorcas had conjured so long ago to warm the rain over them, area matrixes from James and Lily’s objected wedding—and cast a lengthy enchantment over the hamlet, rendering smoke invisible when it left their zone of influence. The following morning he pulled the glamour back down. There was no joy to the magic. No fun. Even as the werewolves sang various funeral songs and someone dragged a record player down to their little dirt plaza to play Bowie’s chipper-yet-mournful Heroes, and indeed even as they broke out their sundry spirits, Remus lingered back, aloof. Mysterious. Above all, brooding.
Kelly was miffed and acting childish over the whole affair, having awoken from the wolf-dreams on the hamlet grounds instead of inside the aconite glade. In turn, Remus had little patience for that and was more snappish than usual, because when it rained in the Cambrian Mountains, it apparently only did so as a pissing downpour.
The campsite had been scrubbed and all hints of it erased. Remus had tracked down Georgie’s little compact city car—Sirius would’ve known the make and model, probably, but Sirius wasn’t bloody well here, was he?—and because he couldn’t drive, set about floating it through the woods at night until he stowed it on the glamoured-off road that lead to the hamlet proper.
Waste not, &c. &c.
At least they wouldn’t have to wire it themselves. He’d distributed most of the survived camping gear in the common areas and either charmed or burned anything that might be identifiable but kept Georgie’s keys in his cabin. The plates on the car would take a little glamouring of their own and he’d have to churn out a convincing set of licenses, but that was another thing off the list. Miscellaneous camping gear, check. Car for werewolves, check. If only Georgie and his friends had left behind something that would help Remus live with himself.
There were drugs, yes, but Remus rather disliked the idea these days of leaning on anything harder than spliff or a handle of vodka in times of distress—they rarely made him feel better, as it turned out, and he preferred recreation and medicine to remain firmly separate. Which, yes, meant he was going to mourn sober, and everyone around him was going to suffer for it. Tough. They could deal with an angry denmother telling them to piss off for a few days.
In truth, however, it didn’t last as long as that. The rage was still there, hot and simmering under Remus’s cold, furious surface, but while he could stare daggers at Kelly for calling Bagsy on the first car ride like it wasn’t robbed off a dead man, or indeed he could mutter about Octavia floating above the fray as though none of it had affected her, even though she must’ve scented Greyback’s presence all over the mountains in the days following, time tempered Remus’s wrath quick and honed it to a single sharp point. Fenrir Greyback.
If he returned on the following moon, Remus would have a plan ready to kill him. It was as simple as that, really. How was that for a test? A final exam?
He’d have time to revise for it. With the wards as proof-of-concept, he could lay traps in the woods that ought only trigger at a werewolf’s presence. It meant he’d need to figure out a means of herding his pack away—perhaps he could use the brook as a natural barrier, though that’d take more research—and, Christ, if only Kelly had completed the first half of the ritual. He could’ve led the pack while Remus hunted. If only he’d completed the second half himself. Then, at least, they might be on even ground.
Although he’d spent years fantasising about it, he nevertheless balked at the size of the task compared to the timeframe: a month to get the better of Greyback. Less, actually. With Georgie dead—some callous part of Remus chastised himself for spending so much time on sentimentality—that meant three weeks and change until the August moon. Almost as long as it’d been since he’d last seen or heard from Sirius or any member of the Order.
Remus often climbed to the top of what he’d come to call his Owling tree, where the height of the larch trees broke past the dome of the wards, and yet no owls came. He’d only keyed a few into the protective enchantments on his necklace—the pair of owls James and Lily shared, Sirius’s nasty one, a grey old bird belonging to Caradoc with a tongue-twisting Welsh name—and somehow still clambered down an hour later each time more disappointed and worried than the last. They could all be dead. Remus might well be the last Order member left alive. Which, he supposed, made the business of wiping out Greyback all the more important—even if his last mark on the world being a bloodstain was a disquieting thought to Remus.
Legacies. Dumbledore would’ve had a field day.
If he was still alive, of course.
And so after three days of sweltering summer heat and one hot pissing rainstorm, Remus dragged his heels to Kelly’s cabin—occupied by him and the other three leaders—and pounded on the door a while to no avail. He then sat on the uncovered veranda like a sopping wet child until eventually the Scot took pity and sat with him in the rain, too. Remus rested his elbows on his knees, dropped his head, held his wet hair. Kelly slipped something under his tongue and whispered for him to let it dissolve, and so an hour later, so too did Remus.
After a week he found Octavia sketching by the brook. She arched a dark brow at him and her round jaw set firm a moment later. She knew what he wanted from him. He knew she knew.
“Will you?” asked Remus.
“Do I get a choice?” she replied. He couldn’t place her body language—wide hips stiff, fancy clothes now ill-fitting for someone so hardened.
“I’m asking,” replied Remus. “Not forcing.”
Octavia only agreed to Occlumency, of course. No one had the right to pilfer the minds of others, and her, apparently, least of all. Once you knew how, it became a reflex. An itch. An addictive substance unto itself, and one, Remus gathered, she thought he wouldn’t resist like the others.
After two weeks he was still rubbish at it, but being rubbish was better than nothing at all, and the begrudging respect he’d earned from Octavia was enough to get her to lower her guard. She talked about Greyback only in fleeting moments, but it was more, Remus realised, than he’d ever heard from anyone about the man—the werewolf, the beast, the horrible, awful person he was—that had ruined his life.
Greyback was unfortunately no sorcerous slouch. Uncompromising, yes, but not inflexible, and although he hadn’t been classically trained as Remus and others were, he was no less deadly with a wand and perhaps more so because it made him entirely unpredictable. Different volumes of lore. Worst of all, Greyback had been the one to teach Octavia both sides of the Legilimency/Occlumency coin, confirming his worst suspicions. She maintained of course that she far exceeded him now, describing his style of mental magic as sheer brute force, a hammer-and-anvil attack oriented around combat. No finesse; no depth.
“Was that how you and the rest planned your escape without him knowing, like?” asked Remus.
Octavia shrugged a Londoner shrug.
“If you’re rum enough at Occlumency,” she explained, “you can conceal that you’re using it at all. It takes an artist to peel back the layers, to slip in without your mark noticing.”
“And Greyback’s no artist.”
“No,” said Octavia quietly. “He’s a monster.”
How did you hunt a monster? Plans. Contingency plans. If this were a prank, a dangerous and life-threatening prank—well, then he’d ask Sirius for help, and, Christ, that was an awful, dangerous thought to let slip, particularly in the presence of a mind-reader—then James and Peter would have something up their sleeves for when Hell inevitably broke loose. Remus had an inkling. It was why he ambushed Amir with his words instead of his tongue once his and Octavia’s training session was over on a late, sunset-y summer evening.
“You must think I’m mad, like,” muttered Remus.
Amir frowned, though his eyebrows did that infuriating thing where they curved upwards in his bushy furrowing rather than down, like he was taking pity on you.
“Why,” he asked, “would you think that?”
“It’s Dragon’s Blood.”
“Whoa, whoa, okay. That’s a strong reaction. Plenty of famous wizards have done it,” explained Amir, and, pardon? He’d never asked much after the older man’s thesis research, but this was news. “It’s no different than a Pepper-Up Potion. Or speed,” he added offhandedly. “How do you think Albus Dumbledore won his duel against Gellert Grindelwald?”
“Do you mean to say,” began Remus, bewildered, “Albus Dumbledore, Order of Merlin, et cetera, duelled the most dangerous dark wizard in two centuries while high on amphetamines?”
“Okay, judgey, a) it’s only a popular theory among magical historians,” continued Amir, annoyed, “and b) no, it wasn’t speed. It was Dragon’s Blood. Keep up, would you?”
“Dragon’s Blood is—”
“—they fly and breathe literal fire and they’re notorious pricks, Remus. You’re surprised their blood does whimsical shite to us mortals?”
“Well—wait, isn’t the Ministry trying to breed dragons?”
Amir grimaced, the corners of his eyes well-lined.
“It’s always a mess. Have you heard of the Dancing Plague in Strasbourg, early 16th century?” he asked, and, when Remus nodded, Amir shrugged. “River dragon a few wizards were trying to harvest died of its wounds in the Rhine. Poisoned the water supply for days before someone found its corpse.”
Suffice it to say, furnishing himself with Dragon’s Blood was easier than he’d expected. Amir had no qualms with having trafficked it into Britain, though he warned Remus to keep it out of sight of the other wolves. Many of them yet had a taste for it, thanks to the Death Eaters.
And so with a goal in mind, nowhere else to be, and a threat closing in with each day, most of August passed in the span of a few held breaths. It wasn’t uneventful—quite the opposite, really, the hamlet was burgeoning thanks to the car, which the pack had named Georgie as a kind of grim reminder—and yet most of it fell to the wayside for Remus. Obsession had taken him. He was a werewolf with a vendetta. A deadline.
August’s end would bring with it the full moon, now only three days away.
Notes:
Fenrir Greyback was first mentioned in Summer 1979, Part I.
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
The next chapter, Summer 1980, Part II will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 18 July, a Friday.
If you're looking for something to read while you wait, my recommendation this week is (WIP warning!) Our House (is a very fine house) by Byro, a R/S break-up make-up fic that manages to (for me) put into words feelings that seemed impossible before. It's also hilarious and clever and wonderfully underspoken: "James makes a face, which is then rearranged into another less conspicuous face."
Chapter 25: Summer 1980, Part II
Notes:
or the one in which Remus relays the scriptures.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The barmaid kicked them out just past midnight, which was well enough for Remus.
It was a velvety-dark Welsh sky, the kind of deep-ocean blue of a sea about to storm. Faint stars. They had a long walk ahead of them. At some point he’d convinced Sirius to try a little food, at which point he’d scarfed a whole basket of chips and then devoured two sandwiches not unlike a delighted dog eating off the table. It was unclear how much Sirius had kept down and how much was now helping corrode a rusty tin gutter behind the pub.
From there they’d started hiking. Remus kept on with his story. The more he talked, the more, it seemed, Sirius remembered what it was like to be among humans. Or maybe it was touch. There was no one to gawk at their handholding and stolen kisses on the sloping mountain roads of the Midlands, even moonlit as they were. Only the wildlife. A badger, a fox with her yearling daughters, a bird, a rat. Not altogether likely gossips.
“With a little time and teaching,” began Remus, “I started appreciating the first half of the ritual beyond its mechanistic outcomes, and—it’ll sound mad, like—but in the corner of my mind’s eye, I started seeing bits and pieces of the second half. Hints and whispers. I heard them and felt them behind me, almost, peeking over my shoulder only to retreat back to whatever distant and infuriating perch they occupied in the sky because I’d inevitably look back over the wrong shoulder. It was a beast of contradiction, who yearned to be studied, yet loathed to be known; a muse and a frustration; empty, full, both, neither; foolish yet all-knowing.
“Still, though, the bits and pieces were coming together. Less a puzzle and more a mosaic. It’s a moon ritual, right, all waxing and waning. The first half was about wrestling control back from the wolf—you know, that wolf named Desire, camp as it sounds—and learning patience. Calming the madness and the lunacy. I gather I never told you outright how I managed it the first time, did I?”
“You didn’t, no.”
“Penned myself in the aconite glade for three days before, three days after, and struggled without end to find the right combination of meditations, lures, and pre-transformation activities to keep the wolf—myself, I s’pose—from breaking free in the long night. Nothing beats a werewolf’s brute force, you know that. I’d torn through every restraint and spell they’d ever cast to keep me trapped or ripped my body apart in the trying. It was almost funny. I was convinced I had it wrong for the longest time, back in the Pyrenees, because I couldn’t actually believe the premise would be so contradictory, but then again I s’pose that was the intent, wasn’t it, like? As Socrates said. Not—the other Socrates. But I’m digressing. All that thus—”
“—‘thus?’”
“—thus remained was sincerity. You have to know what drives your wolf in order to tame it, and once you know how to tame it, well, infuriatingly, you likely already have.”
“Old magic,” said Sirius. “The kind that writes itself into existence by actions rather than the simple wave of a wand.”
“Piano and pianist.”
“What.”
“Never mind that,” muttered Remus, waving his free hand absently. “Just something someone said to me once. Can’t quite recall who, but it set me thinking about the ritual’s second half. If the first part was about waxing human intellect or waning wolf instinct, then I thought perhaps the moon, you know, duality, cycles, wanted the human to wane and the wolf to wax. Now, seven days before and seven days after I would never have figured out on my own—first quarter to last quarter? Why would the moon care?—but the other components were making sense. I thought that perhaps becoming a thing of wild magic meant surrendering to desire, instinct, the wolf, et cetera. Trusting it. If I truly understood what drove that part of me, then, in a manner of speaking, the second half of the ritual ought be a kind of self-love, oughtn’t it? Giving in to one’s self. Believing in rather than simply knowing your coremost impetus.
“Don’t make that face. I made that face more than enough myself when I tried inking out the concrete details. What did any of that look like on parchment? How was I expected to contemplate Bacchanalia and sweet, sweet oblivion when centuries of maenads-stroke-Bassarids had tried and failed, and how at all did it relate to a glade with a rock and some flowers? I was missing something. Again.”
“This sounds vaguely spiritual,” said Sirius. He cocked his head to the side. Very doglike. “Reminds me of that Jesus nonsense you’ve been trying to spin me since, what, third year?”
“Oh, it gets worse.”
“By all means, then.”
“I was missing something again,” continued Remus, “and I didn’t know if it was myself or an orgy or what have you. Spent a night alone and naked on the summit—you have to see it, Pads—watching the sky fall dark atop that volcanic sea-boulder I told you about and the stars make their slow, inexorable way through the night until again the sun rose in the morning. It hadn’t been a full moon, and, yes, that short summer night was magic in its own unique way, but it did not thrust nor push nor gently shuffle me towards the immanent threshold of human-werewolf transcendence. A bust, I think they call it.
“At one point I even tried to maths it out. When you break it down, lycanthropy as it currently exists is a curse—a modification to some pre-existing innate Human and/or Beast Transfiguration, so the ritual must be an abstract way of turning the right arcane keys and pulling the right metaphysical levers in order to walk back the parts of said curse that were undesirable. You get the gist: involuntary transformation conditions, cheers but jog on, thanks; enhanced strength and senses by contrast welcome. And I had half the ritual, an sich all the base principles for at least permanently modifying the curse. If you really break it down it’s not unlike waving a wand and incanting, though here, I s’pose my whole mind-body problem was the wand, like.
“Another moon-teaching perhaps. She—the ritual and the moon were a She, always some part woman much like Bacchus Himself—was mad with inspiration, not fury or lust. Just as humans stared up at Her since time immemorial and saw an eye, an egg, a woman, a twin, some part of me new that She had spent Her entire existence groping for something immaterial, something intangible and yet so desperate to be felt: Her shadow; Her other twin. The moon I knew was playful and whimsy, frenetic, wild, fleeting—quick to anger and quicker to forgive, pulling, pushing, ever-moving, slick with mercury and the craze it induces in hatters. And, well, shit, I was becoming one such hatter. Well on my way, in fact.
“All my wanderings at night and unblinking stares directed skyward blather blather were nothing short, as you’ve so quaintly put it, of quasi-religious practice. I might as well’ve been sending prayers to the boulder or a log or my useless hiking boots for all the good it did me, and I’d have just as much like anthropomorphising them as, well, an unfeeling chunk of rock that orbited the earth.”
“Jesus Christ, Moony.”
“I was not going to start a moon cult,” muttered Remus. “I was not going to host orgiastic Bacchanalias in the woods, and I was not going to base my groundbreaking thaumaturgical praxis on Human Transfiguration by interpreting the moon’s pissing moods, because that would be insane. Loony. Right?”
“Right. So instead—”
“—instead I focused on my impending duel with my arch-werewolf-cum-Death Eater elite-cum-literal boogeyman from my childhood, yes, Pads, however did you know?”
“Intuition,” said Sirius. “I’m on the edge of my seat.”
“Mm. Count your blessings—we don’t usually allow dogs on the furniture.”
“You have dogs at the hamlet?”
“Two, actually,” replied Remus, “about a dozen chickens, and three goats to keep them from growing lonely. It’s Wales. And, well, it’s not as though we bother them on the moons, though I s’pose it must be quite quite confusing for them all. Or, perhaps not the chickens. ’fraid the chickens never have any idea as to what’s going on at the best of times.”
“Fascinating.”
“You’re free to interject with your own story at any moment.”
“No, no. I’m intrigued,” murmured Sirius. “Tell me, do the chickens have names—”
“—the dogs are Oscar and Baldwin,” replied Remus. “I know you too well. Skittish lot, like, given they were strays brought back without my permission—oh yes I know the parallels are very parallel and the metaphors metaphorical—but I let the others tend them, Pads, because I was on something of a mission and, being honest, I thought I was marching off to a battle I wouldn’t survive. Oughtn’t survive, like.
“I don’t know what I was thinking. Me? Against not one but three Death Eaters, all of which’ve likely been werewolves as long if not longer than myself, and one of them Fenrir fucking Greyback? I was barking. It didn’t matter how many traps or silly tricks I set up in those woods, really, I wasn’t getting out of that unscathed. S’pose it was poetic, almost—like fate coming full circle. ‘Here ends the tale of Remus Lupin, where the pools of his and Greyback’s blood look, as it turns out, not so different when they’re seeping into the earth and all mixed up with one another. Everything ends.
“So when the moon came—what, yesterday?” Remus muttered, staring up at the near-full yet waning moon and nodding his head as though befuddled, somehow, to find it still there. “I took apart the Muffling Charm we all use at Hogwarts and recombined it with an inversion framework, then cast a big fuck-off version over the hamlet and the summit integrating the matrices I used to hide the aforementioned funeral pyre. Not sure why I didn’t think of it sooner, if m’honest—s’pose I lacked the drive, had time to burn until I hadn’t any at all, and perhaps without that pressure I wouldn’t have managed the fuck-off casting in the first place—but thereafter I waited until about an hour before moonrise and chugged what I now consider an ill-advised and probably lethal-for-non-lycanthropes dose of Dragon’s Blood. Lethal for a half-dozen non-lycanthropes, I mean to say, like. Perhaps a full dozen. I’m still high, if you couldn’t tell.”
“This is the most words I think you’ve ever spoken in a single day since—”
“—since the time I did Troll marrow cocaine, yes—”
“—and before that never at all. I had a feeling. This is novel behaviour for our Moony.”
“I haven’t slept, Pads. I might never fall asleep again.”
“Jesus.”
“I—fucking Hell,” mumbled Remus. He eyed the distant road and was grateful for the cold and dim moonlight hiding his blush. His breath came out hot and white, freezing in the air between them. “I wish I could say it was a blur, but I recall every moment of it following. The transformation was—well, Pads, I—when I transformed, it—I—oh, bugger.”
Sirius blinked. “You…?”
“I achieved orgasm,” said Remus through grit teeth. There weren’t words clinical enough to describe it. “It makes my skin itch to say, but it was—well. I don’t think I was capable of feeling pain. My brain cells were on fire and releasing every potential thought they might ever think all at once, and the delicious, ashen juices of that were filtered through a film of liquid orgasm. Every sensation was a wireless on full blast. Don’t get ideas. Don’t get ideas, but those maenads were onto something, I gather, as while I didn’t quite reach oblivion, it was as though everything that’d ever bothered me came off with my human skin and I was left to stare into the puddle at my feet like a bloody pensive. For a moment,” added Remus, “I was five years old again.
“Cool earth beneath me, blood soaking into my pyjamas, my mum telling me she’d find a way for me to be okay again. That I’d be okay again. And my father—Lyall—him coming out of the fields behind our hold home in Cardiff, singed and smelling of burned fur, acid, metal, et cetera. I remember the grass, still. Soft. Dewy. Not the same way I remember his grip. Him yanking me up to look me over, even though I couldn’t stand on my own. It hurt. Standing and his grip, both of them hurt. The look on his face, like he couldn’t believe I’d been bit and as though it was my fault, somehow—my mum shouting at him—
“That notwithstanding,” said Remus, “I went off into the woods in search of heroic and my Todestrieb, as the Germans call it. Hallucinating the entire time, obviously, and completely fucking sozzled, but I loped off, appreciating the last beauty of the trees, how I’d never really seen the stars until now, actually, and all the clichés. I crossed that tiny little roe deer brook like the Rubicon and howled as loud as I could, knowing the wolves at the hamlet and Kelly atop the summit couldn’t hear me. Howled until I was raw in the throat, even for a werewolf. I threw down my bloody gauntlet.
“And you know what, Pads? You know what’s funny?—not ha-ha, it’s never been, although I s’pose in a manner of speaking it’s the most ha-ha of them all—I howled there like an arsehole, probably terrifying the living shite out of every hiker in a few dozen kilometres depending on the acoustics, for hours and hours and hours while tripping out of my mind. I relived first through fifth year as a canine. I pissed myself. That was how little else I wanted to do other than fight Greyback and his lot to the death. I—oh, this is mad, you’ll love this—I think I might’ve Apparated while transformed, though I can’t be sure, and though I thoughtn’t it possible. Drugs, you understand.
“The whole sky shifted above me and then I was standing on a sloped ridge in the section of new growth, the kind you get when everything’s burned up. It smelled the same as I remembered. Tiny little mountain trees barely up to my knees as far as I could see in the night and the fog except for one stupid slashed up pine with claw marks in it and the trunk still oozing sap. Touched it—must’ve been real, I think, the sap felt real—and then I was back in my woods again, paws still sticky. Moon was almost down. Greyback never came.
“Oh, but—right, you wanted to know what happened to my bloody face, didn’t you?” asked Remus, barking out a small, bitter half-laugh. “Kelly. He—really, I don’t know how he does it, but he’s an impressive menace, like—somehow he’d kept himself in the glade almost all night, except when I came back, moody and high as I was, he practically launched himself at me and I was so gasping for a fight, I took it as an invitation. Most of it wasn’t too bad. Wolves socially try not to murder each other, as it turns out. Must be a pack thing. Still, we each got some dirty hits in towards the end of it, and my healing’s always been pants.
“His is worse—nasty three claw marks right across the clavicle, like, but now I’ve got this forever.” Remus gestured with a lazy index finger at the angled, pinkish line across his nose. “Fitting, I s’pose. Went off thinking I had to die, so why not take a scar to remember it by? Not like it’s the first one Greyback’s given me.”
“Remus…”
Remus winced at that. He furrowed a brow and cracked one eye open at Sirius because at some point Sirius had tugged his wrist to stop them both on the mountain roadside.
“Leave off,” growled Remus, “and don’t do that. Call me that, I mean to say—you never call me ‘Remus’ anymore.”
“Don’t I?”
“Only when you’re cross. Or pitying me,” he added, “a handful of times in the throes of passion—”
“—Remus.”
“What?”
“You’re not supposed to die. No one is. You know that, yeah?”
“Mm.”
“Not supposed to be in pain,” continued Sirius, who, in his many small mercies, began to lead them both up the road once more. His grey eyes were uncanny in the night—whatever Nathaniel’s inkspells had done to his eyesight, it meant his pupils so rarely changed with the darkness, and so in a rare sight most of the moonlight caught on those piercing irises of his instead of being swallowed. Another mercy was how said eyes remained fixed forwards as Sirius continued, “Not supposed to suffer. Not supposed to get hurt—there’s nothing,” he added, slow, “that you could do or say, then or now, that would make it okay for me or anyone to hurt you. You told me that, as you recall?”
“S’pose I might’ve. Hadn’t thought it’d sunk into that thick skull of yours.”
“My skull is phrenologically perfect, I’ll have you know. Can thank my Scylla of a broodmother for that. But, Remus—Moony—you get my meaning, yeah?”
“I do, Pads, except—”
“—‘Except,’ he says. There’s no ‘except’—”
“Except,” repeated Remus, “you didn’t let me finish my story. The bit about my father—”
“We don’t have to. Really. I get it.”
“Shut up. Let me—Christ, Padfoot, let me finish because I—look, I know you’ve heard the story a dozen times. Greyback smashes my window, drags me out into the garden, Lyall fights him off, my mother holds me, Lyall comes back and shouts at me, cue the rest of my life story. Except, Padfoot, except there’s more, and I never tell this part to anyone because—well. S’pose because it makes me sound like more of an animal than I already am.
“I screamed back at him, Pads. I wasn’t just some helpless five-year-old toddler—even then I’d known, somehow, that something was wrong. That my mum wasn’t happy being pregnant. That Lyall wasn’t innocent in any of this. When Greyback smashed my window,” continued Remus, “I grabbed a piece of glass on the way out even if I could never reach him with it, not the way I was being dragged. But do you know what I did with it, Padfoot?
“I fucking cut him with it. Lyall. He yanked me up,” spat Remus, “shook me by the shoulders and I couldn’t see him through the pain, but I swiped at him a few times, nasty, like, and then I buried that glass as hard as I could in his leg. It cut my fingers. I remember that. Lyall let go of me quick after that, like,” he added, half-wry and half-wistful, “and then I fell over. Mum caught me. That’s the rest of it—staying there until near sunrise.
“I don’t know if I mind the scars. Newest or oldest. Not sure if I ever have, really—minded or regret any of them, I mean to say. Never for my own reasons. Been afraid of what others might think, seeing them, and what it’d mean for my life, like, but the scars, even this one, are times I lived. Marks of resilience. All the times Greyback’s tried and failed to kill me.
“Oh, shit,” muttered Remus. He frowned over at a nondescript patch of woodland to their left. “We’re here. You—here, take my hand, you plonker, I’ll pull you through the wards. We ought to keep hush until we reach my cabin, I think—otherwise some fifteen wolves’ll come badger you and you won’t get a decent wink until tomorrow.”
“Badger me? Surely they’ve seen non-wolves.”
“Mm. They have.”
“And yet…?”
“Is there a point to this, or—”
“—Moony,” began Sirius, cocking his head against Remus’s shoulder and grinning up with those stupid enchanting-enchanted grey eyes. “Have you been telling all your little Welsh hiding wolves about me?”
“Awful.”
“Dreadful. Your answer?”
“Perhaps,” murmured Remus. “A little.”
“A smidgen?”
“A tad. Only the best and exciting bits, of course.”
“Well then you’ve oversold me.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
Sirius leaned gentle against him and waited, uncharacteristically patient, at the illusion-ward threshold, hand-in-pale, crooked hand with Remus. His grin was infectious.
“Don’t think you’re getting out of telling me your story,” added Remus in the not-so-quiet of the mountains.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Moons.”
“‘Moons’?”
“Just pull us through—”
***
“Marlene’s dead.”
Remus blinked and, after a pause, set down his tea mug on the splintery wooden rail of the veranda as though it might detonate if indelicately handled. The mug was not unlike Sirius.
In his latest absence someone, Siobhan or green-thumbed Kelly perhaps, saw fit to install one heavy wood-framed flowerbed at the foot of his veranda, perhaps in an attempt to lighten his months-long black mood. Feathery yellow heads, purple flowers. Fennel and wolfsbane. They hadn’t asked him. They were making themselves at home. There’d been all manner of that, lately: rough-carved wood-chimes and the occasional painted empty tin dangled beneath many of the paper lanterns that decorated the Elenydd hamlet, now, and it gave the late evening wind a low, chittering voice. Aharmonious. The forest swallowing them was a deep green-grey, bleached by moonlight. Distant woodsmoke stained his nostrils. Not unpleasant. A few weeks into his two-month tenure Kelly had set up string hammocks across each cabin front in an effort to liven the place up, or so he said while privately Remus assumed that, as with most things, it was a sex thing in disguise.
Sirius was splayed across once such hammock although the subject matter was decidedly unsexy. He twisted his fingers in the taupe netting of it, heavy lids lulled shut by the gentle rocking Remus offered from his perch on the railing. His dark curls were still wet—Remus had thrown him into the shower, alone, while he went off in vainglorious search of a second toothbrush before inevitably giving up after the second disorganised cabinet and letting Sirius borrow his own—but a wash had done him good. Cleaned the dirt if not the horror and reticence off him, though in so doing Remus glimpsed just how many tattoos and piercings he’d gained in just eight short weeks. He was becoming something of an art piece—or, perhaps more accurately, something more of an art piece.
Where once on Sirius’s shoulder had been a pair of angry red half-moons he’d expected to see blank skin, perhaps lightly pink. An unideal wedding souvenir, though there were alas those in excess. Instead, however, he found inky black runes. Unfamiliar.
“They did her. Death Eaters. Did her whole family,” said Sirius, quiet. “Entire McKinnon clan dead in under twenty-four hours. We hadn’t even the slightest idea until it was over. Every safehouse we checked had been breached and a Dark Mark in the sky, Remus, and I—I’ve always hated the Killing Curse,” he continued, voice bitter and cracking, “’cos the whole process is wrong, yeah? Can’t cast it without hatred, yet the bodies it leaves behind—whatever. They’re dead. She’s dead.”
Christ. “Christ,” said Remus.
“It was a tracer.”
“Pardon?”
“The spell you said she got tagged with at Prongs’s wedding?” explained Sirius, craning his neck up at Remus as if he couldn’t quite figure out why it needed explaining. “Some kind of dormant tracer mixed with a targeted dispel. Like a fishhook threaded through a soap bubble—goes in clean, but once you’ve hooked it in fully, one good yank will pop the lot and leave you exposed. It broke every ward from the inside out and spilled their location.”
Remus blinked again. His throat felt clammy. Swollen. He tried to swallow but all the saliva was too thick, too viscous, actually, to be a true liquid, and his mouth was fully slick with it. He might as well have been gargling syrup.
“Pads,” he began, tentative, like the words were—well, you got the gist. Handle with care, words and/or Padfoot. “As I recall, you said that Caradoc also—”
“—he’s missing.”
“Oh.”
“Can I have a fag?” mumbled Sirius, wiping at his eye with the heel of his hand. Better that than scratching. He’d have clawed his eyes out with those nails. “I know we oughtn’t—”
“—just the one,” replied Remus. He tugged a cigarette skinned ages ago from its battered, just-for-emergencies case, lit it with a snap, and took one drag to set it burning right before passing it off to Sirius. “For Caradoc,” he said, exhaling smoke into the night. “For Mean Marlene. Clan McKinnon.”
From there, of course, he lit up a fag of his own and Sirius gave no comment and instead tapped his ash onto the veranda. Which was probably a mistake, but pausing your mourning cigarettes to fetch an ashtray so as to not scorch your shitty cabin flooring seemed, well, gauche.
“I went under, Remus.”
“Pardon?”
“They—I dunno who it was,” said Sirius, scraping at his scalp line with a touch too much ferocity. “We were ambushed a few nights after the McKinnons, him and I, maybe a week, and while I got him clear, there were too many, Remus, and I—I dunno. I thought I was gonna die. She was there. Bellatrix.”
Remus slid off the rail and Sirius, ever prescient, wandlessly froze the hammock in place until the pair of them were squished together in it. Remus’s side dangled precariously low and his hand brushed Sirius’s to the side, scratching whatever itch atop his head gently.
“She put me under the Imperius.”
Oh, Christ.
Sirius turned his head to watch him, expression neutral. Curious, perhaps. Academic.
“You didn’t freeze or flinch,” he said.
“Was I meant to?”
“Dunno.”
“You could try again. I’ll give it my best go, like.”
“Shut the fuck up,” mumbled Sirius. A moment later, he blinked, rapid, then continued, “Most of it’s a mess after that. I think I must’ve been under three weeks or so—everything’s gone from that time, all blank—but I came too feeling off in Diagon Alley, as I recall, and I had the strangest sensation,” he explained, sharp, thin features drawing together. His hands were forwards in the air, groping for the words. “Like I needed, not wanted and not desired, but needed, needed to kill Caradoc Dearborn. It was obsessive. Underlying everything.
“I kicked around a while, looking for Caradoc’s old network and whatnot, but I reckon word had got ’round by him that I’d been nicked or flipped or maybe he never got back ’round to them at all, so I went ’round all his haunts, his flat, his mum’s old place—ah. I keep forgetting. Speaking of mums, Effie’s also gone.
“Dead. Peaceful, as James tells it. Found her in bed, heart gave out in her sleep. Poor ol’ bird, but I reckon it’s as best as any of us can hope for. Can’t for the life of me recall the last time I knew someone to die of natural causes. Stuck around long enough for her to see the—ah! Another thing. Jesus, it’s all slipping. Lily—”
Lily had given birth. Which, well, yes, that was how reproductive biology worked, but Remus hadn’t considered it at all, really, in two months. Part of him had become sure everyone was dead. New life in a time of war by contrast felt an ill-fitting pair of trousers or a funny hat, although this funny hat was, according to Sirius, a vaguely baby-shaped hat by the name of Harry.
“—hiding?” asked Remus, swivelling his head as much as the hammock allowed. Not much. “We’re all already in hiding, Pads.”
“Proper hiding, Remus,” replied Sirius. “Lily, James, Frank, Peter and I discussed it—the Fidelius Charm. Most powerful protections and concealment possible. They’ve been cagey about it,” explained Sirius, “but I gather there’s something in the background to which I’m not privy. Given I was recently captured, however, I can’t—”
“Who’s the secret keeper?” asked Remus, abrupt. He winced.
How did that sound, exactly? ‘Oi oi, Padfoot, I know the whole point of the Fidelius Charm is that the secret keeper is the only soul capable of divulging, let alone enabling other people to perceive or get near that protected place or thing, making them the only weak point of attack—so share that crucial piece of intel with me, would you? Pretty please?’ Except, of course, Remus didn’t care much who it was and more so who he hoped it wasn’t.
“I know that’s not something we ought share,” continued Remus, noting the pause stretching between them, “but—”
“—who else, yeah?”
Remus blinked.
Took a deep breath. Counted stars overhead.
“You’re cross with me,” said Sirius.
“You’re mental.”
“Probably.”
“You’re mental.”
“Shut up.”
“Why not Dumbledore?” said Remus quietly. “He’s powerful—he’s an institution. They’d be safe with him, Pads.”
“Until he dies, Moony. He—look, he offered, all right? But he didn’t so lightly, and he holds so many of the chips already. Keystone of the Order, him, and if we lost Dumbledore and the secret keeper for the Potters and for the Longbottoms in one fell swoop. You’ve got to see it makes sense. Secret keepers aren’t afforded protections under the Fidelius. Anyone they’ve told the secret becomes a secret keeper themselves if the first keeper dies, unless—well, anyway, you see the pattern, yeah? If they ever knocked over Dumbledore, the Order wouldn’t just be broken, we’d all be dead in days, Moony. So it can’t be him.”
“But—”
“Dumbledore’s assembled a team and called in all those favours we’ve been accruing,” said Sirius, blowing past his objections with a nonchalant wave of his hand. “Was a reason to all the dark artefact business we were up to, Fletcher and I. All the deals. Dumbledore, Dorcas, and Lily are gonna cast it once they scrape together all the necessary reagents.”
“Do they know…?”
“They most certainly do not, Remus, and I’d prefer we kept it that way,” muttered Sirius. He rapped the side of his skull with his knuckles. “Caradoc’s been training me as an Occlumens, ’tchu know? No one’s gonna know the thing’s been cast at all, and even if they do, there’s a fat lot they can do about it.”
Twitching a finger towards the veranda, Remus floated over his tea mug, now too cool to taste anywhere decent, and took a long sip. Desperately he wanted to ask why the Order needed two separate secret keepers—he’d have to look into the Fidelius when he again had access to a worthwhile library—and why the Potters and the Longbottoms had been selected out of all possible Order members. Were they to protect a place? A secret? Why did Sirius know all of this and Remus not? All of that, however, would’ve sounded terribly suspicious at worst, and vindictive-stroke-jealous at best. Remus let the silence sit a moment, like tea steeping, then hummed quietly.
“So,” began Remus casually. He sipped his tea again. “How’d you get out of your bind, then?”
“I’m not telling them, Moony. I—I’m still me,” he said. “I shook it off. I’m me.”
“I believe you.”
“Do you?”
“Finish your bloody story, you plonker. I’m on the edge of my hammock.”
“Twat.”
“Git.”
“Yob, et cetera et cetera,” said Sirius. “It’s not exciting. I stalked ’round his mum’s place almost a week, blending in with the Welsh locals about as well as a cockle in a French sundae—”
“—good simile, top marks, yes—”
“—and then I got the bright idea that I ought lurk about as a dog. Really catch him off-guard—no one knows, y’know—but after I ditched my clothes in a bin and shifted, I—there’s no words. Things get simpler when I’m Padfoot, Moony, and—Christ. I’m mental. A mess. Unhinged. Deranged.”
“Synonyms. Continue.”
“It melted off, I guess. Few hours later I couldn’t quite remember why I was even there, but, y’know, it’d been the only thing driving me for the past three weeks, maybe, and everything before that was this yawning hole of anti-memory that terrified me to even think about, so I didn’t shift back for a whole day. Went back the next, and the next after that. Forgot where my clothes were. Relied on charity. Narrowly,” he added, a sly grin splitting his lips, “narrowly avoided being someone’s Thatcherite supper twice. Honestly, Moony, it’s no wonder you’re feral. All the Welsh are.”
“Insult noted.”
“I changed back every so often, but I wasn’t sure if I could go stay in our flat and I didn’t like much how I felt being Sirius, so I spent until a few days ago, being precise, as Padfoot about three quarters of the time. Maybe. Probably more—four fifths but not a fraction higher. Padding around. Saw the baby, y’know, all pink and vomit-y and vaguely human-shaped, and then went back to wandering. Was lost in more than a few ways, I s’pose. I’d missed my meetings with Reg during the gap, maybe, and so I couldn’t get into contact with him again. Still can’t. And the worst part of that gap is—did he know? Did I meet with him, did he notice, and does he think I’m still under? Did I miss it and now he thinks I’ve abandoned him, or that I’m dead? Did I—or, y’know, let’s stop that right there.
“Being Padfoot helps with that. With stopping thoughts, rather. They’re so much more a physical kind of creature, dogs. Sense-driven. I followed these seafood scents from the coast to a pub and slept in the back of a moving muggle flatbed, sniffed out an old book that belonged to a university student, and from Aberystwyth there was—regardless, after a while I realised I was gravitating towards the mountains. Couldn’t quite recall how to get to your little encampment what with the trauma and drink, so I’ve been trawling every town inland and eavesdropping, looking to hear back about a yobbish, camp-ish sort-of bloke who despises shoes and loves literature.”
“Not a narrow set of parameters for Wales, I’m told.”
“Surprisingly not, so then I started adding on a bit about hippy hair and freakish height—”
“—oh, there we are—”
“—found your trail right quick after that. And so,” said Sirius, gesturing broadly out into the night forest, “we’re here.”
“And so we are.”
Remus frowned. His eyes fell again on the unfamiliar runes tattooed on Sirius’s shoulder. There was a turn of phrase, hackles rising: Sirius lifted a slow hand to the pale flesh of his shoulder and met his eye, like covering up a lover’s bites.
“Those are new,” said Remus, casual-like. “What do they say? I can’t quite read them, like.”
“Nor I.”
“Really?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“No,” replied Remus, quick. “No, of course I believe you, Pads. I, er—perhaps they don’t mean anything at all. You were disoriented.”
“Disoriented,” repeated Sirius. “Yeah.”
Nightbugs made their nightbug sounds, horny and silencing-filling, to the beat of their mutual fatigue.
“Did you ever find anything about Ahmed?” asked Remus. “Non-sequitur, obviously, but I thought we might as well cover all our bases given my utter failure of making progress vis-à-vis Socrates.”
Sirius shrugged and it shook the hammock.
“She’s a ghost,” he said. “Mary reckons she gave a fake name and fake records for enrolment—artifice, the lot of it—and I reckon she must’ve stolen your research somehow, Remus, ’cos no matter how obscure the tracker, scrying, or seeking spell I cast, it comes up null, or—”
“‘Or’?”
“Or shut up, I was about to tell you. Sometimes the physical trackers give off trials to places that oughtn’t make sense. Open fields, then a forest on the other side of the island. And ’cos I never fuck up my casting—”
“—well—”
“—it either means she’s been brutally murdered and scattered like dust across the Isles,” finished Sirius, “or she’s not dead, Remus.”
“Like that cat.”
Sirius blinked. He turned, abrupt, in the hammock to stare down at him, grey eyes glinting with a mad idea.
“Say that again.”
“Like that cat?”
“I have an idea,” said Sirius. “Need to reconnect with Lily, first—get Prongs or Wormtail to pass the tome trunk over, probably—but I have an idea. Mad one. Longshot.”
“But an idea nonetheless.”
“I’ll share later.”
“You could share now.”
“I could, Moony, but we’ve—what? Three days, given it’s almost morning, until term starts again—”
“—I cannot believe we’re going back to postgraduate studies after all this nonsense, Pads.”
“You know what Em would say. ‘A war’s no excuse to bunk off your future,’ or some shite like that.”
“S’pose it wouldn’t do well to win this War and starve to death in the aftermath,” muttered Remus. “I’ll eventually have to figure out how to fund this operation on my lonesome.”
“Mm. Right. Aside from safeguarding the futures of all wayward werewolves, Moony,” murmured Sirius dryly, “did you have anything else to do, right, now, immediately?”
“Kelly’s completed his ritual and I’ll likely teach him how to pass it on before I go back, but that can wait a day. Why?”
“I read those filthy zines of yours, Moony, and I have some very romantic words accordingly.”
“Mm.”
“I haven’t eaten in just over two days, pub meal notwithstanding.”
Remus blinked. Some semi-automatic-semiotic part of his brain fired off that it was really unclear if the pub meal counted as a meal before that part was gunned down by the sudden roaring pulse in his ears and in his dick.
“Pads,” he began, but Sirius placed to annoying fingers to his lips and incensed something that theretofore had been far, far off-stage given, well, the heavy and intensely unsexy, unerotic topics at hand.
“Let’s get inside, yeah?”
“Let’s.”
***
As they fell together on the bed, naked, weary, and tobacco still staining their lips, Remus felt a curious push-pull to Sirius’s body. Moon-like. He was dangerously close to conversion: if there were Gods out there, then giving him back Sirius, shaggable no less, while his skin and nerves burned with Dragon’s Blood was a tempting bloody offer. At that Sirius laughed sharply in his ear and Remus lapped at his neck. They’d both chosen the bed for obvious reasons as while Remus had had more than his fair share of impromptu half-clothed sex in makeshift places and, yes, was no less eager for that kind of urgent passion, Sirius moved like an uncertain and fragile dog. A recently-rehomed stray. Much as he’d liked to push past that into hotter, softer places, Remus pulled back even as Sirius whined up at his flush face.
“Moony. Moony,” he crooned, twisting the cabin bedsheets in his hands. Swirling them. “What are you doing.”
“Are you—Padfoot, forgive me,” he muttered, cheeks hot with both lust and embarrassment, “are you alright?”
“Fine. Fine, I’m fine, leave off,” he replied. He squirmed beneath Remus. Their chests were pressed together and Sirius was grinding quite quite tactically against the soft rounded slot where hip met crotch and trying, less successfully, to worm his hand between them and stroke Remus into incomprehensibility, but Remus couldn’t tell if it was out of need or discomfort. Likewise his heart was racing. Lust or anxiety? Adrenaline or fear? Both all, probably, knowing the pair of them. “I just—I need you to be gentle,” breathed Sirius, tugging at the nape of Remus’s neck with his free hand and feathering kisses along his scruffy jaw. “So, so gentle, Remus. Not—we can’t do the hair-pulling, collar-yanking, the biting, all that jazz I know you love—”
“—I should hope you love it as well—”
“—I do, I do, Moony,” continued Sirius. “You’re not glass. I know that, and I bloody well love the way you move under me, but—look, I can’t. I need you to be gentle ’cos I can’t handle that kind of pain, not on top of all the other bits. Don’t want it to be that—”
“Pain?” Remus blinked down at him. “Padfoot. I thought you hadn’t—”
“—had a cock up my arse before? When did I say that?”
Remus pulled back a moment and Sirius pawed, absent, at his cheek and the scraggly hairs on his chest. Always moving, like.
“Why do you think, Pads,” he began slowly, “that any part of this is supposed to hurt?”
“’Cos it does?”
“Not if you do it proper—Jesus Christ, Sirius, who taught you that?”
“Can we just—please, please, Remus,” he mumbled, squeezing his eyes shut and his thighs around Remus’s own, “could we not talk about this? The mood is already absolutely fucking twisted—just look at the sequence of events leading us here, it’s a comedy of horror—and I do not, not need nor want to back over the mood’s thoroughly squished corpse by talking about Prongs.”
Sirius’s lips kept moving after that although his eyes did a strange acrobatic manoeuvre, lids flying wide open, squinting, then shutting slow, and either he made no sound or Remus’s hears had fallen clean off because no words followed. Remus blinked again. His brain rain all the possible scenarios, all the possible ways to parse that revelation, and yet—
“You let Prongs shag you up the arse?” he blurted, aghast and holding the horrible half-spawn of a snort and laugh in his throat with only middling success. “Why? When? And I thought he didn’t know you were…Christ,” he said. “Was—well, I s’pose by the sound of it, it wasn’t very good.”
“Dunno,” muttered Sirius. “He seemed to like it. Left evidence.”
“Christ. We don’t—”
“Last few weeks of seventh year. Post-NEWTs. We’d already had a big fuck-off party,” explained Sirius, and a gentle tapping hand against Remus’s chest signalled for him to roll off and commence with the mood’s funeral procession. Remus did so, of course. “Everyone became nostalgic at once, I reckon, so our drinking and other fun activities unfolded in secret around the Black Lake, up on the hill, the Clocktower, Quidditch pitch, dormitory, you get the gist. Private. Intimate. A lot of hugging. Bleary-eyed promises to stay in touch even though most of us wouldn’t.”
“And this was after—”
“Full year after my first sex with Mary and Nate, yeah. Prongs and I were drunk and stoned and I shamefully recounted the tale—not sure why I was so bashful, but I s’pose Prongs has this way of making everything so genuine and heartfelt.”
“That he does.”
“Sod him.”
“I—”
“—if you make a single joke I’m not gonna touch you for a week. Not a word,” said Sirius. Noting Remus’s silent acquiescence despite the arched eyebrow and quirked lip, however, he continued, “Good boy. In any case, I might’ve let slip that, y’know, in the mix, I may or may not have snogged Nate while also snogging Mary and perhaps sucked his cock afterwards. And Prongs, well, he and Lily had had a spat—something about sex, I reckon, though I never asked—and we were well and truly sloshed, so I might’ve said all coy-like that I could give it another go if he was gagging for it. Slipped out as a joke, really.
“I’d been messing around with blokes on the side a while by then, but—well, anyway, alcohol, hormones, magic, and nostalgia make for a wild cocktail for some fresh young adults about to fully enter that adult world. Tried snogging a bit—honestly, Moony, he’s rubbish at it—and he wasn’t much willing to reciprocate, but after I’d gone down on him a ’mo he gave it a fair shot. Then he told me to turn over and I figured, ‘Yeah, why not?’”
“Please say you had something. Lube. Do not tell me—”
“—barely, yeah, and add some spit for good measure, but it—Christ,” muttered Sirius. “It hurt a lot towards the beginning. Not so much at the end. Mixed everything together, bad and the good, which was my modus operandi at the time and I sort of liked how intense it all felt, but, y’know, I’d figured I’d tried and found it wanting, and so had James with all that lad-on-lad jazz, seeing as he’s never once brought it up—not until after Bordeaux, anyway. But I wanna try again,” he added, quick, “with you. ’Cos you’ve been on the other side of it, too, and I’d love to know how you feel.”
“Padfoot.”
“Moonymine.”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
Sirius squinted one eye at him, not bothering to turn his head fully at Remus. “Come again?”
“When I get—”
“—fucked, shagged—”
“—fucked, shagged, buggered within an inch of my life—”
“—as I’m told one does—”
“—at no point does it hurt unless I explicitly would like it to, Padfoot. If you’re experiencing unwanted pain as a bottom, something’s gone terribly, horribly wrong.”
Sirius trailed a finger over the sheets with a fabric-y noise. Popped his lips.
“You’re sure?”
“I think I’d know.”
“But some of the faces you pull—”
“Oh, don’t criticise my sex faces, Padfoot. And do not,” he added, horror dawning on his own unsexy face, “do not tell me that I have an agonised sex face, above all things. I’ll flee. Become a hermit.”
“It’s not agonised. It’s—s’pose it’s—”
“Spit it out.”
“Dunno. ‘fraid ‘sexy’ and ‘cryptic’ and ‘with lips that look sort of like you’re devouring a peach and the planet’ fail quite to capture it. Your face is still sometimes a mystery, Moony, y’know that? Can’t tell if you’re being ravished by a nice bloke or a hulking, monstrous creature.”
“Even if I were, Pads, there’s—you must realise it’s never hurt when I’ve put my tongue in your arse, right?”
“That’s soft.”
“Or my fingers?”
“That’s—not small, I s’pose, but different. And the way you move them doesn’t involve slamming hips, now, does it?”
“Poor Lily. Jesus Christ, what’s he doing to her?”
“I slam my hips, Moony.”
“Well, yes,” murmured Remus, trailing a finger in Sirius’s dark coarse chesthair, “but either you’ve stretched me out well enough by then or I’ve done so beforehand. And, yes,” he continued, “sometimes there are moments of discomfort, particularly if they’ve got a large dick or it’s been a while—”
“—noted—”
“—but it’s not painful. It’s not unlike the difference between a first stretch and tearing a muscle, Padfoot. Pain is your body telling you that you’re doing damage.”
“Nevertheless.”
“I’ll be gentle, Pads,” said Remus. He rolled over—no matter how many times he saw it, he’d never grow tired of seeing that sly grinning face and dark halo of curls beneath him, and in fact he liked it more with each viewing. Sirius looked correct between his thighs. He belonged. “Of course I’ll be gentle,” he continued, budging backwards, “but if there’s even an iota of pain, tell me. We’ll adjust. Or stop.”
“I don’t wanna stop, though.”
“Being honest, mate, you’re not likely to feel any pain at all. Bit of a swot at this, like.”
“When did you get so cocksure?”
“Funny,” muttered Remus, hooking his elbows under Sirius’s thighs and stooping his head.
“Hilarious, even—ah, Christ—is—” began Sirius, though Remus lapping at his hole contested his claims to the English language. All language, actually, as while Remus detected on occasion some throaty French sounds, Sirius evolved rapidly into a post-verbal creature.
They needn’t go further—a thought that crossed Remus’s mind about as often as the self-conscious one asking who, precisely, used the word needn’t while tongue-fucking someone—because eating out Sirius was a reward unto itself. An intrinsic good, stick that up your Kant and smoke it, and one of Remus’s many favourite things about him.
The order was fuzzy like the middling scruff on Sirius’s sharp chin, the twitching of his fingers whenever Remus threaded his fingers between his dark collar and neck, the coarser hairs running down his chest and belly, and/or Remus’s vision whenever they employed a number of near-suffocating positions. Perhaps it was mutable. Ever-changing. In one moment Sirius’s bony arse was his favourite thing, and yet then it was the way those narrow, squid-like bones of his jabbed Remus in all his soft, jabbable places, whether thigh or hip or belly or cheek; that Sirius was curly all over; the crookedness to his fingers, grin, wicked mind, grim humour; his immunity to shame; his desire for the spotlight and the insatiable need to drag others into it; and the infuriating breakneck pace at which Sirius flitted between sincere and sarcastic.
Even when he was annoying, Sirius was still Remus’s favourite. He’d daresay—never aloud, of course, Jesus knew he needn’t he encouragement—the annoyances were part of the appeal. Integral to it. Sirius rolling those lidded grey eyes at him and biting soft into his lip as Remus worked him looser with slick, lube-y fingers added a certain fuckable je-ne-sais-quoi just as much as Sirius’s need to crack a joke while Remus was hooking legs over shoulder and lining up.
“Y’know, Moony,” he murmured, eyes fluttering shut as Remus teased his hole one last time, “you never did explain the deal with those chickens.”
“Now? Really?”
“Aren’t they afraid?” replied Sirius. He took an unsteady groan of a breath and curled his toes into Remus’s hair because Sirius Black had never once disentangled the sexy from the irritating and/or unsavoury. “Although I s’pose if they can’t grasp ‘breakfast,’ then ‘werewolves’ are right out, and then can we really say they understand ‘death’ on anything other than an automatic, physical level? Beyond adrenaline and cortisol and what have you? And if they can’t comprehend their own mortality, fear is probably lost on them, too.”
“Are you quite finished.”
“I could keep going.”
“By all means.”
“Maybe later,” said Sirius with a snort. How he did that, remaining imperious and floating, somehow, above the fray even with his legs behind Remus’s head and a dick prodding his arsehole, was a mystery and a new kind of magic itself. “I’m about to see what all the—”
“—oh, bloody shut up, would you?”
If nothing else, the stifled laughter and existential considerations might keep Remus from cumming in about twenty seconds flat. He was twitching with anticipation, for Christ’s sake. His dick certainly was—Sirius could shake his slim hips and wag his imaginary tail from fifty paces and weaken Remus’s knees—and yet he whispered, breathy, panting, for Sirius to take a deep breath and then lost all sense of self as it turned out that Dragon’s Blood, in all its sundry enduring effects, had something of an amplifying effect on touch.
Sirius pulled him forwards by the chin. While, yes, that limited the extent to which Remus could pound and/or fuck and/or any other lewd verb he’d like to apply to Sirius’s various soft, hot nouns, kissing Sirius while grinding into him had been a fantasy some several years strong. There’d be time for all the more-harder-yes-sir on other nights.
Remus half-braced, half-performatively dangled his lube-y hand above the headboard and worked his hips with terrible unmatched rhythm. He was frantic. There’d be notes. He didn’t care, as, Jesus fucking Christ, every urgent noise Sirius moaned into his mouth was bliss. Like his hips, they ascended in pitch, building in need and heat and slickness until Sirius’s legs went wild with either cramps or spasms and Remus hilted against his arse one last time. Sirius’s orgasm and twitching muscles pulled Remus over too, and he almost wept at the sexiness and absurdity of it because Sirius’s cum hit his own chin and streaked across his chest with, being honest, frightening velocity.
The noises were like an exorcism. A wet, sweaty murder. Someone would definitely hear them, early morning as it was. At least a few wolves would be up and about. And, well, if they were eavesdropping on his reunion-cum-milestone-cum-drug-addled sex, that was their own bloody fault, wasn’t it? Remus had better things to do with his mind. Other tasks.
One thing Remus had been disappointed to learn was that you could not, as it turned out, feel a bloke and/or werewolf cum inside you. The satisfaction was purely psychological, although the culture in its endless ingenuity had solutions: you could pull out and finish on someone’s hole, which Remus thought was aesthetic and yet frustrating—in the end he was a dog with a bone to bury, not to show off—but failing that, you could always clean your plate.
Remus favoured the latter, of course.
Although he let Sirius think he was some sort of penetrative sex god for about fifteen minutes, which, coincidentally, was about the time it took for Sirius to regain his breath and for Remus to finish eating him out—they were both dogs, who cared?—Remus explained, very academic-like, that the key to a hands-free orgasm was not some mystical art of pelvic thrusting but instead a matter of not getting off for an extended period of time or otherwise working up to it over the course of hours. Cum was not the measure of a good shagging, much as it might’ve been believed.
“Sometimes I want to get shagged,” began Remus, contemplative. While his free hand toyed absently with Sirius’s collar, he was watching the poster on the cabin ceiling and eyeing the crotchline of Freddie Mercury’s scandalous shorts with distant, unfocused eyes. The sort you could expect after multiple days of missed sleep. “But I don’t always want to get off as a bottom. And sometimes getting off is an impediment. Might tire me out or wash all the adrenaline away, and—oh, this is important—it’s considered very, very poor form to stick your dick in someone’s arse while they’re, er, well, cumming, or for some time shortly thereafter. Though that varies from person to person, of course.”
“You can’t have had that much more sex than I have. Not—you’re fit, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t imagine your options were so plentiful in the Pyrenees compared to Hogwarts.”
“Where do you think I learned this shite, Padfoot?”
“Ah, I see. The scriptures.”
“You’d know all this too if you weren’t always nose-deep in some work of fantasy or science fiction.”
“Be that as it may, mate.” Wandlessly summoning a spliff from across the room was something of a show-off move and a turn-on, yes, and almost enough to make Remus forgive smoking inside the cabin. “If I’d read all those zines, then I wouldn’t have all your helpful demonstrations, now, would I?”
“Mm. And I’m told I’m halfway decent at giving directions.”
“Better at taking them. Thought I might give the instructions this time, yeah?”
“Intriguing prospect.”
“C’mere—ah, yeah. Good boy.”
***
“Who’s a good boy?” called Sirius. Dry and detangled and given nearly sixteen hours of uninterrupted sleep, Remus had been shocked to learn his dark curls were several inches shorter than they’d been before Lily and James’s wedding. More and more Sirius’d taken to tying it up or trimming it, claiming that, at least for the War, function ought win out over aesthetics. ‘Claimed’ with a mournful tone, of course.
“Who’s a good boy?” he repeated, springing back and hurling a well-bitten branch into a sparse patch of larch trees with little underbrush between them. Two eager mutts bounded off after it and set Sirius’s grin alight on his face again. “We’ll find out,” he continued, “depending on which of you wins this last round!”
“You know they can’t comprehend you when you’re not Padfoot, yes?”
“I do know this, Moony.”
“Oh, well, carry on then. I’ll do this cooperative bit myself.”
Sirius snorted at that, which, fuck him, was rude, but also understandable given they’d only come out the hamlet’s boundary because a number of useful wards required at least two magical adepts to perform and Remus hadn’t yet shed enough of his paranoia to trust Octavia Fong with their intricacies. That, and as Sirius often pointed out…
“Moony. You know I love you.”
“I’m sensing a ‘but’ here. Perhaps a—”
“—if but and your illusions are rubbish, mate,” said Sirius, squinting into the intangible realm with one white iris. “The wards and shields are halfway decent at least.”
“Not all of us trained under a master illusionist. And I couldn’t put up anything cooperative on my own, like.”
“Still—”
“—could we perhaps skip the part where you lambaste me for my failings?” replied Remus. “I think my ego is of a perfectly reasonable size, all things considered, and I’d much rather we jump to the part where I learn from my mistakes. Might help if I ever want to break the habit of raking myself over the coals of—put a metaphor here, I’m too knackered for it—or what have you.”
It’d been yet another unseasonably warm August, even this late in the month, and they had less than twenty-four hours before they’d need to be on the train platform. A hint of pique was understandable. More so, actually, if you knew that Remus was coming down from a dose of Dragon’s Blood sized for a Troll. Remus huffed.
“Withdrawals,” he said weakly.
“No, I’m being a git,” said Sirius quietly. When both mutts, Oscar and Baldwin, returned with the stick in both their maws, Sirius scoffed and struggled a moment to free it before hurling it in the opposite direction. They were decently trained mutts until, of course, they caught sound of a rat or bird or whatnot, at which point you’d be lucky to have a stick dropped at your feet instead of a bloody carcass. Presuming they caught the thing, of course. “Look. About these past few nights—”
“—it’s not an issue.”
“Are you sure?”
“Mm. And we don’t have to—”
“—it’s been happening since the wedding, I s’pose,” began Sirius. Remus didn’t mind that new habit. At some point Sirius had gone from being a nonverbal creature incapable of finding the words to express himself to a fountain of groping words, and in that fashion, he continued, “Or, that’s not true. It—I think it calms me down. There was a long while where I’d fallen out of being Padfoot, but now that I’m back—and with the War—”
“We really don’t have to talk about it,” said Remus. “I don’t mind, whether it’s here or in our dormitory.”
“And you’re sure?”
Years ago when he’d first made the change, Sirius took every possible opportunity to become Padfoot, leading to an apparently long-lived rumour that the Marauders had somehow smuggled an enormous black dog up into the castle from the village under the noses of every Hogwarts professor. In no small way did it contribute to Remus’s burgeoning, pining, &c. &c., given the requisite nudity involved in covert Animagus transformations, but it also hadn’t been lost on Remus that Sirius’s crises d’angoisse gained a new avenue of resolution around the same time. Perhaps it might help heal his night terrors too.
“I’m sure,” replied Remus. He whispered an incantation at the wardline once more and waited for Sirius’s nod before continuing, “As long, of course, as you don’t go slobbering on me in my sleep. Or my dick,” he added with a frown. “I’d firmly like to keep those wires uncrossed, thank you very much.”
“Your loss.”
“You’re vile and twisted and I’m not dignifying that with a response. Are my wards sufficient yet?”
“We’ll get there.”
Whether or not they ‘got there’ was immaterial, of course. Sirius indicated as much, which is why, in truth, both of them were more invested in the game of quasi-collaborative fetch that Oscar and Baldwin were playing as well as the gossip they’d stirred in the hamlet proper. News of Denmother Remus’s boyfriend had spread like wildfire. Perhaps a poor turn of phrase. There was talk that, with the wards improved, perhaps the wolves could gain some leniency in having overnight guests. Not, of course, that Remus was going to entertain that idea any time soon, and Jesus Christ he really was becoming Professor McGongall. Piss.
Some three hours later the mutts had buggered off, bored, and Remus and Sirius were still squinting at invisible geometry in the woods.
“Adequate?”
“Very,” replied Sirius, glum.
“And yet all it’d take is—”
“—one spy,” said Sirius. “One well-deployed Kissed, and the whole lot goes up in smoke.”
“Leave it to the Ministry to industrialise carceral execution and inadvertently develop a new weapon.”
“The wheel of war turns, Moonymine, and as it does it grinds us beneath its heel.”
“I wasn’t aware wheels of the cosmic variety had heels, whether foot or shoe.”
“Did I say ‘heel’?”
“Mm.”
“I meant ‘wheel’.”
“Ruins the variety, though. In any case—”
“—you’re afraid for them, yeah? What’ll happen to them in your absence?”
“Deathly so.”
Sirius kicked the earth beneath him.
“I’m afraid too, Moony.”
“That’s considerate.”
“I’m afraid of what’d happen if you stayed,” he continued, frowning down at his boots. “Isn’t that awful?”
“If so, then I’m awful too.”
“You—”
“—after three months of looking over my shoulder at every opportunity, Pads,” said Remus, “I genuinely can’t wait to be back at Hogwarts. I should hope wanting a moment of safety, repose, relief—”
“—synonyms—”
“—is hardly awful. My library was dukedom enough.” finished Remus. “Even if we’ve a War to fight in the meantime and theses to defend in so doing, and—oh. Oh, buggering shite.”
“Remus?”
“Lily’s not coming back, is she?”
“Likely not—ah. Ah, Jesus buggering Christ.”
“Piss.”
“Add to the list, then, mentoring four wee babes of the postgraduate variety. Without Lily Evans—Potter, rather—or Mary, bless her. Or the names of said postgraduates, come to think of it, given the lack of owls or any information whatsoever. Unless—no. I refuse,” said Sirius, eyes narrowing with disdain. “Snivellus the fucking Death Eater is not postgraduate liaison to the board. I’ll eat my wand. I’ll eat Dumbledore’s wand.”
“C’mon, then. Let’s back to the village, like—to say our goodbyes. They’ll each be wanting a kiss for good luck from you, I reckon.”
“And Kelly a—”
“—a shag, yes, but try to spare my sheets, would you?”
Sirius grinned sideways at him.
“Anything for our Moony, yeah?” he said with a wink.
Words that once had given him a gleeful warmth—our Moony was unlikely to ever lose its charm—rang now, however, with a macabre and foreboding implication underlying it, as Remus believed it wholeheartedly. Every loss weighed on Remus, but for Sirius each loss was a weight lifted, threatening to unmoor him in a tempestuous War. He was unanchored—just look at how far they’d gone.
They’d invented new spells and turned them to violent ends just, as it turn out, as Remus had feared the Ministry might; they’d stolen research; nearly blown themselves up to decrypt it; Remus had taken a human life, tasted human blood, and who knew, actually, what dirty deeds Sirius had carried out on his Order missions; not only were they training as duellists, both of them had dipped their cerebral toes into Occlumency and the more obscure art of thinking like a Death Eater so as to not fall prey to one; each of them even had their own little game with the Order itself, what with Remus’s Elenydd hamlet, Sirius’s meetings with Regulus and his subsequent secret kidnapping, and, of course, the spy in their midst, although neither of them would ever forget it. Losing Benjy, Marlene, perhaps even Caradoc and Regulus too was—how did it go? Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, or thereabouts?
Except Yeats hadn’t been a wizard. He’d already survived a war, and Remus was yet uncertain that there might be a post-War period to their time. Less certain still was he that either of them would make it through with all their limbs and mental faculties intact, as, once again, he wondered just how far Sirius Black might go to see them through. What he might’ve already done.
Sirius would never hurt him, of course. That wasn’t Remus’s concern. Watching Sirius stoop to peck Kelly, chaste, on the lips while others—Amir in his weatherbeaten glory and tweed-handled cane, Boxdye, the eyebrowless Chains, even Siobhan and her little daughter Maggie who’d been sprouting up like a beanpole as of late—crowded around him, chatting up a storm, Remus could see the ghost of all that trauma still clinging to Sirius and with it the questions and unknowns. The secrets.
Had he really been turned loose by Death Eaters and broken free by curious happenstance, all his missions incomplete? It was possible, yes, but Remus’s paranoia disliked happenstance. Loathed it, in fact. It took happenstance, ground it up in its sharp, omnipresent teeth, and spat out images of Sirius standing over Caradoc and Regulus’s lifeless bodies, wand in hand, eyes as glassed-over as Rucha’s had been in what felt like another lifetime.
And, well, if that had been a ploy, then Sirius stumbling over him in an alleyway the day after the full moon—a full moon in which Greyback conspicuously failed to surface—well, what were the odds of that?
Remus would run the maths tomorrow. Today he allowed himself a breath, a respite from constant vigilance to watch Sirius float a wildflower from the forest floor and weave it, wandlessly, behind Maggie’s ear, and to bask in the slight, star-bright half-smile that followed on his crooked face as well as the delighted one undoubtedly on Remus’s own.
Notes:
To be clear, I am not endorsing or recommending the mixture of fasting, cigarettes, stimulants, werewolves, shapeshifters, and gay sex. I remind you that this chapter technically features one birth and the murder of an entire family line. I wonder how James is doing!
This chapter marks the end of Book II. Don't put down that spade! Remus and Sirius will return soon in Book III, but, first, we'll be enjoying a brief Intermission, posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 1 August, a Friday.
You can find my Bluesky here and my Tumblr here. Both are incredibly and overwhelmingly NSFW.
Chapter 26: Intermission: End of Book II
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
MACDONALD, MARY
03 AUGUST 1979
DEAR MS. MACDONALD,
Concerning your recent inquests into sensitive Ministry information, it is our obligation to remind you that, under the Emergency Powers Decree passed this past November, 1978, all material pertaining to the disciplinary proceedings of Azkaban-bound prisoners or indeed those selected for reformation by way of the Dementor’s Kiss falls under the discretionary purview of the Auror Office and the Department of Magical Law Enforcement due to the potentially damaging effect that publication might have on matters of national security.
To this end, I regret to inform you that we are unable to release the file and records of Theodore Macdonald. The hold on said records is indefinite, but as I am sure you are aware, you may apply again in no less then twelve (12) months.
If you would like to appeal this decision, please submit the requisite application in triplicate to our office no later than two weeks after the posting date of this letter. Your case will be reviewed in eight to twelve weeks.
As for your other inquiry, I am perfectly content in disclosing all the following information despite numerous privacy-protection regulations that bind the Ministry on matters of personal record. That is because no such witch (or wizard, or Squib, or even notable muggle) by the name of ‘Gloria Ahmed’ exists insofar as the Ministry is concerned. We possess no records matching that name, whether on birth, death, immigration, wand registry, or purported enrolment in a public program such as the postgraduate one at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
In pursuing this request, I attempted various spellings, variations, and allowed for errors (e.g. Glory, Glorya, Ahmad, Ahmod, Amed, etc.).
The registry of missing persons at the Auror Office also does not match with said name or any variations. The registry is well-kept and I have been assured that this is no clerical error. While it is possible that a report was filed as you wrote in your release request, if Aurors were unable to verify the identity of a missing person or the presence of foul play while investigating an alleged disappearance, let alone verify that person’s existence, such a report would be stricken from the registry and labelled as unfounded.
Finally, the Ministry cannot release personal information about family or other blood relations, and most certainly not information belonging to those who may or may not be related to a person of indeterminable identity. Unless you are able to demonstrate a family link to any Ahmed family currently or formerly residing in Britain (e.g. by way of marriage between a witch and wizard of the Ahmed and Macdonald families), such familiar records are protected under our privacy decrees.
We hope this satisfies your inquiries into these matters and regret we cannot aid you further.
If you would require further assistance or would like to submit documentation attesting your family links, please do so in person at the Department of Records. It is advised that you bring original copies of all material in so doing.
HOPING YOU ARE WELL,
CASSIOPEIA CARTWRIGHT
DEPARTMENT OF RECORDS, MINISTRY OF MAGIC
ALBUS P.W.B. DUMBLEDORE
13 AUGUST 1979
ALBUS,
No, don’t worry, this isn’t that kind of letter!
Now that I’ve that out of the way, I regret to inform you that this is exactly that kind of letter, albeit one with a protracted timeframe. I am writing to inform you that in two years time I will be beginning a joint project with a number of other magical librarians to examine and restore fragments of lore recovered allegedly from the Library of Alexandria by an unusually prescient Seer. My funding approval has just come through and so I saw fit to inform you posthaste.
Our current project timetable is set to begin in the first months of 1982, which means that, at this juncture, I will be unable to fulfil my duties as resident librarian of Hogwarts for the 1981 school year onwards, although we anticipate project completion no later than 1984.
Cheer up, old friend! I’m overdue for a research sabbatical in any case and I have no doubt that, regardless of whoever becomes my temporary replacement, the damage they might inflict to the unshaped student minds, and more importantly to the books, will be perfectly reversible.
Equally I have no doubt you’ll find no shortage of eligible candidates to temporarily maintain the post. If you find yourself struggling, however, I’ve attached herewith a list of recommendations and a rationale for each candidate.
I recommend you begin interviewing immediately. I’ll be pulling from the same pool in my search for project subordinates—otherwise I scarcely should be recommending them to you!
Should you have any other concerns, we may discuss them in person once term begins. I do miss our evening teas.
BEST REGARDS,
IRMA
DAMOCLES BELBY
01 OCTOBER 1979
MR. BELBY,
Hello! My name is Rucha Nagar, and I’m a postgraduate student with a Fieldwork focus at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Before that, I also matriculated at Hogwarts, finishing seven NEWTs with Outstanding marks across the board (excepting Arithmancy, for which I received an Exceeds Expectations). My specialisation lies with Herbology and interactions between harvesting times and the positions of various solar, lunar, and otherwise celestial bodies as well as their consequential influence on said herbs as potion reagents.
A close colleague of mine let slip that you are considering new research fellows, and I would like to throw my hat in the ring! I’ve read dozens of your publications: each is fascinating, innovative, and daring, all qualities that I think would benefit from my knowledge of critical alchemical minutiae. While I know I stand to gain more from assisting a potions master like you, I think my assistance would also greatly benefit your research. I am an excellent lab partner.
That being said, I know this is an impossible thing to consider over just a single letter. For this reason I’ve made assurances that you receive an invitation to every postgraduate function hosted at Hogwarts.
If the idea of working together intrigues you, please visit one! I’d be more than pleased to demonstrate my prowess in person.
Functions coincide with every major and minor holiday, and there are a number of smaller, more private functions as well if those are your cup of tea. I’ve enclosed a calendar of dates with this letter.
I’ve also enclosed a sample of my own (unreleased!) work on the impact of lunar cycles on various common brewing durations and potencies, as a little bird told me such research might pique your interest. I’d also be happy to provide further work upon request! I am nothing if not persistent.
LOOKING FORWARD TO YOUR REPLY,
RUCHA NAGAR II
The Daily Prophet, 03 November 1979
THREE NIGHTS OF TRUE TERROR: ATTACKS ON WIZARDS SHAKE MAGICAL BRITAIN
HOGSMEADE—Following an unprecedented attack on the town of Hogsmeade and a lacking response from the Ministry as well as its subordinate Department of Magical Law Enforcement (DMLE), the citizens of our great magical nation have been living in fear. No longer is the terrorist threat that looms over us content with mere threats and occupation: this brazen assault constitutes an attack on the people themselves.
On the 31st night of October unknown assailants descended the streets of Hogsmeade, setting fires, blasting apart homes and businesses that have stood for a hundred years, and cursing helpless bystanders during what ought to be a night of revelry. The DMLE reports none dead thus far of the dozens injured. This comes as little comfort, however, as many Hogsmeade residents question how such an attack was allowed to happen in the first place.
“It’s absurd, really,” said Madam Rosmerta, barmaid of the Three Broomsticks, to a Prophet correspondent. “We have Aurors traipsing through the streets every night to interrogate our clients and Dementors on the horizon as if that wasn’t bad enough. What’s the point of all this rigmarole if they can’t stop this horrid sort of thing from happening in our dozy little village?”
Others were more direct in their criticism, naming Minister for Magic Harold Minchum among others as complicit in this attack.
According to a source within the Auror Office who spoke on condition of anonymity, divisions are forming within the Office’s ranks. Some strongly disagree with the ‘passive’ and ‘reactionary’ strategy of their so-called elite taskforce, while others are reticent to throw their full support to DMLE Head Bartemius Crouch, whose measures have been slammed as being ‘tyrannical insasmuch as they are barbaric’.
More disturbingly, sources revealed that there may have been more at play that night than the Ministry has yet revealed. Eyewitnesses claim to have been aided by unidentified witches and wizards who did not present themselves as Aurors. Some, however, offer an alternate story: that clandestine operatives escalated tensions from a frightening skirmish into an all-out terrifying battle that saw several injured in the resulting explosions.
“Might’ve been piss drunk, aye, but I saw what I saw. Four on two, it was, and the lot dressed normal was the ones to kick things off. Right on them, too—those masked freaks were up to no good, I’m sure.”
Another couple claimed they were told to lay flat while either a witch or wizard disillusioned them and that ‘it was as though they knew something big was about to happen before anyone else did’.
While the details will only become clear as the Prophet’s unbiased and independent investigation continues, others feel confident already in making assertions. A statement from Crouch’s office was posted two days after the attacks and said the following:
“Our Aurors have full confidence that their efforts and their efforts alone prevented the loss of what could have been countless lives in this terrible and politically-motivated attack. While no evidence has presented itself to support the veracity of claims to a vigilante presence that night, it behoves us nevertheless to remind our citizens that such flagrant action would be dangerous and entirely unlawful. On the matters of national security, only the Ministry is equipped to handle such tasks.”
Magical Law critic Malodora Snyde, however, took direct aim at Crouch in a written statement disseminated by owl to members of the Wizards with Commonsense Concerns Association (WCCA), excerpted below.
“(…)the All Hallow’s Eve attack confirms, we fear, two long-standing concerns of this Association. The first: that these ‘unmarked participants’ in the conflict are undoubtedly a secret police force put into place by Minchum’s Ministry in a cowardly attempt to evade public criticism of his heavy-handed tactics; and the second, that the attacks on our magical heritage are as intentional as they are unprecedented.
“Of course the DMLE has presented no motive for the attack, but one can assume that an attack on a magical village means that these wretches are targeting political dissidents opposed to the overreach of the Ministry in Squib and muggle management. Nearly all those found injured in the attack were either pureblood or half-blood, which only proves that, in our grim new reality, being bold with one’s beliefs is seen as justification for attack by others.”
Indeed the DMLE has not (as of the time of printing) presented a motive for the attack, which differs conspicuously from one a year prior that saw several muggle-related establishments burgled or damaged. The Auror Office also declined to comment on claims as to a secretive sub-office for clandestine affairs, although previous Prophet correspondence with the Department of Records all but confirms that Aurors have engaged in undisclosed operations since at least 1970, beginning with the reign of Minister for Magic Eugenia Jenkins, elected 1968.
Only time will tell if Minchum’s Ministry is up to the task at hand or if he will see it crumble like Jenkins and Leach before him. Minchum is slated to speak Friday next week at the Conference for Cooperative International Magical Research (CCIMR) in London, where commentators speculate he will be forced to address the recent string of suspicious activity plaguing magical Britain. Unconfirmed reports yet claim that, at the same time as the Hogsmeade attack, a number of other contained attacks against private individuals and residences occurred across the nation, including one at a research dungeon operated by the notoriously camera-shy potioneer Damocles Belby.
As ever, the Prophet will investigate these matters, find the truth within, and bring it to you, our faithful readers.
SIRIUS O. BLACK III
15 NOVEMBER 1979
HI PADFOOT,
Hoping you’re okay after everything that happened a few weeks ago. It’s a mess. I’m still kind of messed up about it myself.
Things got shaken up around here and I’m not helping with Prongs any longer, so I’m not as busy as I was before. Being at home alone has been hard.
I was wondering if you’d like to meet up one weekend for a pint? I’ve been reconnecting with some old Hogwarts friends and it made me realise we haven’t faffed about like old times in a really long time. Prongs won’t be able to make it, if that’s not obvious, but I thought we could each invite a few people and have a night out. I don’t even mind if it’s just us alone because I know you won’t try anything with me.
Let me know when you can. I imagine being back in school must be a nightmare for free time.
CHEERS,
WORMTAIL
REMUS J. LUPIN
24 NOVEMBER 1979
HI REMUS,
Hoping you’re okay after everything that happened a month ago. It’s a lot and I think I might still be processing a lot of it. You’re probably doing better than most of us seeing as you were always the best thinker.
Things are different now and I’m not working with James, so I’ve got loads more time to myself. Mostly I’ve been sitting at home reading about chess or listening to records, but I’ve also been out with some old friends a bunch and I wondered if you would like to have a night out for old time’s sake.
You and I were always on the outside from Prongs and Padfoot’s stuff anyway. Plus, my new mates seem like your kind of crowd. They’re brilliant! Know lots about politics just like you. And there’s this one bird who you’d have a lot more common if I’m reading the signs correctly. You’d get on well.
You can invite your friends too if you want! I invited Padfoot already but you both are probably drowning in schoolwork so he must’ve forgot my owl.
Write me back whenever you can! I miss spending time with my best mates.
CHEERS,
PETER
LILY EVANS
30 NOVEMBER 1979
HI LILY,
I know you probably weren’t expecting a letter from me of all people because we never really talked that much in school, but you’re James’ girlfriend so I thought I’d write anyway. I wanted to ask something and also for a favour.
The favour’s nothing big! I just wanted to ask if you could check in on Sirius and Remus for me. I wrote to them both over the past two weeks and they haven’t written back to me, which I know is probably normal because you’re all doing the school thing again, even if I think that’s a mad thing to do.
I’m a little worried they’re poorly or that they didn’t get my letters. One of my mates told me the Ministry was screening owls for politics these days and I don’t think anything I wrote was super political, but you never know with Minchum, so could you ask them if they got my letters and to write back?
I was planning on hosting a do for all of us to make up for the rough time last month. I still want to do that, and that’s the other thing I wanted to ask you: would you want to come along with us? You can invite your friends and I’ll invite mine, and it can be just like old times in the common room (except with more Houses involved just like you always wanted).
It would be good to get out of the house more often, and I think it would be good for those two too. There’s a girl I think Remus would really like (she’s kind of fringe) and Sirius probably needs a break from using his brain. James won’t be able to make it because he’s busy with some other stuff, but we’d be happy to have you also.
Write back when you have the time!
CHEERS,
PETER
SNYDE, MALODORA P.
14 DECEMBER 1979
MRS. SNYDE,
You are cordially invited to a private meeting at The Duchess of Richmond’s Evening House for the dates of the 20th and 21st of December, whereby business in accord with our last discussion will be arranged.
It is our mutual benefactor’s hope that the collaborative effort of all parties involved, no matter how difficult some may be to stomach, will win out, just our superior blood will always win out in the end. The exact details of any arrangement will be decided in person, but I caution you to remember that the terms may be revisited at our leisure once we are in a more negotiable position. Some tactical compromise may be advisable for the moment.
Ensure some discretion in your arrival. The staff of the Evening House will see to theirs.
The room is paid out for the week prior as a gesture of good faith. Please visit at your pleasure and make any assurances that the circumstances of the deal will be to your tastes. The refreshments, I’m told, are complementary.
The Evening House’s policy does not allow for the attendance of servants, Kissed or otherwise. Ensure they are not with you when you visit: the fuss would be unwarranted and unwise.
We look forward to doing business with your shortly.
CORDIALLY,
SEVERUS SNAPE
GWEN FENWICK
26 JANUARY 1980
DEAR MRS. FENWICK
MRS. FENWICK
GWEN
DEAR GWEN,
I don’t know how to begin this letter
I never thought I’d have to
I
There aren’t words
Being a kid was hard for me. I was really anxious. Really self-conscious. Benjy was one of the few people to make me feel like I could be okay. I’ve never met someone so unerringly self-assured from such a young age, and, genuinely, I think that he’d only become half as brilliant as he would given another twenty so years. His confidence made me want to be confident.
There are an untold number of things I’ll remember fondly about him. I don’t know if he ever said, but he was the first kid about my age who didn’t look at me funny or call me names when I put on a dress. Hell, the first bit of proper magic I ever learned from him was how to mess about with clothes, their colour, style, even if we were dead awful at it, being little. I think I still have that terrible polkadot sundress in my closet somewhere.
Benjy took me out dancing for the first time. I think he regretted it because I dragged him out every weekend that summer thereafter, but he had a rhythm in him underneath all those swotty jumpers and waistcoats. He introduced me to punk music. I taught him how to do his face. He took me for my first pint and held my hair back after the sixth, which is probably something no mother wants to read about her son, though I hope you’ll appreciate the memory nevertheless.
When our family broke
When we lost
After Theodore, Benjy became a big brother to me and my sister. He looked after us and stopped me from doing some truly stupid
Benjy was like the big brother we never had and was better than we deserved in every sense. Benjy deserves better
He deserved better than this. We deserved more memories with him and more than just memories
That people treat him like a memory now infuriates me. It does more than that, truthfully. It makes my blood boil and makes me want to scream. He’s not been dead
It’s only been a month since he was murdered
I know no one’s explained just how your son came to be in the woods that night or why we know he’s not simply missing, but I want to tell you he died a hero.
I want to tell you that but it’s patently not true. No one dies a fucking hero, that’s just the shit they sell you afterwards to ease your grief along with all the other clichés
I can’t even swallow myself
Benjy died and he shouldn’t have, Gwen, and the world shouldn’t be moving on without him. I know, at least in some part, the grief you must be feeling. The anger. The rage. The crushing sadness weighing down your longs. I hope you know that healing doesn’t mean letting go of those feelings, because that’s a load of bollocks. I’m angry. I’m full up with rage and sadness because someone I love died and it feels like we’re supposed to simply march on, lie back and think of England, because he’s ultimately seen as unimportant. A footnote.
Benjy Fenwick was no fucking footnote
. He deserves an entire saga detailing his life, not a sentence or two saying he was a nice bloke who, unfortunately, exploded, and especially not if that sentence isn’t allowed to be written because it
Fucking Hell
I’m sorry, Gwen
There aren’t words.
I’m never posting this letter
SIRIUS BLACK
6 FEBRUARY 1980
S,
Had me worried. If I ain’t heard from you a week, the world’s gone funny cos you’re the only one I ken who talks as much as me. Head must be spinning still so I packed in some treats, go easy
Hate that you two love r writing so much. Mine’s gash. All the letters get jumbled and staring at the paper fucks my head proper.
Owl is a nightmare get a new one
Business is going well. Never had a flat of me own to use, and no I’m not bringing in people for deals. Not a thicko. Just sweet to have a hole to go to ground in.
Speaking off of, your boy trouble ain’t my problem. Ain’t see why not celebrating with a Valentine do is a problem at all. Dead clever’s mad for you, who wants a day for it? Good lad, him, so if it really bothers you, tell him. I’m sure he’d go mad knowing you wanna go all bird on him.
And don’t ask me for no dating advise can’t believe I’m sitting here with a fuckin dictionary in my lap like a fucking knob you poshboys are ruining me advice next time. Longest I ever let a lad be sweet on me is a night at a time if you catch me and I never mind. Too xh too tiring otherwise, not in the good way.
Even if they’re a dead charmer like you, they get all these funny ideas in their head once the powder or pills are out of them and can’t never keep their shit together.
So maybe you shouldn’t go easy. Maybe you gotta go hard. Tossed in some dodgy tea bags that should make it past any sniffers but don’t brew it until you got your head on w right and you got a good mood to stew in.
You ken my rules, aye? Never do drugs just to do drugs. Never redose less you know exactly what the fuck you’re doing. And if you’re gonna be stupid about something then you never be stupid alone, aye?
Only shame is dying cos you were too emmbarr embbar embarrassed to have someone help you fucking nightmare that one who needs all these extra letters anyway
Will write to you again soon but I don’t ken when too much. Got a line on something hush hush. Big score. Real real real big. Might not be around for a bit cos I have to move a lot of moving pieces but I think I can manage it. Don’t worry, you ken I always land on my feet me
LOVE KELLY
P.S. DO YOU THINK HE’LL BE MAD IF I PUT DOWN MY PRESENT AS COLLATI COLLATERAL COS I NEED SOME COIN UP FRONT IF I WANNA PULL THIS OFF. PROMISE I WILL BUY IT BACK ASAP.
The Daily Prophet, 18 February 1980
SENSELESS MURDER SHOCKS NATION: DAMOCLES BELBY STRUCK DEAD IN SO-CALLED ‘SAFEST PLACE IN BRITAIN’
HOGSMEADE—The esteemed potioneer Damocles Belby, known for his sleeping draughts, recluse eccentricities, and shunning of the private recipe patents so common to potions societies across the Wizarding World, was brutally murdered Friday nowhere else than on the grounds of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry while attending an academic function hosted by fellow potions scholar Horace Slughorn. While Aurors have not released the identity of Belby’s murderer, multiple sources confirm that the accused is Rucha Nagar, a pureblood postgraduate student at Hogwarts.
According to witnesses on the scene, Nagar, a short, unassuming Indian witch of no real import, unleashed a slicing curse with no warning upon Belby, striking him in the neck. Despite the immediate attention of healers, he did not survive, and Nagar was taken into custody following a short struggle. No motive has yet been produced to explain Nagar’s actions.
This heinous crime is made only the more shocking as it occurred under the supervision of Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, who, until recently, was credited as maintaining “the safest place in all magical Britain’ in a number of publications.
Speculation has already arisen that Nagar was acting under the influence of the Imperius Curse, although Department of Magical Law Enforcement (DMLE) Head Bartemius Crouch has long maintained that such claims are ‘as prolific as they are convenient.’
“There is no evidence to support the claim of a recent surge in usage of the illegal Imperius Curse,” said a DMLE spokeswitch Saturday. “As ever, our Aurors will nevertheless continue to investigate every possible avenue in a given matter of criminality, and they will undoubtedly uncover the truth as they always do.”
More to come as the story develops.
ANDROMEDA TONKS
25 FEBRUARY 1980
DEAR ANDI STOP
PLEASE SIT DOWN STOP FOR WHAT I AM ABOUT TO WRITE MAY SHOCK YOU STOP OR TRULY IT WILL BE THE MANNER IN WHICH I WRITE IT AND NOT AS MUCH THE SUBJECT MATTER STOP
Hiya Andi. I’m dispensing with my usual style for reasons that’ll probably become clear as you read on and because reading this very longform letter would become something of a laborious eyesore, even if I’ve never felt shy being one. An ill omen, I’m sure.
I truly don’t know how or where to begin.
That’s not true. I’ve begun this letter a dozen times and I can never quite make it through without starting over, and shortly before that I began with a little bit of, you know, because I definitely can’t write this sober. If that sounds pathetic that would be because it is, but a few dear friends of mine have been teaching me that it might be okay to be pathetic, usually if it coincides with a point of personal growth, which I hope this is. I’m not great at talking about my feelings nor writing them down nor least of all asking advice, but that’s unlikely to improve if I don’t blood try, isn’t it?
I need advice. It’s about the girl I’m seeing.
It’s about more than just her, but every time I write this letter it always comes back to her eventually and so this time I might as well start with her.
I’m mad for her. Mad Black mad. I’m Black mad in a lot of ways as of late, but for her, I’m arse-over-teakettle Black mad and it’s maybe the most frightening thing I’ve ever felt. And not for the reasons you’re assuming: obviously I’m terrified of cocking the whole thing up and have almost done so no less than three times, but I think, maybe beneath all that, I find the idea of not eventually cocking it all up horrifying. Grotesque. Like a cosmic horror creeping down from the stars &c. &c. and whenever my mind settles on that thought, I feel I’m the worst person in the world.
We’ve already blown past the surface issues. All the things I’ve heard couples spat or break up over don’t matter to us, because we talk about them and generally we’re in agreement. Because we’ve known each other so long already (and I mean back to the first days of Hogwarts long, but don’t get any ideas of guessing her identity, you never will), there’s not much to surprise us or a fundamental political issue to divide us.
I think that might be the issue.
Neither of us want children, given our shitty pasts, and I can guarantee it’s not about to happen by accident. Neither of us wants to marry, settle down, become like those people (you know I love you, Andi, but you’ve become thoroughly domesticated compared to your muggle music days) and neither of us has many much of an idea of what we want to do with our lives beyond survive the next few years, however unlikely that might be.
But what happens if we do? I love her, truly, but sometimes I look at her and while my inside bits do the hot, clumsy somersaults and my teeth get a mind of their own, then the smile peels off my face because I can only think, ‘Wow. Beautiful. Charming. Funny. Cleverer than a hundred ferrets playing cards. I can’t believe we’re going to spend the next twenty to a hundred years together in this unalterable, unchanging state.’
Before her all of my relationships were fleeting. The longest was six months and by the end of it neither of our hearts were broken because we were such thoroughly different people by then.
I was seventeen! If you aren’t a radically different person every year of your adolescence, you’re likely doing something wrong. You’re likely not living life.
With this one, we’ve been together just over a year, I suppose, and through some awful, awful matters too grim to put in this letter, yet I might be madder for her than I was when we began. Before we began, even. And it’s not (forgive me for this) an issue of monogamy. We’ve mutually declared ourselves free agents, so to speak, and sometimes share because jealousy—it’s not a thing for us. If anything, it’s a brilliant feeling knowing she has the world in her palm, given she’s a dead charmer and could talk the pants off any eligible bloke she meets, and yet I’m the one, me, Sirius, she comes to afterwards to share, repose, love. I don’t think we’ll ever be stale that way, not after two minutes or twenty years of our stories.
But I don’t know if I’m capable of that kind of commitment. I don’t know, Andi, if it’s what I’m meant for, if it’s who I’m meant to be, and I sure as shit don’t know if I can offer her what she wants and needs.
Sometimes we fall into these holes where we spend an entire weekend together doing nothing at all and I feel we can’t have a single breath without the other stealing some of it away. She has troubles (and I’m no saint either) but I can’t always be there for her in the way she needs. When I’ve my own issues, I think she must feel the same way. Mustn’t she?
The nightmares are back and arguably worse than ever. She wakes me, keeps me company when I can’t fall back asleep, and simultaneously I feel a burden and like one. That I have to be whole, healthy, fine for her sake, and that she might not ever be for mine.
It’s a monumental amount of pressure to put on someone who, being honest, is as scrambled as I am. If I left for a few months or a year, I don’t know if there’d be a person left for me to return to or if I’d recognise them at all. I can’t be responsible for that. I’m irresponsible. I’m twenty—even if I could, I don’t think I’d like to be, and less so given the other thousand things on my mind. The other people on my mind—yes, you’ve met, though that’s another bloody letter. Of the thousand things, however? One sticks out more than the other.
As much as you and I joke about the Black family madness and the damages done to us by decades of inbreeding, Andi, I think I might be ill. Sick in the head.
I don’t mean only in the way that being raised like us makes a person sick. It’s more than that. Maybe it’s just the weather in Scotland, but all the moods I’m usually prone to have been getting more extreme if more infrequent—whereas when I was littler, they might swing thrice an hour, these days I feel them unfolding over a manner of weeks. Months. They’re not overwhelming as I still feel in control of the broom, so to speak, but when the pace picks up and my mind goes fast, it’s more that I can direct it but not stop it. I had some months like that this past year.
While it was good for my research and it didn’t hurt my social life, I worry it might’ve contributed to bad things. Awful things. You know.
I wonder if maybe I’d been less reckless, more aware and able to focus and caught more sleep, things might’ve unfolded differently. I wonder what else might’ve been different. Better.
Currently I’m fine. I feel normal, mostly, although feeling one’s mind slow down after three-odd months of racing is not a pleasant feeling on its own. Being honest, it’s gash. I miss the feeling. The awareness. The haste.
Mostly I’m afraid for the low that might/will follow afterwards. I could live just fine with the highs and the mediums, but the knowledge that at some point in the near future I might inexorably slide into a pit for a full season is horrifying horrifying isn’t the right word. It’s beyond dread. I’d take horror and dread any day over the thing on the horizon, Andi.
She has a poem that goes something like this. From W.B. Yeats’s The Second Coming:
“A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Apologies for any error in transcription. She fell asleep on my lap and so I’m trying not to wake her, but her face is currently squished up against that exact page and she’s dribbling on the last verses.
I know that Yeats wasn’t writing about his own moods, but the imagery—the sun as pitiless, the slow, slouching rough beast—it expresses something for which I lack words.
Can I inflict myself on her this way? The last time I hit my low, I was fighting with her constantly, and dragging myself from bed was a struggle. If it gets worse as madness often does—will she stay with me if I can’t bother to dress or clean myself? Will anyone? I’ve lost too many people already, and I think it would kill me to lose her while loving her so deeply. Another colleague of mine has a similar story and it did not go well for her either. And if you add to that the fits of panic, the nervousness, the blinding anger that’s ruined me too often to count, I have to think that this might not be the best path forwards. Endlessly rescuing each other does not a relationship make.
If we stopped seeing each other I don’t know what would change.
It would soften the blow. That’s one thing. But we’ve known each other so long that I think our friendship might survive a break up, handled correctly, and I wonder if maybe that’s the best we can hope for: wounding each other in the least terrible way possible. We were mates first and we could become them again, and we might even still shag and do all the couple-like things we do now without all that pressure.
And, being honest, while the thing we call ourselves changed a year ago, the ways we act around each other really hasn’t—it was as though we’d reshelved the book of us from friendship to romance even though the contents of the books, several volumes long, remained unchanged. But you can fight with friends in a manner that’s less severe and enduring than the way you fight with a lover, even if you love them. I’ve fought with James often enough to know that. I certainly love him, and it might be in the same way I love her, even if the way I show it is different for all the obvious reasons.
Which, in writing that, I suppose requires some more explanation, but I don’t even know where to begin with that mess. I don’t even know how you’ll react to this. I suppose I have to write it, however, because I’d lose you either way whether I’m honest or not.
This girl that I’m seeing isn’t much of a girl, Andi. She’s not much of a boy, either, and I think that’s hilarious because I’m too much of both, and that too terrifies me because I don’t know if she sees me that way. Not truly. When you’ve known someone so long, I have to wonder if you can really appreciate that kind of change. That revelation. I certainly don’t know if I appreciate it—I don’t even know what it means for me, being honest. One of my dear friends was in vaguely the same carriage as me long, long ago, but if we’re going to continue being honest, she’s little help.
I think it’s easier when you’re young. My friend was young when she figured it all out—she never had to be a boy, not really, which was nice for her, I suppose, but at this point I can’t quite tell if I wish I hadn’t been one or if I only wish I hadn’t been forced to put masculinity and femininity into competition, because now I don’t know, truly, what they mean except in mutual opposition to one another. It’s as though I have to stretch myself to touch both ends, to see how far they go, and it’s profoundly unsettling because I keep stretching and stretching and I never find the end, but I am finding out just how much space my body could take up in the space between if it were allowed to do so.
Maybe we aren’t supposed to talk about it, but I love the idea of being a bearded lady, Andi. My body hair does not shock or horrify me. Being recognised as a man in a dress isn’t ideal, but the idea of walking down the streets of London and being unrecognisable as anything other than a woman also makes me sick—I’d have gone from one end to the other and still be putting on a show for everyone else. Maybe it’s the madness, but I think that I want to be that freakshow. I never want to be recognisable as anything other than me.
Yet I get panicky, sweaty, palms clammy and all that jazz whenever I’m about to leave for a function in a dress or skirt or whatever else. My make-up skills are nonexistent. My wardrobe is a shambles. Nothing fits and it’s profoundly embarrassing because I keep waiting for her above all others to see me for the fraud-rebel that I am and then laugh.
She talks a lot about politics, this not-boy not-girl I’m seeing. One thing that comes up often is this thing she calls being reactionary, when everything that you do doesn’t have a core to it and instead is just a response to something someone else is saying or doing, and I wonder maybe if that’s me.
Fuck it. I think that’s certainly me.
And then I think, ‘Well, isn’t that what this is? You only like the dresses and heels and make-up and leghair &c. &c. because you’ve been told it’s something you oughtn’t do; the reason you’re seeing a not-boy not-girl despite fancying both birds and blokes is because it’s rebellious; if it were allowed, acceptable, you’d be uninterested in this whole thing. You’d find it boring.’ It’s been my defining characteristic for a while, from the muggle music to the posters to everything I did with James in school. And she’s brilliant, so she must see that about me—and what, then, must she think about me?
I don’t think this is a phase.
That’s not true. It’s a phase, but one of many. It’s a series of contiguous phases. I’m metamorphosing, constantly, from caterpillar to butterfly to cockroach to whatever’s coming next, and maybe that’s the heart of it. Maybe I want to be the moon.
I’m envious of her, your Dora. It’s an absolutely barking thing to write, obviously, and she’s a child, barely a person, but I think I’d do nearly anything to be a Metamorphmagus like her. Even knowing how hard her life will be for it, I think it’d be nice beyond all the polymorphic bells and transfigurative whistles to have the chance to slip out of your own skin when the world becomes too much.
Like water in motion. It means you might never be still, never be a pond, but you can be every kind of river, the rain, the ocean, clouds, blood, and yes even piss. Certainly there’s times where I’d rather be piss for a week than Sirius O. Black, whomever that is, for but a minute longer.
Staying still with someone so early in this kind of becoming—and I don’t know if I’ll ever not be becoming, being honest—it’s not just a commitment, it’s an anchor, because she’s not the same as I am. She likes boys. Blokes. People who are something close to or at least adjacent to that, and I don’t know if I can limit myself as such, amputate an entire area of becoming just because I’m afraid she might not be attracted to me without those parts. What if I wanted only to be a girl? What if I wanted to be neither, nothing? Something more than any of it? Would she still love me? Would I be changing her against her will, because she might change herself just to still love me, and then be unhappy herself? Does any of this really matter, or am I truly afraid because I think I might be enough for her, but she mightn’t be enough for me?
You said something to me a few Christmases ago that I barely remember because I’d been gifted an inordinate amount of mulled wine, but as I recall it had to do with you and your infuriatingly perfect husband. You said that he was the only person you’d known who you would change for, not because you wanted him to like you, but because you felt he made you want to be a better person.
I don’t know if that’s true with her. I think we might want to be better for each other but I think we make each other worse, at least right now, because the world is a fucking mess, isn’t it, and while that’s not our fault it is our reality.
But we’re allowed to want bad things, aren’t we? Can’t I have a bad relationship where we drag each other down into some sort of dark, timeless nest? What’s the point of being young if I have to know with any amount of certainty where I’ll end up in five or ten or thirty year’s time? Aren’t I allowed to want to be reactionary in my gender or whatever, even though I know it’s bad to not base that sort of thing out of something more solid, and why aren’t I allowed to be that at my core: someone who never wants to be at home with the status quo?
What am I supposed to do, Andi?
I know you can’t tell me whether I’m supposed to a bloke or a bird or both or neither, who or how many people I’m supposed to date. And I know your first instinct is going to be to tell me to break up with her, him, them, but I truly want the advice that the old you would’ve given, not this new you that’s all healthy and all this other bollocks. I’m not asking for the sage wisdom of my old (take that!) and learnèd cousin, I’m asking the advice of the girl who used to get drunk and play me muggle records. Tell me what Andi would do, fresh out of Hogwarts, if she were in my position—the Andi that wasn’t ready for responsibility and did what was best for her even if I didn’t appreciate it at the time. Give me that advice.
And give my love to Dora and Ted (in that order). You have to tell me everything that’s happened with them since the holidays. Normality would be appreciated.
While I know it’s probably not possible because of everything, I’d nevertheless love to meet you for tea and/or wine or something and talk about all this in person. At the very least I couldn’t weasel my way out of the conversation as I have this letter about a dozen times.
XOXO STOP
LOVE YOUR SIRIUS STOP
P.S. I HOPE YOU'VE BEEN KEEPING UP WITH YOUR MUGGLE RECORDS STOP WE ARE IN A NEW ERA OF MUSIC ANDI STOP AND IT IS GOOD, VERY VERY VERY GOOD, CANNOT WAIT TO SEE WHAT THEY COME UP WITH NEXT STOP
EUPHEMIA POTTER
10 MARCH 1980
DEAR MUM,
Sorry I haven’t written to you in a long moment. Things are a proper mess and I’ve been pulling double duty to keep our newest intakes out of trouble while they learn the ropes. Never a dull moment, as they say.
I really, really, really very much wish I could deliver this news in person, but something’s come up and it looks as though I won’t be able to visit for another few weeks, so I thought it best you hear it from me before anyone else.
We’re pregnant!
Lily and I, that is. The expression looks significantly odder written down than said aloud.
Regardless of how you may be feeling, I want you to know that both Lily and I are overjoyed at the idea of having a child, even in our hard times. There’s no regrets on our part: we’ve known a long while now and are definitely keeping it/her/him/them, Merlin forbid it’s twins. I hope that you’ll love our baby just as much as we will. It would mean the world over to me to have your proper blessing, and you should expect Lily to write to you on that as well.
You and dad always were my biggest supporters so I’m writing under the presumption that, even if you’re not entirely pleased with the news given our young age and such, you’ll join us in being cautiously happy. I’m also hoping you’ll give me a bit more support, mum, because while I really am tickled, I’ve a lot on my mind as well.
First and foremost: the wedding.
Of course we’re going to have one! I know that eloping is as à la mode, as I hear the French would say, but Lily and I have given up so much already and we want a proper do. The date is going to be fuzzy—we want it ideally before the baby’s due, but work and school are keeping us devilishly busy—however we intend to give as much notice as possible.
It won’t be the fanciest affair. We’ll keep it swish and hush-hush.
You and dad always threw the best parties, so I’m hoping you’ll help us plan if you’re feeling up to it. Simple things: aesthetics, music, and a guest list that hopefully won’t turn the whole thing into a brawl, even if Lily would undoubtedly come out on top. We’ve been thinking somewhere open and natural, both tame and away from prying eyes. Thoughts?
Beyond the wedding stress, I’m worried about, well, me myself and I. I love the idea of starting a family with her and obviously I love her more than a dragon loves gold, but I am only twenty for Merlin’s sake and know next to nothing about being a father. You and dad set the bar exceptionally high, mum, and I’m terrified I’ll undershoot it horrifically.
Absolutely convinced I’ll end up in a subterranean cavern, if I’m to be honest.
I miss him a lot. There’s so much I wish we’d talked about, but more than anything, I wish he’d have been around to see it all happen. Just feels wrong, us all together without him.
That’s a regret I do have: things feel like they’re coming apart at the seams. Part of the reason I haven’t been writing as much is that all my other family—Sirius, Pete, Marls, Frank and Alice, even Remus after all these years—we’re all being pulled away from one another just when I need them the most and when they need me, and I can’t in good conscience dump all of my troubles on you, mum, and even less so during your recovery.
I know you always said that I shouldn’t stew in things on my own, however I think that part of growing up might be learning to face some of ‘it’ on your own, even if it’s horrid and scarring and leaves you without a proper sense of direction.
Hopefully I’m wrong.
I’ll make an effort to write more, to you and to the others, and we’ll see if we can’t simply shower this baby (these babies?) with enough love to block out all the bad. I think we’d all wished we’d grown up in a brighter, kinder world.
Please please let me know if you need absolutely anything at the house, mum. Anything at all, and I promise me or Lily will be over faster than you can say Gorgon’s Gordian Knot. And give all my love to Hagrid when he next visits: I haven’t seen him in nearly three months!
LOVE,
YOUR JAMES
LILY EVANS
21 MARCH 1980
LILS,
How.
Dare.
You.
It is unforgiveable that you landed out-of-wedlock pregnant and began planning a secret wedding without telling me. For months. I should scarcely think we’re friends at all, as this is exactly the chaos I’m known for injecting myself into. Merlin, Lils, did I do something to offend your (tarnished, tarnished) honour?
Of course I’ll be your maid of honour, you giant sopping ladybird you. And I will simply kill anyone who tries to fight me for the position. The news scars will be well worthwhile.
I’ve already tapped Alice as my subordinate and will likely take a few further recruits to make sure everything goes as smooth as a Kelpie’s puddle. Certainly I’ll field all others by you first. In fact, I have one unorthodox suggestion already.
How do you feel about pulling one over on Potter and recruiting Black as one of your bridesmaids? I hear he’s swish in a dress and it lowers the likelihood of disaster by several magnitudes if we have him under our control instead of leaving him as an unknown danger.
That being said, it’s a deranged idea I’m sure, even if the look Potter’s face would be worthwhile (and, yes, I will continue to address your fiancé by his surname until he finally proves worthy of your affection).
We’ll put it with the draughts.
As for venue selection, I immediately offer any McKinnon stronghold for all your nuptial needs. Those cottages are impenetrable, and the décor—if I may be so bold—is impeccable. Not a speck of dirt in sight.
Do be sure to send me the guest list in advance such that I may screen them all. As the good man says, Constant vigilance!
We’ll have a hen do, all of us girls, if not before the summer than a ceremonial one as soon as the times permit. Perhaps we can even have another stab at France (the Côte d’Azur this time, none of that Atlantic rubbish) and invite everyone provided they can behave. Your other friends are persistently charming, even if some of them have much growing up yet to do.
Much love to you, your parents, and your sister. Give my begrudging respect to Black when you next encounter his entropy and a neutral stare to Lupin, would you? I have to keep them on their toes if they’re ever to become passable.
And no, do not enquire after my own romantic affairs, soon-to-be Mrs. Potter.
This is scarcely an opportune moment for me to be lusting over someone, no matter how brilliant their legs or mind. Never mind that she’s still heartbroken over her old flame (don’t get me started) and I scarcely know if she’s a member of the Lavender Menace. Just my good fortune.
GOOD LUCK,
M.
PETUNIA DURSLEY (NÉE EVANS)
13 APRIL 1980
DEAR PET,
I’ll keep this letter short because I know you won’t bother with a long one.
They’re dying, Pet. Not just sick. Dying. They’re going to die in that stupid hospital of yours, and nothing is going to save them. Not there.
I won’t pretend and say I know for certain that magic can fix them, Pet. It has its limits. Healing is more art than science in my world, but I am begging you with every fibre of my being: if you care for them, if you really care, then please, Pet, let me try and help them. I don’t want to bury them before I’m even married.
I’m breaking a lot of rules trying to do this. You could get me in a lot of trouble just by showing this letter to anyone. What I’m about to tell you is terribly illegal in our world, and I hope that means something to you—that I would go so far just for a shot at helping them.
There isn’t such a thing as ‘light’ or ‘dark’ magic in my world. Not scientifically. It’s just like your science or your maths. Numbers can be used for any manner of thing as you well know, good or bad, so while my research might be called ‘dark ‘by some, the truth is I’m taking bad numbers and putting them towards good ends: like making sense of sexist statistics in a way that shows they’ve been manipulated towards sexist ends.
If you’ve ever trusted me, Pet, please tell me you’ll at least let me try.
After that, you can have anything you like. I’ll never bother you again. I’ll vanish from your life and theirs. I could even make them forget they ever had another daughter to begin with, if that’s what you truly want.
Please, Pet. I can’t see them die and do nothing.
Neither, I hope, can you.
LILY
PASCALLE DU PONT
03 MAY 1980
MS. DU PONT,
On the subject of your previous letter, I’m sorry to say that a series of comical and unfortunate errors resulted in its total and complete incineration before I could be fully apprised of its contents. How dreadful!
I had only the time to read your compliments as to my academic scholarship and, in the interest of reciprocity, I looked into your own singular publication and found it intriguing. However, if you were writing to ask after me as an academic advisor, I must regretfully reply that I cannot, as other matters consume my time. In place of that, I offer this instead:
While it is to my knowledge utterly impossible to break any of the many Bonds, Vows, and Seals that our most ancient minds have forged over the centuries, I cannot imagine a world where such knowledge, if inexplicably possible, is commonplace, as it would force the production of a new Bond, Vow, or Seal to replace its pregnable predecessor.
Perhaps we could say, then, that if someone hypothetically were able to free themselves from one such snare, they would certainly never communicate such a fact in written form, even if such a thing is, again, plainly impossible. A witch or wizard capable of breaking these Bonds, Vows, or Seals would arguably be of such high calibre that it is difficult to imagine them landing in such a predicament in the first place.
But perhaps we might look at it another way: perhaps we might say that the only witches and wizards who ought to have such knowledge, impossible as it might be to obtain, are the ones who needn’t have it taught to them at all.
Adversity often inspires genius; per aspera ad astra, I believe the saying goes.
I hope this was illuminating, Ms. du Pont, even if I fear I haven’t at all answered your letter as you may have hoped. I’m afraid the answers you seek lie outside any textbook or letter if indeed they exist at all.
SINCERELY,
D. MEADOWES,
ORDER OF MERLIN, THIRD CLASS
MARY MACDONALD
23 JUNE 1980
MARE,
It’s disconcerting the way the seal works, I agree. James walked in on me writing the last letter and asked how I’d charmed my quill to conceal the ink—I think he’d like for me to teach him. It feels horrid to keep all of this from him even if I’ve genuinely no choice in the matter.
Continuing from where we left off:
Ahmed’s theorising on the Kissed isn’t limited to a few treatises, as we discovered. I wish Remus were here to cast that Indexing Charm—I still don’t know how he manages it, that mess oughtn’t work with how many random bits and pieces have been thrown together—because parsing the useful from the incidental in two-thousand-and-something pages this close to term is a complete nightmare.
My feet, Mary. My poor swollen feet.
Pray for them.
For example, a section on the history of Ekrizdis and a niche coastal cult circa C15th contains some surprisingly-important information and sketches: the Kissed, if you take Ahmed’s interpretation as correct, which is a big ‘if’, might’ve occupied multiple roles in the cult’s society as priests and leaders as well as sacrifices.
Ahmed writes that the Cult of Ekrizdis as she calls it offered up victims—usually young witches, which about figures—to the Dementors in exchange for either protection or being spared from having their whole society obliterated. There’s a bit in the margin that reads ‘PATRONUS?’, and I think we can take that as Ahmed intending to develop a section on why the cult didn’t or couldn’t use the charm to fend off Dementors. As she never finished that section, however, we’re left to speculate.
I’ve listed some possible theories here:
- The number of Dementors in our world is unstable, and as a result in the fifteenth century there were too many on the coast for a few powerful witches or wizards to consistently fight them off;
- Witches and wizards were worse at magic more generally in the fifteenth century than they are today, or the cult was reticent to train people within the cult because they were a cult;
- The cult leaders could cast a Patronus, but concealed that fact from the cult in order to use the Dementors as a means of control; or
- Something else at the time prevented the use of the Patronus Charm (e.g. Trace-level spell) but went historically undocumented.
I like #3 the best. It fits with what we know about cult behaviour, generally speaking.
Further on, Ahmed notes that there’s some inconsistencies in the surviving pictographic accounts of the coast cults. Ekrizdis himself doesn’t feature in any of the pictographs, for example; often they’re just horrid renditions of women being Kissed. More importantly are the cases where the Kiss doesn’t go off as expected: some of the witches, again, if Ahmed’s interpretation is correct, emerge from death’s door fundamentally altered in a manner somewhat consistent with our Kissed today.
Acting as leaders and priestesses, however, these Kissed witches apparently display autonomy. I can’t imagine that pleased the cult, but without the ability to harm them with magic and given, from what we’ve seen, that the Kissed possess a limited ability to direct or herd Dementors, the cult likely didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. The relative rarity of priestess depiction also suggests it happened so infrequently the cult probably didn’t have to deal with them often.
Whatever makes a Kiss go wrong—Ahmed writes that it could be a ‘partial’ Kiss, and more on that later, though it could equally be some random property of the witch or wizard Kissed—it’s clear that there’s a line from:
- The cult, to
- Ekrizdis, to
- Azkaban, to
- the Ministry.
If indeed the Kissed are only ever ‘produced’ at Azkaban, then they must’ve found the tools to do so in the fortress when they first explored it. Ahmed even speculates that the Ministry might lack the means to reproduce such tools—why else choose a location so inconvenient when flying the Kissed about is a bleeding chore?
From there, the history is unrelated going forwards, but if we skip to a section on the fundamentals of the Kissed, she at least confirms a lot of the groundwork assumptions we’ve made already or attempted to dismiss.
Fundament #1: A ‘full’ Kiss, when performed on a witch or wizard, spawns another Dementor with that witch or wizard’s death.
Grim. Horrifying. That Dementors beget more Dementors is another nightmare I didn’t need.
Fundament #2: A Kissed fully inhibits a spell or enchantment directed at it, ongoing or not, and displaces effects sustained by magic (e.g. magic flame or illusions), but this doesn’t render them immune to, for example, levitating something heavy overtop them and leaving go. The effect according to Ahmed is very narrow yet radiates from them enough, her words, that moving them about is somewhat difficult (Thestrals yes; broomsticks right out).
I hate this next bit. I really do. I don’t find it convincing at all, so know that I am grimacing all the while I’m writing, and not because my feet and neck ache.
Fundament #3: That Dementors attack the SOUL is not some archaic misnomer.
Who’d have taken Ahmed for a true believer?
Now, don’t get me wrong, Mare, this is as gross and unscientific to me as it is to you, but if we drop the theological core to it—replace SOUL with CONSCIOUSNESS or WILL or even ESSENCE—we can grit our teeth and get through to the important bit. If maybe Dementors really do attack the SOUL/WILL/CONSCIOUSNESS/ESSENCE and Descartes was apparently correct in there being some true mind/body dualism, then perhaps that’s why the Kissed act like automatons but can’t be ‘healed’ of the damage done to them: some fundamental core of their being that touches magic has been wholly severed, and only the body remains, animate if unguided as it might be.
Except you’re brilliant, Mare, so I know you’re thinking the same thing as I am: that implies that muggles don’t have a SOUL/WILL/CONSCIOUSNESS/ESSENCE seeing as they apparently can’t become Kissed, though Dementors can still Kiss them, although Ahmed hasn’t explicitly ruled that out either.
I’ve been thinking on the last bit a long time in conjunction with some other research of my own—a long story, don’t ask—and have come up with some ideas.
- Witches and wizards come into existence with a SOUL/ETC. that is somehow ‘separated’ from their body while muggles have theirs intertwined;
- The SOUL is just our connection with magic itself, and we can’t function autonomously without it for some reason even if it’s not life-sustaining;
- There’s a variety of possible SOULS distributed at random and Dementors do different things to different ones when they try and Kiss them; or
- Something else entirely I haven’t yet thought of.
Suffice it to say that this is going to take all of our heads put together to get a handle on.
I can’t imagine what this is like for you right now, Mare, but we’ve got to push onwards. We all know how frustrating research can be. For all we know, I’ll have a breakthrough tomorrow, and for all we know it won’t come for another two or ten years, but in either case we only get somewhere if we keep going. It’s too late to pull back now—we’ve a responsibility to see this through. I believe that now.
Write to me when you can. I miss you; I worry; and I’m going stir-crazy without all of you to keep me on my toes. Once and forever a Head Girl, apparently.
LOVE,
LILY
P.S. ARE YOU SURE YOU’RE DOING ALL RIGHT? YOUR LAST LETTER WAS A LITTLE ERRATIC IF I’M NOT READING TOO DEEPLY INTO THINGS THAT AREN’T THERE.
(Undated note attached to a tree in the Outer Hebrides , affixed via Permanent Sticking Charm.)
F,
POSSIBLY UNTRUSTWORTHY SOURCE SLIPPED US A LINE:
WOLVES. WALES. CAMBRIAN MOUNTAINS.
IF YOU WANT MORE YOU KNOW WHERE TO FIND ME. KNOW YOU'RE INTERESTED.
I HELD MY PART OF THE DEAL SO YOU HOLD YOURS.
SQUIB NETWORK, 1 KISSED, NO QUESTIONS ASKED.
I KEEP OUT OF YOUR AFFAIRS SO YOU KEEP OUT OF MINE. OTHERWISE YOU GET NOTHING.
RAB
SIRIUS BLACK
30 JULY 1980
HI SIRIUS,
I wanted to check that you were all right. You were acting sort of strange last week and you said you’d ring me, which I understand may have been a joke(?), but I’m a bit of a worrier as you know and so I thought it best to check in on you. You haven’t got into Remus’s stash again, have you?
I’d really like to see you again if everything is well! I’ve been sketching like mad the past few weeks now that I’m free of tutoring. Thought your ink could use some touch ups (and maybe that you could do me; the only places I’ve left for inkspells are hard to reach on my lonesome).
Maybe we could make a night of it? Grab a few pints? And while I’d be more than happy if you wanted Remus along, I’d be just as chuffed if it was us two.
Let me know, yeah?
And if you are poorly, I hope you feel better! Ring me if you need anything. My nan makes the most phenomenal stews.
NATE
The Daily Prophet, 03 August 1980
‘NOT GUILTY,’ SNYDE REMARKS
ST. MUNGO'S—Magical Britain was shocked today when Aurors arrived on the scene at St. Mungo’s Hospital to arrest controversial Magical Law critic Malodora Snyde and her husband after examination revealed a number of dark enchantments and necromantic affectations upon Mr. Snyde’s body. According to sources, both Snydes are cooperating with Aurors and will be permitted to remain in St. Mungo’s pending trial under strict guard.
Previously, Snyde made headlines after reporting her own husband missing in early January, claiming that ‘he had not returned home after a two-week trip’ and that the disappearance was uncharacteristic.
Yesterday morning, however, witnesses claim Snyde Apparated to St. Mungo’s with her husband unconscious and in critical condition. One anonymous medi-witch said the following:
“Oh, aye, the stench was dreadful. Like a ruptured Bubotuber,” she explained. “At first we thought someone had had a brewing accident, but it was coming from him.”
The medi-witch described his condition as ‘extensive living putrefaction’ localised in the arm and chest and went on to confirm that such spells could only be the work of highly illegal necromancy.
The Department of Magical Law Enforcement (DMLE) stated that they have both Snydes’ wands in custody and awaiting examination.
“This should serve as a strict reminder that the law applies equally to all of us, regardless of station,” said a DMLE spokeswitch yesterday evening. “While we cannot comment on an ongoing investigation, we at the DMLE would like to emphasise that this kind of foul and evil magic is illegal, dangerous, and will only afford you a one-way trip to Azkaban if proven in trial.”
The Snyde family is not the only one embroiled in the dramatics of missing persons and uncharacteristic crimes afflicting Minchum’s Ministry: many will recall that earlier this year on the 28th of February, twenty-eight half-bloods returned from the blue, some having been listed as missing or presumed dead as early as 1970.
Internal documents verified by the Prophet show that, of the twenty-eight, four remain as indefinite wards of the Ministry, while a further seventeen have had at least one encounter with DMLE agents due to criminal behaviour or other lawlessness. The documents detail their charges as ranging from theft, uttering threats, and unlicensed spellcasting to arson, assault, murder, failing to register as a werewolf, and the trafficking of dark artefacts. In one case, a half-blood was killed during a conflict at Gringotts Bank when he attempted to gain entry to a secure vault without authorisation.
Many of the returned twenty-eight are now awaiting trial for their respective crimes. The new fast-tracking initiative for serious offenses against the state, however, has made such trials a foregone conclusion—or so said the now-accused Snyde last week in a Wizards with Commonsense Concerns Association (WCCA) newsletter, copied below.
“If these documents are indeed real, I fear that, for many of the accused, their fate will be similar: so-called ‘rehabilitation’ by way of the Dementor’s Kiss,” wrote Snyde in the letter. “The erosion of our personal liberties and right to a fair trial under Minchum’s reign should shake even the most resolute of us to our core. Who next will suffer for the crime of another?”
Snyde pointed out that, with no public record for ‘urgent’ trials, the Ministry will have ‘carte blanche’ to arrest and imprison in Azkaban nearly anyone in Britain with no avenue of recourse. She went on to write that some might vanish without notice and never be heard from again—a chilling comment given the growing number of disappearances in our times, and chilling further given Snyde’s own criminal circumstances now.
Snyde’s husband is not the only prominent figure to be lost in recent months: February saw the high-profile murder of Damocles Belby, esteemed potioneer, and Ireland mourned the vanishing of Xavier Flint, a hopeful new player for the Kenmare Kestrels.
In July came the sudden loss of Stephanie Podmore, the first Squib coach to the Holyhead Harpies, after her broom malfunctioned under suspicious circumstances.
Now, in the aftermath, many are asking whether October will bring another attack, following last year’s disappearances of many Hogsmeade residents during a flagrant attack on Britain’s biggest magical settlement and a round of arson and vandalism against several businesses the year prior during the winter holidays.
REGULUS ARCTURUS BLACK II
27 AUGUST 1980
REGULUS,
Your absence is concerning and irksome. You are no less than five days late to return, and the punishment for this unacceptable transgression will be severe. Return at once. Do not think that your father’s passing entitles you to such childish and impertinent behaviour.
You are the last scion of the House of Black. Do not fail us.
WALBURGA V. BLACK
Notes:
Remus and Sirius will return in Book III.
The next chapter, Mentoring, will be posted at 00:01 AM (or thereabouts) on 15 August, a Friday.
Chapter 27: Mentoring
Chapter Text
In the now nine years following his first encounter with Severus Snape, Remus thought often about how much could be decided by one seemingly small moment such as choosing which train compartment to sit in or what to buy from the snacks trolley with your limited pocketmoney.
Remus had a pet theory that the Hogwarts Express was purposeful in how cramped it could become despite being a magical train for a magical school. By forcing students into compartments with another, you necessarily forced them to socialise or at least attempt it, which, being eleven and something of a terrible mother’s boy with no friend that existed outside a book, little Remus had hated at the time. Big Remus hated it sometimes still.
Severus Snape had not, unfortunately, occupied his current role of fascistic supervillain when he was a mere child. Sure, he was abrasive, sarcastic, and above all smarmy when it came to ingratiating himself with the round-faced red-haired girl sat opposite him on those too-big blue seats of the train, but Remus hadn’t set eyes upon Severus’s dark hair or know-it-all smirk and thought, “Oh, this greasy inkstain masquerading as a boy will ruin my life thrice over, most assuredly.”
Part of that was because Remus didn’t yet speak like a swot despite all the reading, but the other part was that—and, being clear, Remus would take this secret to the fucking grave—he’d been envious of Severus’s immediate self-assurance and the way he seemed too close to Lily. Here was a boy, utterly alone and without many friends, but unlike Remus it did not disquiet him. The ill-fitting robes and prepubescent skin conditions did not disquiet him. They were armour. A disguise to keep people underestimating you.
He hadn’t even been cruel, per se.
Little Remus chose their compartment over the one opposite them, figuring that a quiet boy and girl were preferable to the three shrieking boys already a hair’s breadth from throwing punches. Both Lily and Severus eyed him warily, given his height and purportedly wild eyes, but they made no comment, actually, until the snackwitch rolled by with her spilling-over trolley of pastel-coloured glazed sweets and savoury, sweating pastries, and until Remus was paralyzed by the selection on offer.
“Get the sugar quills,” offered Lily, beaming at him with the first of what would be a thousand bright smiles. “You’ll love them in lessons if you’ve a sweet tooth to you.”
“No,” said Severus. He perked up only because Lily had acknowledged Remus’s existence and his analytic eyes flitted over the overstuffed trolley. “The droobles are the best value,” he explained, though Remus didn’t much appreciate the implication that he needed value despite it being true. “They take weeks to lose their flavour. One pack lasts a term.”
The door across them slid open with a loud bang followed by mischievous giggling. A boy—James, the only boy among them who would become a man, really—eyed little Remus with a curious expression from behind his pair of round-rimmed glasses.
“Pardon me, mate,” he said. “Were you still intending to buy something? I could wait.”
“He’s getting the sugar quills.”
“He’s purchasing the droobles.”
James shrugged at him. “Why not get both?”
“Not everyone has the money for both,” growled Severus behind him. “Nor the shameless stomach.” He’d been eleven, of course, so he likely hadn’t said the word ‘nor,’ but memory was an imperfect thing. Still Severus had always been—how to phrase it? Young in limbs, in judgement old.
“Problem solved, then,” said James with another shrug. He handed over a handful of coin to the snackwitch and, grinning, said, “That should cover it, I should hope, and they can have whatever they like as well.”
“We don’t need your charity,” said Severus, sharp.
“Sev…”
“We don’t,” he repeated, slumping back into his seat. “It’s pathetic. He thinks he’s allowed to purchase friends—as though we’re toys for his enjoyment. I refuse on principle.”
“That’s mean, Severus.”
“Suit yourself,” replied James. He looked up at the snackwitch, who, like Remus, was caught in the sudden no-man’s-land that emerged between warring children and was utterly unsure of what to do. “They can have whatever they like,” he said, gesturing at Remus and Lily, “but he’s not included.”
“I take it back. He’s right about you—I don’t want any,” said Lily. She stuck out her round chin, defiant. “Not if he can’t. And the same goes for—”
“I’ll take the droobles and the pack of quills,” said Remus.
“Smart man,” said James. “Come on into our parlour, would you? We’ve business to discuss.”
Perhaps it reflected poorly upon him, but he’d only been a child, after all.
Regardless, the truth however was that neither choosing his seat nor his sweets had been a fateful moment. Fate was pernicious, persistent, pernickety, and a total bloody pain, actually, and her twin happenstance had a laugh like a fucking hyena on speed, but they were an incremental lot. A series of overlapping small apocalypses. Even if you granted that the droobles and quills set the boulder rolling and that the effort to stop it might’ve been Sisyphean, but Remus would never know, given he’d driven it forwards at nearly every possible opportunity thereafter. What was past was prologue; every why had a wherefore, et cetera et cetera. By second year Remus was the anachronistically-named Marauders’ go-to for distracting Lily and therefore Severus in Potions class, letting James and Sirius run with wild and dangerous abandon over their annoyingly-perfect potions, sometimes to hospitalising effect; by third, he’d broken Severus’s nose twice, jaw once, and knocked him down a flight of stairs with a well-placed kick, finally earning detentions in his own right; by fifth came the wargames; and after that, well.
You could only find novel ways to lock a bloke in a train lavatory so many times before fate was a distant spectator disappearing over the rolling Scottish hills and you realised that the one holding those overflowing bogwater reins was no one but yourself.
Yourself and your pathetic pining crush on an ex-aristocrat rebel rebel, to be exact.
Which meant the poetry of the situation was once again Remus’s own doing.
It figured.
“You’re sure it was him?” whispered Remus, attempting to unjam his elbow from Sirius’s armpit and failing quite bad at it. They’d both have bruises. “You’ve made plenty of enemies with your strict flying demeanour, inasmuch as I’ve heard.”
“Yeah, and the bloody Book Boggart is a saint,” replied Sirius. He crouched, squashing Remus up against the hopefully-clean wall tiling while his cheek pressed to the outside of Remus’s thigh, and squinted with a lopsided frown at the doorhandle. Clad in a pair of violently red trousers of curiously shiny, Glam-rock material tied off with a sash in place of belt that he’d matched to a simple white shirt and equally-red tie (worn loose), Remus wasn’t particularly bothered to be stuck in the loo with him. In a minute, he’d likely be pressing something much firmer against Sirius’s cheek. Lady Padfoot had entered his Mercury era.
“Wish I had my knife,” added Sirius, unaware—probably—of how Remus was staring down at him.
“Mm. Why don’t you? And where’s this fabled Goblin one you’ve been so secretive about?”
“Where was I to put it, Moony?” he muttered. Sniffed. “Your fucking kidneys?”
“Your boot.”
“I’m not wearing boots.”
“The boots you ought’ve worn, like.”
“That’s rich coming from you, yeah?” replied Sirius, arching a dark brow at him. His eyes were reddened. In hindsight, commandeering the loo for a cheeky smoke hadn’t been the wisest idea, and the haze had gone from pleasantly groovy to choking at all the poor tortured bronchioles of his lungs. Remus felt, let alone saw, the slight twitching rise of his slim bony shoulders as Sirius stifled a snicker. He poked at Remus’s calloused bare feet.
“Leave off.”
“Abhorrent. Revolting. Who doesn’t wear shoes in the lav?”
“Let’s just blow this thing off its hinges,” replied Remus with a huff. There was a vibrational hum to the tile with which his own cheek was becoming well-acquainted—that unerring mechanical heart to the Hogwarts Express still beat on. “Christ knows we can manage that much.”
“Ah, yeah, that ought to go over well with the students, I think.” Sirius snorted and turned his dried-out grey eyes at the lock and they did the most curious thing. His eyelids, a hooded affair on the best days, vanished into his sockets only a moment as he strained to peer at the doorhandle, demanding it reveal its secrets to them, before rapidly reappearing because Sirius was not the kind of person who could keep his facial muscles tensed on a good day, let alone when he was stoned. “Could you imagine?” continued Sirius, wry. He padded at the door with his flat palm like a dog. “Some poor seventh year, about to brick it or lose their lunch, only to find there’s no door on the lav? That’s like—ah, what’s the name of that book you were telling me about again? The one about the mother.”
“Let’s not go there.”
“No, that wasn’t it.”
“Budge away from the door, would you?”
“Moony—”
There was an untamed beauty to wandless magic, a kind of chaotic and desirous intent inherently therewithin that reminded Remus of Sirius and, perhaps more so, of most magical creatures. Never at Hogwarts had they been taught a Blow a Door Off Its Hinges Charm. Even with the Blasting Curses and Exploding Charms and all the other sundry thaumaturgical building blocks from which he might form some Promethean spell to accomplish this task, it would’ve taken him days to piece it together and untold weeks to perfect the casting. That was the problem with academic magic: it took a long time. Sure, it might’ve been elegant, provided the spell didn’t decorate the hopefully-clean tile of the lavatory with all of Remus and Sirius’s squidgy inside bits, but it would at its core be a needlessly-complex process and result in a nothing-spell that Remus might use twice again in his lifetime while the knowledge of its making occupied a disproportionate amount of his brain. It was inefficient. Crude in a different way.
That, and it was much, much easier to press his ear to the door—he didn’t want to kill anyone, for Christ’s sake, and murder on a train was de trop—follow up by flattening his palm against it, and simply think the thought.
To its credit, the lock groaned and held fast even as the remainder of the door splintered and impacted with a deafening thunk against the train wall opposite it, earning several prepubescent shrieks from nearby compartments. The stench of spliff wafted out ahead of them like a parade of skunks. Remus stifled his own laughter long enough to mend the door—now, reversing entropy in a small localised area and a smaller recent timeframe, that was a spell worth committing to memory—while Sirius shot cheeky grins at all those poking their heads out from behind their foggy glass doors and pressed an upturned finger to his narrow lips. Tapped his nose with a shiny, bitten-down black nail. Very hush-hush, like.
For the first time in a long, long while, Remus felt he might be decent at magic—that he might be magic, actually, in the way that decent witches and wizards and neither-of-the-aboves were. Sorcery was as much a part of them as their fingers and toes and other dangly bits. Sure, tools helped in some circumstances, but they did not need a tool to access their own fingers/toes/etc., and they certainly did not need one to perform basic magic. That came like breathing. All those aforementioned underlying principles were in his brain, after all, drilled into him by almost ten years of something hopefully approaching Wissenschaft, floating free and waiting to be reflexively rearranged, even if it meant he couldn’t spell out the grammar. Breath didn’t care if you knew the process of respiratory gas exchange or the diaphragmatic whatever that did the, well, contraction thing to inflate and deflate your lungs. Breath was breath.
Remus rather liked the idea of breathing magic, though for the moment he’d settle for fresh air.
***
Remus knew that he and Sirius were engaging in textbook bad behaviour. All of it was immature, yes, juvenile beyond belief and utterly unbecoming of an upper-form postgraduate set to enter the professional-cum-adult-cum-real world, whatever that meant when you were fighting a War, in less than a year. Yet after so many traumas in such short sequence, everything that didn’t result in your dismemberment, torture, or death became a touch ha-ha funny. A smidgen. Maybe a heap, though that could be the amplifying effect of sweet herbaceous skunk.
More than that—and this was the real ha-ha funny fucking punchline, come to think of it—he and Sirius had stumbled with poor footing through their year as firsties and scrambled somewhat to catch up before Christmas the second, but when the War had swelled like a great crashing tsunami and occupied the forefront of their brains, it was as though all the cognitive barriers and motivational roadblocks interrupting their thesis progress had melted away or otherwise no longer seemed so insurmountable in comparison. That, and Remus hadn’t pissed away three months of his research time in a half-catatonic state.
Amazing, really, what you could get done when ‘doing your thesis’ became the thing to do when you wanted to procrastinate something else. It was absurdist. Comical. Neither had realised until after they stepped late onto the train, almost missing it, in fact, due to their lackadaisical tardiness, that they were both ahead of where they ought be in their respective research.
They were still far from completion, of course: while Remus had one charm to Plot a location and one to turn a map into a moving one, they did not play nice with one another, and even when they could be convinced to temporarily cooperate before losing cohesion, his thesis as a whole was still resisting all the macro-and-microscopic escalations he needed to make it as functional as the Marauder’s map. What made the original map so wonderful was that you could see the castle as a whole when needed and also take a closer look, down to the positions of someone’s feet in a broom cupboard. The Locator couldn’t adjust. It was frustrating and evaded solution, but he had a year to figure it out.
Sirius was similarly having trouble pulling his pieces together in a way that didn’t result in the eventual overheating and death of his motorbike. In private—Sirius would never hear his, his ego was absurdly, comically large already—Remus thought his bike project should’ve landed him in Theory, what with all the incomprehensible moving pieces Sirius was toying about with. Much of it, like the bike itself, flew over Remus’s head where it hadn’t before.
Yet that assortment of comical absurdities grew quick into countless grievances with how the postgraduate program was being run at Hogwarts. Sure, the War and all its Practical Applications forced them through a gruelling eight-month gauntlet of thaumaturgical practice; yes, Remus and Sirius were cribbing off the twice-telephoned research notes of a mad genius witch; and of course, of course they’d had Mary and Lily and the extra-extracurricular drive put upon them by a number of secret projects from those of Socrates to Dumbledore to Regulus, all the while helping each other with their own theses, but the fact remained that this whole research ordeal was not nearly as difficult as everyone had suggested. Even their dreadful socialising at Slughorn’s dos could be salvaged given a few months of concerted effort and some not insignificant smarm.
Why, then, torment all the firsties? It couldn’t be that much fun, could it?
Science dictated there was only one way to find out.
“They’re late,” murmured Sirius.
“We were late,” said Remus.
“You were all late,” said a witch, oh, that one with the fisherman’s cap and dark curls and sort of pale-but-ruddy complexion. What was her name? Something Morley—Margaret, it must’ve been, because someone on the postgraduate board for Hogwarts had a fetish for the letter M. Remus realised he probably ought learn her name, given she and Pascalle du Pont were what remained of the entire Theory department with Lily now withdrawn.
Fieldwork was in a worse position. Though of course Sirius refused to buy into the rumour, word on the train was that Severus Snape had embarked on a prolonged journey into the field for his yet-undisclosed thesis and wouldn’t return until November, leaving Fieldwork without any upper-form mentors whatsoever—in the year they’d be receiving not one but two incoming postgrads, no less.
It was an unenviable position to say the least.
“Mais non,” said Pascalle, side-eyeing Remus from beneath her curtain of braids and a picturesque beret that seemed somewhat out-of-place with her studious sapphire robes. She had an air of irritation and not very much smoke about her, actually, and those two facts may have been interlinked. The postgraduate carriage on the Hogwarts Express was near the head of the train and thus far, far away from any reasonable smoking spots. “We were not all late,” she added.
Jesus, this was a boring conversation. Remus said so aloud.
He flipped through a stack of parchment—transcripts and letters of recommendation and other academic miscellany Remus was certain would be impressive to someone who could be arsed to be bothered to give some fraction of a shit—and squinted down at the list of names. He was having to do that more and more recently, which was disquieting. Your eyesight oughtn’t start giving out at twenty.
“It’s not gonna change,” said Sirius beside him, peeking over his shoulder. The carriage was spacious, even more so than Remus remembered in his incoming year, though there were only five of them instead of ten. Half the odd backless cushioned chairs lined the chestnut wainscotting like stood-up men outside a Soho club. Little round tables dotted the quatrefoil carpet in a wide circle almost akin to a wedding or garden party, though theirs was something of a sad affair. Too empty. Even the catering provided something of a defeated atmosphere: every conspicuously-small breakfast dish was given its own island of tablecloth, inviting all in attendance (four bloody people) to gawk while you extracted a handful of red grapes from a lonely crystal bowl.
“Pardon?” asked Pascalle.
“A surprise returns from the depths of Remus’s past.”
“What the fuck,” said Nathaniel, loud and abrupt and in a manner far too reminiscent of Sirius’s own speech pattern to be comfortable, “does that mean.”
Four head swivelled to watch Nathaniel, seated with all his gangly limbs sprawling over not one but two of the many unoccupied chairs. Once again he’d changed over the summer. Once again, however, he’d done so in ways unexpected and a touch frightening. Whether he was in fact a few inches taller, just short of Remus’s height, actually, and whether that was natural or engineered was as concerning as it was unclear. There was more ink and piercings aplenty to him, the latter of strange and exotic metals that Remus couldn’t quite identify by sight. Part of that was a matter of familiarity: magic metallurgy, as Goblins had demonstrated for centuries if not millennia, allowed for the production of metals and other substances that did not map neatly onto a modern periodic table or any other modes of measurement, actually, and Remus had to wonder with whom exactly Nathaniel was spending all his summers. Quite the niche.
A niche with obvious consequences as, beyond all the runed jewellery and intricate tattoos of dark and colourful pigments, the boy had done something that Remus only picked out by accident when they’d hugged earlier. There was an illusion over his eyes. Just his irises and sclera, in fact, and if you peeked under said illusion as Remus had, you discovered with abject horror and a little begrudging respect that some side-effect of what could only be a Human Transfiguration spell had turned the whole of his eyes a clouded, milky white, though Nathaniel had tattooed tiny characters onto those as well, like an inky morning cereal left out for too long. Apparently it didn’t impede his eyesight.
“What?” said Nathaniel. He swivelled his head back over all of them. “Um, it was an honest question.”
“You’re a terrible influence on him, Padfoot.”
“Oui, we are all proud,” muttered Pascalle. Her eyes raked over Nathaniel’s state of dress. Black, that was it in totality, nothing but fraying black trousers and entropic black shirts all held together by safety pins and other loose bits of metal. She was regarding him with the impressed lip-curled only a French woman equal parts cultured and horny might manage when finally put face-to-nose ring with a decently fit English punk. Remus was certain they were still fucking. The lingering stare gave it away, even as Pascalle peeled away and asked, “What is this surprise?”
Sirius grinned. “You’ll never guess the name of our incoming P.A. postgrad.”
“Oh-là-là. Sa revenante?”
“Severus warned me about you all,” said Margaret beneath her breath and cap, “and I’m beginning to see why. Why they call you ‘3L’ as well.”
Remus tilted back in his chair much to Sirius’s chagrin—he had a foot braced against the table’s edge and been teetering on the brink of disaster while reading for the better part of five minutes—and was about to bite back at her with something to the effect of, What the fuck’s that supposed to mean, Morley? before he bit into his tongue and surveyed the room. Perhaps she had a point. If you knew all the nitty-gritty, all-the-better-to-bury-you-with details, the postgraduate carriage contained one secret camp werewolf with a secret mountain colony and no shoes, one dark disinherited aristocrat whose unhinged mind was held together by ill-fitting dresses, leather jackets, safety pins, and dreams of David Bowie, one chainsmoking French cryptographer who had, being fair, attempted to extort their covert academic conspiracy for personal gain, and one—well, one whatever was going on with Nathaniel North, resident punk artist and sacred geometry-lover.
Remus paused, balancing his chair on two legs, only for the carriage door to fly open with a sharp bang and for him to overturn the whole bloody thing out of surprise. He hit the floor hard.
“Hello?” called a voice.
When Remus righted himself, receiving, mind you, absolutely no aid from Nathaniel who was too far way in his seat or Sirius who’d burst into giggling peals at the sound of him hitting carpet, Remus frowned from the floor at the three tiny, baby-faced children stood just inside the doorway and frowned harder after a moment at the buck-toothed blonde witch of average height ahead of them. There wasn’t a matronly air to her. If anything, she looked put off by their presence—like a pale farmer at the beginning of harvest, one tasked with attending a bunch of city-slickers that also happened to be twelve or maybe fourteen years old.
Perhaps he was exaggerating, but they were painfully young. Three years and great expectations did that to a person.
“Welcome,” said Remus, one knee braced against the floor. He fanned out his hands magnanimously and determined shortly thereafter that it was a mistake. “I’m sure you must all be very overwhelmed—”
“Where are the rest of you?’ said one of the firsties. An aristocratic boy, very English and über-posh, not unlike Sirius if he hadn’t grown out of all—most—of his obnoxious upper-class habits and speech patterns. One of his pockets had the chain of a gold pocketwatch.
“I’m not sure I follow. This is all of us.”
“I told you Severus Snape wasn’t going to be here,” said another firstie. She—oh, Jesus, how was he supposed to keep track of them? She was a brunette and the second to speak, so Remus numbered her Two.
“Thought you were having me on,” said Three. He looked, in truth, like an unfortunate boy who was probably named Boris or Vlad. Tall, broad, slightly too pink. Oldest-looking of them. “I thought he was in the running for Potions Master after Slughorn retires next year? He’s the best wizard in this place, after all.”
“Oi!” shouted Sirius. He rose with such force he overturned his own chair, although as ever Sirius never lost his footing. “Severus fucking Snape is a shite wizard the same way a bloody Crup with paper wings stuck on its back is a shite dragon. Every postgrad in this room,” he began, then cast an uncertain grey glance at Morley and corrected, “Almost every postgrad in this room could cast circles around Snape. Some of us could cast two bloody circles around him, simultaneously and blindfolded, while he struggled with the basic bloody geometry of a circle.”
“Who are you?” said One.
“Who—who am I? Who am I, he says.”
“That’s the assistant flying instructor, remember?” said Two. She sounded bored. “Mad Black. And that one on the floor’s—”
“—um, shut the fuck up, yeah?” called Nathaniel. He rose from his chair and rolled up his sleeves to expose the ink underneath. What, was he going to punch them? That was Remus’s—or, actually, never mind that. “Show some respect? You’re not likely to make it through this program if you piss about and anger everyone before your first day.”
“Oui, he is right. Shut the fuck up and you may yet still learn something,” said Pascalle.
There came a bout of replies—a number of volleys back and forth, all of equally intelligent content until One and Two were hovering their hands over their wands while Remus had his arms hooked under Sirius’s flailing, squid-like armpits to keep him from throwing himself bodily at Three, who probably weighed twice as much as Sirius did soaking wet, actually, with most of that being muscle. Pascalle struggled vaingloriously to do the same with Nathaniel North, having fumbled her own wand and kicked it under a table somewhere.
Even with their disadvantages, this wasn’t likely to be a fair fight. While often he used his hands for precise direction, Sirius had progressed over the summer to the point where he needn’t gesture at all to levitate objects, albeit with unpredictable effect. It was the next step of wandless magic. Sirius could pin both One and Two to the train car ceiling before they could draw and drop them just as quick—and quicker still get the lot of them expelled for assaulting the incoming class of postgrads, of course. Worse, if they shattered the chandelier.
All of Remus’s burgeoning stratagems-cum-de-escalation tactics were cut short by a booming voice that resonated in the small bones of his sensitive ears. He felt ill.
“!הַפְסִיקוּ”
Every head in the room whirled towards the sound. Collectively, they watched the buck-toothed witch lift the tip of her wand from her own throat. She coughed.
“Thank you,” she continued, inclining her head to the side, “and now if you would kindly all cease this very, very impressive pissing contest, I believe a round of introductions are in order, no?”
Sirius thrashed one last time in Remus’s grip with albeit half-hearted strength. It had the benefit, however, of making Three jump with surprise.
“I’ll begin,” she said, gracious. “Hello. My name is Emily Leach, and in truth I was supposed to attend this program a few years ago, but—well, I suppose life has a way of muddling these things.”
***
The postgrad pissing contest would be the death of them, Remus decided, or at the very least, he mused as he stood, quiet, two days later and outside the heavy oaken door of the Headmaster’s Office and atop the spiral stair, the death of their academic careers—and so tragically too after all the travails to get him into the program in the first place. He did not appreciate the poetry.
“Come in, Remus,” called Dumbledore’s muffled and ancient voice.
How he always knew, Remus never would.
Heaving open the door and crossing that once-endless plain between it and the claw-footed desk room-centre no longer had its distorting temporal effect. Remus arrived at his chair just as old as he’d begun and found the wizard opposite him not even an inch taller. Older, perhaps. Such it was every time Remus saw him recently, which, yes, was generally how linear functions progressed, but the pacing was odd. Perhaps that was why Dumbledore so often spoke about a moment’s silence. Time was passing quicker than it’d ever been, even if in its paradox it also felt agonisingly slow, like being dragged, rope-bound, behind a startled Clydesdale.
“You asked to see me, sir?” asked Remus, all too aware he appeared at least as odd as his thoughts were.
“Please, Remus, sit.”
Remus sat.
Inscrutable and purposeless devices of the Headmaster’s study area sounded off behind Dumbledore’s tome-laden desk and elegant-if-simple chair, all universal constants, even if the office itself felt changed in atmosphere whenever Remus came to visit. The bookshelves, once bursting, now felt like looming shadows, and therewithin something ready to pounce. Also constant were the teacups.
Tick. Whirr. Chime.
“Before we begin,” began Remus, “I would like to say in our defence—”
“—While I’m sure the tale you were about to regale me with is as thrilling as is it undoubtably scandalous, Remus,” interrupted Dumbledore, “and while I’m equally sure I shall hear no end of it, whatever that might be, from our various staff soon enough, I’m afraid our time is short and so I will spare you. This meeting does not concern your academic or extracurricular endeavours.”
Oh. “Oh,” said Remus.
“‘Oh’ indeed, I’m afraid.” Dumbledore’s eyes, always full up with mischief and unplaceable whimsy, settled not on Remus’s own but somewhere on his forehead or perhaps between his eyebrows. “I would like, Remus,” he continued slowly, “for you to tell me if anything of interest came to pass this summer while you were away.”
“With the werewolves, you mean to say.”
It was not a question.
“In your own time, Remus.” Dumbledore sipped at his tea.
Despite himself and all he’d learn in the arts of subterfuge, Remus’s brows furrowed. Was—did Dumbledore expect they could blow past the betrayal, the revelation of a lifetime before nearly the entire Order without warning and without even an attempt at an apology? An explanation?
“Respectfully, sir,” he said in a tone that implied with no room for error that little if any respect was due, “I would rather not share very much of anything, given the likelihood of it being passed back to those with not inconsiderable prejudice on these matters.”
Dumbledore’s expression froze. His eyes flitted back and forth over Remus’s face, uncertain.
“You don’t trust them?”
“No, if I’m honest.”
“You trust them so little,” he continued, and a half-frown appeared like a ghost on his thin lips, “you would rather gamble the lives of all you care for than place your trust in me? My judgement,” he added, quiet, “is not always perfect, Remus, but I would caution you to question it out of vendetta.”
“Vendetta?”
“Revenge, then. You feel they have hurt you—”
“—they have!” said Remus. Too loud—Jesus, he oughtn’t yell at his fucking Headmaster, let alone Albus Dumbledore, who could probably turn him to stone with a bat of his ancient eyelashes. “They have hurt me,” he continued, metering his frustration, “and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t dreaded waking up to Aurors pounding on the door to my dormitory after receiving an anonymous tip about my unregistered status.”
“I did not say your feelings were wrong. I merely said that you felt them.”
“That—when you phrase it like that, it sounds like you mean to say it’s all in my head.”
“And, Remus?”
“And—and it’s not, is it? It’s not that I kept some frivolous secret from them or everyone else to wound them. This is life-or-death. And I can’t have someone getting cross with me, or upset, or what have you and then deciding to—” He cut himself off abruptly. Christ. He was a broken bloody record. “I scarcely knew most of them beyond the surface details,” he muttered. “Now most of them despise me, not for what I’ve done, but for who I am—a part of me, actually, that’s none of their bloody business.”
“You are more than your condition, Remus.”
Remus’s eyes flickered up at that—he’d gone to staring at his lap, and the savaging he was giving his cuticles out of view stilled the urge to kick out a leg to overturn the desk and their teacups or find something that click whirr ticked to hurl across the room—and for the first time since meeting him, Remus thought Dumbledore might be an idiot.
“I’m not ashamed of being a werewolf, Albus,” he said. Oh, that—the first name, wasn’t that a good hit? “Not anymore. And on all matters lycanthropic, I hope you realise that I am the expert in the room.”
“Naturally.”
Tick. Whirr. Chime.
“Pardon me—”
“—and I hope you realise, then, Remus, that on all matters of the Order,” said Dumbledore, infuriatingly gentle yet with an underlying authoritative implication to his calm, even voice, “and on matters of trust, secrets, and situations of life and death, that I might yet be more experienced than you. At least for the time being,” he added with a sad half-smile.
“But—”
“I will not press the matter, Remus. I will however press you to realise that the Order is held together by something much more powerful than magic oaths or bare need.”
“And what’s that, then?”
“Why, love, of course.”
Remus snorted.
“I scarcely think I can rely on that to keep my secrets.”
“Can’t you?” asked Dumbledore. His snowy beard draped over the edge of his desk as he leaned forward, scrutinising Remus from behind his half-moon glasses. “Severus, who as I understand holds little love for you and none at all for young Sirius, nevertheless concluded that restraint would be in his better interests than telling his tale,” said Dumbledore, wizened face impassive. “So then why, might I ask, would you assume that those in the Order—those who hold much love for you yet, Remus—would share your secret so uncaringly with our cruel world?”
Remus’s jaw set so tight and his teeth grit with such force he thought he might crack them in his mouth or otherwise bleed; his chest tightened, slow at first, but unerringly in a vice; his tongue went fat; and through all that, Remus’s warring thoughts volleyed back at one another, raining, How dare you presume and I am not going to sniffle before Albus fucking Dumbledore like a small ickle child like an exchange of mortar shells. He opened his throat with a cough he hoped sounded callous and gave a half-hearted shrug.
“If this is what their love looks like, Professor,” he began, “then I s’pose I’m not sure I’d like to have any of it at all,” and yes, good, that was wise-sounding indeed. Moreover it was true and therefore helped Remus disguise the hurt pricking his eyes as anger. “Not with what else they’ve yet to hear.”
Dumbledore frowned openly at that and set down his teacup. Remus didn’t meet his eyes, twinkling and whimsical they might’ve been. He’d been taught better.
“And what might that be, Remus?”
Remus opened his mouth a moment.
He paused.
Informing the Headmaster of his sexual habits was not, generally speaking, something that had ever crossed Remus’s mind outside of several nightmare scenarios involving forgotten exams and inexplicably missing clothes, but, well, hold on, it was far, far more than that, wasn’t it? The shagging, enjoyable and filthy and degrading in all the right ways as it was wasn’t the only part to it. Not that it wasn’t important, but so too was the intangible, irrepresentable romance, the friendships that shared that same incoherent boundary—the thousand other ways in which being a big, flaming, sopping queer influenced, actually, every moment that Remus could recall with any clarity and those as well with only partial translucence, just as much as had his lycanthropy. Holding back his queerness meant that Dumbledore had at best an incomplete picture of one Remus Lupin, equal parts yob, Book Boggart, and camp werewolf. Which had significant implications if not for the fact he no longer trusted Dumbledore’s judgement. Not entirely.
“Seeing as we’re resolving to trust one another’s judgement, sir,” he said after what must’ve been a painfully long pause, “I think I ought err on the side of discretion, here.”
Dumbledore folded his aged, many-ringed hands over one another.
“I see.”
“But perhaps one day.”
“Perhaps. I shall look forwards to it.” said Dumbledore.
Remus risked a quick glance up and saw that Dumbledore was staring over his shoulder with a distant and almost forlorn depth to his eyes. The whimsy was far gone. On holiday, a moment, though it returned with a blink.
“Now, on to our secondary matter—”
“—pardon—”
“—Remus, I would formally like to offer you the position of interim Hogwarts Librarian,” he continued, because Albus Dumbledore was a century old and impossible to predict, as Remus probably ought remember. “I would like to stress for clarity that this is not a permanent position, nor would your post start immediately: our current librarian is due for sabbatical and will be unavailable for at least two school years following this one,” he explained, “though in such time we may revisit this conversation and assess whether we ought ease the burden of the post and hire a permanent assistant. Or co-librarians. As I understand, it is becoming something of a trend among novel archives, and I do dare to be daring.”
“I—sir—”
“Please, please, Remus.” Dumbledore lifted a gentle hand to quiet him and smiled one of his soft half-smiles. “You needn’t respond immediately. Consider it, yes, but give it time, and discuss it among your colleagues. We have, after all, an entire school year ahead of us still, and you’ve no doubt a wealth of options to consider in your—ah, what was the popular phrase? Your ‘post-postgraduate world’?”
“I—why—”
There came a knock at the door. Hesitant, but sharp.
“Ah, how the time goes,” said Dumbledore wistfully, “and how everything ends. That is my next appointment—so if you wouldn’t mind, Remus, could you please see them in?”
On automatic legs operated by nothing but sheer learned obedience and a healthy dose of fear, Remus rose from his seat before the claw-footed desk and crossed to the large oaken door of Dumbledore’s office, heaving it open and nearly overturning himself on the person behind it in his blind panic of a flight out. Remus murmured a hasty apology to Sirius and fled down the spiral stair.
Only later would he stop to wonder what Sirius must’ve thought of the whole encounter, given Remus’s pale and terrified bewilderment or perhaps pale and bewildered terror. He must’ve thought they were both being arrested and that Dumbledore had given them an hour’s head start for good show à la The Most Dangerous Game—or, more embarrassingly, that they were both being expelled.
***
“First thing’s first, you lot, if you fancy the idea of staying in this program,” began Sirius. He narrowed his eyes at the empty graduate lounge, staring down at the squat beige furniture, all camelback sofas and fluffy armchairs as they were; at the stationary-filled bureaus, writing desks; the distant bay windows with their brassy frames and high arches and the lone private door leading to the library; the seven-headed hydra mantle above the fireplace; the absence of post-its posted above; and followed, finally, to frown down at Remus with an exacting if uncertain gaze. “Revision groups are—ah, wait, Moony,” he continued, “do you think it’ll be lost on them if I opt for the callback?”
“I think it’ll be lost on everyone but us, if m’honest.”
“Fuck.”
“You could still swing it. It’s very swish, like. Classic.”
Sirius gave a nonspecific groan, though he snapped to attention as the distant corridor entrance swung open. One—or was it Three? Remus couldn’t remember—stepped through with his pack of irritable infants in tow, aristocratic airs not even slightly wind-tousled by the first two weeks of postgraduate chaos. Two and Three/perhaps One were close behind him, though they’d necessarily be divided after the coming speech. The one they’d been workshopping all morning, as it so happened.
If Remus recalled correctly, One’s thesis proposal consisted at least vaguely of something to do with vampires, both the histories thereof and their underlying mechanics, which placed One firmly in the Theory department. If his memory was indeed both spongiform and encephalitic as Pascalle had taken to teasing him, possessing, for whatever reason, a wealth of medical terms in her own already-swollen brain, then One’s thesis otherwise had to do with either Vikings, warrior poets, and the magical histories therein, or alternately it was a—well, arcane archaeology more generally. Whichever mattered little. The two incoming Fieldwork postgrads would be given no mercy once his and Sirius’s speech revealed that they were effectively in direct competition with one another. The thought was intoxicating and could come none too soon, given the collective smugness One, Two, and Three wore like the blue-and-bronze House colours they hadn’t yet shed.
Ravenclaws. Insufferable, really.
Yet that arrangement left little mercy for Remus as well, for it meant—and, well, he should’ve expected as much given the circumstances in which he landed the post—that Emily Leach’s own proposal, an ambitious undertaking and hypothetical reformation of the Fidelius Charm, which, mind you, was the most powerful and fiddly concealment and protection charm imaginable, guaranteed her a position within Practical Applications.
Remus and Sirius were to be her joint mentors.
So too was Nathaniel North, although that was far less dramatic a statement.
Worse, however, was Remus’s paranoia, which ran rampant with all the finesse of a Welsh Greenback in an abattoir or, say, an insatiable werewolf in a library of very descriptive gay zines. Paranoia had in fact purchased a massive corkboard, produced a thick stack of covertly-obtained polaroids, and held as much red string as its well-exercised arms and lupine jaw could carry. Happenstance wouldn’t make a fool of it again. Not this time.
Or would it? Remus was floundering. There was simply so much conspiracy abound and so many scheming players with their cunning machinations and improvisations and inevitable schisms that Remus and his paranoia ended up not a Holmes-and-Watson, James-and-Sirius pairing capable of great things, but instead a pair of gibbering mad dogs eating said red string in the corner. The Fidelius Charm—surely that was no coincidence or happenstance, given that James and Lily were about to undergo it. His own research had turned up shockingly little: he and Irma Pince had discovered (to both their horrors) that someone had purged every substantial volume on the Fidelius Charm from the Hogwarts library, including the purportedly impenetrable Restricted Section, and replaced such sections with blank parchment. Had it been Death Eaters or the Order? A secret third party? They had no idea. As of yet he had no idea whether the professoriate larger knew.
Perhaps that was why Dumbledore had seen fit to bring Emily Leach into their fold. Already her knowledge was vast: as part of his ‘mentorship’, she’d explained to him that the Fidelius’s power extended beyond the protection of a specific area.
“You could turn a library into a secret,” she said cheerfully, “but then you could never visit your library again. A secret keeper can’t cross into the protections of the Fidelius or the whole thing’s scuppered. Wiser, I think, would be to hide a singular book, or a bookshelf: someone could search your library up and down for a century and never find it, even though they’d be passing right by it. Except, you’re not really hiding the book or bookshelf: the secret you’re keeping is where it’s hidden, so you could touch the book, even read it in the open, and no one would be the wiser. Unless they kill you,” she added, less cheerful, “because the Fidelius peters out if there’s no one left to keep the secret. Supposedly, anyway. But if you told someone, say, your daughter, or a trusted friend—”
A fount of knowledge, she was, actually, and she wouldn’t shut up about the bloody charm. Yet even in the best-case scenario, Dumbledore couldn’t expect any substantial research outcome for at least a year and probably three, so how long, exactly, did he see this war going? How did that benefit Lily and James? And what of the other theses? Remus hadn’t caught wind of any update to Dolohov’s petition for vampiric transformation, but he wasn’t much in on the Order’s intel, these days. Was Dumbledore looking for weaknesses? Secrets? Or was he looking to court another dark creature to their cause, just as he’d once courted Remus? As for the Vikings and the archaeology, well, those were much less clear in purpose, and more opaque still given Remus was operating under the presumption that Dumbledore hadn’t had the time to pursue Ahmed’s thesis. It made a certain sense seeing as he hadn’t known what might be in it. Dumbledore was, as he often said, only mortal. Not omniscient.
But he had to be omnipotent. How else could he arrange so many fortuitous research projects to be undertaken not only at Hogwarts where he could have a hand in them, but simultaneously, too? Were there truly that many prospective postgrads out there?
“Oi oi, Moony,” whispered Sirius, nudging his thigh with a foot. “Curtain’s up, innit?”
Remus blinked. With the whole lot of them, One through Three plus Nathaniel, Pascalle, and of course the buck-toothed Emily Leach, gathered together, Remus lifted a hand to grab their attention and quiet their chattering. Sirius took his seat atop the hard spine of one squat sofa like a throne.
“Look here, you lot,” called Sirius. Yobbish and imperial—how he’d grown. “Forget everything you know about study and scholarship, and let me break this down for you—”
“—wait,” called Three, or maybe One, “is this meeting supposed to be a primer on the structure of the postgraduate program?”
Sirius stared with lethal intent at One/Three.
“Among other things.”
“We all got a letter from Ms. Evans, the previous board liaison, back in June?” said Two. Bless her, she looked confused. “And another one from Severus Snape, for all of us in Fieldwork?”
“What.”
“It explained everything? The three departments of Theory, Fieldwork, P.A., and our positions within them? The importance of intra- and interdepartmental cooperation? And the—”
“—fucking Evans—”
“—position that you and Lupin occupy—
“—fucking Snivellus—”
“—sharing an intake year and a department?”
Remus stood stock still and braced, every-ready to spring should Sirius attempt to launch himself out the window and fly wherever had gone Lily and/or Severus to exact his revenge, hot and furious and, arguably, justified beyond all measure. Being honest, he was surprised it hadn’t begun to snow in the lounge itself. An indoor thunderstorm would’ve been apropos.
Someone coughed. Every postgrad was exchanging confused glances.
“Right,” said Remus, “well, there are always questions, so if you’ve any at all to ask?”
Not one hand lifted.
“Right. Okay. Well,” he continued awkwardly, “and do we have any volunteers for organising the next meeting like this?”
Not.
A.
Hand.
“right. okay. well.”
“Are we—”
“—dismissed, yes.”
***
Having the wind so unceremoniously stolen from his sails had a certain charm to it. A palatable je-ne-sais-quoi. Perhaps it was the familiarity. Perhaps it was the reassuring knowledge that no matter what Remus expected of his time at Hogwarts or how much this whimsical, cursed place put him through, it would nevertheless remain poised to humble him.
In a manner of speaking it also helped Remus to justify his recent stint of bad behaviour: all the arriving silently behind schoolchildren in the library to scare them not unlike his namesake; heckling Sirius from the stands during his Flying lessons and, in his more bored, less bright moments, sneaking off to smoke skunk beneath the stands; the boxed wine; so much boxed wine, too much, with grim Nathaniel and inscrutable Pascalle. Once even he drank with the tartan-pyjama’d Minerva McGonagall after he’d stumbled across her like a ghost, castle dead in the night, on her way back from quelling some raucous welcome-home party in Gryffindor tower, and offered, for some incalculable, unknowable reason, to help her grade Transfiguration essays. They’d toiled late into the night growing tipsy. Somehow he’d spent four evenings in the past two weeks alone drinking with Irma Pince, whose acid sarcasm only grew stronger with time like a pH naught wine. In time, they might’ve been more than student and mentor, academic and supervisor: perhaps, in time, they might’ve been friends.
Every evening the postgraduate lounge rocked, crooned, mourned, clamoured with records new and old whether or not (usually not) indeed the other postgrads willed it. When they would suffer Remus no longer, he and Sirius retreated like medieval knights to the battlements of their single-bed dormitory-cum-laboratory-cum-home away from Soho home, smoking, listless and yearning, to the latest Kate Bush, each pair of eyes pricking by Army Dreamers and silent tears trailing up to their scalps after its one-two punch to Breathing; to the Floyds for nostalgia; to Marc Bolan, Jesus rest his soul and goat-like voice, in their pants or less; tumbling in the sheets together to Bowie and Queen and Stevie Nicks, probably like James and Lily were, God he missed them, God he hated them for leaving him and becoming adults with their family, child, and happy, loving home.
All the while Remus ate too much, too little, tempted Sirius with treacle and trifle and every other posh pudding Hogwarts, in all its magic, held in endless supply. Near every other night was spent in revisions fuelled by naught but coffee, tea, and chocolate in unquestionably toxic amounts, until they grew bored, or distracted, or into a pair of lazy, lazy sods, and diverged from their important thaumaturgical designs to the art of taste-changing and other culinary charms. Oh, there was a magic neither mastered. After attempting to spell his scones to taste of their favourite takeaway and failing every morning for a week, he settled for it tasting of vinegar and cockles while Sirius gagged and made faces as though the entire Great Hall, ghosts and students and professoriate alike, could not see them.
And every Friday night without fail a letter would arrive from Kelly in the Elenydd hamlet, whereupon Sirius would demand it be read aloud in their dorm so he could properly mock Remus’s genuinely terrible attempt at a Scottish accent. Often, they’d dictate one another’s letters back. Some were accompanied by parcels. Polaroids, tchotchkes, fine-milled powders. A rubbing of a lettuce leaf from the garden. A feather from a sparrow.
More than once, together, Remus stayed up with Sirius into the wee hours of the morning to throw his wand across the dormitory like it wasn’t a powerful magical artefact because Sirius was Padfoot and wanted to play fetch and then grumbled, bleary-eyed and on a hair trigger the next morning into the lounge given their three collective hours of sleep; alone he stole up to the Clocktower, the Astronomy tower, down off to the kitchens, pretending he was James; fifteen; sixteen; seventeen, in another life, another world, one where time’s hand spun backwards and he was not barrelling towards some immanent threshold, that waterfall end of youth; he graffitied bricks like a yob; suits of armour on unused floors grew decorated with technicolour moustaches, pubic hair, arsecheeks, and a few with enchantments that might never trigger but might equally trigger and frighten the shit out of some poor first-year in desperate need of a laugh some several years from now; he finally threatened Peeves with cannibalism, or whatever appropriate nomenclature for somehow eating an amortal apparition, should the poltergeist ever again repeat the name Loony Loopy Lupin, and to his surprise found the threat extremely effective; he read poetry in private; sometimes he read aloud to Sirius, who in turn read him probably quotes from works of fantasy he himself would never, never read, no matter how many sloppy fucks Sirius offered him nor how many he accepted and thereupon reneged after cumming.
No matter the petulance or the indulgence of it, no matter the Sisyphean futility, Remus was indefatigably recording every last syllable of time possible, and damn anyone who tried to stop him. He swam in the Black Lake in September; he froze; he boggled as Nathaniel shrugged off the freezing water and grinned; he drank his weight in Hogsmeade and nearly was banned from the Three Broomsticks for reasons best undisclosed; in a particular moment of maudlin inspiration, he wrote one-word letters to Mary every day (to cheer her up) and she to him until her and Sirius’s owls were on the verge of unionising due to the rampant fatigue and spent three hours he could’ve directed towards research.
While all juvenile and lachrymose and drenched to the teeth in melancholy and what have you and blah, yes, that was much the point of being in school and one’s late-teens-early-twenties and as much as he thought he was rightly owed given what more had been stolen from him than just wind from his sails in the tempest of War.
As Remus trod the cutback trees that marked the ever-encroaching boundary between the Forbidden Forest and the village of Hogsmeade, staring into the wood, the wood staring back, et cetera et cetera, he felt pulled between more than two worlds. Four? Five? Six, maybe? Make it an uneven baker’s dozen. The Forest was stolen from him—he and Sirius would spend every moon either in Wales or penned together as two dogs in the Shrieking Shack if need be—just as was Socrates; as were Lily and James, their anchors, stolen and hidden away; his mum was lost to him yet not to herself; nearly all of Remus’s loved ones were dead, in constant mortal peril, or otherwise upset with him for a perceived betrayal and his many kept secrets. Then there was Sirius. Delivered, allegedly, from the heart of darkness by who else but happenstance.
The wood won its staring contest with its inexorable sylvan gaze and Remus gave up hope that a Unicorn might present itself. He could do with a reorganised psyche at the moment—someone to make sense of it all, to shuffle all those scattered pieces into a nice, legible, snortable line. At the very least, he’d like to understand why he so often needed humbling.
That too was the environment. Humbling. Standing behind him was the castle in its full glory: tall medieval turrets and skybound spires with dark slate tiles and unflinching stone archways and latticed windows and half, maybe three-quarters the good memories Remus’d ever made were silhouetted there against distant blue mountains and below the dark-grey of swooping autumnal clouds, and yet as Remus’s thoughts raced, raced in his head, his throat closed around something hard and nostalgia-shaped, refusing to swallow in full that lump like a whole egg or six vinegar-soaked cockles slurped at once.
Remus sniffed.
He was not going to cry. That ought to stay on the record—he was not. Not yet, at least. They had another year before he and Sirius would be thrown to the metaphors with their all-the-better-to-mock-you-with teeth.
Remus wiped the corner of his eye with a jumpered sleeve and descended down the winding path into the village proper. He had a meeting to make, after all, and friends yet living awaiting him. Hogwarts would still be there when he returned, whether in twenty minutes or as many years. That was part of its quintessential magic. That, and if he did have a wistful sopping cry on the hill, not only was Mary going to see right through his reddened eyes and dampened sleeves to mock him for his earnestness, someone else might see him, and he hadn’t spent the better part of two years cultivating a reputation as the resident Hogwarts Book Boggart only to become Lachrymose Lupin a year before becoming the school’s librarian, if albeit only temporarily.
Christ. It was the first post for which Remus felt vaguely qualified, even if he’d only been offered the post out of nepotism. He might actually have something approaching a career.
Presuming they survived the War, of course, and their thesis defences.
Which brought him once more to Mary and their yet-unnamed conspiracy.
The Hog’s Head, at least, hadn’t changed over the long stretch of the summer. Two brown rats were sharing a mouldy lump of bread two steps from its stoop, though their furless, wormlike tails went taut at the sound of his approach and they quickly scampered off after catching sight of him with their knowing black beady eyes. An oozing swinehead parted from its body still oozed from the sign above the door, the shabby wooden chairs were still shabby, and the grime-encrusted windows of the pub lounge were still too grimy to give sight in or out. Which was something of a shame, actually, seeing as it might’ve prepared Remus for the sight of a familiar face sat at the bar.
It wasn’t the old fellow shuffling around with an equally-old rag that looked, as Remus noted with some amusement, a touch like Albus Dumbledore with his long silver beard and well-lined face. He was a distant ally of the Order and had been at Lily and James’s wedding, even if his name was still something of a mystery. No, the familiar face was handsome and ginger-maned, had a blockish build, and eyed Remus’s belt for a loose coinpurse before catching his gaze with a leer. If not for the last bit, Remus might’ve taken him for a close Prewett relation, though he wasn’t on nearly as good terms with the Prewett twins as he was the thief at the bar. He was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette half the motherfucking width of a cigar.
“Fletcher,” said Remus, tipping his chin down and sliding onto the barstool beside him a moment. He noted the Gillywater-and-onion, still mostly full, and narrowed his eyes even as Fletcher kept a straight, or, well, demure face. That was odd, given the man usually wore a perfume of drink to go with his muggle leathers. “You wouldn’t be following my movements about, would you?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, me, love,” replied Fletcher in his gruff, east-end accent. He sucked the end of his awful skin-up and let the smoke wisp out his nose, slow, like a dragon. Caradoc had been fond of the manoeuvre himself, once. “All you owe me, I’d be a right fuckin’ muppet to grass on you afore collectin’.”
“Mm. Any chance you’ll tell me who…”
Fletcher’s flat stare did not reassure him.
“Fine,” muttered Remus. “You’re not likely to hear anything interesting, I’ll have you know, though I could get up to some mischief if gently persuaded,” he continued, tampering the fingers of one hand over Fletcher’s denim-covered knee. Yet, as Fletcher leered again at him and his bloodshot eyes flickered low, Remus snatched the vaguely martini-shaped glass from atop the bar with his other hand and slipped off his seat, making for the narrow, winding staircase. His escape.
“Oi!”
“I’ll owe you yet one more,” called Remus over his shoulder. There—Fletcher could tell them, whoever them was, that he was a thief as well as potential spy. That ought please someone. Not, of course, that it’d carry much weight coming from Fletcher.
The crooked stairs lead up to an all-too-familiar room with inward-sloping walls that grew more claustrophobic with loneliness and the sickness of hangover, neither of which, thankfully, Remus had at the moment. Friends were a cure for those nightmares. Mary and Nathaniel had arrived well ahead of him and by the buzzing in his ears were engaged in some manner of important if sensitive conversation.
Mary’s gesticulation, already emphatic at the best of time given her painted-on expressions and penchant for statement footwear, balanced atop that fuzzy border between enthusiastic and deranged. A cigarette burned in a pinch between her fingers, unsmoked and untapped and ever-so-slightly crushed by enthusiasm, sending the occasional arc of ash flying to punctuate her bigger movements. She was dressed down. Casual and muggle-like, between her large belt, swooping trousers, and the fashionable beret pinned onto her thundercloud afro, not unreminiscent of some of the styles Remus had seen at the all-nighters the year prior. He’d had some notion that her eleventh-hour sudden unexplained expulsion from Hogwarts might’ve left her in a bleak emotional doldrum or put her in a scorpion mood, but then again, she was Mary. If anyone could spin straw into gold…
As for Nathaniel, his eyes—he’d dropped the illusion, revealing their milky-white nature for all to see—and resigned posture only made him look comical. He nursed his own hand-roll the way an exhausted dockworker might a tumbler of whiskey. He looked tired. She looked wired. The sitting room reeked strongly of sawdust, weakly of piss, something vaguely earthy and more vaguely goat-like, all dusted thereafter by the building cloud of fresh smoky tobacco. His tongue ached.
Remus caught Nate’s attention with an arched and fuzzy eyebrow. Nathaniel gave a precise flick of his wand, and the buzzing in Remus’s ears was replaced with Mary’s rapid-fire yammering.
“—s’just I’m concerned, yeah?” said Mary. She leaned forwards over the table and grabbed for Nathaniel’s hand with both of hers—her nails were painted a sapphire blue and yet worn down either by toil or teeth—and the boy withdrew just as quick. “’Cos I know it’s your body, but, y’know, any class of magic involving Human Transfiguration isn’t much of a laugh, and—oh, oi oi, why, there’s a wench, et cetera et cetera! Remus, were you gonna say anything or simply stand there, leaving me with my cock in my hand like a bloody tosser? C’mere, love, give us a hug.”
And indeed Remus gave her a bewildered hug, nearly spilling his stolen Gillywater, though he shot a look over her high shoulder and past her puff of hair at Nathaniel, mouthing, What the fuck?
Nathaniel returned him an uncertain look and made with just as much uncertainty the smokey-smoke gesture. Which, yes, was as good as guess as one could make given their collective history, but Remus smelled neither smokey-smoke—or at least only tobacco and something familiar underlying it, but not skunk—nor even a whiff of drinky-drink on her. His nose was beyond discerning when put to the task. Remus frowned. Mary pulled back, a frown of her own cracking her otherwise perfectly put-together face. Her makeup hadn’t suffered, at least.
“What’s wrong, darling?”
There was a momentary pause as Remus’s lips parted, heavy, throat still slightly thick because a lot, actually, was wrong at the moment, though he’d choose nevertheless to focus on what was right.
“I’m to be librarian of Hogwarts next year,” said Remus. “Dumbledore—Albus,” he corrected, earning not one but two arched eyebrows from Nathaniel at the table, “offered me the interim post just last week. I think I might accept.”
“You what.”
“I’ve been thoroughly one one-upped, of course. Bit of a nice change, actually, come to think of it. The current professor for Muggle Studies is somewhat prone to nervous breakdowns and is thus taking an indefinite sabbatical, and so that enviable, truly esteemed position among the professoriate has been offered to none other than one Sirius Black.”
“He WHAT—”
“Mary, darling, I’m right here—”
“—ah, shite, pardon me for being excited for two of my best mates.”
“So pardoned,” murmured Remus, extricating himself from her grip and settling in at the table between Nathaniel and her chair, though Mary chose that moment to slide arse-first onto the table and perch her feet on her seat, so Remus perched his own beside hers. “No word from Sirius as to whether he’ll accept. Think we’re both still gobsmacked. Oh, and, where’s the trunk?”
“About that—” began Nathaniel.
“What the fuck happened to your feet, Lupin?” interrupted Mary, incredulous. She’d craned her neck and shifted to get a side-profile of them. Nearly dropped ash on them. “When did you sprout hooves?”
“I didn’t think hooves sprouted.”
“These ones do. Their fruit of choice—”
“—oh, I see the throughline, now.”
“Corn.”
“Corn’s not a fruit.”
“Botanically, Lupin,” said Mary with a tut. “You look like you spent the summer firewalking.”
“I don’t fancy shoes. They’re fascistic. The trunk?”
“Your feet look like they’d make glass bleed when stepped upon,” replied Mary. She hopped off the table and crouched, thoughtful, actually, inasmuch as she was stunned by the sight of them. “They look like the surface of the moon if the moon were paler than usual. They—”
“Are you quite finished.”
“No. They have more cracks in them than the motherfucking Mona Lisa, Lupin, and look worse than your throat sounds. What the shit did you do? Blowtorch them? And, be honest with me, did you manually exercise every toe individually to get them all crooked and muscular like that, or did you just do them with a wooden mallet and hope for the best?”
Remus gave a withering look to Nathaniel, who shrugged at him helplessly and pulled on the end of his cigarette. He tapped the ash neat into a blackened ashtray. Some fucking punk he was.
“All right, now I’m finished.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Okay, well, are you gonna tell us what Hag licked your feet to make them look this way or—”
“—um, Mary—”
“—there’s this old torture technique that muggles invented, now that I think about it,” she continued, “where they’d put honey or some other shite on your feet and have a goat lick them off—rough tongues, goats, I suppose that’s why you Welsh fancy sheep instead—and I think this might be what feet look like if you regrew all the sloughed-off skin as a first-year healer after about sixteen pints. Can you feel anything when I touch them?”
“I yield.”
“Spill, you tit.”
“I spent three months running about without shoes on and several months-stroke-years building up to that extended period of time.”
“That’s it?”
“Mm.”
“Terribly boring, Lupin. Not worth the bit at all. Unless—”
“—oh, fantastic—”
“—if I find out this is another one of those ‘simple, ostensibly-true explanations that belies the grim undertext’ situations you’re so fond of,” she explained, “I’m never gonna let off about your feet again.”
Remus gave a sidelong glance at Nathaniel before looking back to Mary and her, come to think of it, very dilated pupils, which he hadn’t quite noticed given her dark brown eyes.
“Are you high?” asked Remus, deflecting. “Or do you simply have a thing for feet.”
Mary puffed her smoke a moment. Exhaled.
“I don’t like either of those options.”
“If you’ve a thing for feet, Mary, you could’ve just said so,” said Remus. “’fraid you’re out of luck with mine, love. Ask Sirius, though. Lovely toes. Could do with a nice pedicure. Now, about that trunk?”
“Will take it under consideration,” replied Mary. “Is it?”
A beat.
“Um—”
“What?”
“Pardon?”
“Is it one of those situations where you’re lying by crucial omission?”
“Do you have a thing for feet?”
“No.”
“Then no.”
“But if I’d said yes—”
“—you are high, aren’t you?” said Remus. It was his turn to be incredulous, though of course Mary had the gift of concealer and foundation and whatnot, making it hard to assess any of the other commonplace tells that came with using certain recreational if highly-illegal substances they were all familiar with. She’d likely look just as alive and perky as a corpse, so Remus, a master of subtlety, attempted another approach and said, “Sharesies?”
“You can’t tell anyone.” Mary threw a conspiratorial glance around the small, claustrophobic room and landed her gaze on Nathaniel, who, in typical fashion, immediately succumbed to Mary’s bullshit and gave a sharp, sort of pathetically desperate nod.
“Mm. I like where this is going, but does it have anything to do with the—”
“—so if you recall that dragonologist—”
Oh, piss.
And so as Mary prattled and yammered and generally talked their fucking ears off in a long, rambling explanation as to how she’d purchased a few thimbles of Dragon’s Blood from the erstwhile dragonologist Amir Maalouf and been indulging at her leisure, given her sudden excess of free time, all the while repeatedly bracing both hands on his knee for some reason with ash-dripping fag still between her fingers, Remus’s only coherent thought was a swelling, embarrassed desire to snog Sirius, because, oh, oh no, oh Jesus Christ no, was this what he’d sounded like, not once, but twice? Sirius must’ve had the patience of a saint. Engelsgeduld. It was as though he were looking in a fabulous if very distorted mirror.
Another thought, less coherent, rattled about in his now-rattled birdcage, imploring him to ask after the trunk with Ahmed’s research in it again, but that was something of a losing battle given the smouldering humiliation in Remus’s memories. That, and if he had to listen to Mary explain it once to him and them once again when Sirius and Pascalle arrived, Remus was likely to put a hole through in the wall if only to end his mortification. The mockery in Sirius’s eyes alone would be lethal.
Except when Sirius did arrive, heralded by creaking steps and, oddly, no braid-haired French beauty behind him, there was only a grave weight to his grey eyes. His dark overcoat was damp and his long curls were tied up behind his head, as he’d taken to doing whenever something required full focus.
“Oi oi, Sirius,” called Mary. She flicked her wand and his expression cleared somewhat as a result.
“Where were you?” replied Sirius, staring, confused, at Remus. Eyes shifting from the cigarettes to the Gillywater to Remus once more. “You missed the—did no one reach you to say Dumbledore wanted you in his office again?”
Mary and Nathaniel’s heads swivelled. Eyes bored down on him. Remus frowned.
“I—well, yes,” he said quietly, ducking his head, “but Albus and I aren’t on speaking terms and I presumed it could wait.”
“We’re joint liaisons to the graduate board, Remus.”
“Are you now?” said Mary. She followed it with a low whistle.
“Mm. I’m aware, but—”
“—whatever, fine, it’s not important, but at least tell me next time, yeah?” muttered Sirius, shedding his coat and sliding, squid-like, half of his bony arse onto the same seat as Remus because he was evidently fond of being a dick. “Left me standing there with my cock in my hand.”
“That’s what I said!”
“Hiya, Mary, sorry, should’ve—”
“—was it really so important—”
“—ah, and Nate, mate, that funding you were looking for—”
“—Padfoot.”
“Moony.”
“What did I miss?”
Sirius winced and gave another look at the staircase.
“Might do us well to have a round, first. News isn’t the best.”
After two pints and much badgering, Sirius explained to their collective, swelling horror that, beyond the volatile political atmosphere at Hogwarts, students fighting with increase viciousness in the corridors, and sightings of werewolves in the Forbidden Forest over the summer and other dark creatures—both Mary and Sirius blinked exactly once Remus’s way at that, and Nathaniel’s milky eyes revealed nothing—one of the incoming firsties had been found dead in a boarding room at the Three Broomsticks that very morning. It’d been the one studying vampires.
“Dead how?” asked Nathaniel. With his elbow perched on the table, chin on tattooed knuckles, he looked intrigued.
“Jesus wept, Nate.”
“How else?” said Sirius, grim. “Exsanguination.”
Bernat Báthory. That had been his name, though Remus knew him only as Three. While it was too early to tell what exactly had happened and while official word wouldn’t spread until tomorrow’s Prophet, One and Two, the shooting star and fourth placer in some arrangement, had been informed and chosen that same moment to tender their withdrawal from the postgraduate program, effectively immediately. And if you did the maths as the postgraduate board and Ministry evidently had…
“WHAT?”
“Christ, Mary,” said Sirius.
“They can’t—that’s—fuck that,” she sputtered, reeling in her seat. “I’m bloody gutted. If they shut down the program, my credentials are mud. My name is mud.”
“Ah, that’s what you’re worried about, are you?”
“Who gets expelled from a defunct disgraced program? That’ll haunt me for years. Not all of us exactly have your options, Black.”
“Um.”
“If I might,” began Remus, quick, hoping to cool whatever bubbling tension was brewing between Mary and Sirius before it boiled over—even if, as he reckoned, it seemed less about the present conversation and something else entirely—and he continued, “I’m not sure that’s entirely what Pad—what Sirius was saying. Was it?”
“The board only threatened to shutter the program,” explained Sirius. “Dumbledore assuaged them, but they agreed together that, if enrolment drops below fifty percent, they ought ‘re-evaluate’ the structure and program going forwards. Can’t lose another soul, us. Or, well, we could do with Snape buggering off and still be sorted—”
Mary groaned. “We know what that means under Minchum’s Ministry, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Indeed.”
“Um, yeah.”
“Fuck,” continued Mary with another low groan. She slumped against the old worn wood of her chair and pushed her drink, a compromising butterbeer after Remus scuppered anything harder given her previous indulgences, far across the table as though it contained live spiders and not delicious warmth. She flicked the remainder of her cigarette into the glass, which promptly drowned.
“I know it might seem insensitive,” said Remus, “but, Mary, really, about the trunk—”
“Oh, I’ve not got it. May have had a bit of an episode. With some incendiary spells. Y’know.”
Remus blinked. Nathaniel winced, as he probably knew as much already, while Sirius’s thin eyebrows began a slow but vicious ascent up his forehead. His lip twitched. If he’d been a spider himself, his fangs would be oozing venom.
“Look—”
“—ah, well, this is rich,” said Sirius with a derisive and acidic snort. “All up in our fucking twats and you can’t even keep your own shite together?”
“Padfoot!”
“If you knew the absolute shite she’s been spitting—”
“—Jesus wept, it’s not gone,” said Mary loudly. She stared Sirius down from behind her waspish painted mask. “Lily and I put so many protective enchantments on the trunk, it could survive re-entry from orbit—and include in that, mind you, the works of yours truly. It was a symbolic burning. Letting go. Something,” she added towards Sirius, “that some of us are capable of doing, ’cos we’re not all fucking mad in the head, are we?”
Remus cleared his throat. “I’m sensing a—”
“—oi, Lupin, shut the fuck up, would you?”
“—um—”
“—piss off, Mare, don’t you bloody lay into him just ’cos—”
“—fucking Lily Evans, you pricks,” shouted Mary. She rose from her seat at the same moment and heaved, hard, worn-nailed hands braced against the underside of the table, but while Mary was clever and strong of spirit, a bodybuilder she was not. The table did not flip. Its aching wood legs clattered loud against the creaking floorboards and quieted the room. Their drinks sloshed in their glasses, some spilling over. Mary towered over them all.
“She caught me sneaking off with the thing to build up a nice bonfire and went barking. Said, ‘You lot have no idea what Ahmed was working on,’ or some piss like that, and it that it was integral to something she was working on herself—oh, don’t sodding ask, Lupin, it’s not like anyone tells me shite, do they?—and, in summary, as none of that matters at all, she said the rest of us were children and could ask Miss Evans-Potter to send us notes on a particular subject if we truly needed it. When she has time in her busy schedule, obviously.”
Sirius’s face did something acrobatic, then, looking up at Mary.
“She’s—”
“—vetting all requests and making us queue, yeah, so if you were hoping to fuck about all semester and make your bike fly better by cribbing off the notes of a dead witch ’cos you’ve never had a single original thought in your life, you’re right buggered, bitch.”
Remus stood, abrupt, and while no he was not going to leap at Mary in defence of Sirius, not exactly, they would never find out. Dragon’s Blood had quickened her reflexes, and so with a loud bang Remus found himself flattened against the far claustrophobic wall of the sitting room, ears ringing and vision spotty. Something twisted in his chest. His ribs ached. Vaguely he could make out the furious exchange of insults—Mary screaming at Sirius to rein in his bloody dog, which was rich coming from her of all people—and Sirius firing back a string of outraged obscenities occasionally punctuated by hurtful words you could rarely, if ever, take back.
“—heartless bitch—”
“—oh, ow, truly, Black, that wounds my ickle soul—”
“—is what you want everyone to think, o’course,” spat Sirius. They were rounding each other like dogs, now, snarling and with wands out like bared teeth. Speaking poniards, every word stabbing, and Sirius determined to pierce all those icy layers of detached sangfroid. One of them had blasted the round table against another far wall where it’d splintered and lay in a heap of wood and broken glass, and Nathaniel stood beside its wreckage looking very small and un-punk-like. “’Cos how else is Mary fucking Macdonald supposed to float above the fray? She’s too cool to care. Certainly, she doesn’t care about the missing girl she’s been pining over for almost two years—”
“—um—”
“—piss off—”
“—the one who’s not dead, I reckon, except then that means you didn’t matter to her at all, did you? Faked her death and left you to the wolves. S’why you won’t hear it. Can’t handle that someone wouldn’t fall all over themselves just to be with you, is that it?”
“I’ll hex your bloody tongue out.”
“She’s alive,” said Sirius, taunting, grey eyes brimming with malice in a manner too reminiscent of someone else they knew. “I know she is, except someone won’t tell me that bloody cat’s name to prove it.”
“Um, how would—”
“—oh, just piss off, would you, Nate?” said Mary, rolling her eyes. “Adults are talking. Go do your dangerous magical shite, why don’t you? Turn into a Hag or whatever. You’ll be right at home with Black—and his mum.”
Nathaniel glanced helplessly at Remus with his empty white eyes, but, well, Remus wasn’t much help, given he was just as confused. Where had all this been all summer? But Nathaniel, despite the confusion, was taking the abuse in stride with much more grace than any of the rest of them. His face wasn’t screwed up with delicate rage like Sirius’s or deadly cold like Mary’s, nor, as he imagined, was it anything close to what Remus’s wilder features must’ve looked like. Nathaniel blinked twice and lifted a hand as if to quiet them, though it failed to grab anyone’s attention. His words, however, did.
“Is this because Remus is a—what he is?” asked Nathaniel quietly, and instantly the whirlwind around them fell still. Nathaniel mouthed the word werewolf.
Remus’s blood froze in his veins a moment. Both Mary and Sirius’s heads turned like owls, revolving painfully on their necks even as they kept their harsh stances towards one another, to stare between him and Nathaniel.
“Nate—” they began.
“How?” said Remus. He peeked up at Nathaniel from his slump against the wall and felt, most curiously, more fatigue than fear. The ice was melting quick. It was if nothing else reassuring that Sirius and Mary would both immediately jump to damage control—to spinning lies wholecloth to cover his naked secrets. But no more. “How did you…?”
“Um.” Nathaniel was—wait, was he blushing? “Well, when I was giving Remus his tattoo…”
“Oh, Christ,” muttered Remus. He pawed at the angled, pinkish line that he still often forgot had made its home across his nose. “Was it this new scar or the shagging?”
Mary’s arms literally pinwheeled. Remus coughed. Right. The whiplashing atmosphere in the claustrophobic sitting room ought’ve broken all their necks, and yet Remus felt a familiar anxious laugh bubble in his throat as Mary glanced, eyes pitiful, between Nathaniel and Sirius.
A pot left on boil. He’d prepared something to say to Mary, to explain the winelike complexity of his journey of sexual discovery, and in an instant every word had evaporated. Perhaps, perhaps he could justify hiding his romance with Sirius from her, if only because the Order would divide them the moment they learned, but then again the more he thought about it the more he realised he was in effect calling her a gossip and untrustworthy. She’d kept the secret of his lycanthropy. And, moreover, every time he tried to justify hiding his flaming homosexuality from her for years it felt structurally impossible. Like adding two sums and receiving different results. Piss. No. That was another lie. Perhaps he’d wanted her to bloody well notice on her own; perhaps he’d wanted her to take him seriously, for once, to see him as proper fucking competition.
“It—you don’t have to lie,” continued Remus, still quiet. “I was planning on looping Mary in on that particular revelation tonight anyway.”
“I can’t believe you,” said Mary. She called over one of the few intact chairs in the room with a wave of her wand and deflated into its seat. With another precise flick, the table slid back into position before her, repairing itself in a manner of seconds. “Any of you. Genuinely,” she continued, wounded, “you all knew?”
“Um.”
“Ah, well, about that, Mare…”
Mary shot Sirius a withering, lethal look, and gave a guttural kind of growl before whamming her forehead hard against the restored table. She did it once more with feeling.
“I can’t believe I’m the last one to know. Me,” she said, muffled. “Me, Remus?”
“Mary…”
“I give up. Fuck it. Fine, Black, you win.” Mary rose with a decent welt on her forehead, still rising, and the edge of it bleeding as headwounds often did by her hairline. Her fingers daubed at it—she smiled, eyes utterly hollow like those of a skull, and for a moment Remus felt an animal kind of fear—but from there, she only dragged both hands slow over her face as if to rub sobriety into it. It left lipstick smeared across her upper lip and chin. “Dig up her body. Parade it around. Become a bloody monster, if truly, truly that’s what you want,” she continued, tucking her wand back into the pocket of her trousers and shrugging. “I’m not gonna stop you.”
With one last smeared, sombre stare at both Nathaniel and Sirius, each cowed by Mary’s sudden swing to sincerity, she closed her eyes. “Adelaide, Sirius. The cat’s name was Adelaide.”
Crack.
The sitting room above the Hog’s Head felt yet more claustrophobic without Mary Macdonald to hold back its crumbling walls.
Notes:
The next chapter, Allegory of the Cave will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 1 September, a Monday.
Chapter 28: Allegory of the Cave
Chapter Text
By the time Mary Macdonald was four years old, she had already become best friends with her grandmother, who lived with the rest of her family in their crowded flat. So, it was only natural that Mary shared her first and biggest secret with her nan: sometimes, when Mary was alone, she could squeeze her big brown eyes shut and believe something until it came true.
At first it was only the small things. Making her toys move on their own, opening cupboards with hidden-away sweets though they ought be out of reach; the usual imaginative things that her parents wrote off as a child’s whimsy and some precocious ingenuity. When her hair grew six spiralling inches overnight and her wardrobe started changing from trousers to skirts and frilly dresses, however, it quickly grew impossible to deny something was afoot. Not that they didn’t try, of course. The alternative was somehow more impossible.
Mary’s nan was an anchor in all that and her saviour. She wasn’t a witch herself, nor had been anyone in the family as far as she knew, but in the old country she’d befriended an older girl with weird tricks and uncanny wisdom and recognised as much in little Mary. Nana Macdonald had also been the first to realise Mary was a girl.
Once she was seven, she’d flown fast beyond the realm of precocious child and found herself in the new isolating heights of assigned genius. She learned the collected works of old English poets by heart; sang like an angelic choir; mathed maths; painted perfect watercolour landscapes with childish flair, London cityscapes decorated with flying faeries and bridges adorned by great sleeping dragons; and in all her doing she crashed up against near every barrier that could be imposed between success and a given member of the Black British with all the unaware force of the ocean. She was a brewing force of nature, but still Mary’s nan was her heart—the only one to truly see her. The only one as well to accept that someone as young and clever as her could nevertheless want a different name.
For almost a decade thereafter Mary swore that her nan could do magic as well—or, well, to those she trusted. After one of her tantrums over an inexplicable polka-dot dress her mum had traded away for a pair of boy’s trousers, Nana Macdonald had hushed Mary quiet, shut the door to the kitchen behind her, and never raised her voice. Not a once.
When she emerged a few hours later, her well-pregnant mum waddled off to fetch back the dress.
Two months went by. They picked up their lives and moved to a slightly smaller flat in Brixton, leaving no forwarding address in their wake and arriving with one newly-born son, age zero, and one newly-born girl, age eight. Neither of them existed in any official record. It was a home birth twice-over, and, growing up, Mary would never again see a doctor. Her parents less as well. Mum took a part-time position in a mail room; Nana cleaned; her father worked the docks at night, where none from their old lives might recognise him. The Macdonalds were a clever family. They would make it work.
Hogwarts, of course, made it work even better. It was the fresh start Mary’d always dreamed of—a true due-over. Even if many of the children there were somewhat as precocious as her.
Remus didn’t count himself among that lot, not then, and not for a good few years after meeting Mary, but James, Sirius, Marlene, and of course Lily Evans-Potter above them all had certainly fit the bill. You could hardly find a pair of thieves thicker than Mary and Marlene, whose first-letter initials became iconic among those of Gryffindor House—M&M esq., Slayers of Slytherin—and even more so to the bleary-eyed students a year below them. When Lily fell in among their ranks at the start of third year, their sisterhood sealed, probably, by some fleeting summer blood pact, she became cool in an instant. A flash transfiguration. If Marlene was bold and a menace on the Quidditch pitch whereas Lily was the lethal, red-haired brains of their operations, Mary was both and more. Not that that always worked out for her. Not, if one was to tell the full tale, that it always worked out for Remus.
Few at Hogwarts recalled the name Davey Gudgeon except to say that he’d been a brave-if-foolhardy boy prone to brave-if-foolhardy games. He and other students across all Houses, Marlene and James and of course Sirius included, dared and taunted one another to show off their scarlet colours by ducking the many flailing bleached white branches of the magical Whomping Willow that’d been brought to the Hogwarts grounds only a few years prior—a semi-sentient magical tree with a violent predisposition and a dozen hammer-like limbs with which to act upon it.
More than once James had threatened, and emptily threatened, mind you, because to do otherwise would’ve been psychotic beyond all belief, to throw the objects of his ire—usually Severus and Regulus their growing crowd of Dark Arts lackeys like cunning Avery and the sadistic-humoured Mulciber, but equally those who chatted shite at anyone over whom he felt protective—beneath the Willow while under the effects of a Body-Bind Hex. He’d always maintained that he’d release the Hex to give them a sporting chance of breaking clear, of course. Very Gryffindor-like. It’d been all bluff and bluster, of course. Probably. And no one could prove otherwise, because before things had escalated with Severus and indeed before James had actually mastered the Body-Bind Hex, all they’d ever done was taunt the tree. Prove their bravery. Their belonging, above all, to House Gryffindor.
There’d been close calls before, yes, and a few broken bones, but poor Davey Gudgeon had suffered the worst of it. By the time Mary and James dragged the boy away while Peter and Sirius, ever-bold Sirius, did battle with it, lost, and earned a fair few ugly purple bruises for their hubris, Davey’s head resembled a marble sculpture that too had done battle, except with time and weathering, losing a nose and crumpling half his face in the process. Madam Pomfrey was too clever a witch for him to lose his eye, but it’d been a close call—or so the rumours said, in any case. What the rumours never said was that Mary had been the one to dare young Davey, nor did they ever catch wind that she and he were having something of a late-term fling. Or a late-term spat after an early-term fling; or something; Remus was never privy. The only reason he knew at all was because, even then, he’d developed an awful habit of eavesdropping. And, well, Marlene did not often exercise her ‘inside voice,’ on or off the pitch.
Perhaps that was the first moment you could say Remus tempered his admiration for Mary, though his memory was tainted soon thereafter. Fourth year had soon come, and with it brought on its cruel, autumn winds the scent of romance. Not too heartbroken by her role in Davey’s withdrawal, Mary swooned, swooned at the retelling of Sirius’s heroics, and by the beginning of fifth year, they’d got together three times and fully broken up twice. There were breaks between them. There were fights—spectacular fights, melodramatic fights, shrieking-in-the-corridors, earning-Sirius-detentions fights, all set like splendorous cut gemstones in the unnoticed white-gold setting of Remus’s gay pining, because every time they fought, Mary ran to Lily and Marlene, while Sirius ran to him.
And James.
Him and James. Never Peter.
Of course Mary wasn’t the only dalliance, and of course Remus felt an untold amount of guilt whenever he’d be sitting there in the common room far after the lights were out and everyone else in the Tower was asleep, waiting for the sleepy portrait of the Fat Lady to swing open to empty, Sirius-scented air, because sometimes Sirius would come back under the Cloak smelling of someone that was neither him nor Mary. Sometimes when they weren’t on a break.
And, truly, to say Mary was a ‘dalliance’ was to say that having children was a ‘hobby’ in the journey of one’s life. It was rude. It was patently untrue. Perhaps worst of all, Remus called her such behind her back a number of times to Peter and James—and Sirius, whenever they had a big fight and Remus got his gay hopes up, or similarly whenever Remus and Sirius got into a shouting match over something that had nothing to do with Quidditch socks or skiving off lessons for a cheeky smoke—but not once to her face, no, never. He smiled and played nice. Was pleasant. Helpful. Made better friends with Lily as a fortunate byproduct. Once, in a moment of weakness, Remus stumbled across her crying in one of the many grassy courtyards in the maze of the castle, midwinter, sat on the steps in the freezing rain, and offered her his handkerchief and a hand-rolled cigarette, one of his first ever, actually, because even at age fifteen-and-something-months, Remus had been a forty-nine-year-old werewolf with patchy-elbowed jumpers.
Her dad had had an accident on the docks. A snapped metal cable as thick as his neck, but—and Mary had laughed at this part, bitterly in a way that made her uncomfortably like a mirror—they said it’d been quick. He didn’t suffer, they said. He loved you, they said. In another lifetime that moment might’ve made them friends.
In this lifetime, however, Remus hadn’t had the chance. He took all that guilt, conflict, burgeoning, pining, adolescent angst and lycanthropic agony, and most of all that untapped potential for real human growth—all of it, every last drop—and a few weeks later fled with it to the French Pyrenees. And, Jesus, he’d never told her any of this, even as Mary spilled her own drunken guts both figuratively and literally in the figurative shoes of his emotional brain and the literal shoes on his feet during one of many piss-outs in Hogsmeade. Everything about the sex stuff and the sex stuff and the insecurity; the strange relationship she had with her sister; with the rest of her family, being a black sheep among black sheep and yet their prodigal daughter; her brother, Theodore; even some of her most intimate moments with Sirius, which she and he’d never shared with anyone else, no matter how curious they were. Instead Remus offered his platitudes and listened. Never contributed.
So maybe you could say he’d given himself an impoverished portrait of Mary, like a moving photograph that only twitched between two fixed poses. You could hardly know someone if you never invested some part of yourself back into them, and well. There were only a handful of people still alive that Remus had done that with, so you could just as hardly blame him for not realising that Mary had been in love, arse-over-&c., with Gloria Ahmed, great-and-&c., nor for not realising the ways in which she’d yet again become a mirror to him, yet again in uncomfortable fashion.
This time, though, she’d been the one to flee.
That was the funny thing about mirrors. They weren’t people. Mirrors didn’t look back, that was just a trick of the optics—but with people, with Mary, he’d seen too much of himself, run, and never stopped to think about what she might’ve seen in his glass.
***
Most of the utensils, bowls, and flatware of Hogwarts were forged of precious metal alloys or otherwise fine glassy crystal. That fact birthed inordinate and explosive guilt in Remus every time he ever broke one, though of course that, too, decreased with age and maturity. Remus would’ve taken the guilt of a dozen broken crystal fineries over the guilt he felt at present.
Setting the pitcher of water atop one of their bedside tables in the dark, Remus leaned over to peer down at Sirius’s sleeping face. Hollow-cheeked, dark circles beneath his eyes. The sticky pallor of dehydration. If nothing else his face was vaguely peaceful—human-shaped, too, so perhaps something of an improvement. He’d awoken to Padfoot in his, or, well, their bed, every day of the week thus far and sometimes came back from the library to find a massive dog dozing there as well.
“S’impolite,” murmured Sirius sleepily, “to watch someone sleep without asking, Moony. Y’ought know that.”
“Mm. Sorry to wake the angel from his flowery bed. Mother may I?”
“Never call me your mother again.”
“Did—”
“No.”
“You haven’t a clue what I was about to ask.”
Sirius did not turn over and instead rolled his scratchy-haired cheeks against his pillow in the dark. It muffled his voice. “I have a good idea.”
“I brought you food,” whispered Remus, leaning into Sirius’s ear. It almost perked doggishly. Almost. His invisible tail was a hair’s breath from wagging, bless him. “Fresh from the Great Hall.”
“Breakfast is still on?”
“Oh, well—no, not quite,” said Remus quickly. “It’s, well—”
“—surely it’s not noon already.”
“Surely.”
Quiet crept across the darkened dormitory like a silent spider. Sirius shifted, squinting over at the cracks of fading light that sneaked in through their heavy drawn drapes. Two layers of them in fact, as the windows were drawn, and so too were the bewitched lion ones on the bedposts.
“Moony.”
“Mm. It’s treacle tart.”
“I’ve missed supper?” said Sirius, incredulous. He sat up, sudden, and rubbed at his eyes in disbelief. “My flying students—”
“—I set up the agility rings for them as you had it last month and supervised from the ground. Summoned some clay pigeons from the earth while they were warming up and instructed them that they needed to, at once and as a team, catch all seven. I think they rather liked that one. Asked me to do it again but to make them faster.” Remus kneaded a small circle at the crest of Sirius’s bony back while he groaned into his hands. “As for your absence, I told them you were otherwise detained by your postgraduate studies. I think they at least appreciated that I did more than make them fly laps, and a few of them took to offering corrections to one another. I can teach you the spell with the clay pigeons—I think a few escaped, come to think of it—and we can pass the whole thing off as your idea, if you like.”
“They think I’m fucking sozzled, don’t they.”
“Likely not. They adore you, like.”
“I’m a mess.”
“You’re our mess.”
“You’re a saint.”
“Think it’ll take a few more good deeds before I start to burn the tumours off my soul,” mused Remus, passing him a glass of water. Sirius eyed it the way Remus would probably eye free cocaine and downed it like a shot. He filled another one to chase it.
“You are, though. My saint.”
“Saint Bernard. Treacle tart?”
“Do you have anything more—”
“—I filled a whole platter, Pads. What do you think I am, some amateur?”
“Or Peter.”
“Or Peter, and oh Jesus Christ. Peter.”
“What?”
“I got a letter from him.”
“What’s—”
“—last year. Last. Year.”
Sirius’s eyes went wide in the dark. He slumped, already hunched over as he was under the four-post frame, and soon they were beginning a slow, shameful threesome with their mutual mortification.
“Not you as well?”
“Fetch me the greasiest thing on the platter,” muttered Sirius. He wiped at his face again. “And a quill and some ink, would you? I’ve a thousand apologies to write up.”
“I’m letting that slide because you’re distraught over Peter, naturally.”
“Naturally. Good boy.”
“Did you also want me to put the Marley record on?”
Sirius shrugged.
Morosity had crept over Sirius slowly since his fight with Mary, but its march—its slow, meandering slouch, actually—was indefatigable. Remus wasn’t much sure what to do. Being honest, in fact, he wasn’t much sure there was anything he could do, or that anyone could, and so in the absence of any other direction he’d resolved to keep as many of Sirius’s wild plates spinning while he wallowed and/or recovered. Undoubtedly it was an uncomfortable experience for them both. Remus had the distinct impression that Sirius was embarrassed at, well, his slipping hygiene and the amount he was sleeping, but equally he picked out something angrier. Something resentful. If he overstayed his welcome in the dark of their dormitory or tried to cheer Sirius up, often those emotions flared up like an emerging wildfire, so Remus quickly learned the balancing act there. Sometimes he fell off that precarious tightrope. Got burned. Part of the learning, he supposed. Sirius would’ve done the same for him.
And it wasn’t every day, or even every other day—and it wasn’t that Sirius wasn’t appreciative or unwilling to demonstrate that appreciation with his beautiful crooked mouth. Nevertheless, however, it thrust Remus out of his theretofore comfortable niche where Sirius handled their socialising while Remus occasionally turned heads with an odd comment.
It forced him to actually talk to people. On his own. For hours. Without years of rapid-fire patter to demonstrate to others that he was, in fact, as clever and quick-witted as all the veritable geniuses with which he’d inadvertently surrounded himself.
Whenever he found someone, Remus additionally found that an unbecoming rust had settled over him, adding to his shabby animal magnetism and the patched-over elbows on his jumpers a strange, scratchy awkwardness not unlike an ill-fitted wool hat. Part of it must’ve been the pattern rupture. Sirius and Remus were, well, Sirius and Remus; Abbott and Costello; the Rosencrantz to his Guildenstern, if not vice versa; and, perhaps in some moments of hubris, the sharply-said ‘Potter!’ to the exasperated Scottish cry of ‘Black?!’. It was simply weird to see them apart so long. Students Remus had never once spoken to—probably, they all looked so young and tiny and were thus impossible to tell apart—even churned out rumours that they were quarrelling.
“It’ll be all right, Mr. Lupin,” said Professor McGonagall, completely unprompted, while he ate beside her at the staff table in the Great Hall. He followed her bespectacled gaze to the empty seat beside him as she continued, “I’ve seen many a friendship in these storied halls survive more than a simple matter of academic disagreement.”
“I—sorry?”
“Although I would say that both your proffered positions are equally admirable,” she added as an afterthought.
“Pardon me, but—I don’t—do I look upset?”
Professor McGonagall frowned a tight-lipped frown at him from under her wide-brimmed hat. Sharp eyes flicked over him, befuddled.
“Why,” she began slowly, “yes.”
It was awful. His—Sirius’s flying students looked down from their flying perches at him with pity, though they nevertheless snickered whenever one of the inquisitive rats that’d recently taken up residence beneath the Quidditch stands sneaked over his trainers in the early dawn light. Whispers of the Book Boggart suffused the library. On occasion he found small bundles of loose chocolate left unattended on tables as if a sacrificial offering for a folkloric beast, and once in the halls he caught glimpse of an older Hufflepuff girl slapping the three-finger, thumb-outstretched gesture of 3L from a younger student’s hand in a mixed expression of fear and condolences upon her face. Irma Pince, of all people, reduced the acidity of her sarcasm by two steps on the pH scale. Awful. The way students and faculty alike looked at him, you’d have assumed he were either a terrifying, child-eating monster-in-the-woods or some harried and über-fraught hausfrau overburdened with his husband’s errands.
And being clear, Remus was not. Even if he had taken the approximate shape of something similar, that was because every postgraduate took on that form at one point or another. Even their revision group resembled a dysfunctional household. Remus would track down Nathaniel North, hidden away in the sprawling library stacks as he’d taken to doing since the fight at the Hog’s Head, yet he could barely elicit the faintest response from the boy before he found a way to shrug or otherwise give a nonverbal reply, after which point, of course, he’d return to reading his many ancient tomes, though he didn’t quite have the wherewithal to turn a page of Steganographia until Remus was waddling away with his tail between his legs. Neither of them would acknowledge the mutilated corpse of conversation left between them. Often Nate would be sat with Emily Leach—what a horrid bastard he was, mentoring her, that was supposed to be their job—and evidently the thousand apparent rumours swirling about Remus had finally reached her saintly ears, because she too greeted him with something of a cold shoulder.
“Hi, Lupin,” she said quietly. “Did you want to sit with us? North was just showing me—”
“No.”
A young crowd of students revising at a nearby writing desk whispered to one another, almost inaudible and indeed probably inaudible to all but a werewolf’s ears. Remus shot a lethal glare over his shoulder to silence them. One of them yelped. Another leapt halfway from her chair to clamp both palms around the startled boy’s mouth.
“No,” he continued, looking back at Emily and not the gap in her front teeth. “No, I have, er, reshelving to get back to. Perhaps another time.”
“But I really wanted to ask about your thesis—is it true you have the only working map of the library?” she asked excitedly.
“Oh, er, well, sort of. It’s a touch large. Impracticably so. I can’t quite get it to alter its scale on the fly, like.”
Okay. All right. Perhaps—no, fuck ‘perhaps’, it definitely wasn’t her giving him the cold shoulder, but Jesus Christ this was awkward. Why couldn’t he have been ambushed by her in the loo or on a crowded train or in the woods, as one normally met people? How else did you skip past all the small talk and arse-sniffing?
“A pity,” she said, smiling soft at Remus. “Just think, you could have a perfect map of the entire world if only you had a large enough globe.”
Well, now, that was a thought, wasn’t it?
“A globe the size of the planet, I wager,” mumbled Nate.
“A quarter might do. Or an eighth,” she continued, perching her chin in her hand. “I’m unsure, really, how much one could shrink such a scale model before the usefulness begins to diminish. We should consult…”
Though Remus’s fuzzy brows were making a slow ascent up his forehead, his eyes, his only true allies this late in life, spotted a beret-and-braid pairing flitting between two large bookshelves on Arithmantic texts where there were no fewer than twenty much-battered copies of Cryptomenysis Patefacta. Headed towards the Restricted Section. He cleared his throat.
“Sorry, I really do need to—”
“Right, right. Another time, maybe.”
“Maybe.” Remus flailed a hand in Pascalle’s direction and met the puzzled expression on her face with his own pleading one, then mimed a smokey-smoke gesture where neither Nate nor Emily could see it.
Though her face wrinkled with amused confusion, she nevertheless smiled.
“Remus,” whispered Pascalle after crossing to them, “mon cher, I need your help to find something in the Restricted Section. I am not so familiar with all the books that will try to kill me, yet.”
“Right away.”
Pascalle hooked her manicured hands over his upper arm as they went off. Once they’d passed the velvet ropes and secluded themselves among the shorter, thicker stacks, ones full of books that hummed, moaned, whispered as though creeping over Remus’s ear like a noisy spider, and otherwise twitched irritably on their shelves, she hauled him to a stop. Sound didn’t carry well, here, and the ghosts of the castle never entered the Restricted Section. Something to do with all the ambient magic and lingering curses. It was private. Irma Pince had told him that centuries ago this part of the library had played host to a series of works by the now-scorned magical scholar Theodorus Philetas before everyone had thought better of it and attempted to burn the lot of his work if albeit with predictably disastrous results. More than one tome here was bound in tight silver chains; a couple, in fact, seemed to have no means of opening them at all. Their edges were all spine.
“Arrêt. You have need of me?”
“What I really need is a smoke.”
She shook her head mirthfully, braids swaying. “I cannot. I am teaching in an hour. The professor is ill. But, Remus, even if I do not know you well,” she continued, lowering her voice, “I know still that face. Tell me what it is you need.”
“A thaumaturgical—oh, what’s the word? Algorithm? That—that’ll let me cast a big, fuck-off spell alone without causing me to catch fire or otherwise combust. Do you happen to have one of those on hand?”
“For your thesis?”
“Mm.”
“Only for your thesis?” Her tone was reproaching. And—okay, Jesus, maybe he was known to be a bit withholding of the truth sometimes, but could everyone stop riding his arse for five minutes, maybe?
“No,” whispered Remus sharply. “I’m also planning on moving the moon a few inches.”
“Oh-là-la, très bien. But why?”
“Well, I’ve secretly been a werewolf all the time you’ve known me, and the scheduling is highly inconvenient this week, like. But about this algorithm—”
Except Pascalle had frozen like an icy sculpture as he tried to continue and was eyeing him with colliding disbelief and, if he guessed it, realisation. Her attempt to keep composed was not altogether successful.
“But you are not—mon Dieu,” she whispered. Her stricken stare settled on the centre of Remus’s face—likely the new, fading-pink line that cut an angled scar across his nose. Jesus, he was going to need to remember that thing was there.
“Oh, come off it, I was taking the piss.”
“Merde. Merde.” As Remus took half a step forwards, putting on his best lopsided Sirius grin to show that, yes, ha-ha, that truly had been a joke, Pascalle backed into the shelf behind her with a quiet thump. It was small. Nothing, really. Yet, that thump awakened something above her—a particularly predatory atlas of forbidden geography that Remus had watched, exactly once, cannibalise another map for encroaching upon its territory. The atlas snapped its binding around Pascalle’s braids with a papery ripping noise.
To her credit, she did not scream. Pascalle groped for her wand as it yanked, aim flitting between Remus and behind her head even as the atlas unfurled a long map of the Albanian Mountains and attempted to tear into her beret with its cold, snow-capped, mountainous teeth.
In his own fit of growing panic, however, something odd happened. Remus hadn’t dared raise his wand or hand in her direction, lest she believe that, as a werewolf, he’d suddenly become a caricature and was about to attack her in his own workplace, though where he’d hide the body was something of an enigma. With the Mermish biographies? They’d sing like underwater canaries. Still, as the atlas went to bite again, its teeth rebounded off her beret and suddenly retreated, leaving the fragments of the miniature Albanian Mountains embedded in her beret even as the shattered peaks oozed a strange, sanguine lava. The beret had suddenly become sturdy wood. Pascalle groped at it in confusion while righting herself.
“I did not do that,” she whispered.
“I—well, that’s embarrassing,” muttered Remus. “I haven’t done accidental magic like that since—or, actually, let’s stop that sentence there. Where were we?”
A moment’s quiet crossed between them as though the library had become a great gaping chasm. The sarcasm and otherwise acidic tone weren’t going to do him any favours, of course, but he was getting tired of this. Exactly this.
“Look, forget—”
“I know an author—” Pascalle began at the same moment, and she snorted despite herself. The fear hadn’t quite left her eyes, but that was a problem for another time, he supposed. “You have read Gödel?”
“I have.”
“And Turing?”
“Better at maths than he was magic, but yes.”
“Good. They are the framework. I will write you a spell for your mapping, Remus.” She scuttled towards the roped-off exit of the Restricted Section without looking away from him. “But I will find you. I am very busy,” she added, and left without her book.
***
As the week before Hallowe’en neared, their dormitory too took on a darker atmosphere, albeit the most frightening thing about it were the messes, and that fear undercut by the constant playing of any given Bob Marley album. Remus’s organised chaos was becoming less organised and more pure chaos without Sirius’s effortless precision to tidy up after him, and though it smelled—well, it smelled decent and of them, which was about as much as you could ask of a dormitory—you could hardly put a tea mug down without bracing it on a clean-yet-wrinkled pair of trousers or a loose sheaf of parchment. Partly he blamed the recent moon.
Remus gave a mild sigh, knocking the door shut behind him with the flat of his bare foot and putting up their usual Muffling Charm without much of a thought and half a twitch of his finger in its general direction. He flopped down beside the massive dog-shaped lump on their bed and stretched out, letting the lingering adrenaline and magic seep out of him into the mostly-clean covers beneath.
“I think I might be halfway to, well, halfway being a decent flight instructor,” murmured Remus, shifting his gaze to stare up at the motorbike schematics above their bed. He heard the odd rustling sound of Padfoot shifting beneath the covers—fur on fabric, air rushing. “Though I fear I might run out of hoop configurations for them to fly through while doing their assorted tasks. Flew with them today. And you’ll never guess what’s happened: Dumbledore accosted me in the Great Hall this morning. He mentioned that a flock of odd earthen birds has taken up roost in one of the castle’s lower towers, perplexing the Gamekeeper, er, Hagrid’s his name, I believe. Asked me if I’d ever seen such a thing.”
“Moony,” said Sirius, turning over to frown at him.
“Mm?”
“Don’t take this poorly.”
“Mm.”
“You have a smell coming off of you,” he continued. “And, yes, I know that’s rich coming from me. It’s—look, it’s rather strong when I’m Padfoot.”
“When you say ‘smell,’ do you mean ‘reek’, or perhaps, ‘soporific musk’, or—”
“Dunno, if m’honest. You’re not usually sweaty.”
“Incorrect.”
“In bed.”
“Still incorrect.”
“Beforehand,” muttered Sirius, swatting at him lazily.
“Trousers on or off?”
“Ah, I—y’know, I dunno. Recently, it’s like there’s a delay—mind’s not really in it, but my cock is, or vice versa. Takes me a bit to—y’know, synchronise. And it’s not always—”
“Pads.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll take my trousers off and we can lie about in our pants like it’s a Saturday. Or, well, you in less than pants, not that I’m complaining. How about that? You could even be Padfoot again if you like.”
“Acceptable. Agreeable. But—budge up, would you?”
“Oh, well, that’s too far, like.”
“Drat,” murmured Sirius, drawing back the covers so Remus could climb in underneath after kicking off his trousers, tyrants they be. He looped one bare bony arm under a pillow and Remus’s neck while the other, as was fitting for a curious doglike creature, ferreted its way up the front of Remus’s jumper. His calloused fingers dragged lightly against the fuzz on his chest. They lay like that a while, dozing. Remus imagined Sirius must be far away, that he’d lost him to another worrisome thought, but after a moment Sirius tucked his narrow chin over Remus’s shoulder.
“Any luck?”
“Yes and no.”
“Ah, the duality of dog.”
“Dog?”
“Well, you’re not a—”
“—Mm. Right, well, it’s been three weeks of steady enchanting and luck appears to be on my side there, though I’m worried that the taxonomical filtration-stroke-interpretation might work against all the efficiency improvements we’ve made since summer before last.”
“Ah, Bordeaux. Simpler times.”
“Hooligans on the beach.”
“James and Lily shagging in a tent.”
“You and I halfway to shagging in a tent.”
“We’ve upgraded to a cabin since.”
“Still, I think I can swing it. Another day—two, maybe. Rather not cause another freak weather event, as much as I trust Pascalle’s Arithmantic framework. Not my preferred calling card. Maps and heatwaves, I mean to say.”
“But…”
“But,” he continued, a sly grin breaking out on his face in the dark, “yes, I believe I may soon have the only dynamic Kneazle-Mapping Charm cast over a globe that only shows Great Britain in a somewhat functional state, yes.”
“I hear a grin.”
“Oh, I’m just thinking of all the head Nate’ll offer me to peek at my notes, like.”
“Ah.”
“Mm.”
“Say, Moony, might I borrow your notes?” asked Sirius. Nonchalant-like, though his crooked fingers trailed from chest fuzz to Remus’s belly. Fingers resting on the waistband of his Y-fronts. “And, say, I’ve this swanky collar I’m not currently wearing…”
Remus twitched. “You haven’t heard the ‘no’ part.”
“Do I wanna?”
“Well…”
There was one large, girthy, considerable problem, and indeed one that concerned itself with Remus’s globe, singular, not plural. Though the enchantment wasn’t quite complete, and the inefficiencies were still dire, Remus’s initial proof-of-concept using the Hogwarts library had indeed produced a small double-axis globe with the magical luminance of a mid-century lighthouse. Leach’s idea had been ingenious. Practically, however, it still had some kinks to work out. Each time you spun the globe in one full rotation to the right, the map would come up larger and produce more detail, while spinning it leftwards would, as expected, reverse the effect. The double-axis rotation in turn allowed any user to truly look at any part of the map provided. While the effect was fiddly—trying to teach the globe the difference between a spin and mere swivelling was like trying to teach a child the difference between a heap and a mound—he soon learned to navigate it, and the globe soon learned to navigate him.
Remus had even eliminated all accidental or imprecise labellings in the process: after a week of casting the thing over and over again with slight variations to get it right, only books written between century would show up on the map as he’d designated, which meant he could operate within specific taxonomies rather than just vague ones.
The problem therein was that, in using a single, all-encompassing globe, they couldn’t repeat their Indexing Charm trick as they’d done summer before last. Or rather, he could, but six globes hadn’t survived the process and the seventh likely wouldn’t either. The globe itself tended to run hot the larger of an area it was meant to encompass anyways, which was a problem he’d have to sort out before his Thesis Defence at the end of the year: at present the only reason it hadn’t combusted was because Remus had given it the wonderfully specific parameters of only tracking black Kneazles in Britain. Still they had to find every inky dot that represented a Kneazle and manually enlarge it to check if it was one named Adelaide.
“—and so,” said Remus, laughing. His breath hitched. He sucked air between his teeth, slow and sharp, as Sirius pressed into him and all that delicious friction started to give way. Of course Remus wanted nothing more than to throw his hips back, but, well, a), there was little more lube than spit involved, so no, that was a very very bad idea if he fancied doing this again soon, and b), Remus had to wonder if the casualness of it all was the only thing keeping Sirius’s mind-body problem on task. That, and the slight tug on the back of his—Sirius’s collar, worn by Remus—had something of a strange immobilising effect on him.
“And so?” asked Sirius wryly.
“No search-and-find solution there,” groaned Remus. He let Sirius fix both arms tight around his chest as he bottomed out. It gave him good control. Good enough, in fact, that Sirius’s slow hip-dragging achieve the increasingly-impossible task of shutting Remus up. Too mesmerised he was watching Sirius’s half-lidded eyes and thin, pouted mouth crack a grin. Their pace accelerated as Remus loosened up around him, although Sirius did not, in a moment of wisdom, begin hammering away.
It wasn’t quite needed, in fact. Sirius rolled Remus onto his belly and—well, this part was cruel, Sirius let him pull off his overwarm and scratch jumper at the same moment he shrugged back the sheets, which were far too hot and sticky for their liking anyway, but whenever Remus groped for his own dick, Sirius would stop, grind his hips forward with a cruel, all-the-better-to-tease-him-with slowness, and then move Remus’s hands back away to brace against the mattress. It was the most Sirius Remus had seen him in weeks.
Eventually he must’ve grown tired of Remus’s urgent insistence and so fixed his fist in the back of Remus’s borrowed collar. Gripped tight. Pushed him bodily into the mattress, full weight, wrist braced between Remus’s silver-scarred shoulderblades to force his head down against the sheets. Sirius’s breath came muffled and with urgent cursing, building, until he was pleading between curses under his breath, begging, and—maybe this was just because Remus hadn’t copped off very much between all the spinning plates or perhaps because Remus was madly in love with him—he thought there was nothing in that moment sexier than the panting, Yes, yes, yeah’s that spilled out of Sirius as he fucked Remus almost through the bloody mattress.
Maybe Remus almost suffocated in the process. Maybe not.
Sirius collapsed over his back, slick and sweaty and dark curls falling into both their mouths with a gasping kind of laughter on his lips. Remus still ground his hips forwards, whining, rutting against the soft sheets with too little friction for his liking.
“I take it back. Holy shite,” Sirius gasped, nipping at Remus’s ear with his teeth and tickling it with his hot breath. “You’re no saint.”
“Mm. Glad we could correct the error. Could I—”
“Hold on.”
“Padfoot,” he murmured, face flush against the sheets as Sirius pulled out and then away. He was trying—failing—to not sound as desperately horny as he was. “It’s also been a while for me, like. I’m not going to be able to focus on anything other than dicks if I don’t—oh, er, Pads, what are you—oh.”
Now, it wasn’t the most dignified response to having Sirius lapping at and into his slick arsehole, but you could hardly classify his little gay breathy gasps, curled toes, or fistfuls of wrinkled sheet as dignified either.
Sirius lifted Remus’s hips not without a cheeky Good boy, gave his palm a lewd, wet lick during a break for his jaw, and, Jesus Christ, Remus had never cum so hard in his life, having Sirius eat him out while stroking him off from behind. The sounds he made were beyond lewd—there were probably Parisian fucking streetwalkers who’d feel the burning itch to go to church, having heard him, and they probably could all the way in Paris as well. Or, at least Sirius said as much about fifteen minutes later, when Remus’s legs finally stopped twitching.
“Dunno if that helped, being honest,” he added nonchalantly. He unfixed the collar, casual-like, from Remus’s neck and snapped it back around his own. “Think I needed it nevertheless.”
Remus made an unsolid noise that could only be interpreted as, Padfoot.
“Hm?”
He turned his head, hair flying everywhere, eyes probably as deranged as they were lidded with dozy lust, and stared up at Sirius in the dark. Please, please tell me you enjoyed doing that, like, said his expression. Probably. Sirius licked at his palm with a wicked look in his eyes.
“Think I’ll keep it in my back pocket, yeah? Bit of a treat for when you’re good?”
Which was wholly unneeded and uncalled for, if Remus thought about it. To say that Sirius had a bit of a hold over him already was like saying that the moon had a bit of a hold over the tides.
***
By the misty moonlight—the kind that shone eerily through wispy, drizzling clouds too insubstantial to commit either to a downpour of precipitation or a simple chilling fog—you couldn’t have told the feeble-and-fading flicker of motion on the newsprint cover from a trick of the unsober eye, but most people, unlike Remus, were not werewolves. They couldn’t see that shite, just as they couldn’t see the drowned rats fleeing down the end of the alley, or pick out the petrol staining every brick, or the taste of fag ash washed into the gutters by spattering rain. Most people weren’t paranoid. Most above all would believe themselves mad before thinking that the waterlogged newspaper they found in an overstuffed, rusting rubbish bin on the Isle of Dogs to be a genuine moving photograph. ‘Moving’ not necessarily in the emotional sense, though for Remus it was.
“Careless,” muttered Remus. He lifted the wet, stuck-together pages of last month’s Prophet from the bin and rapped it, sharp, with his wand. The water shot clean out of it like iron shavings repelled by a powerful electromagnet, spattering the alleyway wall beside him and leaving it arguably cleaner than it had been before. Remus was left wetter, but that was neither here nor there. His shaggy head of hippy hair had been long glued down by the late evening drizzle.
“AUROR OFFICE DOUBLES REWARD FOR INFORMATION ON MINCHUM'S MOST WANTED,” read one bold blotted headline. The heavy-lidded, playful, and subtly mad face of Bellatrix Lestrange lay beneath it, dark curls spiralling like a thundercloud out to frame her pale skin and strong jaw. Aside her the photo labelled ANTONIN DOLOHOV held only a frightening closeup of one unblinking eye. A dark iris. His picture had disagreed with its framing.
“FOLLOWING THE SHOCKING MURDERS OF A PROMINENT MUGGLE FAMILY AND IN WHAT AURORS HAVE BEEN CALLING A 'FLAGRANT ATTACK ON THE STATUTE OF SECRECY,' FUGITIVES BELLATRIX LESTRANGE AND ANTONIN DOLOHOV HAVE HAD THE BOUNTY ON THEIR WANDS DOUBLED TO TWO THOUSAND GALLEONS IN EXCHANGE FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO THEIR CAPTURE,” began the article’s lead. “DOLOHOV'S PRIOR CRIMES INCLUDE ARSON, THE CREATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF DARK ARTEFACTS, AND THE ILLEGAL PERFORMANCE OF MINISTRY-SANCTIONED CHARMS, THE LATTER AT THE HANDS OF GIANTS UNDER LESTRANGE'S INFLUENCE. MORE ON PAGE THREE.”
“Giants?”
Behind him came a grunt of middling interest. Sirius had caught up. One of the unfortunate downsides of using the globe in lieu of a map or, actually, anything more practical to transport or indeed that could be temporarily bewitched instead of permanently enchanted was the imprecision of their search efforts. While the globe gave them a precise location, they nevertheless needed to trudge from their dormitory all the way to the castle boundaries and then Apparate to a nearby location—sometimes kilometres away, depending on their familiarity with the place—by which point the Kneazle might’ve wandered off in any direction. They were searching for a black feline needle in the proverbial London haystack. Provided they hadn’t scared said needle clean off with the crack of Apparition, of course.
Remus had lured Sirius out of bed Friday for their strange caper with the temptation of progress and one very patient blowjob, though even that was gradually losing its power to rouse Sirius from his, well, crise d’ennui. His languidity. His—the—‘whatever it was that was affecting him so’ was the correct turn of phrase, because Remus was not a doctor and was not eager to become one. He could not glean what afflicts him. It was simply his thing.
That this was a thing from which Remus and Sirius might not be able to fuck their way out was a dangerous, disquieting thought. Lily would’ve known what to do. Or Mary. Maybe Kelly. James, even, would’ve known much better, having always been the one to quell or stoke Sirius’s volatile moods in school, but none of them were here, were they? Nor was the stupid bloody Kneazle. Not only were there a surprising number of them across the British Isles, far outstripping the number of witches, wizards, warlocks, inbetweens, and outsiders combined, but a fair number of them were named Adelaide: apparently ‘Adelaide’ had been the stage name of a popular singing Australian witch whose sultry cabaret tunes still haunted the oldies frequencies of the Wizarding Wireless.
Remus ought’ve known better. Given the sizeable underground pet trafficking network forming the fundament of the Squib borderlands, setting the expectation for their search at a single weekend had been a poor choice. Sunday was creeping up on them like a hangover. Too quick. Sirius hadn’t the stomach for this disappointment. Not right now, in any case.
“’tchu find?” grumbled Sirius. He was clad in one of Remus’s patchy jumpers and a pair of warm, thick trousers, albeit with his own sleek ash-coloured overcoat overtop it. The past few weeks had seen his washing-up pile up and so he’d begun borrowing Remus’s things, though he swam in half of them, giving Sirius something of a smaller, more petulant appearance. “Don’t suppose there’s pawprints on that paper?”
“Prophet.”
“Out here?”
“’fraid it hasn’t been emptied in a long while,” said Remus, grimacing. “Austerity measures, lost jobs. Fuck Thatcher.”
“Fuck Thatcher.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised if no one’s been down this alley for a month—no overhangs, and the docklands have never been worse for unemployment. The all-nighter’s have been drying up as well.”
“Isle’s really gone to the et cetera,” replied Sirius, stopping beside him to read around his shoulder. However, instead of stooping his head to squint at the words in the dark, Sirius ducked fully under his crooked arm and grabbed for something else in the bin. Another paper—Muggle. Sirius too rapped it with his wand.
“This one’s from May,” he said quietly. “Something about the Embassy on Prince’s Gate, and a bunch of blokes who—ah, hold on,” he continued, ducking over the bin again. “How the fuck do they get away with these headlines? Look. They’ve unabashedly written ‘Black Riot’.”
“I recall Mary mentioning something about that last term,” said Remus, pensive. He braced on reflex—raising Mary was not unlike passing a volatile substance in a laboratory via overhand throw—but if Sirius had heard him, he gave no sign of it. “When’s that one dated?”
“April.”
Both of them frowned, tugging wet paper after wet paper from the bin, though curiously not a one of them tore or otherwise fell apart between their fingers.
“MASS HYSTERIA OR MASSIVE DRUG CRISIS? RECENT STRING OF 'ZOMBIE ATTACKS' OWED TO DANGEROUS NEW STREET DRUGS, PLYMOUTH AUTHORITY CLAIMS,” said one damp headline.
“TWISTER MYSTERY: FREAK ‘LOCALISED’ TORNADOES HIT THE HEBRIDES, DAMAGING MOUNTAIN COTTAGES, TRIGGERING LANDSLIDES,” said another.
“BRAZEN MURDER OF ABERDEEN WIDOW, NINETY-THREEE, SHOCKS COMMUNITY.”
“SCREAMING PANIC REVEALED TO BE GAS LEAK AFTER TWELVE DROP DEAD IN INDOOR MARKET TRAGEDY: WITNESSES CLAIM HEARING 'SHRIEKING' BEFORE EARS BLED—”
“—WORRY OF NEW SATANIC CULT: GLASGOW DEADCON—”
“—BUT WHO'S TO BLAME FOR RISING CRIME? THE UNEMPLOYED, SAYS ONE MINISTER—”
“—A SERIAL ARSONIST? NOT SO FAR-FETCHED, CLAIMS—”
“—QUADRUPLE MURDER ENDS IN…”
“…EXSANGUINATION…”
“…CANNIBALISM…”
“…POISONED PASTRIES DISTRIBUTED TO…”
“…AMISS METEOROLOGISTS, WHO REMAIN…”
“…UNABLE TO EXPLAIN DEATHS OF WHOLE FAMILY, OTHERWISE 'ENTIRELY HEALTHY'…”
“…‘THERE HAVE BEEN NO WOLVES IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AT THE LATEST, YOU'RE ALL JUST MAD’, AND OTHER TALES OF FRUSTRATION FROM A COLLECTIVE OF WELSH ECOLOGISTS…”
“…SEARCH ENDS FOR MISSING HIKERS, WHOSE FAMILIES SAY…”
“…‘THE LADY'S NOT FOR TURNING: THATCHER BOLDLY REFUSES ECONOMIC ‘U-TURN’ IN RESPONSE TO HARSH CRITICS AT CONSERVATIVE CONFERENCE…”
“MAGGIE’S MADE IT!”
“DIVIDED WE FALL—”
“TRIDENT IS GO—”
“2.001.208 AND GOING UP—”
“MAGGIE'S DEFEAT ON THE BUSES—”
“MAGGIE'S DEED FOR COUNCIL TENANTS—”
“MAGGIE: I BACK THE ROPE—”
Remus realised he was holding his breath. He gave a sharp exhale and heard Sirius, beside him, do much the same. “Pads, are you—”
“—yeah, what are the odds of—”
“—Mm. Do you think…?”
“Not getting my hopes up.” Sirius nevertheless scanned the misty alleyway again and proceeded forwards without prompting. “Mary wouldn’t.”
So he had heard him.
“Oh?” asked Remus. He kept his tone conversational.
“No, she never got her hopes up for anything,” growled Sirius. “Not unless it had some tragedy in it. Like—ah, you recall that shite Lils mentioned at her wedding?”
“’fraid I need you to be a little more specific, mate.”
“Piss off.”
They turned left around a worn brick-y corner that reeked of cat piss and Remus jogged to catch up with Sirius, who was now stalking ahead, shoulders braced and head ducked, instead of dragging behind. Remus groped for his hand—though Sirius pulled away on instinct and tried to shake him off, it lasted only half a breath before he relaxed—and Remus laced their fingers together.
“She thinks it’s real.”
“Pardon?”
“This—disease, illness, affliction that can apparently tell if you’re queer or not and infect you accordingly. As if Lils’s mum and dad were, what, leading some secret bisexual swinger double life? Imagine that. And I knew Mary would believe it, y’know,” he added bitterly. “Mary doesn’t pull anymore and she’s mad with jealousy hearing how much we do—probably believe any old rubbish they come out with to scare us. Y’know she said you can catch it by snogging?”
“Best stick to cocksucking, then.”
Sirius snorted. “And if it were real, and if it’s allegedly crossed the pond, wouldn’t—how come we haven’t heard anyone talk about it?”
“Besides Lily—”
“—official. Anyone official,” he clarified loudly. “It’s rubbish. Even if it weren’t—”
“—which it is—”
“—it’s not as though you have to worry about it anyhow.”
Water trickled across a ruined gutter in the alley and filled the otherwise quiet, pattering Isle. A rat scampered along it for a moment, tiny feet inaudible over the rain and yet beady black eyes tilted down only a moment before it vanished back over the rooftop. Rats. They’d found so many fucking rats and not a single black Kneazle.
“Er, Pads—pardon?”
“Mary once asked me if you ever get ill.”
“Right.”
“And that’s the thing, innit?” said Sirius, turning left down another brick-cornered alley with mystifying confidence. At least this one smelled only of wet rubber. “You don’t. Can’t recall the last time you came down with anything as much as a sniffle. A non-drug sniffle, I s’pose.”
Remus blinked. “I hadn’t…”
“She reckons werewolves don’t get ill. Not with anything mundane or weakly magical, at least—presuming they’re being allowed to take care of themselves,” he added as an afterthought. “Hard to know for sure. She mentioned something about the way your voice goes all crackly and two octaves deeper so often these days and made a jab about you not taking your vitamins.”
“Bless her. Isn’t gagging on a dick a vitamin?” murmured Remus dryly. “I’m worried that I’ve been going about this nutrition thing all wrong, like.”
Sirius snickered and grinned at him a moment, a sliver of his pale wet face shining back, though it quickly faded.
“S’pose illness is a good cover story,” said Sirius.
Rain rattled a clogged drainpipe and sputtered out its broken and rusted seal with sloshing little gasps. Sirius hopped the puddle at its foot, while Remus splashed through it, tugged along, frown furrowing both his lips and fuzzy brows. He had an idea of where this might be going, and yet…
“Padfoot,” he began, squeezing Sirius’s hand with just as much tenderness as he could muster in his voice, “I don’t know if that’s true for, well, other things. Issues. Qualities,” he continued slowly, “that people might call illnesses. Just look at me—”
Sirius yanked his hand free and shot an annoyed glare over his shoulder at Remus, damp, curly ponytail whipping the tip of Remus’s nose in so doing.
“I’m—piss off,” he repeated. A jagged snarl cut across his narrow lips. “I’m not some bloody problem for you to manage, all right? Christ. I can’t stand you doing that.”
“What?”
“Patronising me,” he spat. “It’s insulting.”
“I’m not trying—”
“—then fight back! Be normal! Be you—ah, Jesus Christ, Remus, you’re letting me push you around and acting like you’re in the wrong for existing. You’re being a rug—or, no, you’re being Peter. What the fuck happened to your spine?”
Remus followed along after him as he turned left around yet another corner, both pairs of boots splashing through the slow-accumulating puddles and chilly autumnal drizzle. Sirius shivered a moment as wind cut across the Isle and down their wind tunnel of an alleyway. Remus had half a mind to throw him his own coat, though that’d likely be met with another explosive outburst.
With a shrug that Sirius couldn’t see, Remus said, “Usually I enjoy it when you push me around, like.”
“Piss off,” muttered Sirius, albeit with a wry edge to his annoyance. “I’m trying to be genuine with you right now.”
“I’ll let that bold-faced lie slide a moment because I love—Sirius.”
“Ah, shite, here we are again. Did I honestly take three left turns in a row, or…”
Sirius trailed off, his grey eyes flicking back to Remus a moment before following Remus’s own bewildered gaze forwards to the jet-black shape in the mist striding forwards. A rolled-up newspaper was tucked between its sharp teeth. The Kneazle let up onto a familiar overstuffed bin full of damp pages and let the newsprint unfurl atop it before hopping back down, the unmistakeable lion-like tuft of its tail catching Remus’s eye.
At the very same moment that he and Sirius took a single cautious step forwards, the Kneazle Adelaide dropped back on its haunches, teeth bared, and hissed down the alley at them with surprising ferocity. Both of them froze.
“It’s you,” they said simultaneously, voices a hissed whisper. Remus eyed Sirius out the corner of his vision, though he dared not turn his head, and found Sirius examining him much the same.
“Kneazles sense dodgy folk, like,” whispered Sirius.
“Cheers for the lesson, mate, but I did know that already, thanks.”
“You never did Care.”
“Wrote well enough essays for Peter and James, though, didn’t I?”
“Did you?”
“Mm.”
“You never wrote mine.”
“Never asked, like,” whispered Remus, whose drew his eyes back to the Kneazle again. “Piss.”
“What?”
“It might actually be me. There’s a reason I didn’t risk taking Care, if you recall?”
“Y’think—ah, well, hold on a ’mo, then, yeah?”
“What are you—Padfoot!” he hissed. It took not inconsiderable effort for Remus to keep the flush from overwhelming his face and, more appropriately, himself from lurching to stop Sirius, who was currently slipping the ashen overcoat from his shoulders while he fumbled with his belt and trousers, threatening the last black nubs of polish on his nails. His boots sat collecting rain in the beginnings of a puddle. “Someone is going to bloody see you,” he warned, then fixed his gaze forwards once more.
The Kneazle kept itself poised to scamper off at a moment’s notice, though infuriatingly Sirius’s disrobing hadn’t yet caused it to flee. Surely it knew they both could do magic? If Remus had truly wanted to catch it by force, he’d have done so already—and, yes, that probably wasn’t the most charitable intent in the world, but you could hardly classify it as ‘dodgy’. Right? And surely of the two of them, Sirius was the wild card. It must’ve been the lycanthropy setting Adelaide off. Pure canine opposition. Except that pet theory was taken quick behind the garden shed and summarily executed as Padfoot in his large, bearlike black shagginess, took shape overtop a pile of puddle-soaking clothes and gave a yappy bark in the Kneazle’s direction, at which point Adelaide sat back down on its haunches and inclined its large ears as if to say, Of course: another wise Beast. You may approach, but leave that mangy dog behind, would you? It’s quite off-putting.
Perhaps Remus was editorialising a touch. A tad. Just enough to make himself feel better and worse, really.
Trotting on over with one smug and doglike glance back at Remus, still frozen in the drizzle, Padfoot eventually laid himself down before the Kneazle a few metres away and covered his snout with his paws, communicating in that intangible, nonverbal way that animals often did and annoying the piss out of Remus in so doing. Even as Padfoot he’d been closed off from Remus as of late. Their full moon runs now included the host of wilder werewolves tucked away in the Cambrian Mountains, leaving much of his, Sirius’s, and Kelly’s time devoted to herding the wayward instead of playing in the woods. At least Padfoot was often in better spirits than Sirius himself.
About two minutes into their silent conversation, Sirius stood, shook his shaggy curled fur to some semblance of moderate dryness and spraying the alleyway as a result, then trotted back Remus’s way, brushing up across his side and moving out of Remus’s frozen eyeline. Bastard. The gesture nearly toppled him, given Padfoot’s massive size, but he held firm until a strange, fabric-y noise cut through the rattle of rainspouts behind him and he heard Sirius’s soft cursing under the splash of bare feet against cold, wet cobblestones.
“Well?” said Remus.
“Give me a bloody minute, yeah? It’s freezing.”
“Might I move, or—”
“Do anything for a gander, won’t you?” whispered Sirius, now closer to his ear. “Finite,” he added dryly. Only out of spite did Remus keep himself from looking over his shoulder at Sirius—enough time had passed that he might be decently clothed, and at that point it wouldn’t have been worth the blow to his dignity. Probably.
“Is it Adelaide?”
“’Tis,” said Sirius. He brushed a hand over Remus’s stiff shoulder a moment before stepping forward into a puddle and crouching, the hem of his grey overcoat dragging across the stones while his now-loosed hair curtained off the side of his face. Oddly, Sirius hadn’t fit his arms into the sleeves and instead let the whole thing drape over his shoulders. Adelaide approached from its—her? Its? Did Kneazles understand gender, and would they subject themselves to it?—its distance and began to brush around and through Sirius’s ankles, flicking its lion-tuft tail on occasion. The noise Adelaide gave was more of a musical rumble than a purr. Birdlike, almost. It cut clean through the rain.
“Anything else to share, or…”
“What? Ah, right, apologies,” said Sirius quickly. He stole his hand back away from Adelaide’s black fur and met Remus’s eye through the mesh of his own curls. “I was bang-on, as it so happens. Ahmed wasn’t heartless enough to cast her familiar out into the cold—or, I s’pose if you wanna put it less charitably, she figured Adelaide might still be of some use to her,” he corrected, though his face flickered with annoyance as the Kneazle gave his nose an equally-annoyed flick with its tail. With an amused and irritated tone, he continued, “Whichever of those is true, she resurfaces infrequently to collect her post from the bin and check in that Adelaide is still all right.”
“Is she?”
“Y’know, it wasn’t the most detailed conversation I’ve ever had, but in sum: she began in Hogsmeade, was accidentally closed in a Vanishing Cabinet that delivered her somewhere nearby to Inverness, fell asleep on a car bonnet, et cetera, rescued a muggle child somewhere between the et and the cetera, and most recently I believe she’s taken over as leader for a herd of feral cats. Few packs them roaming the Isle what with folks turning their pets out on the streets and all the rats about. Made the whole Docklands something of a misnomer, come to think of it.”
“Fascinating.”
“Jesus, someone’s still cross,” said Sirius. Turning in his crouch to throw a lopsided grin, underhand, at Remus, Remus fumbled the catch-and-riposte as he noticed that not only was Sirius’s chest bare beneath his coat—it’d been a while for that—so too were his arms. His legs.
Hips.
“Why are you still naked?”
“I’m wearing a coat. And a collar,” he added, wry.
“You’ll freeze, like,” murmured Remus. He tore his eyes away from Sirius’s dark-haired scruffiness and scanned the alleyway once more as though it might yet reveal some hidden secret after all his patience. “Did this conversation happen to include a potential arrival date, or should we just set up watch for a month or so and hope she’s not gone to ground for the oncoming winter? Or were you busy justifying your indecency?”
Sirius tapped the side of his nose. “They coincide, Moony.”
“Mm. How’s that, then?”
“’Cos, of course,”—Sirius’s wand dropped into sight on Remus’s side without a sound, tucked against his bare ankle and looping through a complex yet recognisable pattern—“she’s here.”
An ambient magical pressure filled the alleyway as though they’d suddenly found themselves a few leagues beneath the sea. At the very same moment Sirius finished his nonverbal Anti-Disapparition Jinx—Remus had learned to pick up on its presence without active thought by now, what with its unfortunately commonplace application in their operations—he threw off his overcoat once more, Padfoot appearing in a flourish of grey fabric before bolting off with a sudden, leaping lope over Adelaide’s low dark form. He became a black streak in the mist.
One sharp inhale later, Remus snatched up Sirius’s wand and was splashing off after him, wishing that he, too, could become a dog at will. It’d certainly have made some things simpler.
***
If you’d ever chased after a large overeager dog, you knew too well how impossible a task it was, even if that dog often moonlighted as an underfed smoker of various herbaceous substances.
Giving chase let them out the labyrinth of Docklands alleyways. As Remus leapt over one lake-sized puddle that’d formed in the middle of the road, aided no doubt by several rubbish-clogged storm sewers, he slipped, skidding like a jetski across a smaller puddle just past the first, made imperceptible by the angle and misty moonlight. His arms pinwheeled; he let out an undignified yelp; by luck and possibly reflexive magic, however, Remus kept himself aloft and hurried after the excited barks of Padfoot.
Ominous black windows with cracked glass flew past him on either side, blurred by drizzle and speed. He overtook rusted warehouse doors, endless grey doorsteps decorated by drowned cigarette butts, half a dozen empty rust-brick alleyways, one alleyway full, yes, of skip bins crowned by skinny feral cats, yet only when he came to the end of the flooded street and found the burned-out shell of some office turned squatter home turned condemned architectural horror did Padfoot’s barking grow nearer instead of further still away, though it was curiously muffled. Matching it now was a frenzy of foul curses tinged by an Australian accent.
The Kneazle had followed on his heels yet sat curiously beside the building’s stoop, turned away and watching the street. Evidently she was no longer put off by him, even though, by all accounts, he’d just chased her witch down the street. Remus shrugged it off and winced instead up at a high room above.
Even this far from their departure point, the pressure of Sirius’s jinx still encroached on his jawbone with the intensity of impending barotrauma, threatening to give birth to a headache. Jesus Christ. Remus rubbed at his jaw absently as he kicked open the admittedly already-open door and began to ascend a set of smoky, blackened steps therewithin. It’d been literal years since he was on the receiving end of Sirius’s jinxes, but he hadn’t recalled them packing quite so much of a punch. A spiked punch, to be sure, almost entirely moonshine in fact, or an entire round of bloody boxing. Maybe he’d modified it to the fly to follow him. A terrifying and arousing thought. For as much as Sirius said he and Remus kept up with one another, Remus wondered if perhaps he hadn’t the most accurate barometer on his capabilities.
Rain drippings spattered down infrequently from a hole in the ceiling where fire had weakened the roof and water was finishing the job. Sidestepping it, Remus breathed easy—sprinting up several flights of stairs was Tuesday to him, like—and slipped through a doorless doorway from which he heard a low, steady growl and the sounds of struggle over the tampering of rain above. Padfoot lay atop a pooling, midnight-black cloak on the ground, which in turn was swallowing a struggling witch beneath him. She was almost unrecognisable.
Gloria Ahmed’s fired-clay skin was now cracked in many places like ill-prepared pottery left far too long in a kiln, giving her formerly smooth complexion a cold, scaly, and fishlike appearance. Her dark hair was now both long and wispy, the greyish-white colour of roadside snow after three days of mild traffic, though, in earnest, she still did not look nearly old enough for it to be from age alone. Shock, perhaps. And as she continued to push feebly against Padfoot’s bearish bulk, Remus noticed, most startlingly, that her struggle was due in part to the way one of her sleeves draped flush against her shoulder socket. At some point she’d parted ways with her arm. Her wand arm, if memory served.
What a year she must’ve had.
“I feel,” began Remus slowly, “we might’ve sent the wrong message by attacking her. Got off on the wrong foot, like,” he added, though Padfoot’s muzzle turned to stare at Remus with as much disagreement as a dogged snout could muster.
You may not have wanted to attack her, Moony, said Padfoot’s dark eyes, but I sure as Hell did. She faked her death; we hosted a funeral; and even though I won’t talk about it no matter how many times you raise the subject, she’s half the key to saving Reg from himself. Bastard.
“Call it off!” shouted Ahmed. She twisted again under Padfoot, expression curling in pain, and Remus noticed a strange, blue-grey substance oozing on her fingertips. He sniffed the air. It didn’t smell of blood. Not iron-y. Not human blood, then.
“Where’s her wand?” asked Remus after a pause. Padfoot pointed with his nose a moment to a corner of the musty, weathered room, where beneath a three-legged table lay an unfamiliar length of untreated wood. As he summoned it to his hand, he felt a prick of petulant resistance. The thing was gnarled. Knobbly. He said as much for Padfoot’s benefit.
At that moment Ahmed ceased fighting her canine restraints. If she was at all frightened, she did not look it, instead putting on the airs of a very bored leprechaun who’d been captured twice that day already by greedy wizards seeking gold. Her eyes—one as Remus remembered it, although she’d the other was large and bulging and bloodshot with blue-grey cracks instead of pale red ones—flicked between him and the dog with emerging curiosity. She’d lost her usual square-rimmed spectacles in the chase or else no longer needed them. Her gaze settled on Remus’s. Their eyes locked.
Immediately, Remus was struck, overwhelmingly, in fact, with the desire to say something clever. His head swam with it. His brain reeled, running through every one of their past encounters—the Valentine’s party, that night in the lounge—groping, reaching for the words—
“Checkmate,” he said lamely. So lamely, in fact, that he wished he’d said nothing at all.
“What?”
“You—there was—pawns,” he began with decreasing volume and pomp each time. “Never mind that. Did—hang on, actually, were you—oh, Jesus, was that Legilimency?”
“Can’t even string together a full sentence. And what a shite Occlumens,” she said. Grumbled, actually, with a petulant tone suggesting perhaps Remus was not as shit of an Occlumens as she desired. Maybe not very shit at all. “Why didn’t that work? What even are you?”
Remus had the distinct impression that she was talking to herself.
“I’ll let you up and give you back your wand,” said Remus. At least this was familiar. His speciality, really, had somehow become diplomacy with people and/or things that were becoming less and less acquainted with their own humanity. “But only if you agree to hear us out a moment. We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to find you without tipping anyone off,” he added, “and, being honest, I’m worried we mightn’t have been entirely successful on that front. Far too many concurrent plots, these days. I’ll be buggered before I let it all go to waste.”
Padfoot shot him a knowing look.
“Shut up, like,” muttered Remus.
“Ickle firstie getting one over on me again,” said Ahmed. Another grumble. Her oversized, bulging eye flickered from him to Padfoot again. “Talking to dogs. Unbelievable. How did you—”
“We’ve done this once before, as I recall? I show you mine, et cetera et cetera?”
“And if I refuse?”
Padfoot growled, and yet, crushed beneath him, Ahmed gave a wheezy kind of laugh.
“You’re not going to kill me,” she said. “Obviously you need me. Obviously,” she continued, after a cackle, “you need me and only me—”
Without warning, Padfoot shifted again. This time he settled as Sirius’s naked figure, still straddling Ahmed’s smaller frame. Droplets dripped from his dark curls onto her scaly features, and Remus crossed closer, wand at the ready. He was not wholly sure if it was readied for Sirius’s benefit or Ahmed’s, yet all Sirius did was lower his face a few centimetres, breath condensing in the chill, grey eyes daring.
“We cracked your research,” he whispered.
Rain tampered on the smoke-damaged roof like a low, rattling drumbeat.
“I don’t believe you,” she whispered back. “Neither of you are nearly—”
“‘In this work I so set out to accomplish one thing above all others…’” began Sirius. Ahmed’s lips moved silently in tandem with his as he continued, “‘…that none may ever forget the name Gloria Ahmed.’”
Having yet another one of those unspoken, telepathic conversations in the long, silent staring that followed, ones that so often carried much more meaning than mere words ever might, Sirius pushed back and away from Ahmed, righting himself and even allowing Remus to drape his own overcoat across his shivering shoulders. In a moment they’d summon his clothes back, but both their stares were still fixed on Ahmed. Neither offered her any help up. Remus hadn’t known her to be the kind of witch to allow any help, of course, but then again she was no longer that witch. Perhaps she was no longer a witch at all. As Ahmed drew herself to full height, Remus caught both the fumbling step to her left leg, opposite her missing right arm as well as the unpronounced hunch to her spine. She reminded him somewhat of a Hag, and yet there was more to it. Something fresh. Dangerous. Reminiscent of his first meeting Socrates in the woods, all Remus knew for certain was the witch before him was no longer some mere mortal.
In that moment in the postgraduate carriage, she hadn’t lied. ‘The last great witch.’
“Grab hold of my elbow, one of you,” she instructed, once Sirius had summoned back his clothes and dressed, and indeed once the Kneazle Adelaide had wandered up the many flights of stairs to their musty, moulding room. “The other take their elbow, and hold that stupid Kneazle. And hand me back my wand.”
Remus and Sirius exchanged glances.
“We could stay here until someone tracks that jinx of yours to this house, calls their mates, and kills us all instead,” she offered. “Or you could see where I’ve been all this time. What I’ve been doing all this time. What purportedly-unbreakable rules,” she added, her tone temping, her my-what-big-eye-you-have eye bulging, “I’ve cleanly broken.”
Yet when Sirius handed off her wand, his grip lingered a moment. His expression was unusually flat and, to Remus, intensely disquieting.
“I’ll Splinch us all if you try anything,” he said quietly.
In that leaky room on the Isle of Dogs, they took up their formation. Adelaide apparently adored Sirius’s touch and only tolerated Remus, leaving Remus as the middle link to Ahmed’s cold, clammy elbow. With but one flourish of her wand, as though brushing aside a cobweb, Gloria Ahmed gave a pointed cackle and the pressure of Sirius’s jinx evaporated. She hadn’t even blinked. Which, hold on—
Remus scarcely had time to wonder what fresh Hell he’d barrelled into before a splash rang out and he found himself hurtling not through a thin silicone straw, but instead what felt to be a thick and viscous rush of blinding, turbulent swamp water, the scent of sulphur and rot filling his nose, his eyes, his lungs, his skin.
Whatever this was felt far, far worse than Apparition.
***
They didn’t drown.
Remus thrashed not unlike a starved vampiric shark when he impacted against the slimy stone wall. He felt it coming, that slow, inexorable way one did anything underwater. He couldn’t kick strong enough against his momentum. His skull ached with pressure. Doubtless that was the steady build-up of carbon dioxide poisoning his lungs, and yet his frenzied panic was not helping matters. Not, of course, that he could help it. He and water had something of a mixed past, what with the ocean trying to drown him as a child. In a way, however, the murky depths, needling his skin with icy-cold water as they were, were not as bad as he imagined. The knowledge he might soon drown was far, far more frightening. Swimming he could do. Diving was right out.
After fumbling an underwater wand movement twice with his benumbed fingers, Remus choked out another precious bubble of buoyant gas, toxic thought it might’ve been, and began to kick for the surface. Wizard he was, yet werewolf yob he’d been first.
The only reason he knew he’d breached the surface was the sudden return of unmuffled sound in his ears, which caught the loud, echoing tumult of splashing water, distant dripping—echoes that were in turn drowning out a mocking laugh. Remus gulped grateful breath after grateful breath of soothing, precious air in the dark. His sputtering and occasional choking fit as his throat caught some strange viscous mixture of grotto-water, spittle, and air kept him from truly noticing that fact for a few minutes: he was in the dark. In the dark dark. Eigengrau dark.
Only one nightmarish memory in Remus’s entire, non-photographic recollection of his life from five years old and onwards had ever placed Remus in true darkness, and even then, it had been the starry, moonlit dark of scenic Cardiff. Light was everpresent thereafter. At times he’d longed for its absence, becoming well-acquainted with fuzzy dimness and its familiar greyscale palette for even the dungeons of Hogwarts and every old broom cupboard he’d ever found himself sharing with James, Sirius, or Peter had within it the traces of some far-bouncing torchlight. Even closing his eyes failed to bring him the same peace. Lycanthropy had taken that, too, from him, the quiet of dark, and with it all the privacy, calmness, and fertile ground in which to sow wondrous things like imagination and possibility instead of poisonous paranoia.
At the very least, he’d have been spared dozens of sights on which he’d preferred never set eyes, many (but not all) of them at Hogwarts, and most of the rest (but again, not all) at the Village in the Pyrenees. Seeing in the dark was not a beneficial power to possess as a teenage werewolf. Not in the least when you were wrestling, sometimes literally, with the strange, unheard-of desires you felt for one or more boys sharing your year, with one or more of which you shared a darkened dormitory, and all of whom had never understood the degree of your night vision or enhanced hearing.
It was the kind of thing that went unmentioned. Unexplored. Remus hadn’t thought about it much after fifth year until he, Sirius, and Nathaniel had drafted the embedded-spell tattoo for Sirius, and once again, later, when Sirius first began drawing all the curtains in their dorm. At first the thoughts had invited nothing but the backwards-facing cringe of his past actions—Jesus Christ, he’d been creepy—but as he floated in the water of a pitch-black grotto, Remus felt a curious sense of peace settle over him rather than panic. The splashing was settling. He turned, then, onto his back, held up by buoyant bubbles of air trapped beneath his coat, and enjoyed the eigengrau, that visual snow as if it might actually fall upon him and cool his poor, tortured optical nerves. He let his other senses drift.
They were underground. Thoroughly. He hadn’t evidence nor the desire to test it, but the pressure he felt in his ears and bones told him they were both a considerable distance beneath the earth and under the effects of some ambient Anti-Disapparition Jinx, likely of Ahmed’s own making. The sensation was odd and unfamiliar, but Remus had broken enough spells down to their base components to recognise all the individual flavours in this unsavoury combination. On a more abstract level, he simply knew. He was aware. Understood. Practicing wandless magic had trained back into him what Hogwarts had trained out of his later childhood: reflexivity.
A growing warm light appeared like a distant lighthouse, shining through Remus’s eyelids a moment before dimming to a more comfortable and yet ill-fitting luminosity. It was wrong. Perverse, even—this place had never known light. It oughtn’t ever. The sound of new splashing cut through the dripping silence and Remus cracked his eyes open. Sirius was swimming over to a distant stony shore, where in her midnight-black robes stood Gloria Ahmed, battered face and shocked white hair much more menacing in the dark. He joined them a minute later, enjoying, oddly, how his body felt as he cut through the grey water. Hadn’t he loved this sort of thing as a child?
“Foolish ickle firsties,” Ahmed was saying—gloating, actually, to Sirius, whose teeth-chattering fury caused him to fumble a Hot-Air Charm no less than four times. “I can’t believe how easy that was—both you, and your giant fucking dog, too!”
For how far they’d come, she wasn’t wrong. But perhaps she wasn’t entirely right, either, as Sirius mimicked Remus’s palm-turn trick, manifesting a stable blue flame over his upturned hand, though quickly he expanded upon it, whispering under his breath as it bathed over him like a dragon’s breath. Sirius emerged entirely unsinged but not entirely dry, though a healthy flush in his pale cheeks showed he must’ve been a far deal warmer. His pale skin remained slightly luminescent even after the flames faded—some inefficiency with the spell. After Remus had tugged off his waterlogged boots and set them at the underground lake’s edge, he opted against Sirius’s strategy, instead letting his own Hot-Air Charm breathe a second wind into him.
“Can we dispense,” began Sirius, tone derisive, “with all of the strange power games I think we all must be thinking through right now? Yes, yes,” he continued, intercepting yet another gloating spell from Ahmed with an aristocratic wave of his still-glowing hand, “you’ve tricked us, how impressive, amazing, truly, innit, but as you know we aren’t interested in hurting you, and we know you had every opportunity to drown us or not be found in the first place at all, come to think of it—well, the pissing contest isn’t gonna get very far, then? ’tchu think, Moony?”
From the shadow on her scaled face, Ahmed looked as though Sirius had slapped her with, well, a scaly fish. Her expression clouded and her normal eye narrowed. The other remained as it was, bulging.
“I remembered you as more fun than this,” said Ahmed.
Remus detected in her tone and indeed her desire to gloat something familiar, probably, to every academic: an essential need to show-off to one’s fellow students and esteemed professors. An essential need foiled, probably, by a lack of both in this dingy grotto and a year of relative isolation.
“We thought you were dead,” said Sirius flatly.
“Disappointed I’m not?”
“We held a funeral.”
“I’m touched,” Ahmed said with a snort. “Was it any good?”
“You—”
“—how is it that you’re alive, exactly?” asked Remus. Not only was his goal to interrupt Sirius, but again, if Remus was supposed to be something of a decent medium between wizards and the wizard-adjacent, then he ought take the reins, here. He’d known a dozen academics like Ahmed. Knew at least one, perhaps two powerful magical creatures, both almost comically lonely. Ahmed would make his third. “I can scarcely believe you’ve evaded the Ministry, Death Eaters, and Albus Dumbledore’s detection for a year without some aid.”
Sirius’s shot him a confused glare even as Ahmed whirled, dark cloak billowing, to stare at him with insult alive in her eyes. She was perfectly dry down to her wispy snow-grey hair. Remus’s brows furrowed. “And that wasn’t Apparition,” he added. It wasn’t a question.
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Did—do you even need a wand to do whatever that was?”
Ahmed scoffed. She was staring up at him as though he were a very tall, very idiotic toddler.
“No one needs a wand to Apparate. The Elves certainly didn’t, nor did witches and wizards when the Elves taught them how. It’s not a spell, didn’t you know that already?”
“But—hold on. How did you—have you met an Elf, then? And did you invent that…wet Apparition, or is that from another creature? And if it’s not Apparition, is it a spell, and does that mean you need a wand to run it? And would an Anti-Disapparition Jinx even halt it? And speaking of wands—”
Ahmed laughed at his barrage of questions and shot him a sharp-toothed grin, turning again, this time towards what the warm glow on the ceiling implied was a darkened tunnel leading only to God knew where. A grotto sex dungeon, why not.
“Come along, children,” she called over her shoulder even as Remus’s echoing inquests followed her. Her voice was vanishing into fuzzy greyness again. “Follow me to my cave of wonders!”
Sirius stormed past him and after her down the tunnel, palms thrust into the pockets of his damp overcoat, stalking, really, like they were in school again. Remus jogged to catch up with him. Finally his luminescence was fading.
“If we want answers,” he whispered, “if we want her help—”
“—I know how to run a scam, Remus,” hissed Sirius. “I only bloody trained with Caradoc, and before that I had Prongs, yeah?”
“Don’t be a prat.”
“Piss off.”
“Don’t be a belligerent prat, then,” whispered Remus. “Don’t ask me how I know, but she’s in a good mood. Even after you bit her. Try flattering—”
Sirius grunted. Loud. It echoed over the smooth, folding walls that gave odd hairpin turns followed by long, darkened stretches ahead, even as Sirius’s Light Charm followed behind them like a looming will-o’-the-wisp, casting an eerie light and long, vanishing shadows ahead of them. Remus had half a mind to tell him off, but motion caught his eye. Ahmed had turned to watch them at a far bend. She was twitching with anticipation. Excitement. And Sirius had warned him with some measured subtlety.
Allowing himself only a brief, quiet prayer to Gods unknown that Ahmed had not become the kind of Hag-like creature that feasted on human flesh—or, at the very least, that a werewolf and canine Animagus would be unpalatable to such a creature—he hooked his elbow around Sirius’s begrudging one as they took the corner.
“This,” whispered Ahmed behind them. The grin was alive in her voice, and their awe, no doubt, alive in the way they’d frozen still at the cavern mouth. “This is what I’ve been doing for a year.”
Nostalgia was the word for it. For Ahmed. It struck Remus immediately. His time climbing trees had cultivated in him an instinct to look up, as well as around, when entering a room. The vast cavern was so tall that it did not open up to a rough ceiling beset with stalactites forged in turn by millennia of dripping mineral condensation. Instead there was darkness at its edges, climbing higher and higher until, like the ceiling of the Great Hall, that dark tapestry was drawn with constellations of the heavens, so high and so faded that they appeared to be night’s sky in earnest. He would need a telescope to see some of them, and they gave the cavern no light.
Not that light was absent here: old oil lanterns befitting an archaeological expedition site decorated squat stone-cut tables, here and there emerging seamlessly from the smooth, flat cave floor, and each gave off a pallid blue light characteristic of a Bluebell Flame Charm. Every single surface—the heavy hewn tables, the workbenches of unknowable wood, shelves that were little more than raw pale planks levitating mid-air and adorned with various trappings—was covered with loose scrolls, dusty tomes, what he soon learned was an alleged full copy of Margites, phials, quills, inkpots, jars of pickled organs and wriggling insects and several eyeballs floating about like jellyfish, filthy tin plates, vast cauldrons, tools of iron, fiddly silver instruments, a violin, an eel in amber, a dagger, metronome, bolts of cloth, quilts, a rickety straw-stuffed mattress, dried skins, wet skins, crumpled-up pyramids of parchment and stacks unblemished nearly as tall as Remus and just overtaking Sirius, and rubbish, pure rubbish, not the useful kind of rubbish but the kind you kept about because you felt too sore about binning it on the off chance it might be useful one day. Ahmed’s cavern laboratory had the very same impossibly-lived in ambiance to it as Dumbledore’s office at Hogwarts.
Unlike Dumbledore—unlike Albus’s office, however, Ahmed was all too eager to shepherd them around the place to examine, even up close, its purported wonders. The first of which upon explanation earned, simultaneously, a mutter of Oh, come off it from Remus and cry of Bollocks! from Sirius. Ahmed cackled. The object was a fine crystalline decanter, one that might have inside it a whiskey of snobbish vintage, but instead Remus saw a milky white liquid that, yes, Ahmed explained was milk.
“Boring and mundane, right?” she began eagerly, setting out a whiskey tumbler and pouring from the decanter. “Wrong. Dead wrong. This, my plucky nonbelievers, is a decanter of everlasting milk—real milk, true milk, true nourishing milk,” she added, watching their faces. “Generated from nowhere. Not summoned, not transfigured, not even multiplied from its molecular Adam. It comes from nothing. It only produces about a pint each week, but it’s a proof-in-concept and I haven’t bothered scaling it up. The thing was a bitch to bewitch. Want a drink?”
If every inch of the decanter hadn’t been etched with tiny, almost-imperceptible runes, and indeed if the decanter hadn’t been giving off the magical radiance of a small nuclear reactor to Remus and Sirius’s attuned senses, he would’ve insisted she was lying. Even after sipping the milk, he thought somehow she must’ve been.
“This is impossible,” said Remus, fully aware that such a thing must be possible given that he was staring dead at it. Christ. She had taken the verboten and deemed it erlaubt—what did that kind of technical mastery do to a person’s ego?
“Looks like there’s only four Principle Exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration. For now,” added Ahmed. Smug as she was, snatching back the whiskey tumbler and setting the decanter back on its stone pedestal, she did not notice Sirius rolling his eyes at Remus and even missed him wanking off the air as they proceeded onwards on their tour. Why he was being a giant fucking brat at this moment, of course, when literal magical history on (half) the level of Nicolas Flamel was being put on parade before them, Remus did not know—perhaps Ahmed too had solved that mystery and kept it in her esoteric collection.
Gloria Ahmed might not have been the greatest witch in the world, not yet, but she systematically and even unintentionally destroyed every lingering hope of Remus’s that he might ever be a great wizard. She presented them with a Goblin-made compass, lead-glass and lightweight, kept in a fragile crystal box, and explained that it would point the bearer to the thing for which they cared most. While Sirius badgered her for the mechanistic explanation, Remus broke free of their argument. He crept over to the box and plucked the compass free. It whirled, silently, round and round and round for a hackles-raising minute before settling on a point just over his shoulder occupied by a dark-haired doglike creature who, impossibly, looked handsome and rugged even while dripping damp in the cold blue light of a grotto laboratory. Remus’s face went flush and he quickly set the compass back into its box and shut it. He dared not ask Sirius to pick it up in turn and followed their arguing to the next treasure.
Ahmed had produced a sextant that could calculate longitude using only the sun at midday; Unicorn Brew, a potion of her own invention that used what she claimed to be freshly-shed Unicorn horns to replicate the defragmenting effect on one’s psyche when drunk, allowing the imbiber to make sense of the entirety of their life as one continuous story; from there she led them to a shut tome upon an enormous lectern and claimed that the book would always have inside it a story you yearned to read but had never yet found, though currently it only worked in three genres; an ordinary goldfish bowl that held within it an accurate scale replica of the moon, down to the shadow currently cast on its face by the earth and, as seen with a magnifying glass, a few fading American flags; a pair of ruby-red Wellington boots that had been made a Portkey of sorts, as Ahmed explained, except they would in truth take you to a place where you had, at least, a chance of living happy; but as she paraded them through the lab, showing off her strange, wondrous offspring of science and art, Remus’s gaze settled upon an old, decorative mirror not far from their current station. The inscription set in its frame was immaterial. Unimportant, actually, to the contents therewithin.
Mirrors were easy objects to bewitch—or, at least in the sense of having them do complicated things that mundane objects ought not do—and Remus recognised immediately that the tall looking glass must be a scrying mirror, for in it he saw a woman. His mother, to be precise. She was walking hurriedly down a probably-Welsh street, at sunset, by the like, looking happy and well even if she also appeared slightly harried as she often had in Remus’s time. Flanking her sides were several boisterous union-ish folk. All were a touch haggard. The new regime hadn’t been easy on them.
“Where is this?” called Remus, looking back to where Ahmed and Sirius were bickering over a quill. His tone rang out sharper and louder in the cavern than he’d expected, and at some point he’d crossed to stand beside the mirror. Just out of frame, himself—he didn’t dare spoil Hope’s image with his own reflection. He’d brough her too much trouble already.
“Where’s what?” said Sirius, frowning at him. He hadn’t seen the mirror, but once he did, he’d recognise—
“Don’t pay any attention to that old thing!” said Ahmed. She laughed as she approached, slapping Remus heartily on the back with her one arm as he stared at her, incredulous. “The only interesting parts of it are all the ancient and funky underlying mechanics. I ‘borrowed’ it,”—she made literal air quotes with her only hand as she said the verb—“from its previous owner so I could peek at the illusionwork and the Legilimency involved, but the whole result is nothing but a parlour trick. It’s not real.”
“So it—”
“—shows you what you want to see,” said Sirius a little hollowly. He put a gentle hand on Remus’s shoulder nevertheless. Squeezed. Gentle. “It’s Hope, yeah?”
Remus shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Yeah,” he said.
“We’ll find her one day.”
“Mm.”
“Let’s come away from there,” continued Sirius, hooking him by the elbow and ushering them both away. Ahmed followed—soon led—but Remus didn’t miss the shared, wistful glance they each gave the mirror in parting.
“Now I imagine you’re wondering how, in such a short span of time, I developed even more of an amazing and incomprehensible grasp on powerful arcane lore than I did during my three years of studies?” asked Ahmed. A leading question. Remus fought the urge to roll his eyes and tried to remind himself that this could, in the worst case, lead to a fatal scenario.
“No,” said Sirius beneath his breath at the same moment that Remus said, loudly, “Well, yes, in earnest I’m struggling to find any of this possible.”
Not that he was struggling, of course. Flabbergasted, yes, and horribly confused, but flattering Ahmed’s ego was the surest way to get them to answers and help them survive Sirius’s current mood. No children’s tale ever ended well when you antagonised a Hag. So as Ahmed flicked her wand a distant violin began improvising a sombre, moody piece, Remus did his best impression of a rapt, studious werewolf, and listened.
“I haven’t been injured. Haven’t got into any fights or scraps—or not ones that resulted in me losing, if we’re splitting hairs. No,” she began, grinning another sharp-toothed grin, “no, it turns out that all the infernal deals you heard about in antiquity are real, but most of them don’t involve something as abstract as selling your soul. Now that’s where I started, I’m not a moron—after I figured out all the gifts you needed to bring and where that stupid cunt’s lake actually was, it was surprisingly easy to bargain my soul away in exchange for knowledge. It turns out that daemons are legalistic across the board. None of this namby-pamby Biblical shit, even if the terms of our agreement specify that, if I die, I’ll in all likelihood suffer some tortured existence in a porcelain soulcatcher pot in the moments I’m not forced to do his bidding forevermore.”
Remus stared blankly at Ahmed, who was making tea.
“What do you mean, ‘If’—” began Remus.
“—Hold on,” interrupted Sirius. “Daemons are real? As in, Hell Daemons? Daemons from Hell? Is Hell real? What, do unlucky sailors crash their ships and find themselves on its shores unexpectedly?” he continued, with building, inexplicable anger plain in his voice and whose origins Remus couldn’t place. Come to think of it, Remus felt something akin to being shipwrecked. This was at least a tempest, if not The Tempest. Hell was empty and all the devils were here.
Ahmed waved her knobbly hand dismissively and hunched back over her kettle, currently brewing over a small blue fire.
“It was a Slavic lake Daemon. Cross between a toad, a fish, an eel, and a turtle, had an underlake-castle kingdom in a mountain that you can’t even reach by walking or climbing.”
“But that doesn’t answer—”
“—so the lake cunt gave me all the breadcrumbs I needed to get along with most of this useless shit,” continued Ahmed, ignoring him. “I spent a few months tinkering with all of this, testing the more, shall we say, je-ne-sais-quoi elements of my thesis theorising before I proceeded with anything of consequence.” She too was playing certain things for effect, that was obvious, and yet she gave a small shrug as she continued, “Eventually, however, I kept rounding back on something the Daemon had said. ‘The answers you seek lie not with any living mortal’—it sounds much more ominous in Old Church Slavonic, trust me—and after I stopped pussyfooting around with necromancy, I realised I was an idiot and he wasn’t talking about dead mortals, either, so I wasted those toes for nothing.
“No, he was talking about creatures that straddle the border between life and death. Took some time to narrow them down, if not as much as you’d think, given how many of them just kill us or leech our sanity, but I eventually settled on Psychopomps. Figured they’d be able to direct me somewhere even if they—”
“—Psychopomps,” said Sirius. He spat the word out, narrow features inscrutable.
“That’s what I said, wasn’t it?”
“As in, afterlife guides?”
“Do you need an encyclopaedia, or…?”
“They’re real?”
“I traded my wanding arm to one,” said Ahmed flatly, “so, yes, they’re real. Very real.”
“But ‘real’ in the sense that they appear to those who are dying or nearing death, or do they truly guide people to their respective afterlives—”
“—so anyway, after eliminating the ones that either aren’t around anymore, don’t have any living worshippers, or the ones that someone or something has killed deader than dead—which turns out cover just about every single Psychopomp in recorded legend, by the way, because I sure as Hell didn’t meet Hermes or have a good sail on the Acheron with the Ferryman—I trapped one by feeding it my arm. Think it’s being kept accidentally alive by some unstable rich-man cannibal cult somewhere in the Americas, though ‘alive’ is a stretch. Why rich people love eating human flesh, I’ll never know. Doesn’t agree with the stomach.
“But nevertheless, worship’s in short order, these days, so the thing was eager to be talking to someone who actually knew what magic was.
“It took some doing and the blood loss wasn’t a great help, but you know how these things go. Give and take, make an offer, make a counteroffer, and eventually I got the Psychopomp to agree to answer exactly one question, using its phenomenal cosmic computational power, with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ reply. Pretty clear it wanted to get shot of me as soon as possible because I was annoying the tits off of it. Or maybe that was because I kept it trapped for another month after that and wouldn’t feed it anymore—oh, don’t give me that look. I had exactly one question that I knew would be answered truthfully, of course I was going to workshop the fuck out of it until even I couldn’t think of any loopholes.”
Remus closed his mouth and smoothed over his look, trying to give his best, Certainly, I have never been in such a position, not once, no, expression. He felt a disturbing kinship with Ahmed, then, though he knew he’d never be quite so psychopathic. Had she ever had empathy?
“It must’ve taken a shining to me, though, because when it answered—”
“—how do you know it was a real Psychopomp?” asked Sirius.
“—but what question did you ask it?” asked Remus.
“A very specific and fiddly question about planes of existence that you won’t understand because, if we’re clear, you’re not there yet,” explained Ahmed. Or, well, explained to one of them. Sirius’s expression was fully sour. “And it answered, ‘Almost, you’re slightly off.’”
“That wasn’t a yes-no answer.”
“I said it took a shining to me.” Ahmed shrugged again with one shoulder. “I set it free.”
“Was it worth it?” asked Sirius.
“What?”
“Your wanding arm.”
“Of course it was worth it,” she said quickly. “Tea?”
“I’ve heard a few stories about accepting brews from creatures in caves, like,” said Remus, but he accepted the proffered teacup nevertheless. “Though, being honest, this place reminds me more of the thesis defence room than a proper grotto.”
“‘It’s where I owe my inspiration,” said Ahmed. “Made some improvements, though in other aspects it’s lacking in comparison. Which brings us to why you’re here.”
“I still have some questions,” began Sirius, but Ahmed held out a teacup in gnarled hand to quiet him. There was a flicker of defiance in his grey eyes—for a moment, Remus was worried he might knock the cup to the floor—but he took it after a long pause and gave the thing a suspicious sniff. “There better not be Veritaserum in this tea,” he added, dark, staring down at her even as he took a sip.
Ahmed snorted. “As grateful as I am for those tattoos of yours, all six of them—”
Remus choked on his hot tea. Scalded the shit out of his throat while Sirius, blessed with more grace than he, only bubbled his with his own surprised breath.
“—they threw off my experiments for several weeks before I realised what was going on and adjusted for them. Almost lost me a lung. And sure, they’ve been useful—having a coven of my own brings an ickle tear to my eye—”
“Pardon?” said Remus, frowning.
“Sorry?” said Sirius, frowning harder. “We’re not—you’re not—”
“Hags are made, not born, whether swamp, forest, confectionary, brew, night, or sea,” she said, setting her empty teacup down and hopping up to sit on the small table upon which she made it so that she sat at eye level with them, hunched and knobbly as she was. “I don’t know their origins, and I don’t know whether it’s the same for all of them, but the rules of covens are very specific, and donning the marked name of your coven sisters—and your coven leader—fits the bill, even if you aren’t aware you’re doing it. Once I figured out you’d branded yourselves, all I needed to do was make my own brand, and, well, the rest was simple.”
Remus, however, had the sneaking suspicion that the rest was not so simple. Great and terrible as she was, and indeed in spite of all the magical anomalies she’d probed and found wanting, she was insolent. Indolent. Both, really, and dominated by an air of frustration even in this filthy flooded grotto. But more than that, and perhaps here he was off-base or mad or ultimately just an idiot, all the familiar shades of himself he saw in Ahmed could not be mere trickery. She was powerful yet impotent; onto something greater than herself yet still groping around in the dark.
If he had to reckon—and Remus and reckoning had a risky, cocaine-and-blood involved history with one another—then Ahmed, too, was stuck halfway through a two-stage transformation like Remus. Unlike Remus, however, and however cruel he was being to himself, this for her was not some lark. He was stuck roadside in dangerous and lethal territory, yes, but his caravan was full with friends and colleagues who might sometimes despise him and at other times love him. He was not alone; he could stay there a long while, and it mattered not to him which way they went. Gloria Ahmed by contrast was walking alone on a railbed in a tunnel, desperately trying to outpace a train she knew would one day sneak up on her at full speed like an overeager, steam-powered Saint Bernard.
“And so my proposal is this,” said Ahmed. Her gaze flitted from Sirius—he was equal parts pensive and begrudging—to Remus, and shook him from his thoughts. “If you’ve indeed cracked my research, and Black here has argued enough using my own material to tell me you have, then you’re here because you want the same thing as me: to finish my thesis. And there’s exactly one thing I wasn’t able to lay hands upon while at Hogwarts, one thing I need, above all others, to finish my work, to test all my theories, put praxis to the art of speculation. The one thing,” she continued, voice growing serious, “that I cannot do myself, being now a creature of wild magic.”
Every iota of Remus’s not inconsiderable willpower worked in concert to keep his face calm and his eyebrows from flying off of his forehead as she said those two words. He gave just as much Herculean effort to keep from asking if she’d met an ancient primordial werewolf during all of her travels, even though that would be a stupid fucking thing to ask.
“Beyond taking my name off your stupid tattoos—we can hash that all out later, I don’t think it’ll be too difficult and probably not horribly painful for long—I’ll finish my thesis and tell you what you need to know. Not all of it,” she added warningly, “but enough. You won’t be able to share it with anyone, and the knowledge’ll die with your mortal lifespans. First, however, you need to bring me one of the Kissed. Alive. Intact. Captured and subdued, yes, and without any of those plucky Ministry people or idiot fascists attached. We’ll also need a place for me to study it, fortified enough that I can set up my own protections before someone descends upon us and ruins the whole thing. One Kissed subject, alive, intact, alone. Can you do that?”
Sirius and Remus exchanged glances on instinct.
He needn’t ask why she couldn’t—she was, as she said, a creature of wild magic. Her physical capacity was, well, diminished, to say the least, and though her magical might would make it easy for her to dispatch any bureaucrat to which a Kissed were attached, how was she supposed to move the Kissed herself? Drag it by the arm? Fly it—where the shit were they, anyway? Probably somewhere in the Balkans, as the grotto had a distinctly Slavic or Germanic feel to it, über-wet and damp not unlike fermenting cabbage—on a plane, and then take it in a taxi, all as a well-wanted witch who, according to Mary, didn’t exist to the British Ministry of Magic? She did not need them, but she needed someone, silent someones capable of improvising and acting without direction, and more importantly people that could be relied upon not by the strong arm of magical influence, but by the lure of what she had to offer.
Though a flicker of uncertainty must’ve been in Remus’s own brown eyes, Sirius’s grey ones were as solid as steel. They’d come this far, hadn’t they? What were they to do? You couldn’t have a quest bequeathed upon you by a mysterious, omniscient, long-bearded wizard and grotto-dwelling half-hag and turn back—not when the fate of your boyfriend’s brother and every other person ever subjected to the Dementor’s Kiss, actually, rested on your ability to put on your big-werewolf trousers and do something well and truly concrete with your near-decade of magical Wissenschaft.
No, that would’ve been the wise thing to do, and when it came to Sirius and Remus, they were far, far too clever for their own good, and not nearly wise enough.
“Of course we can do it,” said Sirius, eyes flickering back to Ahmed after their moment of pause. Remus gave a sharp nod to confirm. “But we’ll fold someone else into the matter—don’t worry,” he said quickly, noticing Ahmed’s look of alarm and intercepting. God, how Remus wished he could truly know his mind. “She’s already in on the conspiracy. In fact, you were once colleagues. Close ones, as it so happens.”
Ahmed ground her jaw a moment, gnashing the proposal between her sharp teeth. Her grey-veined eye bulged more than Remus thought possible.
“We’ll draw too much suspicion without her,” added Remus, and for the first time in several hours, Sirius looked upon him fondly. His heart gave a wobbly kind of flutter. “We can’t vanish from our studies that long—but she’s been expelled from Hogwarts, is unemployed, is not, technically, a member of any side of the War, and you’ll need an assistant whose actually able to parse your thesis, which, being honest, is not an entirely accurate description for either of us here. Though I can’t imagine she’ll be initially pleased with the idea,” Remus continued, trying to find certainty in his voice and to not speak through grit teeth, “Mary Macdonald is, I think, the only witch for the job.”
Notes:
The next chapter, That Same Old Song and Dance, will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 12 September, a Friday.
Chapter 29: That Same Old Song and Dance
Chapter Text
Whether or not you could say James Potter was a just, honest man was in and of itself an unjust and dishonest question. As Remus had learned in his twenty-odd years upon that little, noncontinental patch of earth that was Europe, people were rarely ever just one or two things, and almost never any one thing all of the time. It didn’t matter what that thing was.
Remus himself wasn’t always honest. Being, actually, honest, these days he often wasn’t—and try as he might to justify it under the guise of wartime decisions and lycanthropic conundrums, he could not in earnest do so without also revisiting his many regrets and uncertain moments, in school and without. The four Marauders they were: schemers, swots, sweet-heart-breakers, and, quite possibly but probably only sometimes, swinelike school bullies.
Of the four of them, Sirius embodied Gryffindor in his unwavering need to challenge the status quo, no matter the trouble it earned him in classrooms or corridors; Remus had nerve in excess if nothing else; even little Peter Pettigrew, age eleven, had already been dogged in his loyalty to James for years, being Peter’s longest childhood friend, though Peter in truth had not been James’s; but when it came to James Potter, well, his sheer determination and albeit at times dated sense of chivalry spurred him to constant action, ever ready to lead the charge.
It hadn’t mattered that ‘the charge’ could involve sneaking Zonko’s Invisible Itching Powder into Severus’s dragonhide gloves every day for a month, thirty different ways in fact, as much as ‘the charge’ could be teaching a lesson to older students caught tormenting first years. The charge was the charge. When James lowered his lance and dug his spurs, cruel or not, into the eager flanks of vigilante justice, you charged on after him, aback high horse or not. All his tested mettle let him and Sirius fly fast through that Hogwarts social ladder at record pace.
Remus and Peter had been catapulted with them from nothings to someones. Students took interest. A Hufflepuff girl slipped him revision notes on Potions to repay a favour from James. After James let slip that he thought Remus was Really quite clever, for a yob, he was folded into an inter-House revisions group led by older Ravenclaws. The Quidditch team even learned Remus’s name for how often he was there, reading in the stands to show his admittedly lacklustre support.
Had James been just for firing back two hexes at whatever quarrelling student had sent his way a jinx? Had he been chivalrous, gloating, strutting like a lion-maned peacock after every match snatched like a Snitch from the jaws of defeat? God knew they hadn’t been honest, none of them—not as Animagi, not as students, not during tests and exams and when writing papers as they figured out endless ways to cheat or sneak each other messages, more for the pleasure of rulebreaking than true academic need—but young James had two doting parents who knew him well and thus, before the rest of them, had mastered a face of impregnable innocence.
Quidditch Seeker at twelve; top of the class, just as quick; the darling of every professor; in the eye of every girl and at least, knowing boarding school, a fair handful of boys; devilish angel; incorrigible; scourge to Lily Evans; bane to the grease-stain of Severus Snape, cunning Avery, the sadistic-humoured Mulciber, and whenever James and Sirius fought, unlikely ally to the untouchable Regulus Black. Even the older students took James under their wing, and him, like proud duck to their water.
At other times he had been honest. Painfully, sometimes, whenever Sirius was being a prat or Remus was being a knob or when, in James’s own words, Peter was being a shit-devouring arsehole who needed to stop his own Ouroboros of suck. James had saved Remus’s life no less than twice, being the one to incept the half-mad plan of becoming Animagi and the one to drag Severus back from whence he oughtn’t tread. Wasn’t that chivalry? How were you supposed to tally those things against one another? Did it matter at all James had been the one to save Severus when, if you squinted at their patchy history and the role they’d all played, James was the first of them to set that boulder rolling?
In truth James was the only one of them to not immediately settle on Sirius’s side when his, well, Darling ickle brother Reggie had been sorted into Slytherin. The only one to try and mend that relationship. The only one, in fact, to get to know Regulus at all and toe the nuclear line of Sirius’s blast radius on the subject.
James had been the first one to ever get Remus on a broom after his disastrous lessons in first year, and, yes, there had been a funny navel-turning feeling after James insisted he sit behind Remus, windburned chin tucked over his shoulder and his ears full of the breeze and racing pulses, so he could learn to steer instead of remaining passenger—but they were fifteen, tipsy, and soaring about in the snow during the last good Christmas Remus would ever know. First to write him a letter when Remus ran away. James settled countless fights between him and Sirius, often locking them in their shared loo until they sorted things out or at the very least until they collaborated enough to unlock the bloody door. James was James. Unstoppable, like. A force of nature. If the map had been Peter’s idea first, James was the one to will it into being.
Yet how many times had he and Peter lay in their dormitory together—separate beds, Jesus, always separate beds, him and Peter—bitching and moaning about how they never got to do anything after Remus shot up like a beanpole and the Cloak no longer fit them all? Even if it wasn’t strictly true, seeing as Peter could become a rat, but then again as a rat he needn’t ever be under the Cloak at all.
Still, how often had they commiserated? How often had Remus absconded to Lily, dragging her from Mary and Marlene because he was sick of James’s strutting, and she was the only other nice person he knew who liked to criticise James’s stardom? His ego? His inability to ever not act when provoked? James never let him sleep alone in the Hospital Wing, never let up about Peter’s increasing roundness, never stopped the not-ha-ha-funny jokes Sirius started aiming at Peter even when he wasn’t around.
Never let, full stop, Remus do anything unharassed if James thought it wasn’t a good idea.
No. If it wasn’t James’s idea, fuller stop.
As for why Remus had James on the mind when it was the morning of Sirius’s birthday, well.
“You’re up early, mate.” Though not quite as golden-brown sounding through the two-way mirror—something had gone awry the last time they’d mended it, giving it a tinny quality to the ear—James’s voice cut through the early morning quiet of Hogwarts. The sky wasn’t barely lit yet, not from what Remus glimpsed from their window and not more than a bloodstain of sunrise colour. Most probably still slept. James yawned. Sirius yawned. Remus would’ve yawned as well, but a gentle hand was fisted in the base of his hair. Throat already lax.
“You sound knackered,” said Sirius.
“You look knackered,” replied James. Both of them were grinning. The upturned edge to their tones was a dead giveaway even as they slung insults at one another. “Fair shot better than last time, mind. You’ve been dodging my calls.”
“Haven’t.”
“Have.”
“Haven’t.”
“Have—”
Remus rolled his admittedly-watering eyes. This was—well, being fair, this was a sure improvement over where’d they been before Hallowe’en, but that was something of a low bar and of itself. Arguably it was most impressive that Sirius was staying hard through only the most mature argument you could have being freshly twenty-one. Still, Remus didn’t complain. Far from it: he choked back his complaints, every one, and was ready for seconds, because he’d been terrified out of his mind for weeks, and recent relief had only just come over him like—well, hopefully like Sirius would in a few minutes time.
The day after they returned from making a deal with the half-hag Gloria Ahmed, Sirius did not get out of bed. Not to eat; not to drink; not to use the lav. Remus hadn’t quite figured that out at first. Coming back to their darkened dormitory wasn’t much of a rare occurrence, nor was the Sirius-shaped lump on their bed. He figured it out, however, once he tried to feed him a glass of water, what with Sirius turning his head away after only a few sips and wincing in pain from the presumably intense pressure on his bladder. Motionless and with a racing heart. He’d also turned away all food, wouldn’t—couldn’t, probably—sit up, and would only answer Remus’s frightened pestering with the slightest nod or shake of his head. Remus was terrified.
Sirius was probably out of his mind with dread and alarm.
Talking about it wasn’t a Rubicon they’d crossed yet, and maybe they never would do so, not aloud, but Remus’s paranoia might’ve been their salvation in all that. Calling on Madam Pomfrey was right out, of course. Remus didn’t want to imagine let alone dwell upon the medieval ‘solutions’ wizards probably had for mental cases like him and Sirius. He turned elsewhere. Sought contingencies for the woeful times he hoped would never arrive, groping in the dark as he was, and so before leaving Ahmed’s grotto, Remus had caught a moment with her alone to ask if she’d anything to help with very, very, very down days. Which was how he’d got his hands on a new platter of tiny, tinkling-bell Sweet Nothings. The same Sweet Nothings that sat unused in his trunk.
Less than a week prior, Remus’s worrying had him stop off at Kelly’s cabin that tired morning following the last full moon in the Cambrian Mountains, asking much the same question. There wouldn’t be a cure, of course. They weren’t ill. Sirius wasn’t—
“—but aye, ye want a cure, don’t ye?” Kelly said, rooting around in a bewitched wardrobe whose shelves were impossibly large. He squinted back over his shoulder, copper curls falling in his eyes, and Remus made an indistinct gesture. “Or as good as?”
“I—what I would like,” said Remus, “is a contingency. In case of emergency, break glass, et cetera.”
“Haven’t any glass, but this might help.”
“What is it?”
“Ketamine.”
Remus waited for him to go on.
“Y’ken it? Veterinary tranquilizer?”
“Right, but it’s mixed with…?”
Kelly stared at him, dead knackered. He had, in fact, pulled off his shirt thereafter and perched on the edge of his bed, blinking away the fatigue and pissing around with a cigarette lighter Remus had enchanted for him to never need fuel. They’d been herding wolves all night with Padfoot, though of course he knew better than to ask questions about the bounding black dog that heralded Sirius’s arrival.
“No Doxy eggs?” continued Remus. “Troll marrow? Powdered Unicorn horn, or, I don’t know, tears of a Hag, vampire grave dust, Mandrake root—”
“Nah, mate, s’just straight ketamine.”
And that had been that.
Or not exactly—Remus peppered the tiny, tired Scot with a thousand pharmacological questions neither of them were truly qualified to grapple with, let alone answer, but apparently it was a thing. A working thing. Remus never would’ve thought it sensible-who wanted downers in the down-est state imaginable?—but less than two weeks later, there he was, laying with Sirius in the dark. Foreheads pressed together, Sirius’s eyes squeezed shut. He was glad to have the option.
“Padfoot,” he whispered. “I don’t know if it’ll help, but there are things we can try. Only if—it’s your choice, darling. I’ll follow whatever you say. Kelly said this might…”
Sirius chose the ketamine with a small, small nod, but Remus was the one to suggest he become a dog once the powder had kicked in.
The following morning, Sirius got out of bed on his own, even if Remus hadn’t slept all night for fear of something going horribly, terribly awry. Still, he managed a laugh at Sirius’s audibly minutes-long piss, and Sirius returned him a soft, shameless grin. The following day—the overmorrow, not that same day—Remus slept through the night. So too did Sirius. The day thereafter had been better. And the one after that. And the one after that. And a week plus change later, there they were. There he was. Powder put back away, behind the emergency glass, ideally, until the next season of Sirius’s mind changed again, and Sirius shoving him down beneath the silky Gryffindor-styled covers of their bed without any prompting on Remus’s part. The effect had been more or less immediate—he was still down, yes, but not down-down.
Not down-down down-down.
So Remus had set aside all his misgivings, worries, nightmares, worst-case scenarios—his fears and scandalisations and everything he’d been told, actually, about the purported uses and misuses of drugs—and let himself take one big gulping breath of relief. Until James had signalled through the mirror and he found himself parched for breath, that was.
“Have.”
“Haven’t—ah, that reminds me,” said Sirius abruptly, idle hand ruffling Remus’s hair, “just what have you been doing this past week? Swear every time I see you, you’ve a new room behind you. Not shopping around for a flat, I reckon?”
“And here I thought you wouldn’t notice anything but my handsome features.”
“Cheeky beggar.”
“And are you having a wank right now? Genuinely? What’s that hand doing?”
Sirius scoffed, loud, and with the crook of two black-nailed fingers set the compact mirror levitating before him even as he relaxed, both arms folded behind his neck and head tilted just so, picturesquely so, in fact, on a cradle of mostly-clean pillows to show off his safety pin earring as well as his unoccupied hands. He looked like a Renaissance painting. A punk one. A lewd one, too—one historians would probably destroy to preserve their calcified view of the past—and Remus realised how much he’d missed seeing him in fading light. He still flipped him off, of course, for the cheeky fucking move, even if he was well and truly enamoured of an ass.
“Safehouses are hard to come by, since—after—in any case there’s something to be said,” explained James, sounding fraught, “for moving rather than sitting still. Spend more time travelling between secure locations than in them, these days, genuinely.”
“Makes you harder to track, I s’pose.”
“Makes me worried. No one else in the Order knows about the Cloak, still, but they trust me enough to manage on my own. Emmeline always asks how I manage to sneak up on her, and Dedalus thinks I’ve been downplaying the quality of my illusionwork. Though it kills me to be apart from Lily and the baby so often.”
“Did you just call your own son ‘the baby’?”
“Mate.”
“Mate.”
“It’s—he’s a baby, Pads. Lovely and all that, but that’s what he is. For now,” added James as an afterthought. His tone sounded off. Collapsed not unlike a souffle. Worried, perhaps? “Do you think he’ll recall?”
“What?”
“That I’ve not been around as much as Lily, these first few—”
“—mate.”
“Mate.”
“You’ll be fine. He’ll be fine,” said Sirius, waving him off with a hand. By the conflicted squinting of his eyes, Remus could tell that this was not his preferred topic of discussion, given, well—it was fucking inappropriate, was what it was. “You said it yourself, it’s—he’s a baby, in’t he? And you didn’t exactly ask to be thrust into the middle of a War, so maybe cut yourself some slack, yeah? You’ll see them soon.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Can we talk about something else—”
“—please, mate, I felt myself aging years older in a manner of seconds. Better not sprout grey, you’ll suffer if I do—’tchu wanna talk about, though?” Sirius nestled back into his pillows, grin returning, flexing as Remus buried his nose against dark, coarse hair and gave himself a few strokes under the covers. Sirius’s grey eyes were devouring the sight just out of frame. “Quidditch? Holyheads, again, and how much you loathe their new Seeker? I could give you the latest gossip on—”
“—hey, Pads, do you think we might’ve rushed this whole thing?”
This was, in fact, the worst blowjob Remus had ever given in his life.
“Rushed into…?”
“The—look, mate, I’m mad for her, you know that better than anybody, but—she’d been away doing her studies for two years after we left Hogwarts, and on top of that we’re schoolyear sweethearts who’ve only a few—and I’ve been running with the Order all this time, we’ve barely seen each other, then there was the whole pregnancy job—”
“—‘Job’. ‘Job,’ he says—”
“—and I know we aren’t the only ones to get hitched so quick with everything up in the air it is—I mean, there was Molly Prewett, and your cousin—right, how’s Andromeda doing these days?—but, answer me honestly, do you genuinely think—”
“Prongs. Mate. Take a breath, yeah?”
James gave a breath that was more exhale than in—more sigh than respite—but the silence that followed felt oddly comfortable. Lived-in. Sirius and James did some of their best communicating when they weren’t speaking.
“You’re right.”
“Always am.”
“Prat.”
“Bellend.”
“Wanker,” said James affectionately. “Is Remus around at all?”
“Ah, er, yeah,” murmured Sirius wryly. Lifting his hips just so, he dared Remus to pull away or risk his gagging becoming audible. “Having breakfast, methinks. Why?”
Remus snorted despite himself and Sirius swatted him quietly.
“They don’t serve food this early.”
“Since when has that ever stopped us, mate?”
“Fair. Know when he’ll be back?”
Remus felt Sirius twitch against his tongue as much as he felt the grin split across Sirius’s lips.
“Can’t be much longer, now—maybe a few minutes more, unless he keeps fucking around.”
“Right,” said James absently. “I’ve got to get a move on soon, but I’ll sit about, keep you company until he’s back. Wouldn’t want you to spend your birthday morning alone.”
“Ah, you do love me.”
“’Course I love you. You’re my best mate, Padfoot. Lose my sodding mind if it weren’t for you.”
How Sirius kept his face composed while thrusting so frantically against Remus’s, Remus would never know—and maybe he hadn’t at all, not that Remus could tell because his vision was going dark by the end of it and the gentle asphyxiation of his brain cells was giving his entire body a pleasant, tingly kind of feeling.
When Sirius let him up, Remus pulled off and stared up at his stupid dark curls, high cheekbones, twitching lip—his own eyes probably lidded stupidly with lust—and brushed the cum-and-spittle slick from his chin with a few thoughtful fingers. Perched his chin on his wrist and licked said fingers clean. Sirius’s pulse was rapid and still thrumming in his ears.
“Hey, Pads,” began James, abrupt, “do you think we’re making the right call? Peter—”
“—ah, hiya, Moony, welcome back,” said Sirius. Loud and quick. James clammed up in the exact same moment, while Remus had only the time to shoot Sirius a bewildered, stricken glare before being tugged up and into careful view of the mirror. He faked a cough and used the gesture to wipe his fuzzy face off on his sleeve.
“Hullo, Prongs,” said Remus. Jesus—he was probably beet red. Or, no, they hadn’t yet invented a vegetable that carried the same colour of Remus’s cheeks. “Fancy meeting you here, like.”
“People will talk.”
“Mm.”
“You look like Hell, mate. Hair needs a trim, won’t soon see your eyes—and did you two spend last night pissing about in Hogsmeade again? Is that why Pads’s got his colour back—still stoned and probably pissed, are you? At least Lily tells me you’ve both quit the fags. Filthy habit, that.”
While James fussed over him and then Sirius again in genuinely adorable fashion, Remus and Sirius exchanged fleeting glances. No they hadn’t—they hadn’t left the castle grounds since their Kneazle-seeking excursion, in fact, and the Prophet’s headlines detailing another year of cross-country attacks on Hallowe’en night only strengthened their resolve that their decision was a wise one—but, well, when someone handed you a cover story…
…except it was James. James.
“No,” said Remus after what was probably too long a pause. “Just having a dozy morning lie-in. You know the ones.”
“Surprised I didn’t interrupt you two having a shag.” James laughed. There were worse ways he could be taking the news. Even if his empathetic Fingerspitzengefühl was, as per usual, closer to the truth than was strictly comfortable. “At least one of you has the decency to put on some clothes before answering their mirror, eh, Pads?”
Remus was indeed wearing a patchy-elbowed knit jumper. Hogwarts was not known for its warmth in the late autumn or early winter or most of the year, in fact, being in the Scottish Highlands, so it was hardly surprising. What James did not need to know, however, was that the jumper was Remus’s only article of clothing, nor did Remus think ‘Actually, Prongs, Pads’s wearing a collar—sleeps with it on, I’ll have you know, and snags on every fucking sheet possible’ a very satisfying rebuttal.
“That’s our Moony,” said Sirius. He tipped the compact mirror down ever-so-slightly as he side-eyed Remus, though Remus in turn quickly steadied it. “Speaking of, James, you were saying…?”
“Right, right, we’ll catch up later. Poems and all that toss. You know you can use Padfoot’s mirror if ever you want to—all right, Padfoot, we get it, Merlin’s tits you can stop waving the compact in his face. Poor thing, I don’t know how you put up with him.”
“Best lay north of Glasgow.”
“Charming. Who’s the south?”
Remus shrugged and grinned. It—Jesus Christ, was this really the first time since his bloody fucking wedding that he was seeing James’s face? His eyes were creased in the corners by fatigue and the forehead beset by a few persistent wrinkles, all worry and pensive thought, but they too were dark and full of an eager kind of joy, and beneath them his usually clean-shaven, rounded jaw was sprouting with a week or probably multiple-week fuzz. Upon closer inspection, his glasses were crooked. He probably smelled awful. Yet against all odds, James looked almost happy.
His news, unfortunately, was anything but. According to his and by extension the Order’s intelligence, a representative from the DRCMC—the Department of Creatures—was en route to Hogsmeade on orders from Gwyn Selwyn, head of department himself, and would there remain for some indeterminate period of time in response to rumoured werewolf activity in the Forbidden Forest as well as to update the Register itself. Whether they were a Ministry asset or a Death Eater agent was unknown as of yet—whether it related to Remus at all, in fact, was unknown as of yet—but the risk was there, and so James had found it prudent to tell them.
“—so you two be careful with the Shack—”
“—yeah, mate, if we use it, we’ll be sure to—”
“—‘if’? Mate—”
“Long story,” said Sirius quickly. “Promise we’ll explain next time we see you. Swear on it.”
“Solemnly,” added Remus.
Being James Potter and a Marauder through and through, he did not argue the point and instead gave a decisive nod.
They kept James only a few minutes further, bantering back and forth while reasserting that James ought leave soon, only to follow it up with a question, an exchange of life updates, and other mundane matters to tease things out longer. All the while, Sirius tried with increasing success to steal away Remus’s attention with his out-of-frame hand. And, well. Though obviously, obviously he was enjoying the attention, the thrill, the secret, and above all the audacity of it all, something in Remus’s (empty, empty, you’re welcome Padfoot) gut was doing a strange kind of jig, because even if James wasn’t being hurt or aware, this felt naughty. Not good naughty—or not all-they-way-good naughty. Knowing that James would in all likelihood wince and groan but otherwise shrug off the indecency did not help matters.
Maybe it was Remus’s ethical preoccupations; maybe it was him figuring out whether this kind of pseudo-exhibitionism was truly creepy; but maybe, just maybe, he was stuck thinking about the way that Sirius had cum down his throat while James gave him praise, and, just like a little bit of that cum, actually, the moment was still at the back of his throat, itching for his attention. He wasn’t sure what to do with it. Soon, though, James was making his twelfth and last round of goodbyes. Thereafter Sirius was staring back at the ceiling, a scheme brewing in his face. Plotting.
“Are you thinking the same thing I’m thinking, Moony?’
Remus coughed. “I don’t think so, not at this very moment, no. Care to enlighten me?”
Sirius pouted his narrow lips and then sat up suddenly, dark curls carrying forwards with the momentum. He twisted on the spot to frown at Remus. Cocked his head to the side and tapped a bitten-down black nail against his lips in deep, dangerous contemplation.
“What are the odds, do you think,” he began, a wicked grey glitter in his eyes where they caught the creeping morning light, “that this Ministry head will have a Kissed in their entourage?”
***
Orchestrating the kidnapping of a literal, actual human being from the Ministry of fucking Magic was if nothing else a complex, almost winelike intellectual exercise. It was taboo. Verboten to the highest degree, yet made all the more tantalising by the implied thieves’ rules therewithin: you stole that person first, so, if you thought about it, he and Sirius had every right to steal them back. To liberate them—they were liberating a person whose very essence had been consumed by the Dementors of Azkaban, which had always been the end goal. Even if they hadn’t so much as attempted to do so before it became outright necessary for Ahmed’s continued research.
The academic and ethicist inside Remus were finally aligned. In agreement. Both were finally excited. Without a firm timeline on the DRCMC official’s duration of stay or departure, some aspects of their planning had to be left vague and otherwise adaptable. The sprawling, meters-long parchment flowchart took over Remus’s wall of maps, spilled over stacks of books, unravelled their ideas and rewound them tighter. Soon it garnered endless appendices, comically-long arrows that looped around and back and by the graces of magic sometimes through the air itself, and several terminating boxes that referred to other, shorter flow charts, each one a contingency for a specific scenario. It was coming alive. By all the magic they were pouring into it, edits and re-edits, black-inked letters began breaking off from their neat, regimental formations to do battle with one another on the moors of pulp, consuming the lamenting dead that fell beneath them like an all-devouring epistemological horde. Each one culminated in its evolutionary apex for that specific contingency scenario.
Multiple Kissed, said one simple title.
Decision tree should our diversion fail while we’re separated, said another.
A tiny, compact sheet no larger than your average book page gathered dust in the corner. It was entitled, The Prisoner’s Dilemma: Don’t Be a Hero!
Arguing in circles not unlike playfighting dogs and wolves, Remus and Sirius exchanged volleys about the practicality of their plans and its circumscription in the greater context of, well, the War.
“Any diversion has to operate within the bounds of the DRCMC’s purview, yeah, but it has to be carefully-calibrated so they neither call for backup, ignore it until later, nor tap another department to see the task handled. Gwyn Selwyn’s apparently a bit of a tosser about that sort of thing. And it can’t raise any Death Eater-y flags, or the whole thing’ll go tits up when Aurors swarm the village.”
Remus frowned. “I feel as though most forms of diversion will ring true of Death Eaters—perhaps not to the Ministry, but the people. The Hallowe’en attacks are too fresh in their minds, especially in Hogsmeade.”
“We can’t do anything about that,” said Sirius with a shrug. A touch callous. “Folks are on edge. The world is on edge. Even muggles are—look, there’s no way to create a convincing and enduring distraction without inadvertently stoking fear. Though,” he added quickly, “we should avoid anything that might create the lingering impression of Death Eater activity. Make it’s clear it’s unrelated.”
“Well.”
“Hm?”
“Ought we, though? Ought we make it clear the Death Eaters weren’t involved, I mean to say, because—well, it’d help us cover our tracks, wouldn’t it? And if we were to time it right, the pair of Aurors that patrol the castle boundaries might hold position for fear of diversion rather than run to Hogsmeade. Every distracted Auror is another chip in our favour, right?”
Sirius’s thin, moustached lips parted long before he made any sound. Brows knit together.
“Ethically murky, I s’pose.”
“A bit, innit? We’ll return to this later.”
Setting off a batch of horror-attuned Elemental Genre Mixture was right out, even Remus suggested it might resemble a swarm of Boggarts appearing without the lingering risk to the easily frightened; they nixed Sirius’s idea about setting off Ventriloquism Charms in the Forbidden Forest after Remus reminded him that they were über-forbidden by Socrates Themselves, lest they like to figure out why; Thestrals were too small an issue; a loosed Doxy infestation, too big; the Shrieking Shack had something of a grim reputation as being haunted, but once there, there’d be nothing more to show for it and no delays to keep them; and they had neither the time nor desire nor slightest clue, actually, how they might smuggle in a Boggart before the official’s arrival in less than a week, though there was one still trapped in the unused broom cupboard of Honeydukes’s basement. Probably. Still, though, their plan was forming.
Take the Ventriloquism Charms and the Boggart. Add a healthy base of Elemental Genre Mixture. Stick them together not unlike potion ingredients in the cauldron of the Shrieking Shack, and maybe, just maybe, you produced a multifaceted, obnoxious, and Creature-appearing problem that ought take hours to untangle without terrorising the people of Hogsmeade. As for the other details…
Remus argued they ought wait a few days after the official’s arrival, both to reconnoitre the enemy and so as to not give away that a source had slipped them insider information. Once they took the Kissed, the Ministry was sure to realise the whole thing was a ruse. Deliberate. Not to mention, the Order would be likely to tie them to the crime once the Order, unlike the Ministry, ruled out Death Eater involvement.
Sirius disagreed.
“Mate. Mate,” he said, lips smacking between spoonfuls of hearty stew. Late evening had stolen in over once more. They were both inkstained. They’d missed the evening feast in the Great Hall, though that much was normal by now. So normal, in fact, Nathaniel had brought them another filled filigree platter from the kitchens, perhaps in a(n unfortunately fruitless) attempt to gain entry to their inner sanctum once more. The large inkblot upon Remus’s nose did little to quell his suspicions, and worse, Remus kept noticing it in the corner of his vision.
“We have to do it when they first arrive,” continued Sirius.
As he explained, their best cover story would be to leave, or, well, appear as such, for field testing at least a day before the DRCMC delegation’s arrival. Tell as many folks as possible, be seen leaving by just as many, and then lurk unseen in the village until the time of their ambuscade. And as for the Enigma-Boniface issue, well, Sirius put it thus:
“The only one who knows we know is James, Moony—”
“—oh. Oh! Yes, I rather get it now. But, er,” he continued, brow furrowing, “not Lily as well?”
“They don’t share everything. Besides, I think she’s still on the bench with the Order like we are—though she’s likely still privy to their secrets, unlike us.”
On that, they were in agreement. Even James had been called out from hiding to watch over the house of an Order member’s family on Hallowe’en, while Remus and Sirius had sat there all night, twiddling their thumbs and with their dicks in each other’s hands. They felt useless.
“Mm.”
“I—he knows that she’s been working on something secret and I can tell it’s maddening him to not know, but she hasn’t really the option of sharing, innit? Which is a bit grim. He’s said there’s been a few rows, nothing too big, from the sound of it, but—anyway, yeah, he knows, and he’ll think that’s why we’ve left at roughly the same time. Won’t suspect a thing.”
“Feels like piss, lying to both of them.”
“Omission. It’s not as bad, right?”
Remus grimaced. “Does he know about—okay, he apologised to me on Frank’s behalf over the mirror yesterday, though I can’t imagine Frank fucking Longbottom has ever said the word ‘sorry’ aloud. So I s’pose he knows the extent to which I must be on the outs with the Order, but, well, does he know about…” Remus trailed off. It was still something of a sensitive subject.
“Yeah, he knows I went under, Moony,” said Sirius quietly. He set down his spoon with a gentle clang.” Knows I’m fine, now, though, no lingering anything, just as much as you do.”
“Mm. Good.”
“Yeah.”
“So—”
“No one’ll know we know, though everyone’ll know we knew, yet not know who we are, what we’re up to, or why. They’ll suspect each other of having sources in the Ministry—”
“—which each of them already knew already. Already—piss—you catch my meaning. No information gained or lost, no one exposed, no tracks left.”
“Still’ll feel shite, though.”
“It’s for a good cause.”
“Yeah.”
As the day drew closer, they penned letters. Several letters:
- Half a dozen apologies to Mary and a pleading, grovelling request from Remus, ghostwritten by Sirius, that she be ready to meet them somewhere in Wales when next they sent a letter, though in truth they embedded in it a code Mary ought crack right quick, with a timeframe and town as the yolk;
- one to Kelly, carried by courier, asking him to drag their old camping supplies to the arse-end of the valley, all the way across the river, where he was told to have Octavia set up some basic protective enchantments and illusions;
- one addressed to a Kneazle in the London Docklands to tell Ahmed they’d produce something valuable soon; and, of course,
- one to Albus P.W.B. Dumbledore, informing him and the postgraduate board that they would be embarking upon an extended and joint field-testing expedition that ought last them at least a week, perhaps longer if complications arose.
They copied Irma Pince and the rest of their advisory teams on the last one, then began spreading word. Gossip, really, about themselves. Soon students in the corridors began to whisper about the ominous machinations of Mad Black and Loony Lupin, while one particularly thin and translucent ghost warned them fondly not to experiment too much with magic, lest they end up like her. Nathaniel, Pascalle, even Emily Leach wished them luck—Remus wished he could loop the former two into their plan, but, well, being in the dark would keep everyone safer, or otherwise less likely to rot in a cell in Azkaban—and two days later, Remus had two heavy packs belted across his back while Sirius wheeled his bike, new, detachable sidecar stuck on its side, downhill to the sleepy village of Hogsmeade.
They stopped in at the Three Broomsticks to let Sirius chat up the barmaid Rosmerta, on whom he’d once had a darling crush, and gave word that they’d be off in the countryside for who knew how long. Remus dashed into Gladrags Wizardwear to buy a last-minute woolly hat. Sirius sent a bit of post. They nodded, smiled, or otherwise made themselves known to every passerby on the High Street that might remember their conspicuous attire, all muggle leather motorbike jackets and tight denim and most eye-catching, colourful fleece jacket Remus owned, patched with Welsh colours and a dragon that reminded him, maudlin, of the months-missing Caradoc Dearborn. Wastefully, Remus threw a fresh, half-eaten scone to the tiny crowd of brown rats always lurking outside the Hog’s Head after making himself known inside and purchasing a bottle of butterbeer from the barkeep to the road. One rat even squeaked at them and fled round the corner while the others feasted away, no doubt emboldened by approaching dusk.
Once night fell and they were well shot of the village, Sirius swung the bike back around while Remus, adrenaline bursting his veins, cast a bubble of pure silence about them to cover their return. They landed not too far from a field cottage and found temporary refuge in a hilly cave.
Oddly the air was colder after Remus swung himself off the bike. Sirius had found time in his studies to add a series of Atmospheric Charms to his thesis—layering more fiddly bits onto an already headspinning work of complexity—that, unlike brooms, kept its riders from freezing to death during prolonged trips and eased the worst of wind, rain, or other inclement weather.
“Ah, almost forgot,” said Sirius. They were in the midst of unpacking only the essentials for the night and he’d produced a small wrapped box. “Here, I—look, I do promise this really is a birthday gift for me rather than from me,” he added, quick, intercepting Remus’s flat look of disapproval. “If you’re willing and comfortable, could you—it’d make me feel better knowing you had this on you, in your boot or on your thigh. For emergencies only, of course, and I hope you’ll never use it, but…”
As Remus pulled the decorative maroon ribbon and popped open the box, he recognised the spearhead-shaped silver blade therewithin instantly. Formerly Bellatrix’s, the Goblin-made knife had to it a number of curious engravings and a dark-cobalt gleam that only appeared in certain light and that shifted like oil over ocean waves.
Remus weighed it in his hand. It felt light. Eager, too.
“What about version two of your thieving knife?” he asked conversationally.
“First, how dare you, it’s a mischief and unlocking knife, thanks,” he said with mock woundedness. He met Remus’s eyes, his own softening a moment. “And second, it’s a worthy sacrifice if it means I know you’ll be safe in a pinch, yeah? Mine serves me well enough already.”
“Mm.”
“You don’t have to—”
“—no, no, Pads, I’ll keep it. Loath as I am to admit, you might be right, like.”
“Just be careful, yeah? I’ve never bewitched something Goblin-made before—it’s taken the enchantments frighteningly well, just as Dorcas said, so don’t toss it at anything unless you’re certain you want it dead.”
“Thank you, Padfoot. Really,” he said, even if a few minutes later he’d tucked it away in his pack instead of spelling a spot for it in his boots—he rarely wore them, anyway—nor along his thigh, as Remus did not want to shed his trousers that very moment.
They made camp, huddled, slept fitfully for the nerves and excitement, and in their early, haggard morning, ran over the plan a half-dozen times until Remus was hoarse and Sirius, of course, had become a dog.
***
Remus wished he could become a dog.
The available literature was not clear on the matter, given that less than a dozen Animagi completed their oeuvre each century—or, being precise and minding the grin splitting his lips, less than a dozen known Animagi. Becoming an Animagus as a werewolf was almost certainly impossible given the full moon requirements. Moreover, Animagi were, in turn, immune to lycanthropy while transformed, though the literature also lacked this information as he, James, Sirius, and Peter had discovered once panicked morning at the beginning of Fifth Year and the longest month of his life. Quite possibly it had never happened in the entire history of magic. The odds were astronomical.
Yet as it so happened, Sirius was also the astronomical sort. Animagus. Werewolf lover. The only person who could suggest Remus bite them and not receive a broken jaw in reply. Not that Remus did anything more than vaguely entertain Sirius’s suggestion of being turned, of course. That would be crazy. Loony—no, full-on loopy lunacy. James would murder them if ever he found out they suggested it, let alone carry out the plan. Probably he’d murder Sirius first for being an idiot. Probably. And, well, there was no guarantee Remus would’ve been a dog, now, was there? What if he’d been something useless? Unlikeable? A spider, a trout, a sheep, a punchline—what walks on two legs by day, six when he’s anxious, and has dual bipedal-quadrupedal locomotion in the light of a full moon?
Remus shifted his weight from one foot to the other and slapped at his cheeks. Shook his head. His hippy hair. He paced endless circles around the aching floorboards of the Shrieking Shack and only stopped to peer through the barricaded windows like a creepy fucking stalker because Sirius was not yet late but on the verge of being. He hadn’t his clothes. His collar. His wand. One of those was more important the others.
Padfoot was their Hogsmeade lookout, awaiting the arrival of the DRCMC delegation as a large if otherwise unmemorable dog painted straw-gold with a glamour because they were insane, not stupid, while Remus was tasked with arranging their bait-and-trap. He’d finished about half an hour ago. Dust leapt from the cracks in the floor and peeled itself in sheets from high broken shelves at the sheer ambiance of magic therein as though gifted temporary and limited sapience—it was preparing for the show. Each time the rattling wardrobe in the corner moaned at him, Remus thought he could just hear the androgynous Welsh whisper of Cariad.
Or perhaps that was all just stray fumes from the Elemental Genre Mixture making him more paranoid than usual. Jesus, Sirius was cutting it close.
A measured knock came at the boarded-over door.
Remus jumped out of his skin, nearly pissed himself, and did not become a dog.
Padfoot loped in while Remus cast one last paranoid glance out the door and shut it after them. His teeth itched. His ankles ached from the pacing and his restless forefoot bouncing. Oddest of all, he felt inappropriately and just slightly horny. The biggest funny-hat crime, strange caper, et cetera, they’d ever attempted now hinged on whatever words tumbled out from Sirius’s lopsided grin of a mouth.
“Arrived at the Three Broomsticks just as expected,” said Sirius. Tugging on his trousers with just as much evident excitement, Sirius snagged his crooked toes in their many hazardous tears no less than four times. At least they were a larcenous black in place of his usual Stuart tartan or glam rock sheen. “Told you they weren’t gonna stay at the Hog’s fucking Head.”
“I would’ve.”
“You’re paranoid to shit, mate, and this bird oozes contempt for the unclean. Pretty face, ugly hat—Goblin-made bracelet on her wrist, which about sums up her approach to the Department as a whole, yeah? Probably thinks she’s untouchable. Probably,” he added, tone acid and bitter and directed, bless him, against Remus’s enemies instead of him, “she thinks she pisses rainbows.”
“Gather she’s not made an excellent first impression, like,” said Remus wryly. “How did you know it was her?”
“Overheard her and her entourage—two Aurors in red and two Kissed in black, though I didn’t get a good look at any of them under their cloaks—singing Gwyn Selwyn’s praises and discussing new developments in the Werewolf Register,” said Sirius. He spat on the old wooden floorboards and on another day might’ve left the Shack cleaner for it, but Remus had layered so many Charms on the building and its collection of shattered wooden tchotchkes that Sirius’s saliva skittered as a whole globule across the ground not unlike cool water droplets over a hot iron pan. Very Leidenfrost. “Apparently,” he continued, “there’s plans underway to have a live-updating Register for any concerned citizen who always wants the latest news on-hand. Might have an action bulletin in it, too—no need to wait for the next Prophet. Though I imagine they’re not about to stop printing infections any time soon either. Selwyn’s chomping at the bit to announce it to the press, or so I’ve heard.”
Remus groaned. “Fucking fascists. Do I want to know how they’re managing it?”
“Protean Charm.”
“Oh, good, just a NEWT-level charm that, what, seven out of ten NEWT students aren’t able to manage correctly—without counting, of course, the ones who fake their way through, or so Flitwick says. Glad to see our Ministry’s putting that kind of aptitude to good use.”
A Protean Charm was a niche bit of magic at the intersection of charms and transfiguration, which was half the reason so many witches and wizards found it difficult to perform. Advanced charms were already nightmarish and transfiguration a fever dream on its better days, so the concept of marrying both after seven or so years of stressing that they were separate areas of magic was, to say the least, daunting. That, and the effects were lacklustre: identical objects linked by Protean Charm simply echoed any changes made to one onto its companions, though the connection could be limited to flow in one direction if needed.
Sirius snapped together his belt and brushed himself off.
“It’s fucking rough, mate,” he said.
“Mm.” It was indeed fucking rough. “Sun’s nearly down. Are you ready?”
“No.”
“Oh, well, we’ll call it all off, like.”
“Glad you understand. Are you ready?”
“Bricking it, mate.”
“We’re mad.”
“Mental.”
“Beyond mental.”
“They’d need to invent a new category of asylum just to hold the unfortunate psychologists forced to examine us. Mad Black and Loony Loopy Lupin: a Case Study.”
In the corner of the Shack, the wardrobe rattled again. The Boggart therewithin probably sensed their swelling anxiety and dread—was probably feasting on it. They were a ripe pair for carrion.
“Shall we?” said Sirius.
“Let’s.”
“Then put your boots back on, yeah? If someone catches wind one of these devilish brigands was barefoot, half the castle’ll know it was you, and I’m too young to whittle away my days writing maudlin, weepy, forlorn letters to a Welsh werewolf in the clink.”
***
One of the benefits of being a werewolf, a conspirator of crimes in funny hats, and a magical appreciator of astronomy was that there were endless tables and charts and calendars for every imaginable celestial event, spectacular eclipse or simple sunset, some calculated down to the very second, so you either mastered the art of Timing Charms right quick or otherwise drowned trying to stay afloat in your conspiracy. As the sun slipped beneath the wooded horizon indeed not unlike a struggling swimmer pulled under by the patient ocean waves, Sirius was counting down seconds under his breath.
Two minutes and twenty-four seconds after it fell behind the treeline, fading rays bloodying the distant sky still even as the brightest stars began to reveal themselves, the first tortured wail cut through the night air like a sudden drop of temperature. They were all in theory Remus’s screams. His own or ones conjured from memory, twisted and manipulated by their mutual overlaying and the intricacies of a Ventriloquism Charm. And yet, this far from the Shrieking Shack, fear still pricked the back of Remus’s neck like a wandering spider. A second mournful crooning, impossibly loud and just as empty, joined the first; then a sobbing; a high, earsplitting cry reminiscent of a banshee; and, of course, the telltale hollow howl that still set Remus’s teeth on edge. Sounds collided like spells and produced new, twisted offspring.
What disquieted Remus most, however, were the spells and potions themselves: he and Sirius watched from beneath their woollen travelling cloaks and from their perch as an almost incandescent darkness swelled around the frame of the Shrieking Shack. It swallowed the light. A billowing grey fog rolled like the frayed shawls of Dementors over the hill atop which sat the Shack and crept down its rolling slope towards the unsuspecting village of Hogsmeade, undulating with its shrieking chorus, while high above the Shack’s derelict A-frame peaks, the darkness climbed the fog and leapt up to meet its reflection in the sky. The treeline grew misty, the horizon darkened much too quick, and, one by one, stars began to vanish from the night’s sky.
As those pinpricks of white light vanished above, below in Hogsmeade, windows began to alight with a warm golden glow. Curtains parted; curtains flew shut; murky silhouettes pressed themselves to the windowpanes while the boldest braved their doorsteps, lanterns or wands in hand, to stare in disbelief at the far, looming figure of the Shrieking Shack. Their lights never carried very far. The dark was swallowing them.
“Jesus Christ, Moony,” whispered Sirius after a long, low whistle. He tugged the hood of his cloak tighter over his tied-back hair and Remus forwards by the wrist as they wended down their path towards the village, pushing themselves through a quaint wooden kissing gate that had likely never met an animal in its lifetime and floating Sirius’s bike clear over it. “’tchu think you might’ve overdone it? A tad, maybe? A smidgen?” he said, shaking his head. “You’ve been holding back on me. To think I dared assume I was pulling far ahead, what with you busy rescuing every wayward werewolf in Britain from the slavering jaws of Thatcher.”
Remus’s face was flush with remorse. With confusion. Frustration. Perhaps—and he would never say this out loud, not even to Sirius—perhaps a hint of pride.
“My magic’s been unpredictable as of late,” he whispered unconvincingly. “I didn’t—this wasn’t my intention.” Was it?
“We’re nowhere near the full moon.”
“I think, Pads,” he whispered, stomach sinking out of his body and into the depths of the earth beneath him, “perhaps that’s not how it works anymore. I think, Pads,” he continued, quieter, “there might be something wrong with me.”
Sirius’s grey eyes flickered quick to the side and he lifted a single upturned finger against his lips. The universal gesture of shut up, though it was unclear, really, if Sirius had caught his words. Sneaking forwards through to the edge of the Highlands wildgrasses, they wheeled Sirius’s bike along a low paddock fence to hug the corner of a small, darkened cottage at the end of the High Street and watch down the road. Most everyone had ducked back into their homes, probably bracing for imminent impact, but the door to the Three Broomsticks was wide open, beam of bright golden light bearing out like a spotlight. There the barmaid Rosmerta stood, ushering in a few scattered citizens who preferred to take their chances in a crowd than alone.
Yet not everyone was staying in. For every three people taking shelter, one hurried out into the street, some Disapparating with a sharp crack that drew out cries of alarm from the panicking masses. Just before Rosmerta pulled her door shut, however, a short witch in Ministry robes slipped passed her. Two figures swaddled in crimson cloaks followed after her.
Hoods thrown back, Remus saw that one was missing his left ear while the other lacked most of her nose, giving her face a crumpled-in look, not unlike—well, his brain was all over the place, really, but she looked reminiscent of Davey Gudgeon after his face had become acquainted with the Whomping Willow. Two further black cloaks trailed them, passive and dutiful.
There was a short, animated discussion. The short Ministry official stared off at the Shrieking Shack, which stared back at her through the mists, and gave rapid direction punctuated by a series of points, each one jangling the Goblin-made bracelet on her wrist. As a chilling wind whipped down the High Street, rattling rooftop shingles and making mournful, eerie sounds as it fed through the village’s many alleyways, Sirius twisted a hand near his ear and whispered under his breath—some sort of niche eavesdropping spell to catch sound on the air and bring it to him.
“They’re splitting up,” whispered Sirius. He flashed a grin. “One-Ears’s gonna escort Ms. Creatures and a Kissed to the Shack—they think it’s some bad Haunting feeding off all the high tensions, and in any case it’ll put them in close proximity to the Dementors to check no one’s been around—while Lady Gudgeon’s supposed to take the other one and sweep the village, make sure there’s no foul play, et cetera.”
Remus, in the meantime, had tugged a folded-up piece of parchment from his pocket and was frowning down at it between glances back up at the inn. He’d enchanted it only days before using the latest iteration of his Comprehensive Locator Charm in hopes of quickly matching names to the Aurors and Ministry official so they could track them thereafter—and, in a moment of ethical-cum-practical-cum-thaumaturgical wisdom, had limited it strictly to only map the streets of Hogsmeade rather than all its interior nooks and crannies—yet, according to the map in his hand, no one was standing in front of the Three Broomsticks, nor was there a front door or wall to the building at all. The ink was gone.
His eyes disagreed of course. And in a flash, he recalled his time staring at the wallpaper of their London flat and all the maps stuck thereupon it with their invisible, all-consuming anti-inkspots that had mystified him so.
“it’s the Kissed,” he murmured, as much to himself as Sirius. Tucked the map away and took grip of the bike’s handles to steady himself. “They’re interfering somehow. But that’s a bit far for a radiating effect, isn’t it? Farther than a broomstick. Or have they figured out some way of tapping into the—well, no, they couldn’t have. Not using magic, like.”
C’mon, clever clogs,” continued Sirius, canting his head to the far side of the cottage. “We can theorise after we’ve freed one to study.”
Stealing through dusty alleyways, tall-fenced gardens, fields of fading autumn wildgrasses, and over, with some struggling, the occasional low rooftop if a home looked unoccupied, Remus and Sirius crept along, a pair of common cat burglars albeit with a flying motorbike in tow. They moved like rats. They found rats sneaking about along gutters and through drainpipes and under fences, all brown, indistinguishable, and almost offended to have their roles taken by such giant understudies. In one, he almost saw something human behind those beady black eyes. Knowing. And yet, perhaps that was the paranoia, the creeping cold that blew through his travelling cloak that set his gaze searching for encroaching Dementors, though never did he see one. It was almost certainly mad, sneaking around with a bloody motorbike, and yet no one caught hide nor hair of them as they made their way onwards. They might actually pull this off.
He’d spent two year terrorising the village with the Marauders and Sirius four, so their confidence was not unearned—not to mention the bouts of petty thievery Remus had become prone to in moments or impulse or the veritable layers of veils and nondetection spells they bore. The chain bearing Remus’s inverted cross felt hot against his skin.
Once arrived at a familiar juncture Remus recognised as the very same one he, Sirius, Marlene, and Benjy had once been ambushed in, they exchanged grim, jaw-set glances, stowed the bike deep in the fieldgrass a decent distance away where they figured it oughtn’t be spotted, and then took up position.
“MSSRS MOONY, WORMTAIL, PADFOOT, AND PRONGS WERE HE,” read brick wall in four versions of mismatched handwriting.
They’d planned this contingency: if the map failed, they were to find the best ambush spot they could and wait. The Auror would have to sweep the whole village, whether that meant they were stuck waiting there for two minutes or two hundred, and, well, this particular spot had been a demonstrably good ambush, away from both the light, businesses, and most cottages. Opened to a field for a quick getaway.
Remus tucked into a corner opposite a locked garden gate near the end of the alley where the wall dipped in, mostly hidden by the niche and the rest by darkness, while Sirius waited at the juncture’s turn proper. He liked this part least. Sirius was inarguably twice, probably three times the duellist Remus was—even after some of Sirius’s own tutelage, he lacked the creativity, the vicious invective, and the years of hard-earned muscle-memory that pooled together into a primordial killer instinct—but anyone could get a lucky shot in. Sirius was exposed. He was good. Ace, yes, but he wasn’t an Auror. He wasn’t an Auror who’d been given carte blanche to kill first, ask questions later.
Minutes crawled by like centipedes through hair and one particularly audacious rat over his boot. With only the unearthly shrieking racket from the faraway Shack and impenetrable fog needling their bones for companions, Remus was barely breathing—beyond terrified that something as simple as clouding breath on a cold night might land them in Azkaban or a shallow grave. He stopped breathing altogether at the echoing sound of footsteps down their alley. Surefooted. Confident. Wary—and yet, above all, familiar. Remus knew them too well. It’d often been his job to listen for them in the corridors of Hogwarts, after all, in an ambush situation not entirely unlike this.
Of all the contingencies they’d planned for, the unexpected, unfortunately-timed return of Severus fucking Snape had not been one of them.
A disgusted scoff.
On instinct Remus seized that moment to swivel from his niche, wand at the ready, and saw the distant inkstain that was Severus touching his black-gloved hand against the bricks where their names were written. Closer still, he saw that Sirius, too, had seized that moment, black cloak swirling in the dark.
Severus hadn’t yet seen them. They ought to retreat—to hide, hope the cover of dark would conceal them from all human eyes until Severus passed and the Auror surfaced, but—well, hold on a moment, what, exactly, were the fucking odds of this burgeoning car crash piling up right this very moment? Remus felt like blinking might take an entire lifetime, that was how fast his thoughts were racing. Sirius was hesitating. He oughtn’t—they oughtn’t, mercy wasn’t, actually, the clever idea here, because of course, of course the DRCMC delegation ‘investigating werewolf activity in the area’ hadn’t been related to Socrates’s warnings or the takeover that had happened last summer. How would anyone have known? And even if they had—why now, a full season later? Why on the very night that Severus returned to Hogwarts, if not because Severus Snape, the first unwilling confidant to Remus’s life-ending secret, had summoned them there?
Remus finished blinking.
Sirius finished hesitating.
And at the very same moment, each of him, Sirius, and Severus finished casting a spell.
Remus’s was the simplest and therefore quickest, and he hoped to every God there was, alive or dead, forgotten or remembered, that it benefitted from the freak surges he’d been experiencing as of late, because silence was golden. Key. Or, in fact, a lock, for as Remus wrapped the entire alleyway in the most powerful Silencing Charm he could muster, he knew that the slightest sound of scuffle could draw the Auror forth and see them thrown in prison. The howling, agonised bellowing of the Shack snuffed in his ears.
Sirius and Severus hurled razor-thin jets of cursed light towards one another in tandem. Each had such exacting aim, however, that they collided mid-air, trembling for a moment as the spells intermingled and then detonated in a flash of vermillion sparks. By the time Remus processed the first volley, three more were passed, banished to bygone eras, and another three were on their way. Technicolour flashes, magenta, ruby, pale silver light and golden flames and a sickly, pale grey—all lighting them light feeble candlelight in a howling wind or a string of strange, dying Christmas lights—and as they rebounded off shimmering shields, loose bricks, bins, the cold cobbles beneath their boots, Remus struggled to both track and control the fallout. The widening gyre. He turned sparks to flowerpetals yanked down by unnatural gravity, smothered flames with darkness, trapped rebounding curses with his own struggling Shield Charms to keep them from flying off into the sky or detonating as he’d seen them do once before, all the while aware that Sirius and Severus, archnemeses of nine years, were digging deeper and deeper into their arsenals of rare, untested, and Dark arcane lore.
Mere victory wasn’t he goal. Stunning or disarming was thrown from the ring, the discarded rubber tips to deadly foils, for both longed to crush another, triumph with the other shattered and crumbling, left as nothing but a pool of blood and tears and acid beneath their heel and the pool then scorched from the very earth from the family tree. The victor would make soap and wine from the ashes and glut themselves until they were sick. That would be victory. Whichever of them hungered more for it, however—
With a slash of his wand like a broadsword, Severus’s curse missed by only a beat, gouging a deep, silent gash into the brick wall behind ducking Sirius, yet never did he falter; with a wave and mute incantation, the dust and mortar sprang to life, growing billowing cloud arms that tried in vain to wring Sirius by the neck, though his own travelling cloak had puffed out and developed an iron-like sheen to keep its dusty hands at bay. A moment later, comical in the imposed silence, a soundless shockwave black of air flew out from Sirius, scattering the animus to the four winds while also forcing Severus to brace his footing against the smooth cobbles. It was the opening Sirius needed.
While Remus caught the dustwave, transforming it into a silent pile of grey mud and an invisible twister at the far end of the alley, Sirius took the offensive, locked his gaze on Severus, and repeated the strange, finger-in-mouth yanking manoeuvre that produced from Severus’s lips a translucent grey blob. The Stolen Breath Jinx he’d performed on Mr. Snyde.
Both were unwavering. Remus kicked over a rubbish bin stacked full of old cardboards, loose flyers, and a few old Prophets, sending pages and sheets fluttering into the air where he duplicated them in sequence to scatter and block the outgoing light, feeling otherwise useless. The alleyway was too narrow. Their duel was too wild. He’d hit Sirius’s unwatched back, he’d miss, hit nothing but shield, and if he stopped hiding them for even a moment—
The magic before him was personal—beyond personal, spiritual, sexual, a fork in the outlet of a nuclear reactor, all distilled through the medium of pure undilute loathing. The air was crackling. It was alive, tempestuous, horny with nine years of rage and hatred and grief and blame, endless blame, their sky of opposition having finally opened up to release the Furies and cried havoc like thunder and let slip the weeping dogs of war; and yet there was Remus, floundering to block each upward blast of sparks or light Severus kept setting to alert anyone to their position by turning those red sparks to balloons, to petals, to water, to wine while Sirius raged, raged against frozen shields and animate shadows and sheets of flame. If Sirius ever looked at him with one tenth the passion he was investing into this duel, Remus would alight brighter than every candle ever made or ever to be made going up at once and be happy to have been, for a moment, his star. The very idea frightened him. Excited him. It was all simply too much; everything, in that crushing, unnatural silence, was simply too much.
Yet onwards Sirius and Severus traded blows like fencers forged from lightning. There was literal lightning involved; a bolt so bright from Severus it scorched an afterimage in Remus’s retinas; Sirius caught the end of it with his wand and coiled it round him like a metres-long whip, turning it emerald green and solid and into a slithering, wicked rosevine that burrowed through the cobbles as though it were nothing but loose sand, where they erupted and dived for Severus’s ankles as starving, carnivorous worm-plants, but they could not reach him for the ring of fire that burst forth around his feet; for the bricks that flew up from the ground to whirl about him, a deadly carousel; shooting forwards; careering off Sirius’s shield and returned with twice the velocity, then twice again, the deadliest fucking game of table tennis imaginable; Remus’s Silencing Charm strained; his skull ached; the sound must’ve been a thunderclap in their bones as it was the thunderous pounding in his heart; and just as Sirius relented, turning the brick to harmless, intangible smoke, Severus called his bluff and did not prepare to block. Instead his wandtip traced a fiery rune in the air which soon copied itself onto Sirius’s Shield Charm, shattering it, turning it to the broken pieces of a mirror all around him set with laughing, red-eyed faces and harassing him like serrated wolf’s teeth.
Neither of them were breathing. Remus’s own breath was heavy. He was hauling himself up in the dark, foot braced on a fencepost to gain roof access. One of them, it didn’t matter who, had dropped a quick Anti-Disapparition Jinx just over the alley, which meant he had to resort to such manual methods for getting a clear shot at Severus. Remus was not going to stand by, gaping like a lunatic as he had before. Not when Sirius appeared in trouble.
Sirius cast smaller shield after smaller shield to hold off the mirror-teeth and yet each one shattered just like the first, feeding the beast he was fighting. He was stumbling. Before him, Severus declined the advance to instead work something powerful, eyes scanning the dark and guided by fading flames and burning cardboards, but Remus was above them. No one ever looked up.
He couldn’t be sure, but rather than try and finish off Sirius, who was now charming his own reflection in the mirror shards one by one and bouncing them back off Severus’s own impervious shield, Severus’s big spell looked familiar. Lily’s maximal counterspell, he reckoned, minus all the Viking energies. As he scrambled over the rooftop, feet scrabbling on the smooth, angled shingles like ice, he knew he couldn’t let Severus finish the casting. They were lucky enough no one had yet seen some stray flash, a jinx, anything Remus might’ve missed or failed to stop—not that Remus was sure that was wholly true. The silence could not break before the end of the duel. It would be the end of them, and yet the end, as always, was fast approaching like a steam-engine train, and they, stuck racing along the railbed.
Remus was no seasoned combatant. A yob, yes, and thrower of a mean punch, but he couldn’t get close to Severus, and even if he did, stopping that kind of massive spell mid-cast was inadvisable. Which, hold on—
Remus tapped his wand atop the roof and instantly the sound of shrieking screams, howling wind, and shattered, crackling glass filled his ears. Severus’s sallow face flickered in surprise—Sirius was swearing, mirrors thwarted, dying flames crackled out of existence—and he looked uncertain. The alleyway was loud with the sound of the Shrieking Shack but quiet with everything else. There was no longer any spell permeating his shield to target besides the shield itself, and if Severus dropped his current casting while encased in a solid bubble of force, the result would be messy. A Pollock painting in the round. At best a fast, searing entry into low orbit if his shield stopped at the cobbles, followed by a sad and gruesome Humpty fucking Dumpty end to the sad and gruesome tale of Severus fucking Snape. Zugzwang, to put a precise German word on it: the move was forced.
Severus dropped his shield and released the spell unfinished. The resulting wave of force carried through the alleyway like a Giant’s yawp, brief yet with the strength of a hurricane wind, ringing out in Remus’s bones like a howl, and yet all the dust and ash was coloured ruby-red by two jets of light, one from above and one from below.
When the dust settled, Severus Snape lay motionless on the ground a small distance away from where he once stood—and, perhaps too cruelly, a moment thereafter he was struck once more by another red jet of light and rolled a few metres further. Sirius Black confirmed his victories. If you didn’t see the enemy go down, if you hadn’t Stunned them yourself, you had better sodding treat them like an active threat, or so Caradoc Dearborn had once taught them.
Remus breathed out a sigh of relief perched perilously on a gutter’s edge as he was. That’d been loud, yes, but disguisable by the atrocious racket of the Shack—they could plan. Recover. Breathe, a moment, which Sirius, by his gasping, hands on knees, travelling cloak singed by rebounding flames, desperately needed. Both of them were sweating, probably. Remus tugged his fallen hood back up.
He tugged his hood back up at precisely the wrong moment.
At the far end of the alleyway, a heavyset boot gave exactly one thunderous clunk, hardly audible over all the screaming. Remus’s wand lurched forwards of its own accord, trying to leap from his clenched fingers. He pulled back. Overcompensated. For his iron grip, Remus found himself with the reward of being pulled bodily off the rooftop. The worst part of it all was that he’d held firm through the untargeted disarm and yet left go as he plummeted backwards into the untamed garden below.
Head turning as he fell, Remus’s last sight was Sirius’s wand sitting frozen mid-air an inch from his fingertips, and—truly this was inappropriate, but he felt hilarious. They were hilarious. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern making a mockery of someone else’s play because there they were, acting in the role of Death Eaters and standing in the aftermath of a grandiose duel, and yet they’d been disarmed by the Auror, both of them, before ever being seen.
Sirius vanished behind the fenceposts.
Remus blinked. Realised, in the zero point something seconds it took for him to fall from the roof that he could either silence his fall or soften it, but probably not both, as he’d never truly mastered Parallel Sequencing and this was not the moment in which to try.
Piss.
Remus hit the ground very very hard and very very quietly. A thorny wooden shrub broke his fall and he the shrub, stunning Remus with the cocktail of stinging, piercing agony sheer gravitational impact, and the sudden lack of breath in his lungs. He flailed in silence. Struggled. Freed himself as quick as he could and crouched along the fence once he realised his Silencing Charm had gone out again and, unsuccessfully, attempted to summon his wand from wherever it’d fallen. He tried again. And again. And again. There was frenzied action, loud, carrying out just opposite the fence, an entire fucking duel part two, probably, and he couldn’t summon his stupid bloody wand let alone find a crack to peer through or the fortitude to haul himself back over. It’d couldn’t even have flown that far.
Remus staggered to a stand and turned, slow, aching, intent on scanning the garden, and then stood still. Froze in the hopes that the small, black-cloaked figure standing uncomfortably close behind him had reptilian vision based on movement and not light or proximity. Which was stupid, really, because when he did not immediately die, Remus gathered that the figure was not in fact a Dementor or Death Eater, or disguised One-Ear pair to Lady Gudgdeon behind the fence. They were holding a familiar wand, yes, but it was backwards in their hand. Upside-down. A moment later they offered it up to Remus, and—oh. Oh. Well, that would be why his Summoning Charm hadn’t work.
Remus turned his wand over in hand only once to ensure it was not damaged before he looked back lamely at the tiny black-cloaked Kissed standing before him as though there were not a fight ringing out just past the fence. His breath was coming out funny, because the Kissed, she was so short, dark hair peeking out from beneath the hood, and when that knotted rope tied in his gut grew too overwhelming to halt his hand, Remus yanked back her hood a touch too forcefully.
Happenstance had come to Hogsmeade once more. Though it hadn’t brought with it Aurors, it had brough the tiny, unassuming, dark-haired once-witch Rucha Nagar, who stared up at Remus with empty and soulless eyes.
***
Perhaps his soul had left his body, then, as well. His compassion certainly had. So too had all the panic and adrenaline and cortisol and other shite that usually froze his body while his mind whirled, as this time, they swapped roles. Remus was pulling Rucha by the wrist—she followed, pliant—and boosted her over several garden fences, high and low, until they reached the edge of fieldgrass where they’d stashed Sirius’s bike for their quick, clean getaway. Each landing was agony—he’d killed the shrub but it’d taken a last dirty shot at his ribs, conspiring with gravity to bruise them, and possibly he’d rolled his right ankle falling off the roof—but the pain was duller, now. Further away. Remus strapped her into the sidecar like a bloody toddler and fixed a useless helmet over her head. In a moment of inspiration, however, he whispered that she was not to make any sound or wander off until someone came and unstrapped her from the sidecar.
From there he looped back through the rows of garden hedges. Too tired and battered to haul himself over again, he settled for conjuring a momentary silence in which to kick gates open or else break a fence apart wholesale with his good leg. It took some doing, some wild and frenetic doing, punctuated by dozens of silent curses, but it felt good. He hadn’t broken anything in too long, it felt, and the waves of pain from his alternating jog-limp mambo grounded him in familiar reality until he wound his way back to the sounds of faltering battle.
Battle was good. Battle meant Sirius was not dead or dying or on his way to Azkaban, and that Remus wouldn’t have to reckon with his split-second decision of stealing away the Kissed. Though, again, what was he to do? Help Sirius duel an Auror? No, he trusted Sirius, mostly, and certainly believed in him enough to trust he’d fight defensively until Remus returned as a one-wolf cavalry.
Yet as Remus peeked down the alley, he was that the Auror had made a steady advance on Sirius’s position, driving him back with a relentless barrage of bog-standard duelling spells, all impeccably performed. He bloodied his nose slamming into something solid at the alleyway’s end, however. A Shield Charm to block retreat and pen Sirius in. Sirius was staggering. Breathless. Unaccustomed, it appeared, to duelling someone whose entire career had been devoted to capturing and outfoxing the quick, the clever, and the Dark Arts inclined, and already well wearied by the first raging duel with Severus. This had all been hubris.
Remus ducked back into the maze of back gardens and hedgerows and broken fences even as Sirius cried out in alarm—he heard the rapid scrabbling of elbows and heels against cobblestones, the inexorable advance of boots; found the garden gate at which he’d began what felt like an hour ago but was merely a few minutes; stood there, pressed against the solid wood, listening as the Auror’s boots crossed close; and when she was just on the other side, Remus breathed deep and pushed as hard as he could, not with his wand, but with his hands.
The gate blew off its hinges and splintered hard, trapped between Remus’s wild, wandless push and the lightning-quick whip-round of the Auror, who’d interposed a shield between herself and the gate. As he advanced, the wooden gate cracked down the middle, split at the top—Remus saw her crumpled features, lips forming words of disbelief, and met her determined gaze—but she broke their stare first, eyes flicking back to the alley’s end for only a moment. There came the sound of rushing. Something swift through air or blood through the ears. Sirius’s curse was deadly green and she threw herself back to avoid it, though it came at unfortunate and mortal cost.
Her shield dropped. The gate flew forwards, or, no, Remus forced the gate forwards, his nose springing up with blood at the sheer effort of it, carrying her bodily off her feet with a stomach-turning crunch-splinter-thud and smashing both hard against the brick wall like a cheap marionette by child in tantrum. A breath later she fell to the ground and did not move as the gate collapsed, splitting apart around her. Her neck was twisted at an odd angle, face crumpled even more than before, blood trickling thick already from her nose, an eye, her mouth, an ear—all the king’s men and horses at St. Mungo’s would look upon her broken body and weep—
Remus’s only full thought was, Oh, God, I’ve done it again.
Even then Sirius was dragging him by the arm away, whispering frantic plans and curses and cursing heavily, yet Remus soon was tugging him along instead, both taking turns as obedient Kissed. It was simpler that way. Not their faults.
“I have her,” whispered Remus, feverish, in Sirius’s pierced ear. He scanned the wildgrasses. They all looked the same, and they were fucked, this whole thing was motherfucking fucked.
“What?”
“The Kissed. I have her.”
“You—what?”
“We have to get out of here—the bike, I stowed her at the bike—oh, fucking Hell, what were we thinking? We have to—go, Jesus, go, we have to—”
What had they been thinking? How was this supposed to go, ideally? There’d been a thousand branches on their charts, a hundred contingencies, a dozen worst-case scenarios that never came within a thousand leagues of this calamity. This travesty. His chest was exploding; his lungs, on fire; Remus was dying, his world was dying, he’d just killed a woman, hadn’t he, and kidnapped another and it was Rucha Nagar and Severus knew they’d been here, he could point the finger, and James would never, never look at them the same again, if he could even bear to look at them—
“Ah, Jesus fucking Christ,” hissed Sirius as they parted another patch of wildgrass and found the bike. He stared down at Rucha, unblinking in the sidecar as she was, only for a moment. “Christ. Christ,” he repeated. “Get on.”
Sirius swung a leg over his bike and Remus followed him automatically, one arm wrapped about his cloak and the leather underneath, while his free hand worked magic and his mind returned to the charts. Peaceful, flowing charts. You couldn’t disillusion a Kissed or shroud them in silence, but the sky was pitch black and the air full of screaming. All it took was one well-practiced attempt at a charm to erase their tracks and put right the spot where the bike had been hidden, grass springing back into place, and then Sirius was taking them up, up, up into the dark of night, as though they might eventually climb high enough and reach a place where their many hounding sins dared not follow.
Notes:
The next chapter, Badly Behaved Bonnie and Clyde, will be posted at 00:01AM (or thereabouts) on 26 September, a Friday.
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