Chapter Text
The fire had burned down to glowing embers but still Remus read the book open before him, Magical Artifacts of Western Europe, eyes straining, undeterred. He sat cross-legged on the shabby carpet before the hearth, books sprawled in various states of unread around him. He had not been sleeping. He had not been eating.
The words he’d said to Harry still rang in his ears, even weeks later. “There’s nothing you can do, Harry… nothing… he’s gone.” He had reacted in the moment then, and even in hindsight believed he’d done what Sirius would have wanted—kept Harry safe, pulled him away from danger.
But still, the ghost of a laugh on Sirius’ face as he had slipped behind that veil was emblazoned on the backs of Remus’ eyes like he’d been staring at the sun for too long.
Sirius had vanished like a cut-rate magician—disappearing behind a tattered curtain and failing to reappear. It was a cruel cosmic joke to take him that way: no explosion, no blaze of glory. Bloodless, nearly silent. He hadn’t even gotten to kill any of his cousins—a fixation that had gone well past unhealthy and deep into feral in those last, frantic days. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.
Afterwards, Remus, still shaking and covered in unknowable dust from the battle, had stolen a moment of Dumbledore’s time, gripping his arm perhaps more forcefully than was entirely appropriate.
“What is that thing in there?” he had asked, knowing that he was giving himself away, that his desperation was plain.
Dumbledore had looked at him gently, almost pityingly, and Remus had the sudden urge to smash a fist into his half moon glasses. A very Sirius impulse, he thought, and the thought itself burst in him like a boil, rage numbed by sudden grief.
“It was being studied,” Dumbledore said softly. “Knowledge of it is somewhat limited. But I believe the Ministry considers it a gate between the living and the dead.”
Perhaps seeing Remus’ face, which felt flayed and exposed, he added, “It is not wise to tamper with such things. He’s beyond us, now, Remus. I don’t believe he’ll be able to come back.”
He hadn’t said dead.
As Remus had left the Ministry, apparating back to Grimmauld Place at a limp, it was this thought that rang in his head, the soundtrack to the replay of Sirius’ slipping smile as he’d disappeared behind the veil. Dumbledore had not said Sirius is dead.
In the days that followed, Remus diagnosed himself clinically: denial. Next would come anger, then bargaining, then depression, then acceptance. A neat, linear path for his hollowed-out heart to follow.
So the deeply seated, tightly held conviction that Sirius could not possibly be gone was just a reaction to grief, a normal reaction. It was so normal, in fact, that it was probably written out in Muggle books about psychology accompanied by helpful tables and statistics. Almost trite. Utterly cliche.
He had not been able to clean out Sirius’ room in Grimmauld Place. He’d stood outside of the door listening to Buckbeak’s huffing and stomping for an hour before Tonks appeared and laid a soft hand on his arm, guided him back to the kitchen and made him tea. She handled it herself, reappearing in far too short a time with one box– all of Sirius’ belongings, relegated to one single box. Remus had not looked inside. The box now sat in his hall closet at his London flat. Remus tried to ignore, again, the cliche, embarrassing thought he’d had as he’d shoved the box into the far back: He’ll need this once he’s back.
Now, exceptional though his eyesight was, the darkness finally made reading impossible. He slumped back, lying down amongst the detritus of his research. It had been three weeks since that night at the Ministry, and Remus thought bitterly that he was still stuck at denial. Wasn’t there supposed to be progress? Surely he should be at depression by now, or have at least been waylaid at bargaining.
Poking at his psyche like a healer might prod at an infected wound, Remus found he did not feel in denial. He knew denial. He’d lived in denial for a decade of his life.
Right now, surrounded by books on ancient magical artifacts and his own scribbled notes, Remus felt certain that Sirius was not dead. He would know if he were. He would feel it.
It would feel like a thread snapping. Like a ship suddenly unmoored as an anchor chain broke and sank into the sea.
Sirius’s death should have felt like a calamity, a rending of the soul, the earth cracking open beneath his feet.
And this—this did not feel like that. It felt like something else entirely. Remus knew this was a ridiculous and delusional thing to think, but think it he did.
And how could he give up on Sirius again, a second time, if there was any chance of recovering him? How could he not go back for him, if there was something to go back for?
After that Halloween night, after Sirius had been sent to Azkaban, Remus had clicked through the phases of grief for two years– cycling, reverting back, circling around, driving himself mad with it. But in the end, he had reached what he thought must have been acceptance. He had folded Sirius up neatly in his mind, packed away all the love and anger and memory in an envelope labeled dead, and moved on.
Now he knew: that had just been another form of denial.
Later, shamefully, he had admitted this to Sirius.
“It felt better to pretend you were just dead,” Remus had said one night in the kitchen of Grimmauld Place, in the first of many firewhiskey-tinged conversations they would have in that room over the next year.
“If I’d had any say in it, I probably would’ve picked dead too,” Sirius replied. He wasn’t in one of his darker moods, so he said it lightly, passing the bottle back across the table.
“That wasn’t fair of me, though. Maybe if I had spent more time thinking about it all rather than just ignoring what happened and pretending you were dead, I would have come to the right conclusion.” Remus took a long swallow. He was hoping to have it out with Sirius, to fight about the gaping wound of betrayal and distrust between them. They had been edging around it, circling the burning crater of it, treating each other too kindly, too nervously. It did not feel right; it was not them.
“Or,” Sirius said, “you would’ve landed on the same conclusion and just hated me more. Or maybe you’d have obsessed over it—ruined your life shouting at the Ministry about me until they tossed you in Azkaban too.” He smiled, a small, crooked twist of the mouth. “It’s alright, Moony. You handled it the only way you could.”
Gentle again, too gentle, but the implication of the word you, the way Sirius stressed it, suggested to Remus that someone else may have handled it better.
Remus knew now that he had handled it all like a fool, like an emotionally stunted child. He had never processed it, had refused to deal with it. For twelve years he had kept landing back on denial, the first rung of the ladder– again and again. He couldn’t, with the reality of the situation before him, deny that Sirius had betrayed the Potters. The glaring absence of James and Lily and Peter in his life made that impossible.
But he could at least deny that Sirius was still alive out there, freezing by the North Sea, hollowed by Dementors. It was easier to make him dead– a dead traitor– and choose to grieve that. That way there was nothing to litigate, nothing to try to understand, no person to forgive or not forgive or hate or not hate. Just something to bury.
“I’m sorry, Sirius,” Remus had choked out at last, lifting the bottle again for a hasty swig. “Is what I’m trying to say.”
“I’m sorry, too, if that’s what we’re doing tonight,” Sirius replied, a flicker of anger in his voice. “What is this, Moony? You think we’re going to fix this over some drinks in one night?” Remus felt a twinge of relief in his heart to hear that edge of anger in Sirius’ voice, to hear him acknowledge that there was something to fix.
“No, not in one night. But it might help if we get properly bladdered. That always used to nudge us along in the emotional department.”
Sirius barked out a laugh, sudden and bright.
“I suppose you’re right, though I’m sure Dumbledore won’t approve of us spiralling into alcoholism under the guise of plumbing our emotional depths.” Sirius stood up, stretching. “I’m off to bed. I recommend you do the same. Busy day tomorrow.”
The next day, the Weasleys would arrive and Remus and Sirius’ emotional depths would remain yet unplumbed.
Remus woke up the next morning on his living room floor, a crumpled piece of parchment scrawled with his own handwriting (“gate into a hallway not a room”, “celtic or welsh?”, “100 AD, possibly druidic”) plastered to his face by his own drool. He’d slept fitfully, dreaming of the archway, of the moon, of red flashes, of Harry’s furious face.
“Wotcher, Remus,” Tonks said from above him, nudging his leg with a bare foot. Before he could move to scramble together the evidence of his delusion, she had already plucked up a book, eyes scanning the page.
He sat up, ready to make excuses. “Just a bit of research. For curiosity’s sake.”
Her eyes flicked across the page, and he knew, from the cover of the book she had snatched up, that she was seeing a diagram of the archway.
“Remus…” she started, frowning as she turned the page. Her hair was brown today and she looked worn out, drab. Remus supposed that just about everyone was looking that way lately.
“It’s nothing,” he said quickly. “Just something I can’t get out of my head.”
She finally looked at him. He was surrounded by papers and books, having clearly slept on the ground, having not eaten a bite in at least two days, having not showered for longer. Of course, she didn’t believe a word he said.
“I talked to Dumbledore, after,” Tonks said, choosing her words carefully. “He said that gate was ancient. Iron Age maybe. Grindelward stole it from the Ministry and was futzing around with it. Interesting thing for a wizard like that to chase—an old archway.”
Remus knew all this from his feverish reading. “Yes, apparently there was some coven in Dorset that… I don’t know. Was studying death or something like that. I can see why that might have drawn him.”
“It’s dark magic, Remus. Soul magic, necromancy.” She was leveling a warning. She’d been doing her reading too.
“Soul magic isn’t inherently dark, it’s just… controversial,” he defended lamely. He had no excuse for the necromancy bit.
Tonks laid the book down on the end table and slumped back onto the couch. It creaked beneath her. Remus took the opportunity to drag himself off the floor and bustle into the kitchen, putting on the kettle. He ran a self-conscious hand through his unclean hair, trying futilely to get it in order, embarrassed about the state of his flat, the state of himself, the state of his life.
His flat in London had been abandoned since he and Sirius had left it for Grimmauld Place nearly a year ago and he had only just returned. It was unchanged from that day; a museum, a mausoleum. Sirius’ blankets and pillows were still a tangle on the couch. Their two half-drank cups of tea still sat by the sink.
They had spent two uneasy months here together while Sirius had laid low after the Triwizard Tournament, offering each other tea and a hand with the dishes and scraps of friendship like so much litter dug out from the bin of their lives but mostly just not speaking. Sirius had not been well. Even a year out of Azkaban he was still almost constantly fearful, jumpy. The return of Voldemort, the reappearance of Peter, and the renewed threats against Harry’s life had only made things worse. Beneath the reek of fear that clung to Sirius, Remus could smell his rage—hot, metallic, barely contained.
At first, Sirius spent entire days as Padfoot, sleeping mostly, waking with a low, vicious growl. As a man, he would lunge at any owl tapping on the window, ripping the post from their legs in frantic hope for news of Harry, only to be met with disappointment: a newspaper, a terse note from Moody, a flyer for discounted robes.
Sirius seemed encased in a brittle, painful shell he had no intention of breaking free from. He lashed out. He didn’t smile. He had no interest in talking. But Remus knew that the man he loved was still in there, buried under the weight of it all.
One morning, three weeks in, Remus awoke again to the sound of Padfoot snarling and barking himself into consciousness. He rushed out of his room to find Padfoot curled in his usual nest of blankets on the couch, twitching and whimpering, trapped in a fitful nightmare. Kneeling beside him, Remus whispered soothing words, scratching behind his ears until Padfoot startled awake. But seeing Remus there, he began to settle. Usually, at this point, Sirius would transform back, and they’d go their separate ways: Remus retreating to his room, Sirius curling into himself on the couch until the sun rose high enough to force the day upon him.
But this time, Sirius stayed a dog.
The dog, Remus thought, was much easier. Under Remus’ hand, Padfoot stopped whale-eyeing, stopped panting and growling, and settled with his head on his paws. They sat together, man and dog, affectionate in a way that felt entirely effortless and familiar. Just man and his best friend. They stayed that way perhaps longer than was entirely appropriate: Remus sitting on the floor, petting Padfoot, resting his own head on the couch by the dog’s paws. If he started to pull away, Padfoot would nudge his snout into Remus’ hand, insistent.
It wasn’t the first time Sirius had sought affection only as a dog. Remus remembered the nights at Hogwarts, waking to find Padfoot curled at the foot of his bed, and the early mornings when the dog would nose at his hand until, half-asleep, Remus reached out and buried his fingers in the silky fur behind his ears.
It was odd but it was also entirely Sirius. This was not a response born of Azkaban or the long years of torment and separation—not like the rage or the fear—but a classically Sirius coping mechanism. An old trick he played to claim the comfort he couldn’t allow himself in human form.
And Remus let him. Again and again, he allowed Sirius this sleight of hand, letting himself believe just for a while that this was simply a dog he loved: a wonderful, loyal dog. That kind of love was simple. Pure. Untarnished. Unburdened by betrayal or misunderstanding, by distrust, by death, by Azkaban, unhaunted by ghosts.
That morning, the fog of that simplicity settled over him again—until Sirius changed back abruptly, leaving Remus’s hand hanging in the air where the dog had been.
“I’m starving, mate,” Sirius said gruffly.
They’d moved on then, retreating from the too-warm living room into the kitchen to prepare eggs, bacon, toast, tea. They still orbited around each other,, circling, never touching, but after that morning it felt as though the crater of their love was no longer such a burning wound. The crater could cool, perhaps, and life could grow there again.
Tonks stayed through the afternoon. They finished some work together, jotting out letters to Moody outlining the information Tonks had uncovered the night before about a possible Death Eater hide out in Cardiff and carefully recreating the map of where exactly it could be found.
Remus made lunch: cheese toast, crisps, two dusty beers unearthed from the back of his fridge. Afterwards, he tried to focus on his other job, the one that actually paid: editing a Muggle technical document about how to operate a new model television. It was easy work for him, oddly comforting. As a half-blood, he’d grown up with these devices, but he also knew the wizarding sort who found them incomprehensible. Writing idiot-proof instructions came naturally.
He was halfway through a paragraph about the “On” button when he noticed Tonks had drifted back into the living room and opened An Encyclopedia of Esoterica. He jumped up and went to her, ready again to diffuse whatever he was sure she was thinking.
“Relax, Remus– I’m not trying to get you in trouble. I won’t tell,” she said, smiling. “Though I don’t think this is exactly the healthiest way to–”
He pulled the book out of her hands before she could finish, needing suddenly to explain himself, to make her understand. The quirk of her eyebrow as he snapped the book shut was so unmistakably Black that it almost made him sick.
“I don’t believe it, Tonks,” he said, sounding a little ragged even to himself. “I’m sorry. I know I should, but I don’t believe he’s dead. He is not dead.” For the first time he knew he meant it; it was not just wishful thinking, not just denial. He did not believe Sirius was dead. He would never believe it, not until Sirius’ body was cold and stilled and empty under his hand.
Tonks gave him a look of great pained sympathy and sighed, sitting back down on the couch and gestured for him to join. She took his hands in hers and leveled him with a serious look. “So,” she said, too gentle, too patient, “What will you do about it?”
He let out a breath he had not realized he’d been holding.
“That archway—it’s old magic. Iron Age, like you said. From what I could find, there was a coven in Dorset studying death—maybe part-druidic, no one’s sure. They documented experiments with the arch. Some say they built it; others say they found it. Either way, they thought it was a gateway to death’s—”
“So Remus–” Tonks began, but he put up a finger to silence her, anticipating her argument.
“Not a gateway to death, but a gateway to death’s… I don’t know how to describe it. Death’s liminal space. A hallway. A passage between the two, life on one side and death on the other. A middleground. A place only souls can cross.”
She had that pained-sympathy look again and he wondered how pathetic he must seem, how unhinged. At least he’d showered; small mercies.
“So if Sirius is in a hallway,” Tonks said, “Life on one side and death on the other, what’s he been doing in there? Dallying about for the last month?”
He smiled faintly despite himself. Remus had imagined this vividly ever since he had started his research. He didn’t know, of course, what the liminal death-space might look like or feel like or even be, really, if it was real. But he imagined it, in his academic speculations and in his fevered dreams, like a misty hallway. He knew that, for Sirius, one end would be James and Lily, smiling, beckoning him. On the other: Harry.
Mostly, he imagined that Sirius would see that thing that his life had been dictated by for so long: the fight. Voldemort, Death Eaters, his family, his Noble and Ancient Black heritage. The job of destroying it all was left unfinished, a hanging thread that would be intolerable to Sirius, a reason to return. In moments of pitiful indulgence Remus imagined Sirius might think of him, left alone again, the damage to their relationship also unresolved, tempting, perhaps, in its possibility.
So yes, Sirius might dally. He might dally for a while.
“It’s all abstract, very theoretical. But…” The thought to ask Tonks for help had occurred to him last night. She was assigned guard duty shifts at Hogwarts so it would not be so difficult for her to slip into the library, into the Restricted Section, and retrieve just one more book that might peel back another layer of this mystery. He steeled himself. “I don’t think I can move on until I know for sure. I can’t leave him again, Tonks. I can’t. If there’s any chance he’s there—I have to go back for him.”
She thought for a minute, chewing on her bottom lip, eyes drifting to somewhere just above Remus’ head. He knew the look. She was weighing the options: help Remus with his insane pursuit or owl Dumbledore immediately and have Remus committed to St. Mungo’s.
Without speaking, she dragged the book, Encyclopedia of Esoterica, into her lap, flipping to a dog-eared page.
She would understand, Remus was sure. She had spent so much time with them at Grimmauld Place over the last year, just eager at first to know any member of her mother’s family and then, seemingly, happy in their company. She knew how special Sirius was, how impossible it would be to abandon him to death.
A few months earlier, Sirius had sunk resolutely into one of his darker moods, skulking in his room and speaking to no one for days. Tonks, naive to the obstinance of Sirius’ more truculent moods, had brought over a bottle of Muggle whiskey (“From my dad, he loves this stuff! It’s loads better than firewhiskey, I promise! Stronger too!”) and, improbably, a chocolate cake baked by Andromeda.
Remus had fetched Sirius from his haunt in the ruined master bedroom and dragged him to the kitchen with promises of getting hammered and eating cake. It would have been rude not to.
And so they had.
“Then Remus here, a prefect mind you, transfigured the whole mess into a bloody teapot and jammed it in his bag. McGonnagal was none the wiser! A tangle of grindylows, covered in pus– must’ve been at least ten of them– and Remus–” Sirius snapped his fingers to show the ease with which grindylow rat-king had become teapot, “--just transfigured the lot, just like that.” He laughed. “We never did get in trouble for that, and I think that teapot stayed in Remus’ trunk until seventh year.”
“Might still have it somewhere, actually,” Remus added.
Tonks was cackling, her cheeks flushed pink from the whiskey. They’d been at it for hours, trading stories—Animagus mishaps, nights in the Forbidden Forest, pranks that had nearly got them expelled. Tonks told tales of her own Hogwarts years: convincing the house-elves to throw her a secret midnight feast for her sixteenth birthday, or transforming into Snape to sneak into his office and alter the grades of a Slytherin who’d hexed her (“Ew, that’s foul! But I guess anything in the name of vengeance!”).
The evening was softened by the warm blur of nostalgia.
At one point, passing behind Sirius on her way to the bathroom, Tonks reached out to ruffle his hair and then impulsively wrapped her arms around him from behind, closing her eyes as she gave him a wobbly squeeze. Alarmed at first, then grinning, Sirius accepted the hug, placing a hand on her arm in return. His foul mood had dissipated like a morning fog under the heat of the rising sun.
“I wish I could say my mother had told me all about you growing up,” she had said sadly. “You were her favorite cousin, I know.” And she stumbled up the stairs to the loo, leaving them alone.
They picked at the last crumbs of the cake in companionable silence. Sirius, almost absentmindedly, stretched a leg out so his foot rested on the edge of Remus’ chair, just barely grazing ankle to knee.
Remus thought, with a sad kind of amusement, that if he tried to hug Sirius the way Tonks just had, they would both jump out of their skins.
With a huff, Tonks slammed the Encyclopedia closed and finally looked up.
“So what’s your plan then?”
Remus, relieved, grateful, guilty, explained what he needed: a book, Soulseeking and Other Techniques.
“It’s in the Hogwarts Restricted Section,” he explained, before she could interrupt. “The only surviving record of the Dorset coven’s experiments with the arch. There’s a few references to the manuscript in some of these books, cited again and again in connection with the thing. They call it the Veil, or the Dorset Arch, or Death’s Door, or in some of the more stuffy papers, the Liminal Traversal.”
Tonks raised an eyebrow, unimpressed.
Remus pressed on, as if more information would protect him from sounding mad. “You know, most people don’t realize Hogwarts isn’t just a school library. It’s a research archive—centuries of manuscripts, properly preserved. Half the scholars in Europe petition Dumbledore for access. Soulseeking is in there somewhere, I’m sure of it.”
“And it’s restricted because…” Tonks prompted, though she clearly already knew the answer.
“Because soul magic is classified as Dark.” He hesitated, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “Dark-adjacent, really. Not inherently Dark. It’s just—controversial. Dangerous, maybe. But the Dorset coven wasn’t using it to harm anyone, only to study the soul’s transition after death. It’s not—”
“—necromancy,” Tonks finished for him, her tone dry.
He didn’t meet her eyes. “Not necessarily.”
For a long moment she said nothing, weighing him. Then, with a sigh, she leaned back against the couch. “You’re lucky I like you, Remus.”
She asked a few practical questions—when she could get into the library, how to hide what she was taking, what exactly the cover story would be—and in the end, she agreed. She’d try to fetch the book.